Judith of the Plains Part 7

Judith watched Hamilton with narrowing eyes. And now she was all Indian, the white woman in her dead. Only the Sioux watched, and, in the patient, Indian style, bided its time. "Cattle thieves," "the girl at Wetmore's"-the words sang themselves in her head like an incantation.

"Cattle thieves" meant her brother, their recognized leader-her brother, who was dearer to her than the heart in her breast, the eye in her head, the right hand that held together the shambling, uncertain destiny of her people. Would he turn to the left, Justice, on a pale horse, hunting her brother gallowsward? Would he turn towards the right, the impetuous lover spurring his steed that he might come swiftly to the woman. A pulse in her bosom rose slowly until her breath was suspended, then fell again; she was still watching, without an outward quiver, long after he had turned to the right-and the woman.

VI

A Daughter Of The Desert

Judith knew that the name of the girl whose letter sent Peter Hamilton vaulting to the saddle was Katherine Colebrooke. There had been a deal of letter-writing between her and the young cow-puncher of late, of which perforce, by a singular irony of fate, the postmistress had been the involuntary instrument. The correspondence had followed a recent hasty journey to New York, undertaken somewhat unwillingly by Hamilton in the interest of certain affairs connected with the settlement of an estate.

The precipitancy of this latest turn of events bewildered Judith; but yet a little while-a matter of weeks and days-and her friendship with Hamilton had been of that pleasantly indefinite estate situated somewhere on the borderland of romance, a kingdom where there is no law but the mutual interest of the wayfarers. Judith and Peter had been pitifully new at the game of life when the G.o.ds vouchsafed them the equivocal blessing of propinquity. Judith was but lately come from the convent at Santa Fe, and Hamilton from the university whose honors availed him little in the trailing of cattle over the range or in the sweat and tumult of the branding-pen. It was a strange election of opportunity for a man who had been cla.s.s poet and had rather conspicuously avoided athletics during his entire college course. In pursuing fortune westward Hamilton did not lack for chroniclers who would not have missed a good story for the want of an authentic dramatic interpretation of his plans. His uncle, said they, who had put him through college, was disposed to let him sink or swim by his own efforts; or, again, he had quarrelled with this same omnipotent uncle and walked from his presence with no prospects but those within grasp of his own hand. Again, he had taken the negative of a fair lady more to heart than two-and-twenty is in the habit of taking negatives. Peter made no confidences. He went West to punch cows for the Wetmore outfit; he was a distant connection of the Wetmores through his mother's side of the family.

In those days Peter wore his rue-whether for lady fair or for towering prospects stricken down-with a tinge of wan melancholy not unbecoming to a gentle aquilinity of profile, softened by the grace of adolescence. His instinctive aristocracy of manners and taste would have availed him little with his new a.s.sociates had he been a whit less manly. But as he shirked no part of the universal hardship, they left him his reticence. He even came to enjoy a sort of remote popularity as one who was conversant with the best-a nonchalant social connoisseur-yet who realized the stern primitive beauties of the range life.

Judith's convent upbringing had conferred on her the doubtful advantage of a gentlewoman's tastes and bearing, making of her, therefore, an alien in her father's house. When Mrs. Atkins, who was responsible for her education, realized the equivocal good of these things, and saw moreover that the girl had grown to be a beauty, she offered to adopt her; but Judith, with the pitiful heroism of youth that understands little of what it is renouncing, thought herself strong enough to hold together a family, uncertain of purpose as quicksilver.

In those tragic days of readjustment came Peter Hamilton, as strange to the bald conditions of frontier life as the girl herself. From the beginning there had been between them the barrier of circ.u.mstance.

Hamilton was poor, Judith the mainstay of a household whose thriftlessness had become a proverb. He came of a family that numbered a signer of the Declaration of Independence, a famous chief-justice, and the dean of a great university; Judith was uncertain of her right to the very name she bore. And yet they were young, he a man, she a woman-eternal fountain of interest. A precocious sense of the fitness of things was the compa.s.s that enabled Peter to steer through the deep waters in the years that followed.

But the girl paid the penalty of her great heart; in that troublous sea of friendship, she was soon adrift without rudder, sail, or compa.s.s.

Judith was now eight-and-twenty, and a sculptor would have found a hundred statues in her. Long of limb, deep-bosomed, youth and health radiated from her as sparks fly upward. In sunlight, her black hair had the bluish iridescence of a ripe plum. The eyes were deep and questioning-the eyes of a young seraph whose wings had not yet brushed the far distant heights of paradise. Again, in her pagan gladness of living, she might have been a Valkyr come down from Valhalla on a shooting-star. And yet, in this wilderness that was famishing for woman's love and tears and laughter, by a very perversity of fate she walked alone.

She was a true daughter of the desert, the child of stark, unlovely circ.u.mstance. No well-bred romance of book and bells and churchly benediction had ushered her into being. Her maternal grandfather had been the famous Sioux chief, Flying Hawk; her grandmother, a white woman, who knew no word of her people's tongue, nor yet her name or race. The Indians found the white baby sleeping by her dead mother after the ma.s.sacre of an emigrant train. They took her with them and she grew up, in the Black Hill country, a white-skinned Sioux, marrying a chief of the people that had slain her people. She accepted her squaw's portion uncomplainingly; slaved cheerfully at squaw's work while her brave made war on the whites, hunted, and smoked. She reared her half-breed children in the legends of their father's people, and died, a withered crone, cursing the pale-faces who had robbed the Sioux of the buffalo and their hunting-ground.

Her daughter, Singing Stream, who knew no word of English, but who could do better bead-work than any squaw in the tribe, went to live with Warren Rodney when he finished his cabin on Elder Creek. That was before the gold fever reached the Black Hills, and Rodney built the cabin that he might fish and hunt and forget the East and why he left it. There were reasons why he wanted to forget his ident.i.ty as a white man in his play at being an Indian. In the first flare of youth and the joy of having come into her woman's kingdom, the half-breed squaw was pretty; she was proud, too, of her white man, the house he had built her, and the girl pappoose with blue eyes. Furthermore, she had been taught to serve man meekly, for he was the lord of creation.

Rodney talked Sioux to her. He had all but forgotten he was a white man.

The girl pappoose ran about the cabin, brown and bare, but for the bead jacket Singing Stream had made for her in the pride of her maternity.

Rodney called the little girl "Judith." Her Indian mother never guessed the significance of the strange name that she could not say, but made at least ten soft singing syllables of, in the Indian way. The little Judith greeted her father in strange lispings; Warren Rodney was far from unhappy in playing at primitive man. This recessional into conditions primeval endured for "seven snows," as the Indian tongue hath it. Then the squaw began to break, after the manner of the women of her father's people. She had begun her race with time a decade after Warren Rodney, and she had outdistanced him by a decade.

And then the Tumlins came from Tennessee to the Black Hills. They came in an ox-cart, and the days of their journey were more than two years. They had stopped in Ohio, and again in Illinois; and, behold! neither was the promised land, the land that their excited imaginations had painted from the large talk of returning travellers, and that was further glorified through their own thriftless discontent with conditions at home. They had travelled on and on across half a continent in the wake of a vanishing sky-line. The vague westward impulse was luring them to California, but they waited in Dakota that their starved stock might fatten, and while they rested themselves from the long journey, Warren Rodney made the acquaintance of Sally Tumlin, who rallied him on being a "squaw man."

Warren Rodney had almost forgotten the sorceries of the women of his people; he had lived so long with a brown woman, who spread no silken snares. Sally's blushes stirred a mult.i.tude of dead things-the wiles of pale women, all strength in weakness, fragile flowers for tender handling-the squaw had grown as withered as a raisin.

Now, Sally Tumlin had no convictions about life but that the world owed her "a home of her own." Her mother had forged the bolt of this particular maxim at an early date. And Sally saw from precocious observation that the business of women was home-getting, to which end they must be neat and sweet and sparing of speech. After the home was forthcoming, then, indeed, might a woman take ease in slippers and wrapper, and it is surely a wife's privilege to speak her mind. Sally knew that she hated travelling westward after the crawling oxen; each day the sun pursued them, caught up with them, outdistanced them, and at night left them stranded in the wilderness, and rose again and mocked them on the morrow. Her father and oafish brother loved the makeshifts of the wagon life, with its chance shots at fleeing antelope, scurrying sage-hens, and bounding cotton-tails; a chance parley with a stray Indian but added zest to the game of chance.

But Sally hated it all. The cabin on Elder Creek had a tight roof; Warren Rodney had money in the bank. He had had uncommon luck at trapping. His talk to Sally was largely of his prospects.

Sally knew that the world owed her "a home of her own"; and why should she let a squaw keep her from it? Sally's mother giggled when consulted. She plainly regarded the squaw as a rival of her daughter. The ethics of the case, as far as Mrs. Tumlin was concerned, was merely a question of white skin against brown, and which should carry the day. Singing Stream knew not one word of the talk, much of which occurred in her very presence, that threatened to pull her home about her ears, but she knew that Sally was taking her man from her. The white-skinned woman wore white ruffles about her neck and calico dresses that were the color of the wild roses that grew among the willows at the creek. Sally Tumlin's pink calico gowns sowed a crop of nettles in the mind of the squaw. It was the rainbow things, she felt, that were robbing her of her man. All her barbaric craving for glowing colors a.s.serted itself as a means towards the one great end of keeping him. Singing Stream began to scheme schemes. One day Rodney was splitting wood at the Tumlin camp-though why he should split wood where there were two women puzzled the squaw. But the ways of the pale-faces were beyond her ken. She only knew that she must make herself beautiful in the eyes of Warren Rodney, like this devil woman, and then perhaps the pappoose that she expected with the first snowfall would be a man-child; and she hoped great things of this happening.

With such primitive reasoning did Singing Stream put the horses to the light wagon, and, taking the little Judith with her, drove to Deadwood, a matter of two hundred miles, to buy the bright calicoes that were to make her like a white woman. It never occurred to the half-breed woman to make known her plans to Warren Rodney. In circ.u.mventing Sally Tumlin the man became the spoils of war, and it is not the Indian way to tell plans on the war-trail. So the squaw left her kingdom in the hands of the enemy, without a word.

Sally Tumlin and Warren Rodney looked upon the disappearance of the squaw in the light of a providential solution of the difficulties attending their romance. They admitted it was square of her to "hit the trail," and they decided to lose no time in going to the army post, where a chaplain, an Indian missionary, happened to be staying at the time, and have a real wedding, with a ring and a fee to the parson. The wedding party started for the post, old mother Tumlin fluttering about the bride as complacently as if the ceremony had been the culmination of the most decorous courtship. The oafish brother drove the bridal party, making crude jests by-the-way, to the frank delight of the prospective groom and the giggling protestations of the bride. The chaplain at the post was disposed to ask few questions. Parsons made queer marriages in those tumultuous days, and it was regarded as a patent of worthy motives that the pair should call in the man of the gospel at all. To the question whether or not he had been married before, Rodney answered:

"Well, parson, this is the first time I have ever stood up for a life sentence." And the ceremony proceeded.

Some of the ladies at the post, hearing that there was to be a wedding, dropped in and added their smiles and flutterings to the rather grim party; among them, Mrs. Atkins, who had just come to the post as a bride.

They even added a trifle or two from their own store of pretty things, as presents to Sally. And Miss Tumlin left the post Mrs. Warren Rodney, with "a home of her own" to go to.

Singing Stream did not hasten in her quest for bright fabrics with which to stay the hand of fate. To the half-breed woman the journey to town was not without a certain revivifying pleasure. The Indian in her stirred to the call of the open country. The tight roof to the cabin on Elder Creek had not the attractions for her that it had for Sally Tumlin. She had chafed sometimes at a house with four walls. But now the dead and gone braves rose in her as she followed the old trail where they had so often crept to battle against their old enemies, the Crows, before the white man's army had scattered them. And as she drove through the foot-hill country, she told the solemn-eyed little Judith the story of the Sioux, and what a great fighting people they had been before Rodney's people drove them from their land. Judith was holding a doll dressed exactly like herself, in soft buckskin shirt, little trousers, and moccasins, all beautifully beaded. In her turn she told the story to the doll.

Singing Stream told her daughter of the making of the world, as the Sioux believe the story of creation; of the "Four who Never Die"-Sharper, or Bladder, Rabbit, Turtle, and Monster; likewise of the coming of a mighty flood on which swam the Turtle and a water-fowl in whose bill was the earth atom, from which presently the world began to grow, Turtle supporting the bird on his great back, which was hard like rock. The rest of the myth, that deals with the rising and setting of the sun, Singing Stream could not tell her daughter, as the old Sioux chiefs did not think it wise to let their women folk know too much about matters of theology.

Nor did they relate to squaws the sun myth, with its account of much cutting-off of heads-thinking, perhaps, with wisdom, that these good ladies saw enough of carnage in their every-day life without introducing it into their catechism.

But Singing Stream knew the story of "Sharper," or "Bladder," as he is called by some of the people, because he is round and his grotesquely fat figure resembles a bladder blown to bursting. Bladder's province it is to make a fool of himself, diving into water after plums he sees reflected there from the branches of the trees. He dives again and again in his pursuit of folly, even tying stones to his wrists and ankles to keep himself down while he gathers the reflected fruit. After his rescue, which he fights against valiantly, as he lies gasping on the bank of the stream, he sees the fruit on the branches above his head. It is this same Bladder who is one of the _dramatis personae_ in the moon myth, and that is told to women as safely without the limits of that little learning that is a dangerous thing. Bladder met Rabbit hunting; and Bladder kept throwing his eye up into the tree-tops to look for game. The Rabbit watched him enviously, thinking what a saving of effort it would be if he could do the same thing. Wherefore Bladder promised to instruct him, telling him to change eyes after using one four times, but Rabbit did not think that the first time counted, as that was but a trial. So he lost his eye after throwing it up the fifth time. And the eye of the rabbit is the moon, and the face seen in the full moon is the reflection of the rabbit seen in his own eye as we see ourselves reflected in the eye of a friend if we look closely. The little girl was wonderfully impressed. She put her hand to her own eyes, but they were in tight, too tight to throw up to the tree-tops.

Singing Stream also told little Judith that the Great Mystery had shown truths, hid to man, to the trees, the streams, the hills; and the clouds that shaped themselves, drifting hither and yon, were the Great Mystery's pa.s.sing thoughts. But he had deprived all these things of speech, as he did not trust them fully, and they could only speak to man in dreams, or in some pa.s.sing mood, when they could communicate to him the feeling of one of the Great Spirits, and warn man of what was about to befall him.

Judith was not quite four when she took this memorable drive with her mother, but the impression of these things abided through all her years.

It was to the measureless s.p.a.ces of desert loneliness that she learned to bring her sorrows in the days of her arid youth, and to feel a kinship with all its moods and to hear in the voice of its silence a never-failing consolation.

And when they had come within a mile of Warren Rodney's cabin on Elder Creek, Singing Stream halted and prepared for the great event of reinstatement. First she made a splendid toilet of purple calico torn into strips and tied about the waist to simulate the skirts of the devil woman.

Over these she wore a shirt of buckskin, broidered with beads of many colors, and a necklace of elk teeth, wound twice about the throat. On her feet she wore new moccasins of tanned elk-hide, and these, too, were beaded in many colors. Her hair, now braided with strips of scarlet flannel, hung below the waist. And she walked to Rodney's cabin, not as an outgrown mistress, but as the daughter of a chief. The little Judith held up her head and clung tight to the doll. She knew that something of moment was about to happen.

The gala trio, Singing Stream, Judith, and Judith's doll, presented themselves at Rodney's house, before which the bride was washing clothes, the day being fine. Sally, as usual, wore one of the rose-colored calicoes with the collar turned well in and the sleeves rolled above the elbows.

She washed vigorously, with a steady splashing of suds. Sally enjoyed this home of her own and all the household duties appertaining to it. She was singing, and a strand of pale-brown hair, crinkly as sea-weed, had blown across the rose of her cheek, when she felt rather than saw a shadow fall across her path, and, glancing up, she saw facing her the woman whom she had supplanted, and the solemn-eyed little girl holding tight to her doll.

Now, neither woman knew a word of the other's speech, but Sally was proficient in the language of femininity, and she was not at a loss to grasp the significance of the purple calico, the beaded buckskin shirt, and the necklace of elk teeth. The half-breed walked as a chief's daughter to the woman at the tub, and Sally grew sick and chill despite her white skin and the gold ring that made Warren Rodney her man in the face of the law. The dark woman held Judith proudly by the hand, as a sovereign might carry a sceptre. Judith was her staff of office, her emblem of authority in the house of Warren Rodney.

Singing Stream held out her hands to Sally in a gesture of appeal-and blundered. Of the chief's daughter, walking proudly, Sally was afraid; but a supplicating half-breed in strips of purple calico, not even hemmed, was a matter for merriment. Sally put her hands on her hips, arms akimbo, and laughed a dry cackle. The light in the brown woman's eyes, as she looked at the white, was like prairie-fires rolling forward through darkness.

There was no need of a common speech between them. The whole destiny of woman was in the laugh and the look that answered it.

And the man they could have murdered for came from the house, an unheroic figure with suspenders dangling and a corncob pipe in his mouth, sullen, angry, and withal abjectly frightened, as mere man inevitably is when he sniffs a woman's battle in the air. The bride, at sight of her husband, took to hysterics. She wept, she laughed, and down tumbled her hair. She felt the situation demanded a scene. Rodney, with a marital brevity hardly to be expected so soon, commanded Sally to go into the house and to "shut up."

Then he faced Singing Stream and said to her in her own language: "You must go away from here. The pale-faced woman is my wife by the white man's law-ring and Bible. No Indian marriage about this."

But the brown woman only pointed to Judith. She asked Rodney had she not been a good squaw to him.

And Rodney, who at best was but a poltroon, could only repeat: "You got to keep away from here. It's the white man's law-one squaw for one man."

From within came the sound of Sally's lamentation as she called for her father and brother to take her from the squaw and contamination. Warren Rodney was a man of few words. It had become his unpleasant duty to act, and to act quickly. He s.n.a.t.c.hed Judith from her mother and took her into the house, and he returned with his Winchester, which was not loaded, to Singing Stream.

"You got to go," he said, and levelling the Winchester, he repeated the command. Singing Stream looked at him with the dumb wonder of a forest thing. "I was a good squaw to you," she said; and did not even curse him.

And turning, she ran towards the foot-hills, with all the length of purple calico trailing.

Now Mrs. Rodney, _nee_ Tumlin, was but human, and her cup of happiness as the wife of a "squaw man" was not the br.i.m.m.i.n.g beaker she had antic.i.p.ated.

The expulsion of her predecessor, at such a time, to make room for her own home-coming, was, it seemed, open to criticism. "The neighborhood"-it included perhaps five families living in a radius of as many hundred miles-felt that the Tumlins had established a bad precedent. A "squaw man"

driving out a brown wife to make room for a white is not a heroic figure.

It had been done before, but it would not hand down well in the traditions of the settling of this great country. Trespa.s.s of law and order, with their swift, red-handed reckoning, were but moves of the great game of colonization. But to shove out a brown woman for a white was a mean move.

Few stopped at the Rodneys' ranch, though it marked the first break in the journey from town to the gold-mining country. Rodney had fallen from his estate as a pioneer; his political opinions were unsought in the conclaves that sat and spat at the stove, when business brought them to the joint saloon and post-office. The women dealt with the question more openly, scorning feminine subtlety at this pa.s.s as inadequate ammunition. When they met Mrs. Rodney they pulled aside their skirts and glared. This outrage against woman it was woman's work to settle.

Mrs. Rodney, who had no more moral sense than a rabbit, felt that she was the victim of persecution. She knew she was a good woman. Hadn't she a husband? Had there ever been a word against her character? What was the use of making all that fuss over a squaw? It was not as if she was a white woman. The injustice of it preyed on the former Miss Tumlin. She took to the consolations of snuff-dipping and fell from her pink-and-white estate.

The Tumlin family did not remain long enough in the Black Hill country to witness Sally's failure as the wife of a pioneer. The restlessness of the "settler," if the paradox be permissible, was in the marrow of their bones. The makeshifts of the wagon, the adventures of the road, were the only home they craved. The spring after Sally's marriage they set forth for California, the year following for New Mexico, and still sighed for new worlds to visit. They were happier now that Sally, the one element of discontent, had been removed from their perennial journeying by the merciful dispensation of marriage. Old Tumlin, his wife, and the son gave themselves up more than ever to the day-dreams of the road, the freedom of the open country, and the spirit of adventure.

Rodney's squaw wife was taken in by some neighbors, good folk who were conversant with all phases of the romance. They stood by her in her hour of trial, and afterwards continued to keep her as a servant. Her son Jim grew up with their own children. When he was four years of age his mother, Singing Stream, died, and Sally persuaded her husband to take young Jim into their own home, partly as a sop to neighborly criticism, partly as a salve to her own conscience. Sally had children of her own, and looked at things differently now from the time when she fought the squaw for Rodney's favor.

Jim's foster-parents were, in truth, glad to part with him. From his earliest babyhood he had been known as a "limb of Satan." He was an Ishmael by every instinct of his being. And Mrs. Warren Rodney, _nee_ Tumlin, felt that in dealing with him, in her capacity of step-mother, she daily expiated any offence that she might have done to his mother.