Judith of the Godless Valley Part 58

Douglas told her of the conversation. Judith looked serious.

"You see, Doug, Dad keeps Scott sore all the time about me. I don't think he'd be half so ugly to you if it were not for that."

"O yes, he would!" replied Douglas. "Scott and I were born to fight with each other, just like old Prince and Charleton's Nero. We can't help our backs bristling when we see each other."

"Inez could make Scott behave if she cared anything about it. Scott isn't in love with her, but she has a lot of influence over him, like she has over the other men in this valley." Judith watched her hunting-boots steam against the hearth.

"She has too much influence over you, Judith," said Mr. Fowler.

"She's my friend," returned Judith briefly.

"Your friend!" cried Fowler. "Your friend! Do you realize what you are saying?"

"Yes, I certainly do, and I don't want a lecture about it either."

Judith sat erect.

Mr. Fowler leaned forward, his eyes glowing with indignation. "I've swallowed all I can swallow about Inez Rodman. I allowed Douglas to bring her to the table and I ate with her though my gore rose in my throat. Because I felt that my only chance to win the confidence of Lost Chief was to countenance for a time that which cannot be countenanced.

But I am through. How long do you think you can be a friend to Inez, Judith, and not become like her?"

Judith jumped to her feet. "O, I am so sick of this kind of thing!" she cried.

"Fowler is dead right and you know it, Judith," said Douglas.

"You don't dare to say these things to her face!" Judith's eyes were full of the tears of anger.

"I'd just as soon," Douglas grinned.

"I'm going to tell her what I think of her and what she is doing to the youth of Lost Chief," stated Mr. Fowler.

"She's not a bit worse for Lost Chief than Charleton Falkner," exclaimed Judith. "And you don't pick on him!"

"He couldn't be as bad as Inez," insisted the preacher. "There is nothing so bad for a community as her kind of a woman."

"That just isn't so, Mr. Fowler," protested Douglas. "Charleton is worse than Inez ever thought of being. All I'm complaining about is her influence on Judith."

"You both talk as if I had no mind of my own!" Judith said indignantly.

"If you knew the temptations I'd withstood, you'd not be so free with your comments about me. And if all I'm going to get when I come up here is criticism, I'm not coming any more. Don't you follow me, Douglas!"

and Judith, in her short khaki suit, swept out of the cabin with a grace and dignity that would have done credit to a velvet train.

The preacher was deeply perturbed. He rose and paced the floor.

"Douglas, I've tried to play this thing your way. But now I am through compromising. There can be no compromise with G.o.d. I'm no longer going to keep silence when events like those this afternoon take place.

Undoubtedly my stay in Lost Chief will be short. But while I'm here I am going to stand openly and vehemently for the ten commandments."

Douglas tilted his chair back, folded his arms on his chest, and dropped his chin. "Something's wrong with your religion," he said.

"Nothing is wrong with my religion," retorted the preacher. "But Lost Chief is more wrong than most places. It's a transplanted New England community, and people who come from Puritan stock can't get along without G.o.d. They are worse than any one else without Him."

"I'm sick of worrying about it!" cried Douglas irritably.

"Do you mean you are sick of the fight? That you are going to let Inez have Judith?"

Douglas straightened up. "No, by G.o.d! Not if I have to shoot Inez! You go ahead and preach your own way. I'll see that you are not hurt."

And this was his last word on the subject that night.

CHAPTER XV

THE FLAME IN THE VALLEY

"The coyote is a coward, so his bite is the nastiest."

--_Old Sister, the dog_.

The next day when Douglas went down to the ranch to help out with a day's work for which John had asked him, Judith obviously avoided him.

Douglas made no attempt to enforce a tete-a-tete until mid-afternoon.

Then he followed Jude into the empty cow stable.

"Jude, I can't bear to have you think I'm not fair about Inez. If that's what you are sore about."

Judith laid carefully back the eggs she had taken out of the manger. Her face was set when she turned to him. "It doesn't matter much, I suppose, whether you are fair to Inez or not. She can take care of herself. What I'm angry about is your being so stupid with me, always picking at me about the things that don't count and so wrapped up in your own ideas that you can't see what I really need, and why I am so terribly restless."

Douglas leaned against the door-post, his face eager, his breath a little quickened. Now, at last, perhaps he was to win past the threshold and gaze upon Judith's inner solitude. But he would not crowd her.

"What is it that makes you so restless, Judith?" he asked gently.

"Well, it certainly isn't lack of religion and it certainly isn't lack of marrying," she retorted. "Those are the only suggestions you've ever been able to make about my state of mind."

"But, you see," Doug's voice was still gentle, "I don't even know what your state of mind is! Sometimes you tell me you find life a bitter disappointment. Sometimes you find it very beautiful. Sometimes you want to spend all your days in Lost Chief. Sometimes you must sell your heart's blood to get away from it. All that I really know about your state of mind is that you are lonely and uneasy, like me."

Judith watched him with less perhaps of anger than of resentment in her deep gray eyes.

"It's the unfairness of it! The utter unfairness of life to women!" she burst out. "Don't you see?"

Douglas shook his head. "How can I see? You are very beautiful. You have the strength of a fine boy. You have a splendid mind. You have a very special gift in handling animals. You are gay and brave-hearted and lovable. Why in the world should I feel that life isn't fair to you?"

"Don't you see?" wringing her hands together. "I have all that, and no chance to use any of it so that it's put to any sort of big use at all.

I'm buried alive!"

"Oh!" Douglas gasped. He had indeed seen Judith's trouble. All the vital beauty, the splendid talents--was marriage to him a big use of them?

"Oh!" he repeated. He brushed his hand across his eyes. "G.o.d! Judith,"

he muttered, "what can I do?"

"I don't know," she said, "but at least you can stop trying to thrust old Fowler down my throat. As for Inez, I judge Inez a good deal more exactly than you do and in many ways more harshly. But what I do insist on is that no man in Lost Chief is fit to judge her."

Judith again picked up the eggs, and went out.