Judith of the Plains Part 8

Sally grew slatternly with increasing maternity. She spent her time in a rocking-chair, dipping snuff-a consolation imported from her former home-and lamenting the bad marriage she had made. Rodney ascribed his ill-fortune to unjust neighborly criticism. He farmed a little, he raised a little stock, and he drank a great deal of whiskey. Sally hated the Black Hill country. She felt that it knew too much about her. The neighborly inquisition had fallen like a blight on the family fortunes. A vague migratory impulse was on her. She wanted to go somewhere and begin all over again. By dint of persistent nagging she persuaded her husband to move to Wyoming, then in the golden age of the cattle industry. Those were days when steers, to speak in the cow language, had "jumped to seventy-five." The wilderness grew light-headed with prosperity. Wonderful are the tales still told about those fat years in cattle-land. It was in those halcyon days of the Cheyenne Club that the members rode from the range, white with the dust of the desert, to enjoy greater luxuries than those procurable at their clubs in New York.

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-p.r.i.c.ks 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.

Judith was ten years old when her father, his wife, and their children moved from Dakota-they were not so particular about North and South Dakota, in those days-to take up a claim on Sweet.w.a.ter, Wyoming. Judith gave scant promise of the beauty that in later life became at once her dower and her misfortune, that which was as likely to bring wretchedness as happiness. In Wyoming she was destined to find an old friend, Mrs.

Atkins, who, as the bride of the young lieutenant, had been present at the marriage of Sally Tumlin and Warren Rodney, and who had always felt a wholly unreasonable sense of guilt at witnessing the ceremony and contributing a lace handkerchief to the bride. Her husband, now Major Atkins, was stationed at Fort Washakie, Wyoming. Mrs. Atkins happening again on the Rodney family, and her husband having increased and multiplied his army pay many times over by a successful venture in cattle, the scheme of Judith's convent education was put through by the major's wife, who had kept her New England conscience, the discomforts of frontier posts notwithstanding.

So Judith went to the nuns to school, and stayed with them till she was eighteen. Mrs. Atkins would have adopted her then; but Judith by this time knew her family history in all its sordid ramifications, and felt that duty called her to her brother, who had not improved his unfortunate start in life, though his step-mother did not spoil him for the staying of the rod.

VII

Chugg Takes The Ribbons

Chugg, comforted with liquids and stayed with a head-plaster, presented himself at the Dax ranch just twenty-four hours after he was due. His mien combined vagueness with hostility, and he harnessed up the stage that Peter Hamilton had driven over the day before, when his prospective pa.s.sengers were looking, with a graphic pantomimic representation of "take it or leave it." Under the circ.u.mstances, Miss Carmichael and the fat lady consented to be pa.s.sengers with much the same feeling of finality that one might have on embarking for the planet Mars in an air-s.h.i.+p.

There was, furthermore, a suggestion of last rites in the farewells of the Daxes, each according to their respective personalities, that was far from rea.s.suring.

"Here's some bread and meat and a bottle of cold coffee, if you live to need it," was Mrs. Dax's grim prognostication of accident. Leander, being of an emotional nature, could scarce restrain his tears-the advent of the travellers had created a welcome variation in the monotony of his dutiful routine-he felt all the agitation of parting with life-long friends. Mary Carmichael and Judith promised to write-they had found a great deal to say to each other the preceding evening.

Chugg cracked his whip ominously, the travellers got inside, not daring to trust themselves to the box.

The journey with the misanthrope was but a repet.i.tion of that first day's staging-the sage-brush was scarcer, the mountains seemed as far off as ever, and the outlook was, if possible, more desolate. The entry in Miss Carmichael's diary, inscribed in malformed characters as the stage jolted over ruts and gullies, reads: "I do not mind telling you, in strictest confidence, 'Dere Diary'-as the little boy called you-that when I so lightly severed my connection with civilization, I had no idea to what an extent I was going in for the prairie primeval. How on earth does a woman who can write a letter like Mrs. Yellett stand it? And where on the map of North America is Lost Trail?"

"Land sakes!" regretted the fat lady, "but I do wish I had a piece of that 'boy's favorite' cake that I had for my lunch the day we left town. I just ate and ate it 'cause I hadn't another thing to do. If I hadn't been so greedy I could offer him a piece, just to show him that some women folk have kind hearts, and that the whole sect ain't like that Pink."

"Boy's favorite," as adequate compensation for shattered ideals, a broken heart, and the savings of a lifetime, seemed to Mary Carmichael inadequate compensation, but she forbore to express her sentiments.

The fat lady had never relaxed her gaze from Chugg's back since the stage had started. She peered at that broad expanse of flannel s.h.i.+rt through the tiny round window, like a careful sailing-master sweeping the horizon for possible storm-clouds. At every portion of the road presenting a steep decline she would prod Chugg in the back with the handle of her ample umbrella, and demand that he let her out, as she preferred walking. The stage-driver at first complied with these requests, but when he saw they threatened to become chronic, he would send his team galloping down grade at a rate to justify her liveliest fears.

"Do you think you are a-picnicking, that you crave roominating round these yere solitoodes?" And the misanthrope cracked his whip and adjured his team with cabalistic imprecations.

"Did you notice if Mrs. Dax giv' him any cold coffee, same as she did us?"

anxiously inquired the fat lady from her lookout.

Mary hadn't noticed.

"He's drinking something out of a brown bottle-seems to relish it a heep more'n he would cold coffee," reported the watch. "Hi there! Hi! Mr.

Chugg!" The stage-driver, thinking it was merely a request to be allowed to walk, continued to drive with one hand and hold the brown bottle with the other. But even his too solid flesh was not proof against the continued bombardment of the umbrella handle.

"Um-m-m," he grunted savagely, applying a watery eye to the round window.

"Nothing," answered the fat lady, quite satisfied at having her worst fears confirmed.

Chugg returned to his driving, as one not above the weakness of seeing and hearing things.

"'Tain't coffee."

"Could you smell it?" questioned Mary, anxiously.

"You never can tell that way, when they are plumb pickled in it, like him."

"Then how did you know it wasn't coffee?"

"His eyes had fresh watered."

Mary collapsed under this expert testimony. "What are we going to do about it?"

"Appeal to him as a gentleman," said the fat lady, not without dramatic intonation.

"You appeal," counselled Mary; "I saw him look at you admiringly when you were walking down that steep grade."

"Is that so?" said the fat lady, with a conspicuous lack of incredulity; and she put her hand involuntarily to her frizzes.

This time she did not trust to the umbrella-handle as a medium of communication between the stage-driver and herself. Putting her hand through the port-hole she grasped Chugg's arm-the bottle arm-with no uncertain grip.

"Why, Mr. Chugg, this yere place is getting to be a regular summer resort; think of two ladies trusting themselves to your protection and travelling out over this great lonesome desert."

Chugg's mind, still submerged in local Lethe waters, grappled in silence with the problem of the feminine invasion, and then he muttered to himself rather than to the fat lady, "Nowhere's safe from 'em; women and house-flies is universally prevailing."

The fat lady dropped his arm as if it had been a brand. "He's no gentleman. As for Mountain Pink, she was drove to it."

All that day they toiled over sand and sage-brush; the sun hung like a molten disk, paling the blue of the sky; the gra.s.shoppers kept up their shrill chirping-and the loneliness of that sun-scorched waste became a tangible thing.

Chugg sipped and sipped, and sometimes swore and sometimes muttered, and as the day wore on his driving not only became a challenge to the endurance of the horses, but to the laws of gravitation. He lashed them up and down grade, he drove perilously close to shelving declivities, and sometimes he sang, with maudlin mournfulness:

"'Oh, bury me not on the lone prairie.'

The words came low and mournfully From the cold, pale lips of a youth who lay On his dying couch at the close of day."

The fat lady reminded him that he was a gentleman and that he was driving ladies; she threatened him with her son on Sweet.w.a.ter, who began, in the maternal chronicles, by being six feet in his stockings, and who steadily grew, as the scale of threats increased, till he reached the alt.i.tude of six feet four, growing hourly in height and fierceness.

But Chugg gave no heed, and once he sang the "Ballad of the Mule-Skinner,"

with what seemed to both terrified pa.s.sengers an awful warning of their overthrow:

"As I was going down the road, With a tired team and a heavy load, I cracked my whip and the leaders sprung- The fifth chain broke, and the wheelers hung, The off-horse stepped on the wagon tongue-"

This harrowing ballad was repeated with accompanying Delsarte at intervals during the afternoon, but as Mary and the fat lady managed to escape without accident, they began to feel that they bore charmed lives.

At sundown they came to the road-ranch of Johnnie Dax, bearing Leander's compliments as a secret despatch. The outward aspect of the place was certainly an awful warning to trustful bachelors who make acquaintances through the columns of _The Heart and Hand_. The house stood solitary in that scourge of desolation. The windows and doors gaped wide like the unclosed eyes of a dead man on a battle-field. Chugg halloed, and an old white horse put his head out of the door, shook it upward as if in a.s.sent, then trotted off.

"That's Jerry, and he's the intelligentest animal I ever see," remarked the stage-driver, sobering up to Jerry's good qualities, and presently Johnnie Dax and the white horse appeared together from around the corner of the house.

This Mr. Dax was almost an exact replica of the other, even to the apologetic crook in the knees and a certain furtive way of glancing over the shoulder as if antic.i.p.ating missiles.