Judith of the Plains Part 24

"Oh, Jim," she said, and her face was all aquiver, "I never could divorce you, no matter what you done." And then the grim philosophy of the plains-woman a.s.serted itself. "I never can understand why women feed their pride on their heart's blood; it never was my way."

He did not like to remember that he had given her cause for a way.

"There's a lot of women as wouldn't exactly regard me as a Merino, or a Southdown, either;" he gulped the coffee to ease the tightness in his throat.

"They'd be women of no judgment, then," she said, with conviction.

Jim's head was tilted back, resting in the palm of his hand. His profile, sharpened by anxiety, more than suggested his quarter-strain of Sioux blood. He might almost have been old Chief Flying Hawk himself, as he looked steadily at the woman who had been a young girl and reckless, when he had been a boy and reckless; who had paid her woman's penalty and come into her woman's kingdom; who had made a man of him by the mystery of her motherhood, and who had uncomplainingly gone with him into the wilderness and become an alien and an outcast.

These things unmanned him as the sight of the gallows and the rope for his hanging could not have done. Shielding himself with an affected roughness, he asked:

"What the h.e.l.l's the matter with you? I've been drinking like a beast of an Indian, and you give me coffee instead of a tongue-lashing."

The color had all gone out of her face. She gasped the words:

"Jim, I dreamed it last night-they came for you!"

She cowered at the recollection.

"Did they get me?" he asked. There was no surprise in his tone. He spoke as one who knew the answer.

"Yes, the children saw. The noise woke them."

"You mustn't let 'em see, when-they come. They've a right to a fair start; we didn't get it, old girl."

"The children gave it to us," and she faced him.

"Yes, yes, but we want them to have it from the start, like good folks."

They looked into each other's eyes. The memory of dead and gone madness twinkled there a moment, then each remembered:

"You must hurry, Jim. You haven't a moment to lose. I dreamed it was to be to-night-they'll come to-night!"

"The game's all up, old girl! If I had a month I couldn't get away.

Morrison's been looking for me over to the Owl Creek Range; he's back-Stevens told me yesterday. He'll be heading here soon. The price on my head is a strain on friendship."

"Have the sheep-men gone back on you?"

"Yes, d.a.m.n them! A thousand dollars is big money, and they've had hard luck!"

"They deserve it; I hope every herd in the State dies of scab."

"There wasn't a scabby sheep in our bunch. What a sight they were, loaded with tallow! There wasn't one of them that couldn't have weathered a blizzard; they could have lived on their own tallow for a month."

She tried to divert his attention from his lost flock. When he began to talk about them the despair of his loss drove him to drink. She was ground between the millstones of his going or staying. If he stayed they would come for him; if he went, they would apprehend him before he was ten miles from the house.

"Jim, we got to think. If there's a chance in a thousand that you can get away, you got to take it; if there ain't, the children mustn't know. We got to think it out!"

"There ain't a chance in a thousand, old girl. There ain't one in a million. They're circling round in the hills out here now, waitin' for me, like buzzards waitin' for the eyes of a dyin' horse."

She rocked herself, and the clutching fingers left white marks on her face, but the eyes that met his glittered tearless:

"Then there ain't nothing left but to face it like a man?"

"That's all there be." He might have been giving an opinion on a matter in which he had no interest.

"Then there ain't no use in our having any more talk about it?"

"'Tain't just what you'd call an agreeable subject," he answered, with the sinister humor of the frontiersman who has learned to make a crony of death.

She was tempted to kiss him-they were not given to demonstrations, this pair-then decided it were kinder to him, less suggestive of what they antic.i.p.ated, not to deviate from their undemonstrative marital routine.

"Do you want your breakfast now?"

"I guess you might bring it along."

And for the same reason that she refrained from kissing him, she repressed a desire to wring the neck of a young broiler and cook it for his breakfast, remembering that she had heard they gave folks pretty much what they wanted when they wouldn't want it long. So Jim got his usual breakfast of bacon, uncooked canned tomatoes, soda-biscuit, and coffee.

She sat with him while he ate, but they spoke no more of "them" or of how soon "they" might be expected. She told him that young Jim had pretended that morning that he had a cactus thorn in his foot, so that he might have a piece of dried apple. And old Jim, in an excess of parental fondness and pride, said: "The d.a.m.ned little liar, he'll get to Congress yet!"

But the children were a dangerous topic for overstrained nerves at this particular time, so Alida told Jim that she had put the black hen to set and she thought they'd have some chickens at last. Jim smoked while Alida washed the dishes, and when Jim's back was turned she examined the lock on the door-a good push would open it. Then she looked at the brown bureau, and the recklessness of despair came into her eyes. In the room beyond, Jim was reading a two weeks' old newspaper and smoking. He looked like a lazy ranchman taking his ease.

As she went about her household tasks that morning, Alida noticed things as she had never noticed them before. A sunbeam came through the shutterless window of the house and writhed and quivered on the wall as if it were a live thing. She read a warning in this, and in the color of the sun, that was red, like blood, and in the whirr of the gra.s.shoppers, that was sinister and threatening. The creeks had dried, and their slimy beds crept along the willows like sluggish snakes. Gaunt range-cattle bellowed in their thirst, and the parched earth crackled beneath the sun that hung above the house like a flaming disk. Sometimes she sank beneath the burden of it; then she would wring her hands and call on G.o.d to help them; they were beyond human power. She and Jim were alone all the morning; they did not again refer to what they knew would happen. He read his old paper and she put her house in order. She did it with especial care. It was meet to have things seemly in the house of the dead. And every time she glanced at Jim she repressed the desire to fling herself on his breast and cry out the anguish that consumed her.

At noon she brought the children home to dinner, and afterwards Jim taught them to throw the la.s.so and played buffalo with them. Alida did not trust herself to watch them; she stayed in the kitchen and saw the sunbeam grow pale with the waning of the day, the day whose minutes dragged like lead, yet had rushed from her, leaving her the night to face. At sundown she cooked supper, but she no longer knew what she did. A crazy agility had taken possession of her and she spun about the kitchen, doing the same errand many times, finding herself doing always something different from that she had set about doing. The molten day was burning itself out like a fever; hot gusts of air beat up from the earth, but the woman who waited felt chilled to the marrow, and took a cloak down from a peg and wrapped it about her while she waited for the biscuit to bake. At supper they sat down together, the man and his wife and their three children. The children were in fine spirits from the fun they had had that afternoon. Never had daddy been so nice to them. He had taught Topeka to throw the la.s.so so well that she had caught the cat once and little Jim twice; and daddy had played he was a buffalo and had charged them all with his head down, till they screamed in terror. But daddy seemed more quiet through the meal, and once mother started up and cried:

"What's that?"

She ran to the door with her hand pressed to her side, but daddy called after her:

"Don't you know the cowards better than that? They'll wait for nightfall."

But these things had not worried the children, with their heads full of playing buffalo and throwing the lariat.

"Jim," said his father, before they went to bed, "remember you are the man of the family." But young Jim was already nodding with sleep. Topeka and Judith were sleepy, too; they kissed their father and were glad to go to bed.

The night began menacingly to close over the wilderness. Where the sun had hung above the mountain a moment before there glowed a great pool of red that dripped across the blackness in faint tricklings. The outlines of the foot-hills loomed huge, formless, uncouth. In the half-light it seemed a world struggling in the birth-throes. All day the dry, burning heat had quivered over the desert, like hot-air waves flickering over a bed of live coals, and now the very earth seemed to palpitate with the intensity of its fever. The bellowing of the thirst-maddened cattle had not stopped with the twilight that brought no dew to slake their parched throats. In the hills the coyotes wailed like lost souls. It was night bereft of benisons, day made frightful by darkness. All the heat of a cycle of desert summers seemed concentrated in that house in the valley where the man and his wife waited. Each sound of the desert night Alida translated into the trampling of horses' feet; then, as the sound would die away, or prove to be but some night noise of the wilderness, the pallor would lose its pinch on her features, and she would stare into her husband's face with eyes that did not see. Jim smoked his pipe and refilled it, smoked and filled again, but gave no sign of the object of his waiting.

"Jim," she said, when the clock had struck ten, then eleven, "I am going to fasten up the house."

"Do you hear them?" he asked, without emotion, but as one who deferred to the finer senses of women.

She shook her head, not trusting herself to speak.

He looked at the door that was shrunken and warped from the heat till it barely held together, and there was no measure to the tenderness he put into:

"Oh, you poor little fool, do you think you could keep them out by fastening that?"

"Jim, I must," and her voice broke. "They may think you are not here, that it's only me and the children, and that's why the house is fastened." She got up and began to move about as though her thoughts scourged her to action, even if futile. He shook the ashes from his pipe.