Читать книгу Judith of the Plains - Marie Manning - Страница 6

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The arrival of Chugg’s stage with the mail should have been coincident with the departure of the stage that brought the travellers from “Town,” but Chugg was late—a tardiness ascribed to indulgence in local lethe waters, for Lemuel Chugg had survived a romance and drank to forget that woman is a variable and a changeable thing. In consequence of which the sober stage-driver departed without the mails, leaving Mary Carmichael and the fat lady to scan the horizon for the delinquent Chugg, and incidentally to hear a chapter of prairie romance.

Some sort of revolution seemed to be in progress in the room in which the travellers had breakfasted. Mrs. Dax had assumed the office of dictator, with absolute sway. Leander, as aide-de-camp, courier, and staff, executed marvellous feats of domestic engineering. The late breakfast-table, swept and garnished with pigeon-holes, became a United States post-office, prepared to transact postal business, and for the time being to become the social centre of the surrounding country.

Down the yellow road that climbed and dipped and climbed and dipped again over foot-hills and sprawling space till it was lost in a world without end, Mary Carmichael, standing in the doorway, watched an atom, so small that it might have been a leaf blowing along in the wind, turn into a horseman.

There was inspiration for a hundred pictures in the way that horse was ridden. 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. No slouching garb of exigence and comfort this, but a pretty display of doeskin gaiter, varnished boot, and smart riding-breeches. The lad—he could not have been, Miss Carmichael thought, more than twenty—was tanned a splendid color not unlike the bloomy shading on a nasturtium. And when the doughty horseman made out the girl standing in the doorway, he smiled with a lack of formality not suggested by the town-cut of his trappings. Throwing the reins over the neck of the horse with the real Western fling, he slid from the saddle in a trice, and—Mary Carmichael experienced something of the gasping horror of a shocked old lady as she made out two splendid braids of thick, black hair. Her doughty cavalier was no cavalier at all, but a surprisingly handsome young woman.

Miss Carmichael gasped a little even as she extended her hand, for the masquerader had pulled off her gauntlet and held out hers as if she was conferring the freedom of the wilderness. It was impossible for a homesick girl not to respond to such heartiness, though it was with difficulty at first that Mary kept her eyes on the girl’s face. Curiosity, agreeably piqued, urged her to take another glimpse of the riding clothes that this young woman wore with such supreme unconcern.

Now, “in the East” Mary Carmichael had not been in the habit of meeting black-haired goddesses who rode astride and whose assurance of the pleasure of meeting her made her as self-conscious as on her first day at dancing-school; and though she tried to prove her cosmopolitanism by not betraying this, the attempt was rather a failure.

“Are you surprised that I did not wait for an introduction?” the girl in the riding clothes asked, noticing Mary’s evident uneasiness; “but you don’t know how good it is to see a girl. I’m so tired of spurs and sombreros and cattle and dust and distance, and there’s nothing else here.”

“Where I come from it’s just the other way—too many petticoats and hat-pins.”

The horseman who was no horseman dropped Miss Carmichael’s hand and went into the house. Mary wondered if she ought to have been more cordial.

From the back door came Leander, with dishcloths, which he began to hang on the line in a dumb, driven sort of way.

“Who is she?” asked Mary.

“Her?” he interrogated, jerking his head in the direction of the house. “The postmistress, Judith Rodney; yes, that’s her name.” He dropped his voice in the manner of one imparting momentous things. “She never wears a skirt ridin’, any more than a man.”

Mary felt that she was tempting Leander into the paths of gossip, undoubtedly his besetting sin, but she could not resist the temptation to linger. He had disposed of his last dish-cloth, and he withdrew the remaining clothes-pin from his mouth in a way that was pathetically feminine.

“She keeps the post-office here, since Mrs. Dax lost the job, and boards with us; p’r’aps it’s because she is my wife’s successor in office, or p’a’ps it’s jest the natural grudge that wimmin seem to harbor agin each other, I dunno, but they don’t sandwich none.”

Leander having disposed of his last dish-towel, squinted at it through his half-closed eyes, like an artist “sighting” a landscape, saw apparently that it was in drawing, and next brought his vision to bear on the back premises of his own dwelling, where he saw there was no wifely figure in evidence.

“Sh-sh-h!” he said, creeping towards Mary, his dull face transfigured with the consciousness that he had news to tell. “Sh-sh—her brother’s a rustler. If ’twan’t for her”—Leander went through the grewsome pantomime of tying an imaginary rope round his neck and throwing it over the limb of an imaginary tree. “They’re goin’ to get him for shore this time, soon as he comes out of jail; but would you guess it from her bluff?”

There was no mistaking the fate of a rustler after Mr. Dax’s grisly demonstration, but of the quality of his calling Mary was as ignorant as before.

“And why should they do that?” she inquired, with tenderfoot simplicity.

“Stealin’ cattle ain’t good for the health hereabouts,” said Leander, as one who spoke with authority. “It’s apt to bring on throat trouble.”

But Mary did not find Leander’s joke amusing. She had suddenly remembered the pale, gaunt man who had walked into the eating-house the previous morning and walked out again, his errand turned into farce-comedy by the cowardice of an unworthy antagonist. The pale man’s grievance had had to do with sheep and cattle. His name had been Rodney, too. She understood now. He was Judith Rodney’s brother, and he was in danger of being hanged. Mary Carmichael felt first the admiration of a girl, then the pity of a woman, for the brave young creature who so stoutly carried so unspeakable a burden. But she could not speak of her new knowledge to Leander.

She glanced towards this childlike person and saw from his stealthy manner that he had more to impart. He walked towards the kitchen door, saw no one, and came back to Mary.

“There ain’t a man in this Gawd-forsaken country wouldn’t lope at the chance to die for her—but the women!” Leander’s pantomimic indication of absolute feminine antagonism was conclusive.

“The wimmin treats her scabby—just scabby. Don’t you go to thinkin’ she ain’t a good girl on that account”; and something like an attitude of chivalrous protection straightened the apologetic crook in his craven outline.

“She’s good, just good, and when a woman’s that there’s no use in sayin’ it any more fanciful. As I says to my wife, every time she give me a chance, ‘If Judy wasn’t a good girl these boys about here would just natchrally become extinct shootin’ each other upon account of her.’ But she don’t favor none enough to cause trouble.”

“Are the women jealous of her?”

“It’s her independence that riles ’em. They take on awful about her ridin’ in pants, an’ it certainly is a heap more modest than ridin’ straddle in a hitched up caliker skirt, same as some of them do.”

“And do all the women out here ride astride?” Mary gasped.

“A good many does, when you ain’t watchin’; horses in these parts ain’t broke for no such lopsided foolishness as side-saddles. But you see she does it becomin’, and that’s where the grudge comes in. You can’t stir about these foot-hills without coming across a woman, like as not, holdin’ on to a posse of kids, and ridin’ clothes-pin fashion in a looped-up skirt; when she sees you comin’ she’ll p’r’aps upset a kid or two assoomin’ a decorous attitood. That’s feeminine, and as such is approved by the ladies, but”—and here Leander put his head on one side and gave a grotesque impression of outraged decorum—“pants is considered unwomanly.”

“Leander! Leander!” came in accusing accents from the kitchen.

“Run!” gasped Mrs. Dax’s handmaiden; “don’t let her catch us chinnin’.”

Mary Carmichael ran round one side of the house as she was bidden, but, like Lot’s wife, could not resist the temptation of looking back. Leander, with incredible rapidity, grabbed two clothes-pins off the line, clutched a dish-towel, shook it. “Comin’! comin’!” he called, as he went through the farce of rehanging it.

The lonesomeness of plain and foot-hill, the utter lack of the human element that gives to this country its character of penetrating desolation, had been changed while Mary Carmichael forgathered with Leander by the clothes-line. From the four quarters of the compass, men in sombreros, flannel shirts, and all manner of strange habiliments came galloping over the roads as if their horses were as keen on reaching Dax’s as their riders. They came towards the house at full tilt, their horses stretching flat with ears laid back viciously, and Mary, who was unused to the tricks of cow-ponies, expected to see them ride through the front door, merely by way of demonstrating their sense of humor. Not so; the little pintos, buckskins, bays, and chestnuts dashed to the door and stopped short in a full gallop; as a bit of staccato equestrianism it was superb.

And then the wherefore of all this dashing horsemanship, this curveting, prancing, galloping revival of knightly tourney effects was apparent—Judith Rodney had opened post-office. She had changed her riding clothes; or, rather, that portion of them to which the ladies took exception was now concealed by a long, black skirt. Her wonderful braids of black hair had been twisted high on her head. She was well worth a trip across the alkali wastes to see. The room was packed with men. One unconsciously got the impression that a fire, a fight, or some crowd-collecting casualty had happened. Above the continual clinking of spurs there arose every idiom and peculiarity of speech of which these United States are capable. There is no Western dialect, properly speaking. Men bring their modes of expression with them from Maine or Minnesota, as the case may be, but their figures of speech, which give an essential picturesqueness to their language, are almost entirely local—the cattle and sheep industries, prospecting, the Indians, poker, faro, the dance-halls, all contribute their printable or unprintable embellishment.

Judith managed them all—cow-punchers, sheep-herders, prospectors, freighters—with an impersonal skill that suggested a little solitary exercise in the bowling-alley. The ten-pins took their tumbles in good part—no one could congratulate himself on escaping the levelling ball—and where there’s a universal lack of luck, doubtless also there will be found a sort of grim fellowship.

That they were all more or less in love with her there could be no doubt. As a matter of fact, Judith Rodney did not depend on the scarcity of women in the desert for her pre-eminence in the interests of this hot-headed group. Her personality—and through no conscious effort of hers—would have been pre-eminent anywhere. As it was, in this woman-forsaken wilderness she might have stirred up a modern edition of the Trojan war at any moment. That she did not, despite the lurking suggestion of temptation written all over her, brought back the words of Leander: “If Judy wasn’t a good girl, these boys would just nacherally become extinct shooting each other upon account of her.”

And yet what a woman she was! It struck Miss Carmichael, as she watched Judith hold these warring elements in the hollow of her hand, that her interest might be due to a certain temperamental fusion; that there might lie, at the essence of her being, a subtle combination of saint and devil. One could fancy her leading an army on a crusade or provoking a bar-room brawl. The challenging quality of her beauty, the vividness of color, the suggestion of endurance and radiating health in every line, were comparable to the great primeval forces about her. She was cast to be the mother of men of brawn and muscle, who would make this vast, unclaimed wilderness subject to them.

At present neither pole of her character, as it had been hastily estimated, was even remotely suggested. The atmosphere in the post-office was, considering the potential violence of its visitors, singularly calm. And Judith, feeding these wild border lads on scraps of chaff and banter, and retaining their absolute loyalty, was a sight worth seeing. She had the alertness of a lion-tamer locked in a cage with the lords of the jungle; the rashly confident she humbled, the meek she exalted, and all with such genuine good-fellowship, such an absence of coquetry in the genial game of give and take, that one ceased to wonder at even the devotion of Leander. And since they were to her, on her own confession, but “spurs and sombreros,” one wondered at the elaboration of the comedy, the endless wire-pulling in the manipulation of these most picturesque marionettes—until one remembered the outlaw brother and felt that what she did she did for him.

“You right shore there ain’t a letter for me, Miss Judith. My creditors are pretty faithful ’bout bearing me in mind.” It was the third time that the big, shambling Texan who had been one of the company at Mrs. Clark’s eating-house had inquired for mail, and seemed so embarrassed by his own bulk that he moved cautiously, as if he might step on a fellow-creature and maim him. Each time he had asked for a letter he took his place at the end of the waiting-line and patiently bided his time for the chance of an extra word with the postmistress.

“They’ve begun to lose hope, Texas.”

She shuffled the letters impartially, as a goddess dispensing fate, and barely glanced at the man who had ridden a hundred and fifty miles across sand and cactus to see her.

“That’s the difference between them and me.” There was a grim finality in his tone.

“What, you’re going to take your place at the end of that line again! I’ll try and find you a circular.”

He tried to look at her angrily, but she smiled at him with such good-fellowship that he went off singing significantly that universal anthem of the cow-puncher the West over:

“Oh, bury me not on the lone prairie,

In a narrow grave just six by three,

Where the wild coyotes will howl o’er me.

Oh, bury me not on the lone prairie.”

“Ain’t there a love letter for me?” The young man who inquired seemed to belong to a different race from these bronzed squires of the saddle. He suggested over-crowded excursion boats on Sunday afternoons in swarming Eastern cities. He buttonholed every one and explained his presence in the West on the score of his health, as though leaving his native asphalt were a thing that demanded apology.

“Yes,” answered the postmistress, with a real motherly note, “here is one from Hugous & Co.”

A roar went up at this, and the blushing tenderfoot pocketed his third bill for the most theatrical style of Mexican sombrero; it had a brass snake coiled round the crown for a hat-band, and a cow-puncher in good and regular standing would have preferred going bareheaded to wearing it.

“She seems to be pressing her suit, son; you better name the day,” one of the loungers suggested.

“The blamed thing ain’t worth twenty-five dollars,” the young man from the East declared. A conspicuous silence followed. It seemed to irritate the owner of the hat that no one would defend it. “It ain’t worth it,” he repeated.

“I think you allowed you was out here for your health?” the big Texan, who had returned from the corral, inquired.

“Betcher life,” swaggered the man with the hat, “N’York’s good enough for me.”

“But”—and the Texan smiled sweetly—“the man who sold you the hat ain’t out here for his.”

Judith hid her head and stamped letters. The boys were suspiciously quiet, then some one began to chant:

“The devil examined the desert well,

And made up his mind ’twas too dry for hell;

He put up the prices his pockets to swell,

And called it a—heal-th resort.”

The postmistress waited for the last note of the chorus to die away, and read from a package she held in her hand—“‘Mrs. Henry Lee, Deer Lodge, Wyoming.’ Well, Henry, here’s a wedding-present, I guess. And my congratulations, though you’ve hardly treated us well in never saying a word.”

The unfortunate Henry, who hadn’t even a sweetheart, and who was noted as the shyest man in the “Goose Creek Outfit,” had to submit to the mock congratulations of every man in the room and promise to set up the drinks later.

“I never felt we’d keep you long, son; them golden curls seldom gets a chance to ripen singly.”

“Shoshone squaw, did you say she was, Henry? They ain’t much for looks, but there’s a heep of wear to ’em.”

“Oh, go on, now; you fellows know I ain’t married.” And the boy handled the package with a sort of dumb wonder, as if the superscription were indisputable evidence of a wife’s existence.

“Open it, Henry; you shore don’t harbor sentiments of curiosity regarding the post-office dealings of your lady.”

“Now, old man, this here may be grounds for divorce.”

“See what the other fellow’s sending your wife.”

Henry, badgered, jostled, the target of many a homely witticism, finally opened the package, which proved to be a sample bottle of baby food. At sight of it they howled like Apaches, and Henry was again forced to receive their congratulations. Judith, who had been an interested on-looker without joining in the merriment, now detected in the tenor of their humor a tendency towards breadth. In an instant her manner was official; rapping the table with her mailing-stamp, she announced:

“Boys, this post-office closes in ten minutes, if you want to buy any stamps.”

The silence following this statement on the part of the postmistress was instantaneous. Henry took his mirth-provoking package and went his way; some of the more hilariously inclined followed him. The remainder confined themselves absolutely to business, scrawling postal-cards or reading their mail. The pounce of the official stamp on the letters, as the postmistress checked them off for the mail-bag, was the only sound in the hot stillness.

A heavily built man, older than those who had been keeping the post-office lively, now took advantage of the lull to approach Judith. He had a twinkling face, all circles and pouches, but it grew graver as he spoke to the postmistress. He was Major Atkins, formerly a famous cavalry officer, but since his retirement a cattle-man whose herds grazed to the pan-handle of Texas. As he took his mail, talking meantime of politics, of the heat, of the lack of water, in the loud voice for which he was famous, he managed, with clumsy diplomacy, to interject a word or two for her own ear alone.

“Jim’s out,” he conveyed to her, in a successfully muffled tone. “He’s out, and they’re after him, hot. Get him out of the State, Judy—get him out, quick. He tried to kill Simpson at Mrs. Clark’s, in town, yesterday. The little Eastern girl that’s here will tell you.” Then the major was gone before Judith could perfectly realize the significance of what he had told her.

She threw back her head and the pulse in her throat beat. Like a wild forest thing, at the first warning sound, she considered: Was it time for flight?—or was the warning but the crackling of a twig? Major Atkins was a cattle-man: her brother hated all cattle-men. How disinterested had been the major’s warning! He had always been her friend. Mrs. Atkins had been one of the ladies at the post who had helped to send her to school to the nuns at Santa Fé. She despised herself for doubting; yet these were troublous times, and all was fair between sheep and cattle-men. Major Atkins had spoken of the Eastern girl; then that pretty, little, curly-haired creature, whom Judith had found standing in the sunshine, had seen Jim—had heard him threaten to kill. Should she ask her about it—consult her? Judith’s training was not one to impel her to give her confidence to strangers, still she had liked the little Eastern girl.

These were the perplexities that beset her, sweeping her thoughts hither and thither, as sea-weed is swept by the wash of the waves. She strove to collect her faculties. How should she rid the house of her cavaliers? She had regularly to refuse some half-dozen of them each day that she kept post-office.

In a few minutes more the group in the post-office began to disperse under the skilful manipulation of the postmistress. To some she sold stamps with an air of “God speed you,” and they were soon but dwindling specks on the horizon. To others she implied such friendly farewells that there was nothing to do but betake themselves to their saddles. Others had compromised with the saloon opposite, and their roaring mirth came in snatches of song and shouts of laughter. She fastened up the little pile of letters that had remained uncalled for with what seemed a deliberate slowness. Each time any one entered the room she looked up—then the hope died hard in her face. Leander came in with catlike tread and removed the pigeon-holes from the table. The post-office was closed. Family life had been resumed at the Daxes’.

Judith left the room and stood in the blinding sunlight, basking in it as if she were cold. The mercury must have stood close to a hundred, and she was hatless. There was no trace of her ebullient spirits of the morning. Her head was sunk on her breast and she held her hands with locked fingers behind her. It was hot, hot as the breaths of a thousand belching furnaces. A white, burning glare had spread itself from horizon to horizon, and the earth wrinkled and cracked beneath it. From every corner of this parched wilderness came an ominous whirring, like the last wheezing gasp of an alarm-clock before striking the hour. This menacing orchestration was nothing more or less than millions of grasshoppers rasping legs and wings together in hoarse appreciation of the heat and glare; but it had a sound that boded evil. Again and again she turned towards the yellow road as it dipped over the hills; but there was never a glimpse of a horseman from that direction.