Judith of the Plains Part 9

"Pshaw now, ladies! why didn't you let me know that you was coming? and I'd have tidied up the place and organized a few dried-apple pies."

"Good house-keepers don't wait for company to come before they get to their work," rebukefully commented the fat lady.

Mr. Dax, recognizing the voice of authority, seized a towel and began to beat out flies, chickens, and dogs, who left the premises with the ill grace of old residents. Two hogs, dormant, guarded either side of the door-step and refused so absolutely to be disturbed by the flicking of the towel that one was tempted to look twice to a.s.sure himself that they were not the fruits of the sculptor's chisel.

"Where's your wife?" sternly demanded the fat lady.

"Oh, my Lord! I presume she's dancin' a whole lot over to Ervay. She packed her ball-gown in a gripsack and lit out of here two days ago, p'inting that way. A locomotive couldn't stop her none if she got a chance to go cycloning round a dance."

In the mean time, the two hogs having failed to grasp the fact that they were _de trop_, continued to doze.

"Come, girls, get up," coaxed Johnnie, persuasively. "Maude, I don't know when I see you so lazy. Run on, honey-run on with Ethel." For Ethel, the piebald hog, finally did as she was bid.

Mary Carmichael could not resist the temptation of asking how the hogs happened to have such unusual names.

"To tell the truth, I done it to aggravate my wife. When I finds myself a discard in the matrimonial shuffle, I figgers on a new deal that's going to inclood one or two anxieties for my lady partner-to which end-viz., namely, I calls one hawg Ethel and the other hawg Maude, allowing to my wife that they're named after lady friends in the East. Them lady friends might be the daughters of Ananias and Sapphira, for all they ever happened, but they answers the purpose of riling her same as if they were eating their three squares daily. I have hopes, everything else failing, that she may yet quit dancing and settle down to the sanct.i.ty of the home out of pure jealousy of them two proxy hawgs."

"I can just tell you this," interrupted the fat lady: "I don't enjoy occupying premises after hawgs, no matter how fashionable you name 'em. A hawg's a hawg, with manners according, if it's named after the President of the United States or the King of England."

"That's just what I used to think, marm, of all critters before I enjoyed that degree of friendliness that I'm now proud to own. Take Jerry now, that old white horse-why, me and him is just like brothers. When I have to leave the kid to his lonesome infant reflections and go off to chop wood, I just call Jerry in, and he a.s.soomes the responsibility of nurse like he was going to draw wages for it."

"I reckon there's faults on both sides," said the fat lady, impartially.

"No natural woman would leave her baby to a horse to mind while she went off dancing. And no natural man would fill his house full of critters, and them with highfalutin names. Take my advice, turn 'em out."

Mary did not wait to hear the continuation of the fat lady's advice. She went out on the desert to have one last look at the west. The sun had taken his plunge for the night, leaving his royal raiment of crimson and gold strewn above the mountain-tops.

Her sunset reflections were presently interrupted by the fat lady, who proposed that they should walk till Mr. Dax had tidied up his house, observing, with logic, that it did not devolve on them to clean the place, since they were paying for supper and lodging. They had gone but a little way when sudden apprehension caused the fat lady to grasp Mary's arm. Miss Carmichael turned, expecting mountain-lions, rattlesnakes, or stage-robbers, but none of these casualties had come to pa.s.s.

"Land sakes! Here we be parading round the prairie, and I never found out how that man cooked his coffee."

"What difference does it make, if we can drink it?"

"The ways of men cooks is a sealed book to you, I reckon, or you wouldn't be so unconcerned-'specially in the matter of coffee. All men has got the notion that coffee must be b'iled in a bag, and if they 'ain't got a regular bag real handy, they take what they can get. Oh, I've caught 'em,"

went on the fat lady, darkly, "b'iling coffee in improvisations that'd turn your stomach."

"Yes, yes," Mary hastily agreed, hoping against hope that she wasn't going to be more explicit.

"And they are so cute about it, too; it's next to impossible to catch 'em.

You ask a man if he b'iles his coffee loose or tight, and he'll declare he b'iles it loose, knowing well how suspicious and p.r.o.ne to investigate is the female mind. But you watch your chance and take a look in the coffee-pot, and maybe you'll find-"

"Yes, yes, I've heard-"

"I've seen-"

"Let's hurry," implored Mary.

"Have you made your coffee yet?" inquired the fat lady.

"Yes, marm," promptly responded Johnnie.

"I hope you b'iled it in a bag-it clears it beautiful, a bag does."

Johnnie shifted uneasily. "No, marm, I b'iles it loose. You see, bags ain't always handy."

The fat lady plied her eye as a weapon. No Dax could stand up before an accusing feminine eye. He quailed, made a grab for the coffee-pot, and rushed with it out into the night.

"What did I tell you?" she asked, with an air of triumph.

Johnnie returned with the empty coffee-pot. "To tell the truth, marm, I made a mistake. I 'ain't made the coffee. I plumb forgot it. P'raps you could be prevailed on to a.s.sist this yere outfit to coffee while I organizes a few sody-biscuits."

After supper, when the fat lady was so busy talking "goo-goo" language to the baby as to be oblivious of everything else, Mary Carmichael took the opportunity to ask Johnnie if he knew anything about Lost Trail. The name of her destination had come to sound unpleasantly ominous in the ears of the tired young traveller, and she feared that her inquiry did not sound as casual as she tried to have it. Nor was Johnnie's candid reply rea.s.suring.

"It's a pizen-mean country, from all I ever heard tell. The citizens tharof consists mainly of coyotes and mountain-lions, with a few rattlers thrown in just to make things neighborly. This yere place"-waving his hand towards the arid wastes which night was making more desolate-"is a summer resort, with modern improvements, compared to it."

Mary screwed her courage to a still more desperate point, and inquired if Mr. Dax knew a family named Yellett living in Lost Trail.

"Never heard of no family living there, excepting the bluff at family life maintained by the wild beasts before referred to. See here, miss, I ain't makin' no play to inquire into your affairs, but you ain't thinkin' o'

visitin' Lost Trail, be you?"

"Perhaps," said Mary, faintly; and then she, too, talked "goo-goo" to the baby.

VIII

The Rodneys At Home

All that long and never-to-be-forgotten night the stage lurched through the darkness with Mary Carmichael the solitary pa.s.senger. The fat lady had warned Johnnie Dax that he was on no account to replenish Chugg's flask, if he had the wherewithal for replenishment on the premises. Moreover, she threatened Dax with the fury of her son should he fail in this particular; and Johnnie, hurt to the quick by the unjust suspicion that he could fail so signally in his duty to a lady, not only refused to replenish the flask, but threatened Chugg with a conditional vengeance in the event of accident befalling the stage. It was with a partially sobered and much-threatened stage-driver, therefore, that Mary continued her journey after the supper at Johnnie Dax's, but the knowledge of it brought scant rea.s.surance, and it is doubtful if the red stage ever harbored any one more wakeful than the pale, tired girl who watched all the changes from dark to dawn at the stage window.

Once or twice she caught a glimpse of distant camp-fires burning and knew that some cattle outfit was camped there for the night; and once they drove so close that she could hear the cow-boys' voices, enriched and mellowed by distance, borne to them on the cool, evening wind. It gave a sense of security to know that these big-hearted, manly lads were within call, and she watched the dwindling spark of their camp-fires and strained her ears to catch the last note of their singing, with something of the feeling of severed comradeship. Range cattle, startled from sleep by the stage, scrambled to their feet and bolted headlong in the blind impulse of panic, their horns and the confused ma.s.sing of their bodies showing in sharp silhouette against the horizon for a moment, then all would settle into quiet again. There was no moon that night, but the stars were sown broadcast-softly yellow stars, lighting the darkness with a shaded l.u.s.ter, like lamps veiled in pale-yellow gauze. The chill electric glitter of the stars, as we know it from between the roofs of high houses, this world of far-flung distance knows not. There the stars are big and still, like the eyes of a contented woman.

The hoofs of the horses beat the night away as regularly as the ticking of a clock. It grew darker as the night wore on, and sometimes a coyote would yelp from the fringe of willows that bordered a creek in a way that made Mary recall tales of banshees. And once, when the first pale streak of dawn trembled in the east and the mountains looked like jagged rocks heaved against the sky and in danger of toppling, the whole dread picture brought before her one of Vedder's pictures that hung in the shabby old library at home.

They breakfasted somewhere, and Chugg put fresh horses to the stage. She knew this from their difference of color; the horses that they had left the second Dax ranch with had been white, and these that now toiled over the sand and desolation were apparently brown. She could not be certain that they were brown, or that they were toiling over the sand and desolation, or that her name was Mary Carmichael, or indeed of anything.

Four days in the train, and what seemed like four centuries in the stage, eliminated any certainty as to anything. She could only sit huddled into a heap and wait for things to become adjusted by time.

Chugg was behaving in a most exemplary manner. He drove rigidly as an automaton, and apparently he looked no longer on the "lightning" when it was bottled. Once or twice he had applied his eye to the pane that separated him from his pa.s.senger, and asked questions relative to her comfort, but Mary was too utterly dejected to reply in more than monosyllables. As they crept along, the sun-dried timbers of the stage creaked and groaned in seeming protest at wearing its life away in endless journeyings over this desert waste, then settled down into one of those maddeningly monotonous reiterations to which certain inanimate things are given in seasons of nervous tension. This time it was: "All the world's-a stage-creak-screech-all-the world's a stage-creak-screech!" over and over till Mary found herself fast succ.u.mbing to the hypnotic effect of the constant repet.i.tion, listening for it, even, with the tyrannous eagerness of overwrought nerves, when the stage-driver broke the spell with, "This here stage gets to naggin' me along about here. She's hungry for her axle-grease-that's what ails her."

"I suppose," Mary roused herself to say, "you have quite a feeling of comradeship for the stage."

"Me and Clara"-the stage had this name painted on the side-"have been travelling together nigh onto four year. And while there's times that I would prefer a greater degree of reciprocity, these yere silent companions has their advantages. Why, compare Clara to them female blizzards-the two Mrs. Daxes-and you see Clara's good p'ints immejit. Yes, miss, the thirst-quenchers are on me if either one of the Dax boys wouldn't be glad to swap, but I'd have to be a heap more locoed than I am now to consent to the transaction."

At sunset the interminable monotony of the wilderness was broken by a house of curious architecture, the like of which the tired young traveller had never seen before, and whose singular candor of design made her doubt the evidence of her own thoroughly exhausted faculties. The house seemed to consist of a series of rooms thrown, or rather blown, together by some force of nature rather than by formal design of builder or carpenter. The original log-cabin of this composite dwelling looked better built, more finished, neater of aspect than those they had previously stopped at in crossing the Desert. Springing from the main building, like claws from a crustacean, were a series of rooms minus either side walls or flooring.

Indeed, they might easily have pa.s.sed for porches of more than usually commodious size had it not been for the beds, bureaus, chairs, stove with attendant pots, kettles, and supper in the course of preparation. Seen from any vantage-point in the surrounding country, the effect was that of an interior on the stage-the background of some homely drama where pioneer life was being realistically depicted. The _dramatis persona_ who occupied the centre of the stage when Mary Carmichael drove up was an elderly woman in a rocking-chair. She was dressed in a faded pink calico gown, limp and bedraggled, whose color brought out the parchment-like hue and texture of her skin in merciless contrast. Perhaps because she still harbored illusions about the perishable quality of her complexion, which gave every evidence of having borne the brunt of merciless desert suns, snows, blizzards, and the ubiquitous alkali dust of all seasons, she wore a pink sun-bonnet, though the hour was one past sundown, and though she sat beneath her own roof-tree, even if lacking the protection of four walls.