Judith of the Plains Part 23

"Don't bleeve him, mammy. He 'ain't ever cried. He'd a cried, for sure, if his toe was sore." At the age of five, little Judith, namesake of her aunt, was something of a doubting Thomas.

"Let mammy see, Jimmy," and Alida bent over her son and heir.

"Doth Dimmy det any apple?" The wee man sometimes succeeded in making terms with his mother, when the other children were not present. Though feeling himself a trifle over-confident, he held the disputed toe with the air of one keeping back a trump card, and looked his mother squarely in the eyes.

She struggled with the temptation to give him the apple. He had lifted the horrors of her dream as nothing else could have done, but she answered him with quiet firmness.

"Jimmy must not tell stories."

"Less see," insisted Topeka.

"He da.s.sent," affirmed Judith, junior, of little faith.

"It hurths me," and Jimmy tried to squeeze out a tear. "It hurths me, my tore toe!"

His mother tipped him over on his fat little back and opened the chubby hand that held the trump toe. It was white from the pressure applied by the infant dissembler, but there was no trace of the treacherous cactus thorn. She gave him an affectionate spank and went into the kitchen to make coffee.

"I with I had a tore toe," he crooned, quite unabashed at the discovery of his deception. "I with I toud det a tore toe 'thout the hurt."

But the horror of the dream gripped her when she found herself alone in the kitchen; and she remembered she had not told the children not to go into the room where their father was sleeping. She went back and found that Jimmy had not left his post on the side of the bed, where he still regretted that his perfectly well toe did not ent.i.tle him to gastronomic consideration. Topeka, who had arrived at an age where little girls, in the first subconscious attempt at adornment, know no keener delight than plastering their heads with a wet hairbrush, till they present an appearance of slippery rotundity equalled only by a peeled onion, put down the brush with guilty haste at sight of her mother.

"I'm goin' to dress him soon as I've done my hair."

"Any one think you was goin' to be married, the time you've took to it."

"It's gettin' so long," urged Topeka.

"I wouldn't give it a chance to grow no longer while Jimmy was waitin' to get dressed. And don't go into the front room. Your father's gettin' his sleep out."

Topeka opened her round eyes. There was always something suspicious about that sleep her father had to get out, but she felt it was something she must not ask questions about. Her mother lingered; she dreaded to be alone in the kitchen. The little, familiar intimacies between herself and her children scattered the horrors of the dream which would come back to her when she was again at the mercy of her thoughts.

"Judy, s'pose you dress Jimmy this morning! I want Topeka to help me get breakfast."

"Yessum," said Judith, dutifully. "Is he to have his face washed?"

"He certainly is, Judy. I's ashamed to have you ask such a question.

'Ain't you all been brought up to have your faces washed?"

But young Judith seemed disinclined to take up this phase of family superiority. She merely inquired further:

"Is he to have it washed with soap, maw?"

"He sh.o.r.e is. Any one would think you had been born and raised in Arizony or Nebrasky, to hear you talk. I'm plumb ashamed of you, Judy."

"But, 'deed, maw, I ain't big enough to wash his face with soap. It takes Topeka to hold his head."

The subject of the discussion still sat on the edge of the bed, a small lord of creation, letting his women folk arrange among themselves who should minister to his wants. As an instrument of torture the washcloth, in the hands of his sister Judy, was no ign.o.ble rival of the cactus thorn.

The question of making terms for his sufferings again appealed to him in the light of a feasible business proposition.

"Muvvy, tan't I have the apple? Judy hurts me a lot when she wathes my face wis soap."

"Yes, you can have the apple, honey; and, Judy, you be gentle with him.

Don't rub his features up, and be careful and don't get soap in his eyes."

"No'm." And Judy heroically stifled the longing to slick her hair, like Topeka's, with the wet hairbrush. There were easier tasks than was.h.i.+ng the face of her younger brother.

When Topeka and her mother were alone in the kitchen, Topeka grinding the coffee and all unconsciously working her jaw in an accompaniment to the coffee-mill, her mother bent over her and said:

"Did you dream of anything last night?"

Topeka simultaneously stopped working the coffee-mill and her jaw, and regarded her mother solemnly. She did not remember having been thus questioned about her dreams before.

"No'm," she answered, after laborious consideration. But something in her mother's face held her.

"You're sure you didn't dream nothing?"

"Yes, maw."

"Did Judy or Jim say that they dreamed anything?"

"Jim said he dreamed he had a pup."

"Was that all? Think hard, Topeka!"

Topeka held the handle of the coffee-mill in her hand; her jaw continued to work with the labor of her mental process. "I've thought hard, maw, and all he told was about the pup."

Alida went back to her bedroom and again felt the brown bureau. "What's the matter with me, anyhow? It's the lonesomeness, and they bein' agin Jim the way they are. G.o.d, this country's hard on women and horses!"

When breakfast was over, and young Jim had received the reward of his valor in presenting a brave face to his ablution, and Judith the reward of her skill, the evidence of which almost prevented the young martyr from smiling while he enjoyed his treat, their mother sent them all to play in the canon. She told them not to come home till she should come for them, and if any one should ask about their father, to say that he was away from home. And this, as well as the mystery of her father's "getting his sleep out," roused some slight apprehension in Topeka, who was old for her age.

They were seldom sent to the canon to play. Topeka looked at her mother as she had when questioned about the dream, but there was no further confidence between them.

"You do as your sister Topeka tells you, and remember what I said about your papa," Alida said to the younger children. Jim and Judy clasped each other's hands in mute compact at the edict. Their sister Topeka had a real genius for authority; they were minded all too well when she swayed the maternal sceptre vicariously.

Alida made fresh coffee for Jim when the children had gone. She made it carefully; there was this morning, unconsciously, about each little thing that she did for him, the solemnity of a funeral rite. Struggle as she would, she could not divest her mind of the conviction that what she did this day she did for the dead. She would go to the door and listen to his breathing, and tell herself that she was a fool, then wring her hands at the remembrance of the dream.

As he tossed, half waking, she heard him groan and curse the cattle-men with oaths that made her glad she had sent the children from home. Then she bent over him and woke him from his uneasy slumber.

"Jim, don't you want me to bathe your head? And here's some nice, hot coffee all ready for you."

Jim woke slowly to a realization of his troubles and his blessings. His wife was bathing his head with hands that trembled. Not always had she greeted his indiscretions with such loving forbearance. He noticed, though his waking faculties were not over-keen, that her face was pale and frightened, and that her eyes, meeting his, held a dumb, measureless affection.

"What th' h.e.l.l are you babying me for?" But his roughness did not deceive her woman's wits. He was not getting the lecture he antic.i.p.ated, and this was his way of showing that he was not embarra.s.sed by her kindness. The morning sunlight was pitilessly frank in its exposure of the grim pinch of poverty in the mean little room, but the woman was unconscious of these things; what she saw was that Jim, the reckless, Jim, the dare-devil terror of the country, Jim, who had married and settled with her into home-keeping respectability, Jim, who had struggled with misfortune and fallen, had, young as he was, lost every look of youth; that hope had gone from his dull eyes, and that his face had become drawn until the death's-head grinned beneath the scant padding of flesh. But he was to-day, as always, the one man in the world for her. In making a world of their own and reducing their parents to supplementary consideration, their children, whom she had sent away that she might be alone with him, had given a different quality to the love of this pair that had known so many curious vicissitudes. The responsibilities of parenthood had placed them on a tenderer, as well as a securer footing; and as she saw his age and weariness, he recognized hers, and both felt a self-accusing twinge.

"That's a blamed good cup of coffee," he said, by way of relieving the tension that had crept into the situation. "Any one would think you was settin' your cap for me 'stead of us being married for years."

Alida sighed. "It's better to end than to begin like this," she said, in the far-away voice of one who thinks aloud. The word "end" had slipped out before she realized what she was saying, and the knowledge haunted her as an omen. She glanced at him quickly, to see if he had noticed it.

"Why did you say end?" He saw that her eyes were full of tears and chafed her. "You ain't thinking of divorcing me, like Mountain Pink done Bosky?"