Judith of the Plains

And Judith, taken unawares by the unexpected turn of things, comforted as a lost child that is found, told all her feeling for him in the way she called his name. The easy tenderness of the man awoke; his senses swayed to the magic of her voice, the mystery of the night, the shadow world in which they two, ’twixt earth and sky, were alone. They rode without speaking. Peter’s hand sought hers, and all her woman’s terror of the desolation, her fear of the vague terrors of the dreadful night, spoke in her answering pressure. It was as if the desert had given them to each other as they groped through the silent darkness. In the great company of earth, sky, silence, and this great-hearted woman, Peter grew conscious of a real thrill. There were depths to life—vast, still depths; this woman’s unselfish love for him made him realize them. He felt his soul sweeping out on the great tide of things. Farther and farther it swept; his patron saint, caution, beckoning frantically from the receding shore, was miles behind. “Judith!” he said, and he scarce recognized his own voice. “Judith!” he struggled as a swimmer in a drowning clutch. Then his patron saint threw him a life-line and he saved the situation.

“Judith!” he said, a third time, and now he knew his voice. It was the voice of the man who tilted at life picturesquely in a broad-brimmed hat, who loved his darling griefs and fitted them as a Rembrandt fits its background. And still, in the same voice, the voice he knew, he said: “I feel as if we had died and our souls were meeting. You know Aldrich’s exquisite lines:

“Somewhere in desolate, wind-swept space,
    In twilight land—no man’s land—
Two hurrying shapes met face to face
    And bade each other stand.

“‘And who are you?’ cried one, agape,
    Shuddering in the gloaming light.
I know not,’ said the other shape,
    ‘I only died last night.’”

“‘I only died last night!’” she repeated the line, slowly, significantly. In her questioning she forgot the night, the desolation, the presence of the man. Had she died last night? Had youth, the joy of living, her infinite capacity for love, had they died when Peter, with the ugly haste of the man without a nice sense of the time that should elapse between the old and the new love, had spurred away cheerfully at the beck of another woman? And now the desert, this earth-mother as she called it, in the Indian way, had given him back to her, thrown them together as driftwood in the still ocean of space. She drew a long breath, the breath of one waking from an anguished dream. A wild, unreasoning gladness woke in her heart, the joy of living swept her back again to life. She had not died last night, she was riding through the wilderness with Peter.

“Look!” she whispered. The sky had lost its forbidding blackness. The sharp notches of the mountains, faintly outlined in white, undulated through an eternity of space. Venus hung in the west, burning softly as a shaded lamp. The trail they climbed seemed to end in her pale yellow light.

Peter had saved the situation, but the wild beauty of the night stirred in him that gift of silvery speech that was ever his tribute to the sex, rather than the woman. He bent towards Judith. A loosened strand of her hair blew across his cheek. The breakneck ride to Kitty was already the madness of a dead and gone incarnation. He pointed to the pale star, and told her it was the omen of their destiny; the formless blackness through which they had groped was the way of life, but for such as were not condemned to eternal darkness Venus held high her lamp and they scaled the heights.

And Judith, listening, found her heart a battle-field of love and hate. “Were women dogs, that men should play with them in idle moods, caress them, and fling them out for other toys?” she demanded of herself, even while the tones of his voice melted her innermost being to thankfulness for this hour that he was wholly hers.

Gayly, with ready turns of speech and snatches of song, trolled in his musical barytone, Peter rode through the night, even as he rode through life, a Sir Knight of the Joyous Heart, unbrushed by the wing of sorrow, loving his pale griefs for the values they gave the picture. And Judith understood by reason of that exquisite perception that was hers in all matters pertaining to him, and, knowing, only loved the more.

Down the valley came the sharp yelp of a coyote, and in a moment the towering crags had taken it up, the echo repeating it and giving it back to the valley, where the coyote barked again at the shadow of his voice. The night was full of the eerie laughter. Peter put a restraining hand on Dolly’s bridle, and, waiting for the coyote to stop, called Judith’s name, and all the mountains made music of it. The echo sang the old Hebrew name as if it had been a psalm. Peter’s voice gave it to the mountains joyously, but the mountains gave it back in the minor. And Judith was reminded of the soft, singing syllables that her mother, in the Indian way, had made of her daughter’s Indian name. The remembrance tugged at her heart. In her joy at seeing Peter she had forgotten that the errand that had brought her was an errand of life and death—life and death for her brother!

But Peter’s ready enthusiasms pressed him hard. Surely love-making was the business of such a night. “Ah, Judith, goddess of the heights, if I could sing your name like the mountains, would you love me a little?”

For his pains he had a flash of white teeth in a smile that recalled his first acquaintance with Kitty, the sort of smile one would give to a “nice boy” when his manœuvres were a trifle obvious. “Not if you sang my name as the chorus of all the Himalayas and the Rockies and Andes, and with the fire of all their volcanoes and the beauty of their snows and the strength of all their hills, for it’s not my way to love a little!”

He bent towards her; to brush her cheek lightly as they rode was but to imply his appreciation of the scene as a bit of chiaroscuro, the panorama of the desert night, eternal romance typified by the man and woman scaling the heights, the goddess of love lighting them on their way by her flaming torch. But Judith, who said little because she felt much, was in no mood to brook such dalliance, and, urging the mare sharply, she cantered down the divide at peril of life and limb. Peter, cursing the heavy-footed beast he rode, came stumbling after.

Judith rode wildly through the night, leaving Peter laps behind, to beseech, to prophesy dire happening if she should slip, and to scramble after, as best he might, on the heavy-footed beast he repudiated, with all his ancestors, as oxen, to the fourth generation. But the woman kept her pace. She had stern questions to put to herself, and they were likely to have truer answers if Peter were elsewhere than riding beside her. Whither was he going? They had met casually on a trail known to few honest men. It led over a spur of the Wind River to a sort of no man’s land, the hiding-place of horse and cattle thieves. She had gone to warn her brother. Could he be going there—She could not bring herself to finish.

Her heart was divided against itself. Within it were fought again the red and the white man’s battles, bitterly, and to the finish. And now the white man, with his open warfare, won, and all her love rose up and scourged her little faith. She would wait on the trail for Peter, penitent and ashamed. And while she waited suspicions bred of her Indian blood stirred distrustfully, and she told herself that her mother’s daughter made a worthy champion of the ways of white men. Did Hamilton hunt her brother gallowsward, making merry with her the meantime? He had not even been courteously concerned as to where she was going when they met on the divide. They had met and ridden together as casually as if it had been the most natural thing for them both to be taking the horse-thief trail as a summer evening’s ride. And she had not thought to wonder at his possible destination, when the man from whom she rode in terror through the night proved to be Peter, because the lesser question of his errand had been swallowed up in the greater miracle of his presence.

She was by this time well down the divide. The temperature had risen perceptibly on the down grade. The heat of the plains had already mingled with the cool hill air; the heights, where Venus kept her love vigil, were already past. Judith gave Dolly a breathing spell, herself lounging easily meanwhile. She knew how to take her ease in the saddle as well as any cow-puncher on the range.

“The Hayoka has dominion over me,” she mused, with Indian fatalism. “As well resign myself to sorrow with dignity. Hayoka, Hayo—ka!” and she began to croon softly a hymn of propitiation to the Hayoka, the Sioux god of contrariety. According to the legends, he sat naked and fanned himself in a Dakota blizzard and huddled, shivering, over a fire in the heat of summer. Likewise the Hayoka cried for joy and laughed for sorrow.

She remembered how the nuns at Santa Fé had been shocked at her for praying to Indian gods, and how once she had built a little mound of stones, which was the Sioux way of making petition, in the shadow of the statue of the Virgin Mary, and how Sister Angela had scattered the stones and told her to pray instead to the Blessed Lady. She still prayed to the Blessed Lady every day; but sometimes, too, she reared little mounds of stones in the desert when she was very sad and the kinship between her and the dead gods of her mother’s people seemed the closer for their common sorrow.

Peter, coming up with a much-blown horse, found her still chanting the Indian song.

“Sing him a verse for me, Judith. Heaven knows I need something to straighten out my infernal luck. Tell the Hayoka that I’m a good fellow and need only half a chance. Tell him to prosper my present venture.”

She had begun to chant the invocation, then stopped suddenly. “I must not; you know I am a Catholic.” Suspicion that had been scotched, not killed, raised its head. “What was his present venture?” Her eye had not changed in expression, nor a tone of her voice, but in her heart was a sickening distrust for all things.

A belated moon had come up. The level plain, on which their horses threw grotesque, elongated shadows, was flooded with honey-colored light. Each straggling clump of sage-brush, whitening bone and bowlder, gleamed mysterious, ghostly in the radiant flood-tide. They seemed to be riding through a world that had no kinship with that black, formless void through which they had groped but yet a little while. Then darkness had been upon the face of the deep. Now there was a miracle of light such as only the desert, in its desolation, knows. To Judith, with a soul attuned to every passing expression of nature, there was significance in this transition from darkness to light. The sudden radiance was emblematic of her belated perception, coming as it did after a blindness so dense as to appear almost wilful. Her mind was busy with a multitude of schemes. Fool though she had been, she would not be the instrument of her brother’s undoing.

“I’ve come too far,” she cried, in sudden dismay. “I should have stopped at the foot of the divide. I’ve never been over the trail before.”

“You foolish child, why should you stop in the middle of the wilderness?”

She wheeled the mare about and faced him, a figure of graven resolution.

“I promised to meet Tom Lorimer there—now you know.”

With which she cracked Dolly sharply with her heel and began to retrace her way over the trail. Peter turned his horse and followed, with the feeling of utter helplessness that a man has when confronted with the granite obstinacy of women. Judith had meanwhile expected that the announcement of her mythical appointment with Tom Lorimer would be received differently. Tom Lorimer’s reputation was of the worst. An Eastern man formerly, an absconder from justice, rumor was busy with tales of ungodly merrymaking that went on at his ranch, where no woman went except painted wisps from the dance-halls. But Peter was too loyal a friend, despite his shortcomings as a lover, to see in Judith’s statement anything more than a sisterly devotion so deeply unselfish that it failed to take into account the danger to which she subjected herself.

However, it was plainly his duty to prevent an unprotected rendezvous with Lorimer, to reason, to plead, and, if he should fail to bring her to a reasonable frame of mind, to go with her, come what would of the result. There were reasons innumerable why he, a cattle-man, should avoid the appearance of dealing with the sheep faction, he reflected, grimly. Lorimer owned sheep, many thousand head. His herds had been allowed to graze unmolested, while smaller owners, like Jim Rodney, had been crowded out because his influence, politically, was a thing to be reckoned with. So Peter followed Judith, pleading Judith’s cause; she did not understand, he told her, what she was doing; and while perhaps there was not another man in the country who would not honor her unselfishness in coming to him, Lorimer’s chivalry was not a thing to be reckoned with, drunken beast that he was. And Judith, worn with the struggle, tried beyond measure, made reckless by the daily infusion of ill-fortune, pulled up the mare and laughed unpleasantly.

“You think I’m going to see Lorimer about Jim? I’m going with him to a merrymaking. We’re old pals, Lorimer and I.”

“Judith, dear, has it come to this, that you not only distrust an old friend, but that you try to degrade yourself to hide from him the fact that you are going to your brother’s? You’ve never spoken to Lorimer. I heard him say, not a week ago, that he had never succeeded in making you recognize him. You deceived me at first when you spoke of meeting him—I thought you had a message from Jim—but this talk of merrymaking is beneath you.” He shrugged his shoulders in disgust. He felt the torrent of grief that rent her. No sob escaped her lips; there was no convulsive movement of shoulder. She rode beside him, still as the desert before the sand-storm breaks, her soul seared with white-hot iron that knows no saving grace of sob or tear. She rode as Boadicea might have ridden to battle; there was not a yielding line in her body. But over and over in her woman’s heart there rang the cry: “I am so tired! If the long night would but come!”

Peter drew out his watch. “It’s a quarter to eleven. We’ll have a hard bit of riding to reach Blind Creek before midnight.”

Then he knew as well as she, perhaps better, the route to Jim’s hiding-place; she had never been there as yet. And if Peter knew, doubtless every cattle-man in the country knew. What a fool she had been with her talk of meeting Tom Lorimer! A sense of utter defeat seemed to paralyze her energies. She felt like a trapped thing that after eluding its pursuers again and again finds that it has been but running about a corral. Physical weariness was telling on her. She had been in the saddle since a little past noon and it was now not far from midnight. And still there was the unanswered question of Peter’s errand. It was long since either had broken the silence. A delicious coolness had crept into the air with the approach of midnight. Judith, breathing deep draughts of it, reminded herself of the stoicism that was hers by birthright.

“Peter”—her voice lost some of its old ring, but it had a deeper note—“Peter, we make strange comrades, you and I, in a stranger world. We meet on Horse-Thief Trail, and there is reason to suppose that our errands are inimical. You’ve pierced all my little pretences; you know that I am going to my brother, who is an outlaw—my brother, the rope for whose hanging is already cut. And yet we have been friends these many years, and we meet in this world of desolation and weigh each other’s words, and there is no trust in our hearts. Our little faith is more pitiful than the cruel errands that bring us. I take it you, too, are going to my brother’s?”

“I’m going there to see that you arrive safe and sound, but I had no intention of going when I left camp. You’ve brought me a good twenty miles out of my way, not to mention accusing me of ulterior motives. Now, aren’t you penitent?” He smiled at her, boyish and irresistible. To Judith it was more reassuring than an oath. “It’s like dogs fighting over a picked bone; the meat’s all gone. The range is overworked; it needs a good, long rest.” He turned towards Judith, speaking slowly. “What you have said is true. We’re friends before we’re partisans of either faction. I’m on my way to a round-up. There’s been an unexpected order to fill a beef contract—a thousand steers. We’re going to furnish five hundred, the XXX two hundred and fifty, and the “Circle-Star” two hundred and fifty. Men have been scouring the enemy’s country for days rounding up stragglers. It will go hard with the rustlers after this round-up, Judith.”

She felt a great wave of penitence and shame sweep over her. She had not trusted him; in her heart she had nourished hideous suspicions of him, and he was telling her, quite simply, of the plans of his own faction, trusting her, as, indeed, he might, but as she never expected to be trusted.

“Peter, do you know that sometimes I think Jim has gone quite mad with these range troubles. He’s acted strangely ever since his sheep were driven over the cliff. He’s not been home to Alida and the children since he has been out of jail, and you know how devoted to them he has always been! He spends all his time tracking Simpson. Alida wrote me that she expects him to-night, and I’m going there on the chance.”

“It’s the devil’s own hole for desolation that he’s come to.” Peter looked about the cup-shaped valley that was but a cul-de-sac in the mountains. Its approach was between the high rock walls of a cañon. Passing between them, the rise of temperature was almost incredible. The great barrier of mountain-range, that cut it off from the rest of the world, seemed also to cut it off from light and air. The atmosphere hung lifeless, the occasional bellow of range-cattle sounded far-off and muffled. Vegetation was scant, the sage-brush grew close and scrubby, even the brilliant cactus flowers seemed to have abandoned the valley to its fate. A lone group of dead cotton-woods grew like sentinels close to the rocky walls. Their twisted branches, gaunt and bare, writhed upward as if in dumb supplication. There was about them a something that made Judith come closer to Peter as they passed them by. The night wind sang in their leafless branches with a long-drawn, shuddering sigh. The despair of a barren, deserted thing seemed to have settled on them.

“Those frightful trees, how can Alida stand them?” She looked back. “Oh, I wish they were cut down!”

Before them was the cabin, its ruined condition pitifully apparent even by night. It had been deserted ten years before Jim brought his family to it. Rumor said it was haunted. Grim stories were told of the death of a woman who had come there with a man, and had not lived to go away with him. The roof of the adjoining stable had fallen in, the bars of the corral were missing. The house was dark but for a feeble light that glimmered in one window, the beacon that had been lighted, night after night, against Jim’s coming. It added a further note of apprehension, peering through the dark, still valley like a wakeful, anxious eye, keeping a long and unrewarded vigil. Judith felt the consummation of the threatening tragedy after her first glimpse of the sentinel trees. She could not explain, but her heart cried, even as the wind in them had sung of death. Perhaps her mother’s spirit spoke to her, just as she had said, on that memorable drive, that the Great Mystery spoke to his people in the earth, the sky, and the frowning mountains.

“Peter”—she had slid from her horse and was clinging to his arm—“when it happens, Peter, you will have no part in it?”

“It won’t happen, Judith, if I can help it.”

She kissed his hand as it held the loose reins.

“Lord, I am not worthy!” was the thought in his heart. He sat graven in the saddle. Sir Knight of the Joyous Heart though he was, the unsought kiss of trust gifted him with a self-reverence that would not soon forsake him.

Judith was rapping on the door and calling to Alida not to be frightened. And presently it was opened. Peter wanted to leave Judith, now that she was safely at the end of her journey, but she would not hear of it till he had eaten.

“You would have had your comfortable supper five hours ago had you not been playing cavalier to me all over the wilderness.” And Peter yielded.

Judith busied herself about the kitchen. Her mood of racking apprehension had disappeared. Indian stoicism had again the guiding hand. She waved Peter from the fire that she was kindling, as if he were a blundering incompetent. But she let him slice the bacon and grind the coffee as one lets a child help. Alida came in, white-faced and anxious over the long absence of her husband, but conscientiously hospitable nevertheless. Peter noticed that Judith made a gallant pretence of eating, crumbling her bread and talking the meanwhile. The pale wife, who had little to say at the best of times, was put to the test to say anything at all. But, withal, their intent was so genuinely hospitable that Peter himself could not speak with the pity of it. Accustomed as he was to the roughness of these frontier cabins, never had he seen a human habitation so desolate as this. The mud plaster had fallen away from between the logs, showing cross sections of the melancholy prospect. An atmosphere of tragedy brooded over the place. Whether from its long period of emptiness, or from the vaguely hinted murder of the woman who had died there, or whether it took its character from the prevailing desolation, the cabin in the valley was an unlovely thing. Nor did the cleanliness, the conscientious making the best of things, soften the woful aspect of the place. Rather was the appeal the more poignant to the seeing eye, as the brave makeshift of the self-respecting poor strikes deeper than the beggar’s whine. The house was bare but for the few things that Alida could take in the wagon in which they made their flight. And all through the pinch of poverty and grinning emptiness there was visible the woman-touch, the brave making the best of nothing, the pitiful preparation for the coming of the man. Wild roses from the creek bloomed against the gnarled and weather-warped logs of the walls. Sprays of clematis trailed their white bridal beauty from cans rescued from the ashes of a camp-fire. But Alida was a strategist when it came to adorning her home, and the rusty receptacle was hid beneath trailing green leaves. There was at the window a muslin curtain that in its starched and ruffled estate was strongly suggestive of a child’s frock hastily converted into a window drapery. The curtain was drawn aside that the lamp might shed its beam farther on the way of the traveller who came not. There was but one other light in the place, a bit of candle. Alida apologized for the poor light by which they must eat, but she did not offer to take the lamp from the window.

Peter was no longer Sir Knight of the Joyous Heart as he watched the little, white-faced woman, who went so often to the door to look towards the road that entered the valley that she was no longer aware of what she did. He saw her wide eyes full of fear, the bow of the mouth strained taut with anxiety, her unconscious fear of him as one of the alien faction, and withal her concern for his comfort. Judith’s control was far greater, but though she hid it skilfully, he knew the sorrow that consumed her.

There was a cry from the room beyond, and Judith, snatching up the candle, went in to the children. All three of them were sleeping cross-ways in one bed, their small, round arms and legs striking out through the land of dreams as swimmers breasting the waves. She gave a little cry of delight and appreciation, and called Peter to look. Little Jim, who had cried in some passing fear, sat up sleepily. He stretched out his small arms to Peter, whom he had never seen before. Peter took him, and again he settled to sleep, apparently assured that he was in friendly hands.

The warm, small body, giving itself with perfect confidence, strongly affected Peter’s heightened susceptibilities. In the very nature of the situation he could be no friend to Jim Rodney, yet here in his arms lay Jim Rodney’s son, loving, trusting him instinctively. Judith noticed that his face paled beneath its many coats of tan. He was afraid of the little sleeping boy, afraid that his unaccustomed touch might hurt him, and yet loath to part with the small burden. Judith took the boy from Peter and placed him between the two little girls on the bed.

Through the window they could see Alida’s dress glimmering, like a phantom in the darkness, as she strained her eyes towards the path. Peter hated to leave the women and children in this desolate place. The night was far spent. To reach the round-up in season, he could at best snatch a couple of hours’ sleep and be again in the saddle while the stars still shone. His saddle and saddle blanket were enough for him. The broad canopy of heaven, the bosom of mother earth, had given him sound, dreamless sleep these many years. He bade the women good-night, and made his bed where the cañon gave entrance to the valley. But sleep was slow to come. Now, in that vague, uncertain world where we fall through oceans of space, and the waking is the dream, the dream the waking, Peter caught pale flashes of Kitty’s gold head as she ran and ran, ever in the pursuit of something, she knew not what. And as she ran hither and thither, she would turn her head and beckon to Peter, and as he followed he felt the burden of years come upon him. And then he saw Judith’s eyes, still and grave. He turned and wakened. No, it was not Judith’s eyes, but the stars above the mountain-tops.