Marie Manning

“ The horse, with a keener sense than his master, shied slightly as he passed the group of pines where Judith stood; but Peter’s glance was for the open trail, and as she heard him canter by, so close that she could have touched his stirrup with her hand, it seemed as if he must hear the beating of her heart.
“Oh, blind eyes, and ears that will not hear, and heart that has forgotten how to beat! Yes, go to that pale, cold girl! You speak one language, and life for you is the way of little things!” ”

“ The trail that she must take to Jim’s camp in the mountain was known to but few honest men. Fugitives from justice—the grave, impersonal justice of the law, or the swift justice of the plains—found there an asylum. And while they sometimes suffered, in death by thirst or hunger, a sentence more dreadful than the law of the land or the law of the rope would have given them, the desert, like the sea, seldom gave up her own. It was more than probable that no woman except Alida Rodney had ever taken that trail before, and reasonably certain that no woman had ever taken it alone. ”

“ 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. ”

“ She spoke to him from the darkness, as the spirit of grief might speak. “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, that is the justice of the plains. But, Peter, it is but poor justice. What’s done is done, and fresh violence will not give back Alida her husband nor the little ones their father. What we need is friends, one or two loyal souls who, though knowing the hideous truth of this thing, will stand by us in our pitiful falsehood. I have told no one, nor shall I, but you and—Peter, you must not laugh at your fellow-conspirator—Leander.” ”

“ The herd crashed forward in a stampede, Simpson in the lead on a tired horse, but a scant length ahead of a thousand maddened steers bolting in a panic of thirst and fear.
“Hell’s loose!” yelled the men in their blankets, making for the temporary rope corral to secure horses. Simpson, tallow-colored with fear, clung like a cat to his horse, and dug the rowels in the beast’s flanks till they were bloody and dripping. He had seen Jim Rodney’s face above the white cloth as it fluttered in the face of the herd that came pounding behind him with the rumble of nearing thunder. ”

“ The horse seemed to be gaining. A few more lengths ahead and Simpson could turn her to one side and let the maddened cattle race to their own destruction. All he asked of God was to escape their trampling hoofs, and though he gained he dug the rowel and plied the quirt, unmindful of what he did. On they came; the chorus of their fear swelled like the voice of a mighty cataract, the pound, pound, pound of their hoofs ringing like mighty sledge-hammers.
Suddenly he felt himself sinking, horribly, irresistibly. “God! What is it?” as his horse went down with her foreleg in a gopher-hole. ”

“ The Cabin In The Valley
And Judith, taken unawares by the unexpected turn of things, comforted as a lost child that is found, told all her feeling for him in the way she called his name. The easy tenderness of the man awoke; his senses swayed to the magic of her voice, the mystery of the night, the shadow world in which they two, ’twixt earth and sky, were alone. They rode without speaking. Peter’s hand sought hers, and all her woman’s terror of the desolation, her fear of the vague terrors of the dreadful night, spoke in her answering pressure. ”

“ He bent towards her; to brush her cheek lightly as they rode was but to imply his appreciation of the scene as a bit of chiaroscuro, the panorama of the desert night, eternal romance typified by the man and woman scaling the heights, the goddess of love lighting them on their way by her flaming torch. But Judith, who said little because she felt much, was in no mood to brook such dalliance, and, urging the mare sharply, she cantered down the divide at peril of life and limb. Peter, cursing the heavy-footed beast he rode, came stumbling after. ”

“ Mary had dismissed her pupils a few minutes before the usual hour, on a particularly bad day, that she might rally her scattered faculties and present something of a countenance to the watchful eye of Mrs. Yellett. Every element of humor had vanished from the situation. The inverted tub was no longer a theme for merriment in her diary; home-life without a house was no longer a diverting epigram; she had closed her eyes that she might not see the mountains in all their grandeur. In her present mood of abject homesickness the white-capped peaks were part and parcel of the affront. ”

“ They began their journeying towards the land of promise long before the Indians had ever seen the shrieking “fire-wagon.” All day they would toil over the infinitude of prairie, the sun that hid nightly behind that maddeningly elusive vanishing-point, the horizon, their only guide. But the makeshifts of the wagon life were not without charm. They began to wander in quest of they knew not precisely what, and from these vague beginnings there had sprung into existence that nomadic population that was once such a feature of the far West, but is now going the way of the Indians and the cow-boys. ”

“ In her contemplative stoicism she felt with pride that she was no unworthy daughter of her mother’s people, and catching a glimpse through the trees of the abjectly waiting woman who, though safe and sound, could but wait, wretched and dispirited, for some one to come and adjust her to the situation, Judith felt for her a wondering pity at her helplessness. She waited, expectant, for the sound of Peter’s horse. Surely he must come at any moment, overcome with apologies, and she—Judith hid her face in her hands at the thought—she would steal away through the thicket at the first sound of hoofs. ”

“ He must feel the joy in her heart that all was well with him. The hoofs came nearer, the man’s voice sounded but intermittently, as he got his horse under better control. She felt as if he must come to her, as if some overpowering consciousness of her presence would speak from her heart to his; but his eyes scanned the distant trail for a glimpse of Kitty or Kitty’s horse. Judith saw that his head was bound in something white and that it bore a red stain, but he held himself well in the saddle. He was not the man to heed a tumble. ”

“ Her Indian fatalism had intervened. “Life was life,” to be lived or left. And yet she felt herself a poor creature, one who had lived long on illusion, who had bent her neck to the yoke of arid unrealities. The pale-haired woman who kept him with her miserliness of self, who intruded no sombre tragedy of loving, was well worth a trip across the foot-hills to see. And yet, Judith reflected, it was the portion of her mother’s daughter to make of loving the whole business of life, even if she rebelled and fought against it as an accursed destiny. ”

“ And among them stood Judith, waiting to play her part, waiting to show her world that she could dance and be merry because all was well with her and hers. But the bronzed sons of the saddle hung back, they who a day before would have quarrelled for the honor of a dance. They were afraid of her; it would be like dancing with the death angel. She looked from face to face. Surely some one would ask her to dance, and her eyes fell on Henderson, returning from the bottled courage in the bunk-room. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The breakneck ride to Kitty was already the madness of a dead and gone incarnation. He pointed to the pale star, and told her it was the omen of their destiny; the formless blackness through which they had groped was the way of life, but for such as were not condemned to eternal darkness Venus held high her lamp and they scaled the heights.
And Judith, listening, found her heart a battle-field of love and hate. “Were women dogs, that men should play with them in idle moods, caress them, and fling them out for other toys?” ”

“ To the girl following the trail the silence was more dreadful than a chorus of threatening voices. She listened till the stillness beat at her ears like the stamping of ten thousand hoofs, then pulled up her horse, and the desert was as still as the chamber of death.
“Ah, Dolly, my dear, a house is the place for women folk when the night comes—a house, the fire burning clear, the kettle singing, and—” Dolly whinnied an affirmative without waiting for the picture to be completed. The wilderness was being gradually swallowed by the shadows, as deliberately as a snake swallows its victim. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In glancing up to make some remark about Judith, Mary was confronted by a radiant apparition whose lilac calico skirts looked fresh from the iron.
At the side of the house languished a wretched, abortive garden, running over with weeds and sage-brush, and here a man pottered with the purposeless energy of old age, working with an ear cocked in the direction of the house, as he turned a spade of earth again and again in hopeless, pusillanimous industry. ”

“ Nor was it all feasting and merrymaking. A heroic band it was that battled with the wilderness, riding the range with heat and cold, starvation and death, and making small pin-pricks in that empty blotch of the United States map that is marked “Great Alkali Desert” blossom into settlements. When the last word has been said about the pioneers of these United States, let the cow-boy be remembered in the universal toast, that bronzed son of the saddle who lived his little day bravely and merrily, and whose real heroism is too often forgotten in the glamour of his own picturesqueness. ”

“ Peter turned to Kitty, expecting to see her face aglow with the warmth of it. She stood beside him, the one unresponsive soul in the room, on her lips a pale, tolerant smile.
“Aren’t they splendid, Kitty, these women? More than half of them work like beavers all day, and they have young children and dozens of worries, but would you suspect it? They’re just the women for this country.” ”

“ To the most searching glance every faculty was intent on the shirt-waist with the ringed buttons. Yet both women felt—by a species of telepathy wholly feminine—that Judith was deeply wounded. Loyal Sarah Yellett decided that Hamilton’s guests would get but a scant supper from her if her friend Judith was to be unfavored with an invitation, while Judith, in her own warm heart, resented as deeply as Peter’s slight of herself, his tale of Miss Colebrooke’s impatience to meet Mrs. Yellett. The matriarch’s dominant personality evoked many a smile even from those most deeply conscious of her worth ”

“ No flashes of daylight between saddle and rider in the jolting, Eastern fashion, but the long, easy sweep that covers ground imperceptibly and is a delight to the eye. It needed but the solitary figure to signify the infinitude of space in the background. In all that great, wide world the only hint of life was the galloping horseman, the only sound the rhythmical ring of the nearing hoofs. The rider, now close enough for Miss Carmichael to distinguish the features, was a thorough dandy of the saddle. ”