Judith of the Plains Part 3

"Place it on the stage, awaitin' yo' ohdahs." And to her expression of infinite relief-"Yo' didn't think any disrepec' would be shown the baggage of a lady honorin' this hyeh metropolis with her presence?"

She thanked the knights of the lariat the more warmly for her unjust suspicions. They stowed away the luggage with the deft capacity of men who have returned to the primitive art of using their hands. She climbed beside the driver on the box of the stage. Lone Tooth Hank and the cow-punchers chivalrously raised their sombreros with a simultaneous spontaneity that suggested a flight of rockets. The driver cracked his whip and turned the horses' heads towards the billowing sea of foot-hills, and the last cable that bound Mary Carmichael to civilization was cut.

III

Leander And His Lady

The only stage pa.s.senger besides Miss Carmichael was a fat lady, whose entire luggage seemed to consist of luncheon-pasteboard boxes of sandwiches, baskets of fruit, napkins of cake. These she began to dispose of, before the stage had fairly started, with an industry almost automatic, continuing faithful to her post as long as the supplies lasted.

Then she dozed, sleeping the sleep of the just and those who keep their mouths open. From time to time the stage-driver invoked his team in cabalistic words, and each time the horses toiled forward with fresh energy; but progress became a mockery in that ocean of s.p.a.ce, their driving seemed as futile as the sport of children who crack a whip and play at stage-coach with a couple of chairs; the mountains still mocked in the distance.

A flat, unbroken sweep of country, a tangle of straggling sage-brush, a glimpse of foot-hills in the distance, was the outlook mile after mile.

The day grew pitilessly hot. Clouds of alkaline dust swept aimlessly over the desert or whirled into spirals till lost in s.p.a.ce. From horizon to horizon the sky was one cloudless span of blue that paled as it dipped earthward. Mary Carmichael dozed and wakened, but the prospect was always the same-the red stage crawling over the wilderness, making no evident progress, and always the sun, the sage-brush, and the silence.

It was all so overwhelmingly different from the peaceful atmosphere of things at home. The mellow Virginia country, with its winding, red roads, wealth of woodland, and its grave old houses that were the more haughtily aloof for the poverty that gnawed at their vitals. This wilderness was so gaunt, so parched; she closed her eyes and thought of a bit of landscape at home. A young forest of silver beeches growing straight and fine as the threads on a loom; and through the gray perspective of their satin-smooth trunks you caught the white gleam of a fairy cascade as it tumbled over the moss-grown stones to the brook below. It was like a bit from a j.a.panese garden in its delicate artificiality.

And harder to leave than these cherished bits of landscape had been the old house Runnymede, that always seemed dozing in the peaceful comatose of senility. It was beyond the worry of debt; the succession of mortgages that sapped its vitality and wrote anxious lines on the faces of Aunt Adelaide and Aunt Martha was nothing to the old house. Had it not sheltered Carmichaels for over a century?-it had faith in the name. But Mary could never remember when the need of money to pay the mortgage had not invaded the gentle routine of their home-life, robbing the sangaree of its delicate flavor in the long, sleepy summer afternoons, invading the very dining-room, an unwelcome guest at the old mahogany table, prompting Aunt Adelaide to cast anxious glances at the worn silver-would it go to pay that blood-sucking mortgage next?

But hardest of all to leave had been Archie, best and most promising of young brothers-Archie, who had come out ahead of his cla.s.s in the high-school, all ready to go to The University-the University of Virginia is always "The University"; but who, it had seemed at a certain dark season, must give up this long-cherished hope for lack of the wherewithal.

Mary, being four years older than her brother and quite twenty, had long felt a maternal obligation to administer his affairs. If he did not go to the university, like his father and grandfather before him, it would be because she had failed in her duty. At this particular phase of the domestic problem there had appeared, in a certain churchly periodical, a carefully worded advertis.e.m.e.nt for a governess, and the subsequent business of references, salary, and information to be imparted and received proving eminently satisfactory, Mary had finally received a tearful permission from her aunts to depart for some place in Wyoming, the name of which was not even to be found on the map. She was to consider herself quite one of the family, and the compensation was to be fifty dollars a month. Archie would now be able to go to "The University."

As the day wore on the sage-brush became scarcer and grayer, there were fewer flowering cacti, and the great white patches of alkali grew more and more frequent. In the distance there was a riot of rainbow tints-violet, pink, and pale orange. It seemed inconceivable that such barrenness could produce such wealth of color; nothing could have been more beautiful-not even the changing colors on a pigeon's neck-than the coppery iridescence, shading to cobalt and blue on some of the b.u.t.tes.

Night had fallen before they made the first break in their journey. The low, beetle-browed cabin that faced them in the wilderness carried in its rude completeness a hint of the prestidigitateur's art-a world of desolation, and behold a log cabin with smoke issuing from the chimney and curtains at the windows! The interior was unplastered, but this shortcoming was surmounted by tacking cheesecloth neatly over the logs, a device at once simple and strategic, as in the lamplight the effect was that of plaster. Miss Carmichael, suddenly released from the actual rumbling of the stage, felt its confused motion the more strongly in imagination, and hardly knew whether she was eating canned tomatoes, served uncooked directly from the tin, fried steak, black coffee, and soda biscuit, in company with the fat lady, the stage-driver, and the woman who kept the road ranch, or if it was all some Alice in Wonderland delusion.

The fat lady had brought her own bedding-an apoplectic roll of bedquilts-and these she insisted on making a bed of, despite the protests of the ranch-woman, who seemed to detect a covert insinuation against her accommodations in the precedent. Miss Carmichael profited by the controversy. The landlady, touched no doubt by the simple faith of a traveller who trusted to the beds of a road-ranch, or because she was young or a girl, led the way in triumph to her own bedroom, and indicating an imposing affair with pillow-shams, she defied Miss Carmichael to find a more comfortable bed "in the East."

In the unaccountable manner of these desert conveyances, that creak and groan across the arid wastes with an apparently lumbering inconsequence, the stage that brought the travellers to the Dax ranch left at sunrise to pursue a seemingly erratic career along the North Platte, while Miss Carmichael and the fat lady were to continue their journey with one Lemuel Chugg, who drove a stage northward towards the Red Desert, when he was sober enough to handle the ribbons.

Breakfast was largely devoted to speculation regarding the approximate condition of Mr. Chugg-would he be wholly or partially incapacitated for his job? Mrs. Dax, flirting a feather-duster in the neighborhood of Miss Carmichael in a futile effort to beguile her into giving a reason for her solitary journey across the desert, took a gloomy view of the situation.

But Miss Carmichael kept her own counsel. Not so the fat lady. Falling into the snare ingenuously set for another, she divulged her name, place of residence, and the object of her travels, which was to visit a son on Sweet.w.a.ter. Furthermore, she stated the probable cause of every death in her family for the past thirty-five years. Miss Carmichael felt an especial interest in an Uncle Henry who "died of a Friday along of eating clams." He stood out with such refres.h.i.+ng vividness against a background of neutralities who succ.u.mbed to consumption, bile colic, and other more familiar ailments of the patent-medicine litany. But loquacity, apparently, like virtue, is its own reward, for the landlady scarce vouchsafed a comment on this dismal recitative, while Miss Carmichael remained the object of her persistent attentions.

But there seemed to be no topic of universal interest but Chugg's condition, Mrs. Dax finally a.s.serting, "Before I'd trust my precious neck to him, I'd get Mr. Dax to shoot me."

Meditating on this Spartan statement, Mary and the fat lady became aware for the first time of a subtle, silent force in the domestic economy. But so un.o.btrusive was this influence that one had to scrutinize very closely, indeed, to detect the evanescent personality of Mrs. Dax's husband.

Leander was his name, but it is safe to say that he swam no h.e.l.lesponts for the masterful wife of his bosom. Otherwise he was slender, willowy, bald; if he ever stood straight enough to get the habitually apologetic crooks out of his knees, he would be tall; but so in the habit was he of repressing himself in the marital presence that Leander pa.s.sed for middle height. He waited on the table at breakfast with the dumb submissiveness of a trained dog that has been taught to give pathetic imitations of human servility. But no sooner had his lady left the room than Leander began quite brazenly to call attention to himself as a man and an individual, coughing, rattling his dishes, and clearing his throat. Mary and the fat lady, out of very pity, responded to these crude signals with overtures equally frank, and Leander ventured finally to inquire if they aimed to spend the night at his brother's ranch, it being the next mess-box between here and nowhere. They admitted that his brother's ranch was their next stopping-place, and Leander went through perfect contortions of apology and self-effacement before he could bring himself to ask them to do him a favor. It would have taken a very stern order of womankind to refuse anything so abject, and they blindly committed themselves to the pledge.

"Tell him I send my compliments," he whispered, and, looking about him furtively, he repeated the blood-curdling request.

"Is that all?" sniffed the fat lady, at no pains to conceal her disappointment.

"It's enough, if it was known, to raise a war-whoop and stampede this yere family." His glance at the door through which his wife had disappeared was pregnant with meaning.

"Family troubles?" asked the fat lady, as a gourmet might say "Truffles."

"Looks like it," said Leander, dismally. "Me and Johnnie don't ask for nothin' better than to bask in each other's company; but our wives insists on keepin' up the manoeuvres of a war-dance the whole endoorin' time."

"So," said the fat lady, as a gourmet might tell of a favorite way of preparing truffles, "it's a case of wives?"

"Yes, marm, an' teeth an' nails an' husbands thrown in, when they get a sight of each other's petticoats."

"I've known sisters-in-law not to agree," helped on the fat lady, by way of an encouraging parallel.

"While I deplores usin' such a comparison to the refinin' and softenin'

inflooance of wimmen, the meetin' of the Dax ladies by chanst anywheres has all the elements of danger and excitement that accompanies an Injun uprisin'."

The travellers looked all manner of encouragement.

"You see, my wife's a great housekeeper; her talent lies"-and here Leander winked knowingly-"in managin' the help."

"Land's sake!" interrupted the fat lady. "Why don't you kick?"

Leander sighed softly. "I tried to once. As an experiment it partook of the trustfulness of a mule kickin' against the stony walls of Badger Canon. But to resoom about the difficulties that split the Dax family.

Before Johnnie got mislaid in that matrimonial landslide o' his, he herds with us. Me an' him does the work of this yere shack, and my wife just roominates and gives her accomplishments as manager full play. She never put her hand in dirty water any more than Mrs. Cleveland sittin' up in the White House parlor. Johnnie done the fancy cookin'; he could make a pie like any one's maw, and while you was lost to the world in the delights of masticatin' it, he'd have all his greasy dishes washed up and put away-"

"No wonder she hated to lose a man like that," interrupted the fat lady, feelingly.

"But he took to pinin' and proclaimin' that he sh.o.r.e was a lone maverick, and he just stampeded round lookin' for trouble and bleatin' a song that went:

"'No one to love, None to caress.'

"Well, the lady that answers his signal of distress don't bear none of the brands of this yere range. She lives back East, and him and her took up their claims in each other's affections through a matrimonial paper known as _The Heart and Hand_. So they takes their pens in hand and gets through a hard spell of courtin' on paper. Love plumb locoes Johnnie. His spellin'

don't suit him, his handwritin' don't suit him, his natchral letters don't suit him. So off he sends to Denver for all the letter-writin' books he can buy-_Handbook of Correspondence, The Epistolary Guide, The Ready Letter-Writer_, and a stack more. There's no denyin' it, Johnnie certainly did sweat hisself over them letters."

"Land's sakes!" said the fat lady.

"Yes, marm; he used to read 'em to me, beginnin' how he had just seized five minutes to write to her, when he'd worked the whole day like a mule over it. She seemed to like the brand, an' when he sent her the money to come out here an' get married, she come as straight as if she had been mailed with a postage-stamp."

"The brazen thing!" said the fat lady.

"They stopped here, goin' home to their place. My Lord! warn't she a high-flyer! She done her hair like a tied-up horse-tail-my wife called it a Sikey knot-and it stood out a foot from her head. Some of the boys, kinder playful, wanted to throw a hat at it and see if it wouldn't hang, but they refrained, out of respect to the feelin's of the groom.

"From the start," continued Leander, "the two Mrs. Daxes just hankered to get at each other; an' while I, as a slave to the fair s.e.x"-here he bowed to the fat lady and to Miss Carmichael-"hesitates to use such langwidge in their presence, the att.i.tood of them two female wimmin sh.o.r.ely reminds me of a couple of unfriendly dawgs just hankerin' to chaw each other.

"At first, Johnnie waited on her hand an' foot, and she just read novels and played stylish all the time and danced. She was the hardest dancer that ever struck this yere trail, and she could give lessons to any old war-dancin' chief up to the reservation. No dance she ever heard of was too far for her to go to. She just went and danced till broad daylight.

Many a man would have took to dissipation, in his circ.u.mstances, but Johnnie just lost heart and grew slatterly. Why, he'd leave his dishes go from one day till the next-"

"There's more as would leave their dishes from one day till the next if they wasn't looked after." And the wife of his bosom stood in the door like a vengeful household G.o.ddess. Mr. Dax made a grab for the nearest plates.