Judith of the Plains Part 1

Judith Of The Plains.

by Marie Manning.

I

"Town"

It was June, and a little past sunrise, but there was no hint of early summer freshness in the noxious air of the sleeping-car as it toiled like a snail over the infinity of prairie. From behind the green-striped curtains of the berths, now the sound of restless turning and now a long-drawn sigh signified the uneasy slumber due to stifling air and discomfort.

The only pa.s.senger stirring was a girl whose youth drooped under the unfavorable influences of foul air, fatigue, and a strained anxiety to come to the end of this fateful journey. She had been up while it was yet dark, and her hand-luggage, locked, strapped, and as pitifully new at the art of travelling as the girl herself, cl.u.s.tered about the hem of her blue serge skirt like chicks about a hen. The engine shrieked, but its voice sounded weak and far off in that still ocean of s.p.a.ce; the girl tightened her grasp on the largest of the satchels and looked at the approaching porter tentatively.

"We're late twenty-fi'e minutes," he rea.s.sured her, with the hopeless patience of one who has lost heart in curbing travellers' enthusiasms.

She turned towards the window a pair of shoulders plainly significant of the burdensome last straw.

"Four days and nights in this train"-they were slower in those days-"and now this extra twenty-five minutes!"

Miss Carmichael's famous dimple hid itself in disgust. The demure lines of mouth and chin, that could always be relied upon for special pleading when sentence was about to be pa.s.sed on the dimple by those who disapproved of dimples, drooped with disappointment. But the light-brown hair continued to curl facetiously-it was the sort of hair whose spontaneous rippling conveys to the seeing eye a sense of humor.

The train plodded across the s.p.a.cious vacancy that unrolled itself farther and farther in quest of the fugitive horizon. The sc.r.a.p of view that came within a closer range of vision spun past the car windows like a bit of stage mechanism, a gigantic panorama rotating to simulate a race at breakneck speed. But Miss Carmichael looked with unseeing eyes; the whirling prairie with its golden flecks of cactus bloom was but part of the universal strangeness, and the dull ache of homesickness was in it all.

"My dear! my dear!"-a head in crimpers was thrust from between the curtains of the section opposite-"I've been awake half the night. I was so afraid I wouldn't see you before you got off."

The head was followed, almost instinctively, by a hand travelling furtively to the crimpers that gripped the lady's brow like barnacles clinging to a keel.

Mary expressed a grieved appreciation at the loss of rest in behalf of her early departure, and conspicuously forbore to glance in the direction of the barnacles, that being a first principle as between woman and woman.

"And, oh, my dear, it gets worse and worse. I've looked at it this morning, and it's worse in Wyoming than it was in Colorado. What it 'll be before I reach California, I shudder to think."

"It's bound to improve," suggested Mary, with the easy optimism of one who was leaving it. "It couldn't be any worse than this, could it?"

The neuter p.r.o.noun, it might be well to state, signified the prairie; its melancholy personality having penetrated the very marrow of their train existence, they had come to refer to it by the monosyllable, as in certain nether circles the head of the house receives his superlative distinction in "He."

Again the locomotive shrieked, again the girl mechanically clutched the suit-case, as presenting the most difficult item in the problem of transportation, and this time the shriek was not an idle formality. The train slowed down; the uneasy sleepers behind the green-striped curtains stirred restlessly with the lessening motion of their uncouth cradle. The porter came to help her, with the chastened mien of one whose hopes of largess are small, the lady with the barnacles called after her redundant farewells, and a moment later Miss Carmichael was standing on the station platform looking helplessly after the train that toiled and puffed, yet seemed, in that crystalline atmosphere, still within arm's-reach. She watched it till its floating pennant of smoke was nothing but a gray feather blowing farther and farther out of sight on the flat prairie.

The town-it would be unkind to mention its name-had made merry the night before at the comprehensive invitation of a sheepman who had just disposed of his wool-clip, and who said, by way of general summons, "What's the use of temptin' the bank?" "Town," therefore, when Mary Carmichael first made its acquaintance, was still sleeping the sleep of the unjust. Those among last night's roisterers who had had to make an early start for their camps were well into the foot-hills by this time, and would remember with exhilaration the cracked tinkle of the dance-hall piano as inspiring music when the lonesomeness of the desert menaced and the young blood again clamored for its own.

"Town"-it contained in all some two dozen buildings-was very unlovely in slumber. It sprawled in the lap of the prairies, a grimy-faced urchin, with the lines of dismal sophistication writ deep. Yet where in all the "health resorts" of the East did air sweep from the clean hill-country with such revivifying power? It seemed a glad world of abiding youth.

Surely "Town" was but a dreary illusion, a mirage that hung in the unmapped s.p.a.ces of this new world that G.o.d had made and called good; an omen of the abominations that men would make when they grew blind to the beauty of G.o.d's world.

Mary Carmichael, with much the feelings of a cat in a strange garret, wandered about the sluggard town; and presently the blue-and-white sign of a telegraph office, with the mythological figure of a hastening messenger, suggested to her that a rea.s.suring telegram was only Aunt Adelaide's due.

Whereupon she began to rap on the door of the office, a scared pianissimo which naturally had little effect on the operator, who was at home and asleep some three blocks distant. But the West is the place for woman if she would be waited upon. No seven-to-one ratio of the s.e.xes has tempered the chivalry of her sons of the saddle. A loitering something in a sombrero saw rather than heard the rapping, and, at the sight, went in quest of the dreaming operator without so much as embarra.s.sing Miss Carmichael with an offer of his services. And presently the operator, whose official day did not begin for some two hours yet, appeared, much dishevelled from running and the cursory nature of his toilet, prepared to receive a message of life and death.

The wire to Aunt Adelaide ran:

"Practically at end of journey. Take stage to Lost Trail this morning. Am well. Don't worry about me.

"MARY."

And the telegraph operator, dimly remembering that he had heard Lost Trail was a "pizen mean country," and that it was tucked some two hundred miles back in the foot-hills, did not find it very hard to forgive the girl, who was "practically at end of journey," particularly as the dimple had come out of hiding, and he had never been called upon to telegraph the word "practically" before. He was a progressive man and liked to extend his experiences.

After sending the telegram, Miss Carmichael, quite herself by reason of the hill air, felt that she was getting along famously as a traveller, but that it was an expensive business, and she was glad to be "practically" at the end of her journey. And, drawing from her pocket a square envelope of heavy Irish linen, a little worn from much reading, but primarily an envelope that bespoke elegance of taste on the part of her correspondent, she read:

"LOST TRAIL, WYOMING.

"My Dear Miss Carmichael,-Pray let me a.s.sure you of my gratification that the preliminaries have been so satisfactorily arranged, and that we are to have you with us by the end of June.

The children are profiting from the very antic.i.p.ation of it, and it will be most refres.h.i.+ng to all us isolated ones to be able to welcome an Eastern girl as a member of our family.

"Although the long journey across the continent is trying, particularly to one who has not made it before, I hope you may not find it utterly fatiguing. Please remember that after leaving the train, it will be necessary to take a stage to Lost Trail. If it is possible, I shall meet you with the buckboard at one of the stage stations; otherwise, keep to the stage route, being careful to change at Dax's Ranch.

"Unfortunately, the children vary so in their accomplishments that I fear I can make no suggestions as to what you may need to bring with you in the way of text-books. But I think you will find them fairly well grounded.

"I had a charming letter from Mrs. Kirkland, who said the pleasantest things possible of you. I am glad the wife of our Senator was able conscientiously to commend us.

"With our most cordial good wishes for a safe journey, believe me, dear Miss Carmichael,

"Sincerely yours,

"SARAH YELLETT."

In the mean time, "Town" came yawning to breakfast. It was not so prankish as it had been the night before, when it accepted the sheepman's broad-gauge hospitality and made merry till the sun winked from behind the mountains. It made its way to the low, shedlike eating-house with a pre-breakfast solemnity bordering on sulkiness. Not a petticoat was in sight to offset the spurs and sombreros that filed into breakfast from every point in the compa.s.s, prepared to eat primitively, joke broadly, and quarrel speedily if that sensitive and often inconsistent something they called honor should be brushed however lightly.

But the eternal feminine was within, and, discovering it, the temper of "Town" was changed; it ate self-consciously, made jokes meet for the ears of ladies, and was more interested in the girl in the sailor-hat than it was in remembering old feuds or laying the foundations of new.

In its interior aspect, the eating-house conveyed no subtle invitation to eat, drink, and be merry. On the contrary, its mission seemed to be that of confounding appet.i.te at every turn. A long, shedlike room it was, with walls of unpainted pine, still sweating from the axe. Festoons of scalloped paper, in conflicting shades, hung from the ceiling, a menace to the taller of the guests. On the rough walls some one, either prompted by a latent spirit of aestheticism or with an idea of abetting the town towards merrymaking-an encouragement it hardly required-had tacked posters of shows, mainly representing the tank-and-sawmill school of drama.

Miss Carmichael sat at the extreme end of the long, oilcloth-covered table, on which a straggling army of salt and pepper shakers, catsup bottles, and divers commercial condiments seemed to pause in a discouraged march. A plague of flies was on everything, and the food was a threat to the hardiest appet.i.te. One man summed up the steak with, "You got to work your jaw so hard to eat it that it ain't fair to the next meal."

His neighbor heaved a sigh. "This here formation, whatever it be"-and he turned the meat over for better inspection-"do sh.o.r.e remind me of an indestructible doll that an old maid aunt of mine giv' my sister when we was kids. That doll sort of challenged me, settin' round oncapable o'

bein' destroyed, and one day I ups an' has a chaw at her. She war ondestructible, all right; 'fore that I concluded my speriments I had left a couple o' teeth in her."

"Well, I discyards the steak and draw to a pair of aces," and the first man helped himself to a couple of biscuits.

Miss Carmichael knew, by the continual sc.r.a.ping of chairs across the gritty floor, that the places at the table must be nearly all taken; and while she antic.i.p.ated, with an utterly unreasonable terror, any further invasion of her seclusion at the end of the table, still she could not persuade herself to raise her eyes to detect the progress of the enemy, even in the interest of the diary she had kept so conscientiously for the past three days; which was something of a loss to the diary, as those untamed, manly faces were well worth looking at. Reckless they were in many instances, and sometimes the lines of hards.h.i.+p were cruelly writ across young faces that had not yet lost the down of adolescence, but there were humor and endurance and the courage that knows how to make a crony of death and get right good sport from the comrades.h.i.+p. Their faults were the faults of l.u.s.ty, red-blooded youth, and their virtues the open-handed generosity, the ready sympathy of those uncertain tilters at life who ride or fall in the tourney of a new country.

At present, "the yearling," drinking her execrable coffee in an agony of embarra.s.sment, weighed heavily on their minds. They would have liked to rise as a man and ask if there was anything they could do for her. But as a glance towards the end of the table seemed to increase her discomfiture tenfold, they did the kindest and for them the most difficult thing and looked in every direction but Miss Carmichael's. With a delicacy of perception that the casual observer might not have given them credit for, they had refrained from taking seats directly opposite her, or those immediately on her right, which, as she occupied the last seat at the table, gave her at least a small degree of seclusion.

As one after another of them came filing in, bronzed, rugged, radiating a beauty of youth and health that no sketchy exigence of apparel could obscure, some one already seated at the table would put a foot on a chair opposite him and send it spinning out into the middle of the floor as a hint to the new-comer that that was his reserved seat. And the cow-puncher, sheep-herder, prospector, or man about "Town," as the case might be, would take the hint and the chair, leaving the petticoat separated from the sombreros by a table-land of oilcloth and a range of four chairs.

But now entered a man who failed to take the hint of the spinning chair.

In fact, he entered the eating-house with the air of one who has dropped in casually to look for a friend and, incidentally, to eat his breakfast.

He stopped in the doorway, scanned the table with deliberation, and started to make his way towards Mary Carmichael with something of a swagger. Some one kicked a chair towards him at the head of the table.

Some one else nearly upset him with one before he reached the middle, and the Texan remarked, quite audibly, as he pa.s.sed: