The matriarch had delayed longer in moving camp than was consistent with her habitual watchfulness where the interests of the sheep were involved. Mary Carmichael, who had already become inured to the experience of moving, was even conscious of a certain impatience at the delay, and could only explain the apathy with which Mrs. Yellett received reports of the dearth of pasturage on the ground that she wished each fresh educational germ to take as deep root as possible before transplantation. So that when Mrs. Yellett, shortly after Leander Dax’s arrival at camp in the capacity of herder, announced that she and Leander were to make a trip to the dipping-vat that had kept Ben from his classes for the past ten days, and invited the “gov’ment” to join the expedition, Mary accepted with fervor.
The Yelletts’ “bunch” of sheep did not exceed three thousand head, and the matriarch had wisely decreed that it should be restricted to that number, as she wished always to give the flock her personal supervision.
“‘The hen that’s the surest of her chicks is the one that does her own settin’,’” was the adage from the Book of Hiram with which Mrs. Yellett succinctly summed up the case.
Each autumn, therefore, the wethers and the dry-bag ewes were sent to the market, and as the result of continual weeding of the stock the matriarch had as promising a herd of its size as could be found in Wyoming. Often she had explained to Mary, who was learning of the wonders of this new world with remarkable aptness, that she had constantly to fight against the inclination to increase her business of sheep-raising, but that as soon as she should begin to hire herders or depend on strangers things would go wrong. With the assistance of her sons, she therefore managed the entire details of the herd, with the exception of those occasions on which Leander lent his semi-professional co-operation.
As a workman Leander was, considering his size and apparent weakness, surprisingly efficient. It was as a dispenser of anti-theological doctrine that Mrs. Dax’s husband annoyed his temporary employer. Freed from his wife’s masterful presence, Leander dared to be an “agnostic,” as he called himself, of an unprecedentedly violent order. His iconoclasm was not of a pattern with paw’s gusty protests against life in general, but it was Leander’s way of asserting himself, on the rare occasions when he got a chance, to deny clamorously every tenet advanced by every religion. The mere use of certain familiar expletives drove him, ordinarily mild and submissive though he was, to frantic gesticulation and diatribe. Mary Carmichael could not make out, as she watched the comedy with growing amusement, whether poor Leander really believed that he was the first of doubting Thomases, or whether he took an unfair advantage of the lack of general information in his casual audiences to set forth well-known opinions as his own. Whatever its basis may have been, Leander sustained the rôle of doubter with passionate zeal, wearing himself to tatters of rage and hoarseness over arguments maliciously contrived beforehand by cow-punchers and sheep-herders in need of amusement; and yet he never saw the traps, going out of his way, apparently, to fall into them, tumbling headlong into the identical pits time after time. Jonah and the whale constituted one bait by means of which Leander could be lured from food, sleep, or work of the most pressing nature.
“The poor fool would stop in the middle of shearing a sheep to argue that Jonah never come out of the whale’s belly,” the matriarch had told Mary Carmichael, in summing up Leander’s disadvantages as a herder. And the first remark she had addressed to him on his arrival was: “Leander Dax, you’d have to be made over, and made different, to keep you from bein’ a infidel, but there’s one p’int on which you are particularly locoed, and that’s Jonah and the whale. Now at this particular time in the hist’ry of the United States, nobody in his faculties has got no call to fret hisself over Jonah and his whereabouts—none whatever. There’s a lot of business round this here camp that’s a heap more pressin’. Now, Leander Dax, if I do hereby undertake to hire, engage, and employ you to herd sheep, do you agree to renounce discussions, arguments, and debates on the late Jonah and his whereabouts durin’ them three days? God A’mighty, man, any one would think you was Jonah’s wife, the interest you have in his absence!”
“I come here to herd sheep,” Leander had brazenly retaliated. “I ’ain’t come to try to make you think.”
Nevertheless, he appeared docile enough as the time came for the journey to the dipping-vat, and did his part in making ready. The wagon was the rudest of structures; it consisted merely of one long, stout pole. Though she saw the horses being harnessed to this pole, Mary Carmichael, discreetly exercising her newly acquired wisdom, forbore to ask where she was going to sit, and listened with interest to a discussion between Mrs. Yellett and Leander as to the number of horses it would take to get the dip up the mountain. Leander, who loved pomp and splendor, was for taking six, but Mrs. Yellett, who carried simplicity to a fault, was in favor of only two. They finally compromised on four, and Leander went to fetch the extra two.
Mrs. Yellett, ever economical of the flitting moment, took advantage of the delay to give Mr. Yellett a dose of “Brainard’s Beneficial Blackthorn.”
“Paw’s as hard to manage as a bent pin,” she remarked, in an aside to Mary, while he protested and fought her off with his stick. But she, with the agility of an acrobat, got directly back of him, took his head under her arm, pried open his mouth, and poured down the unwelcome, if beneficial, dose.
“There, there, paw,” she said, wiping his mouth as if he had been a baby, “don’t take on so! It’s all gone, and I can’t have you sick on my hands.”
But Mr. Yellett continued to splutter and flare and use violent language, whereupon the matriarch went into the tent and returned with a drink of condensed-milk and water, “to wash down the nasty taste,” she told him, soothingly.
A moment afterwards she and Leander were engaged in rolling the barrels of sheep-dip to the wagon, Mary Carmichael helplessly looking on while Mrs. Yellett looked doubtfully at a “gov’ment” who could not handle barrels. Finally, under the skilful manipulation of Mrs. Yellett and Leander, the long pole took on the aspect of a colossal vertebral column, from which huge barrel-ribs projected horizontally, leaving at the rear a foot or so of bare pole as a smart caudal appendage, bearing about the same proportion to the wagon as the neatly bitten tail of a fox-terrier does to the dog.
Mrs. Yellett kissed “paw” good-bye, explaining to Mary, in extenuation of her weakness, that she would never forgive herself if she neglected it and anything happened to him during her absence. She then climbed to the front barrel and secured the ribbons. Leander had brought out three rolls of bedding of the inevitable bed-quilt variety, but Mrs. Yellett scorned such luxury while driving, and accordingly gave hers to the “gov’ment” for a back-rest. Mary sat on the lower row of barrels, with her feet dangling, using one roll of bedding for a seat and the other comfortably arranged at her back as a cushion.
Madam called sharply to the horses, “Hi-hi-hi-kerat! hi-kerat-kerat!” and they started off at a rattling pace, the barrels of dip creaking and squeaking as they swayed under their rope lashings. Mary bounced about like a bean in a bag, working loose from between the bed-quilt rolls at each gulley, clinging frantically to barrel ends, shaken back and forth like a shuttle. Indeed, the drive seemed to combine every known form of physical exercise. Mrs. Yellett herself was in fine fettle; she drove sitting for a while, then rose, standing on a narrow ledge while she held the four ribbons lightly in one hand and tickled the leaders with a long whip carried in the other. She drove her four horses over the rough road with the skill of a circus equestrienne, balancing easily on the crazy ledge, shifting her weight from side to side as the wagon rattled down gullies and up ridges, the horses responding gallantly to the shrill “Hi-hi-kerat! hi-kerat! hi-kerat!” Her costume on this occasion represented joint concessions to her sex and the work that was before her, as the head of a family at the dipping-vat. She still wore the drum-shaped rabbit-skin cap pulled well down over her forehead for driving. The great, cable-like braids of hair stood out well below the cap, giving her head an appearance of denseness and solidity, but the rambling curls were still blowing about her face, perhaps adding to the sum total of grotesqueness. She wore a man’s shirt of gray flannel, well open at the neck, from which the bronzed column of the throat rose in austere dignity. A pair of Mr. Yellett’s trousers, stuffed into high, cow-puncher’s boots, that met the hem of a skirt coming barely to the knees, contributed to the originality of her dress.
The wagon had been pitching like a ship at sea through the desert dreariness for about an hour, when Mary Carmichael suddenly became conscious that the prods she had been receiving from time to time in her back were not due either to their manner of locomotion or to the freight carried. Clinging to two barrels, she waited for the next lurch of the wagon to shake her free from the rolls of bedding, and, at the peril of life and limb, looked round. Leander hung over the top row of barrels, gesticulating wildly. The change in the man, since leaving camp some two hours previous, was appalling. He seemed to have shrivelled away to a wraith of his former self. His cheeks, his chin, had waned to the vanishing point. He opened his lips and mouthed horribly, yet his frightful grimacings conveyed no meaning. Mary called to Mrs. Yellett, but her voice was drowned in the rattle of the wagon, the clatter of four horses’ hoofs, and the continual “Hi-hi-hi-kerat! hi-kerat!” of the driver. In the mean time Leander pointed to his mouth and back to the road in indescribably pathetic pantomime. “Perhaps the poor creature wants to turn back and die in his bed, like a Christian, even if he isn’t one,” thought Mary, as she called and called, Leander still emitting the most inhuman of cries, like the sounds made by deaf mutes in distress. Presently Mrs. Yellett drew up, and asked in the name of many profane things what was the matter with her companions.
Leander resumed his mouthings and his dumb show, but Mrs. Yellett proved a better interpreter than Mary Carmichael.
“God A’mighty!” she said, “he’s lost his false teeth!” And without another word she turned the four horses and the wagon with a skill that fell little short of sleight-of-hand.
The dialogue that followed between Mrs. Yellett and Leander as to how far back he had dropped his teeth, cannot be given, owing to the inadequacy of the English language to reproduce his toothless enunciation. Catching, as Mary did, the meaning of Mrs. Yellett’s remarks only, she received something of the one-sided impression given by overhearing a telephone conversation:
“What did you have ’em out for?... You didn’t have ’em out?... I just shook ’em out? Then what made you have your mouth open? Ef your mouth had been shut, you couldn’t have lost ’em.... You was a-yawnin’, eh? Well, you are a plumb fool to yawn on this kind of a waggin, with your mouth full o’ china teeth. Your yawnin’ ’ll put us back a good hour an’ we won’t reach camp before sundown.”
At this point of the diatribe the Infidel left the wagon and began to search along the road. He said he had noticed a buffalo skull near the place where he had dropped the teeth, and thought he could trace them by this landmark. Mrs. Yellett held the ribbons and suggested that Mary get down “and help to prospect for them teeth.” As Mary clambered down she heard a fragment of the matriarch’s monologue, which, being duly expurgated for polite ears, was to the effect that she would rather take ten babies anywhere than one grown man, and that as for getting in the way, hindering, obstructing, and being a nuisance, generally speaking, man had not his counterpart in the scheme of creation.
“Talk about a woman bein’ at the bottom of everything!” sniffed Mrs. Yellett; “I be so sick of always hearin’ about ‘the woman in the case!’ Half the time the case would be a blame sight worse if it was left exclusive to the men. The Book of Hiram says: ‘A skunk may have his good p’ints, but few folks is takin’ the risk of waitin’ round to get acquainted with ’em.’”
While Mary was still “prospecting,” a glad cry roused her attention, and Leander came up smiling, with his dental treasures nicely adjusted.
“Quit smilin’ like a rattlesnake, you plumb fool!” called out Mrs. Yellett. “Do you want to lose ’em again?”
So, curtailing the muscular contraction indicative of his pleasure, the Infidel again took his place among the bed-quilts and the journey was resumed.
It was now about five in the afternoon. The heat, which had been oppressive all day, suddenly relaxed its blistering grip, and a keenly penetrating dampness, not unlike that of a sea-fog, came from some unknown quarter of the arid wastes and chilled the three travellers to the marrow. The horses flung up their heads and sniffed it, rearing and plunging as if they had scent of something menacing. Across the horizon a dark cloud scudded, no bigger than your hand.
“Cloud-burst!” announced Mrs. Yellett.
“Cloud-burst, all right enough,” agreed Leander, and he turned up his coat-collar in simple preparation for the deluge.
There flashed into Mary Carmichael’s mind a sentence from her physical geography that she had been obliged to commit to heart in her school-days: “A cloud-burst is a sudden, capricious rainfall, as if the whole cloud had been precipitated at once.” She wanted to question her companions as to the accuracy of this definition, but before she had time to frame a sentence the real cloud-burst came, with a splitting crack of thunder; then the lightning flashed out its message in the short-hand of the storm, across the inky blackness, and the water fell as if the ocean had been inverted. In the fraction of a second all three were drenched to the skin, the water pouring from them in sheets, as if they had been some slight obstruction in the path of a waterfall. The wagon was soon in a deep gully, with frothing, foaming, yellow water up to the hubs of the wheels. Mrs. Yellett, like some goddess of the storm, lashed her horses forward to keep them from foundering in the mud, and the wagon creaked and groaned in all its timbers as it lurched and jolted through the angry torrents.
Each moment Mary expected to be flung from the barrels, and clung till her finger-tips were white and aching. From the drenched red bedquilts a sticky crimson trail ran over the barrel heads, as well as over Mary’s hands, face, and dress. Still they forged on through the deluge, Mrs. Yellett shouting and lashing the horses, holding them erect and safe with the skill she never lost. The fur on her rabbit-skin cap was beaten flat. The great, wet braids had fallen from the force of the water and hung straight and black, like huge snakes uncoiled. She was far from losing her grip on either the horses or the situation, and from the inspiring ring of her voice as she urged them forward it was plain that she took a fierce joy in this conflict of the elements.
It was bitterly cold, and Mary reflected that if Leander’s teeth chattered half as hard as hers did, without breaking, they must, indeed, be of excellent quality. The storm began to abate, and the sky became lighter, though the water still poured in torrents. As soon as her responsibility as driver left her time to speak, Mrs. Yellett lost no time in fastening the cloud-burst to Leander.
“This here is what comes of settin’ up your back against God A’mighty and encouragin’ the heathen and the infidel in his idolatry. I might ’a’ knowed somethin’ would happen, takin’ you along! ‘And the heathen and the infidel went out, and the Lord God sent a cloud-burst to wet him,’” quoted Mrs. Yellett from the apocryphal Scriptures that never yet failed to furnish her with verse and text.
The infidel, from his side of the wagon, began to display agitation. His jaws worked, but he said nothing.
“You ’ain’t lost them teeth again, have you?”
He nodded his head wretchedly.
“‘And the Lord took away the teeth of his enemy, so that he could neither bite nor talk,’” quoted Mrs. Yellett to the miserable man, who could make no reply.
“Wonder you wouldn’t see the foolishness o’ being a heathen and a infidel, and turn to the Lord! You ’ain’t got no teeth, and it takes your wife to herd you. ‘And the Lord multiplied the tribulations of his enemy.’ You got no more show standin’ up agin the Lord than an insect would have standin’ up agin me.”
She had Leander, at last, just where she wanted him. He was forced to listen, and he could make no reply. She alternately abused him for his lack of faith and urged him to repentance. Leander raged, gesticulated, turned his back on her, mouthed, and finally put his fingers in his ears. But nothing stemmed the tide of Mrs. Yellett’s eloquence; it was as inexhaustible and as remorseless as the cloud-burst.
It continued bitterly cold, even after the rain had stopped falling, and the heap of sodden bedclothes furnished no protection against the chilling dampness. It was growing dark; there was no red in the sunset, only a streak of vivid orange along the horizon, chill and clear as the empty, soulless flame of burning paper. There were no deep, glowing coals, no amethystine opalescence, fading into gold and violet. All was cold and subdued, and the scrub pines on the mountain-tops stood out sharply against this cold background like an etching on yellow paper.
Mrs. Yellett’s self-inspired scriptural maxims were discontinued after a while, either because she could think of no more, or because the rain-soaked, shivering, chattering object towards which they were directed was too abject to inspire further efforts. Leander huddled on the barrel that was farthest from Mrs. Yellett, and wrapped himself in the soaked red bedquilt. The dye smeared his face till he looked like an Indian brave ready for battle, but there was no further suggestion of the fighting red man in the utter desolation of his attitude. Mary Carmichael, on her barrel, shivered with grim patience and longed for a cup of tea. Only Mrs. Yellett gave no sign of anxiety or discomfort; she drove along, sometimes whistling, sometimes swearing, erect as an Indian, and to all appearances as oblivious of cold and wet as if she were in her own home.
The gathering darkness into which the horses were plunging was mysterious and appalling. Objects stood out enormously magnified, or distorted grotesquely, in the uncertain light. It was like penetrating into the real Inferno, like stumbling across the inspiration of Dante in all its sinister splendor. It was the Inferno of his dream rather than the Inferno of his poem; it had the ghastly reality of the unreal.
“It wouldn’t surprise me if we had a smash-up in Clear Creek,” said Mrs. Yellett, just by way of adding her quota of cheerful speculation. She ducked her head and whispered in Mary’s ear:
“It’s all along of me hirin’ him! I wouldn’t be surprised if paw died. I’m thinkin’ of shakin’ him out after his teeth. ‘Take not up with the enemy of the Lord, lest he make of you also an enemy.’”
But there was no accent of apprehension in Mrs. Yellett’s dismal prognostications of the evil that might befall her for employing Leander. She spoke more with the air of one who produces incidents to prove an argument than of one who anticipates a calamity.
Leander, toothless and wretched, sitting on the side of the wagon, began to show symptoms of joy comparable to that of the vanguard of the Israelites, catching their first glimpse of the Promised Land. Touching Mary Carmichael on the shoulder, he pointed to a white tent and the remains of a camp-fire. Already Mrs. Yellett had begun to “Hallo, Ben!” But Ben was at work at the vat, which was still a quarter of a mile further up the mountain; so Mrs. Yellett, throwing the reins to Leander and bidding him turn out the horses, lost no time in building a fire, putting on coffee, and making her little party comfortable. So various was her efficiency that she seemed no less at home in these simple domestic tasks than when guiding her horses, goddess-like, through the cloud-burst. And Mary Carmichael, succumbing gradually to the revivifying influence of the fire and the hot coffee, acknowledged honestly to herself a warmth of affection for her hostess and for the atmosphere Mrs. Yellett created about her that made even Virginia and her aunts seem less the only pivot of rational existence. She felt that she had come West with but one eye, as it were, and countless prejudices, whereas her powers of vision were fast becoming increased a hundredfold. How very tame life must be, she reflected, as she sat smiling to herself, to those who did not know Mrs. Yellett, how over-serious to those who did not know Leander! Yet, after all, she knew that the real basis of her readjusted vision was her brief but illuminating acquaintance with Judith Rodney. To Mary, freed for the first time in her life from the most elegantly provincial of surroundings, Judith seemed the incarnation of all the splendor and heroism of the West. And in the glow of her enthusiasm she decided then and there not to abandon the Yellett educational problem till she should have solved it successfully. She might not be born to valiant achievement, like these sturdy folk about her, but she might as well prove to them that an Eastern tenderfoot was not all feebleness and inefficiency.
“Leander!” called Mrs. Yellett. “Just act as if you was to home and wash up these dishes.”