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On Horse-thief Trail
Judith, on her black mare, Dolly, left the Dax ranch after the mid-daymeal to go in quest of her brother. He had left his comfortable cabin onthe Bear Creek, when he had turned rustler, and moved into the "bad man'scountry," one of those remote mountain fastnesses that abound in Wyomingand furnish a natural protection to the fugitive from justice. Judith tookthe left fork of the road even as Peter Hamilton had chosen the right, theday she had watched him gallop towards Kitty Colebrooke with never aglance backward. Judith strove now to put him and the memory of that dayfrom her mind by turning towards the open country without a glance in thedirection he had taken. But her thoughts were weary of journeying overthat trail that she would not look towards; in imagination she hadtravelled it with Peter a hundred times, saw each dip and turn of theyellow road, each feature of the landscape as he rode exultant to Kitty,to be turned, tried, taken or left as her mood should prompt. But Judithwas more woman than saint, and in her heart there was a blending of joyand pain. For she knew--such skill has love in inference from detail--thatthe mysterious far-away girl, who was so powerful that she could havewhatever she wanted, even to Peter, loved her own ambitions better thanshe did Peter or Peter's happiness, and that she would not marry himexcept as a makeshift. For Miss Colebrooke wrote verses; Peter had awhite-and-gold volume of them that Judith fancied he said his prayers to.
As for Peter himself, he had never been able to explain the magic Kittyhad brewed for him. There was a heady quality in the very ring of hername. His first glimpse of her, on Class Day, in a white gown and a hatthat to his manly indiscrimination looked as guileless as a sheaf ofpoppies nodding above the pale-yellow hair that had the sheen ofcorn-silk, had been a vision that stirred in him heroic promptings. He hadno difficulty in securing an introduction. She was a connection of theWetmores, as was he, though through opposite sides of the house. In thefew minutes' talk that followed, he had the disconcerting sensation ofbeing "talked down to." There was the indulgent tolerance of the woman ofthe world to the "nice boy" about this amazing young woman, who might havebeen eighteen. Hamilton had repudiated the very suggestion of being a"nice boy." But he felt himself blushing, groping for words, saying stupidthings, supplying every requisite of the "nice boy" as if he were actingthe part. Her chaperon bore her away presently, and he was left with aradiant impression of corn-silk hair and a complexion that justifiedBouguereau's mother-of-pearl flesh tints. And when she had tilted theruffled lace parasol over her shoulder, so that it framed her head like afleecy halo, he had seen that her eyes were green as jade. Withal he had asense of having acquitted himself stupidly.
Later, when he ran the gamut of some friends, they had chaffed him on hishardihood. By Jove! He had nerve to look at her! Didn't he know she was"the" Miss Colebrooke? Now Hamilton was absolutely ignorant of MissColebrooke's right of way to the definite article, but it wascharacteristic of him to make no inquiries. On the whole, he found thesituation meeting with a greater number of the artistic requirements thansuch situations usually presented. He was still dallying with thispleasant vagueness of sensation when he picked up a copy of a magazine,and the name Katherine Colebrooke caught his eye and held it like theflight of a comet. Her contribution was a sonnet entitled "The Miracle."As a naive emotional confession, "The Miracle" interested him; as asonnet, he rent it unmercifully.
Peter was to learn, however, that this sonnet was but a solitary flake ina poetic fall of more or less magnitude. He rather conspicuously avoided areference to her poetry when they met again. To him it was the very leastof her gifts. Her hair, that had the tender yellow of ripening corn, wasworthy a cycle of sonnets, but pray leave the making of them to some oneelse! By daylight the jade-colored eyes seemed to shut out the world. Thepupils shrank to pin-points. The green looked deep--as many fathoms as thesea. She was all Diana by daylight, a huntress, if you will, of theelusive epithet, but essentially a maiden goddess, who would add nosprightly romance to the chronicles of Olympus. By lamp-light shesuggested quite another divinity. The pin-points expanded; they burnedblack, like coals newly breaking into flame.
When Hamilton knew her better, he did not like to think that he hadthought her eighteen at their first meeting. It impugned his judgment as aman of the world. Young ladies of eighteen could not possibly becontributors of several years' standing to the various magazines.Disconcerting scraps of gossip floated to him. He heard of her asbridesmaid at a famous wedding of six years back, when she had deflectedthe admiration from the bride and remained the central figure of thepicture. Her portrait by Sargent had been the sensation of the Salon whenhe had been a grubby-faced boy with his nose in a Latin grammar. Anunusual situation was abhorrent to him. That he should marry an olderwoman, one, moreover, who had gained her public in a field to which he hadnot gained admission, was doubly distasteful by reason of his deference tothe conventional. If she had flirted with him, his midsummer madness wouldhave evaporated into thin air; but she kept him at arm's-length,ostensibly took him seriously, and the boy proposed.
Her rejection of him was a matter of such consummate skill that Hamiltondid not realize the keenness of his disappointment till he was swingingwestward over the prairies. She had confided to him that her work claimedher and that she must renounce those sweet responsibilities that made thehappiness of other women. It was with the protective mien of one whosought to shield him from an adverse destiny that she declined his suit.
This had all happened seven years ago. In the mean time he had adjustedhis disappointment to the new life of the West. To say that he had fallenin love with the situation would be to misrepresent him. But the role oflonely cow-puncher loyally wedded to the thought of his first love was notwithout charm to Peter. How long his constancy would have survived thetest of propinquity to a woman of Judith Rodney's compelling personality,other things being equal, it would be difficult to hazard a guess. Thecoming of Judith from the convent increased the perspective into whichKitty was retreating. With the vivid plainswoman in the foreground, thepale-haired writer of verse dwindled almost to reminiscence. But thereverence for the usual, that made up the underlying motive for so much ofHamilton's conduct, presented barriers alongside of which his previousquandary regarding Miss Colebrooke's seniority shrank to insignificance.He might marry a woman older than himself and swallow the grimace of it,but by no conceivable system of argument could he persuade himself tomarry into a family like that of the Rodneys--the girl herself, for all herbeauty and rare womanliness, a quarter Indian, her father the synonyme forobloquy, her brother a cattle thief. Hamilton preferred that other menshould make the heroic marriages of a new country. He was prepared toapplaud their hardihood of temperament, but in his own case such a thingwas inconceivable. Similar arguments have ensnared multitudes in the webof caution and provided a rich feast for the arch-spider, convention, theshrivelled flies dangling in the web conveying no significance,apparently, beyond that of advertising the system.
When Peter went East, he had expected to find Kitty worn by the pursuit ofepithets, haunted by the phantom of a career, resigned to the slings andarrows of remorseful spinsterhood. An obvious regret, or, at least,resignation tempered with remembrance, was the unguent he anticipated atthe hands of Kitty. But alas for sanctuaries built to refuge woundedpride! He found Kitty the pivot of an adoring coterie, the magazinesflowing with the milk and honey of her verse and she looking younger, ifpossible, than when he had first known her. Time, experience, even thepangs of literary parturition had not writ a single character on thatalabaster brow. The very atrophy of the forces of time which she hadaccomplished by unknown necromancy seemed to endow her with an elfinyouth, making her seem smaller, more childlike, more radiantly elusivethan when she had worn the poppy hat at Cambridge.
The tan and hardship of the prairie had adjusted the blunder of theirages. Stark conditions had overdrawn his account perhaps a decade; sheretained a surplus it would be rude to estimate. Her greeting of him wasr
adiant, her welcome panoplied in words that verged close to inspiration.A woman would have scented warning instantly, deep feeling and the curledand perfumed phrase being suspicious cronies and sure to rouse thoselightly slumbering watch-dogs, the feminine wits. But Peter only turnedthe other cheek. More than once, in the days that followed, he devoutlythanked his patron saint, caution, that his relations with Judith had beengoverned by characteristic prudence. Kitty admitted him to her coterie,but he had lost nothing of his attitude of grand Turk towards her verses.The sin be upon the heads of whomever took such things seriously! Theirony of fate that compelled a class poet to punch cows may have tincturedhis judgment.
A telegram recalled him to the ranch and prevented a final leave-takingwith Miss Colebrooke. He made his adieux by letter, and they were franklyregretful. Miss Colebrooke's reply mingled sorrow in parting from her oldfriend with joy in having found him. Her letter, a masterpiece ofphrase-spinning, presented to Peter the one significant fact that shewould not be averse to the renewal of his suit. In reading her letter hemade no allowance for the fact that the lady had made a fine art of sayingthings, and that her joy and regret at their meeting and parting mighthave been reminiscent of the printed passion that was so prominent afeature of magazinedom. Her letters--the like of them he had never seenoutside printed volumes of letters that had achieved the distinction ofclassics--culminated in the one that Judith had given him that morning,announcing that unexpectedly she had decided to join the Wetmore girls andwould be glad to see him at the ranch.
That he had flown at her bidding, Judith knew. What she would least havesuspected was that Miss Colebrooke had received her visitor as if hisbreakneck ride across the desert had been in the nature of an afternooncall. If Judith, knowing what she did of this long-drawn-out romance,could have known likewise of her knight's chagrin, would she have pitiedhim?
Ignorant of the recent anticlimax, and with a burden of many heavythoughts, Judith was penetrating a world of unleavened desolation. Beneaththe scourge of the noon-day sun the desert lay, stripped of everyillusion. Vegetation had almost ceased, nothing but sun-scorched,dust-choked sage-brush could spring from such sterility. The fruit ofdesolation, it gave back to desolation a quality more melancholy thanutter barrenness. Glittering in the sunlight, the beds of alkali gleamedleper white; above them the agitated air was like the hot waves that danceand quiver about iron at white heat. From horizon to horizon the curse ofGod seemed to have fallen on the land; it was as if, cursing it, He hadforgotten it, and left it as the abomination of desolation. Judith scarceheeded, her thoughts straying after first one then another of the groupthat made up her little world--Peter Hamilton, Kitty Colebrooke, Jim, hisfamily--thoughts inconsequent as the dancing dust-devils that whirled overthat infinity of space, and, whirling, disappeared and reappeared at somenew corner of the compass.
The trail that she must take to Jim's camp in the mountain was known tobut few honest men. Fugitives from justice--the grave, impersonal justiceof the law, or the swift justice of the plains--found there an asylum. Andwhile they sometimes suffered, in death by thirst or hunger, a sentencemore dreadful than the law of the land or the law of the rope would havegiven them, the desert, like the sea, seldom gave up her own. It was morethan probable that no woman except Alida Rodney had ever taken that trailbefore, and reasonably certain that no woman had ever taken it alone.Dolly, when she saw the beds of alkali grow more frequent, and that thetrails of the range cattle turned back, sniffed the lack of water in theair, slackened her pace, and turned an interrogatory ear towards hermistress.
"It's all right, old girl"; the gauntleted hand patted the satin neck."We're in for"--Judith flung her head up and confronted the infinitedesolation yawning to the sky-line--"God knows what."
Dolly broke into a light canter; this evidently was not an occasion fordawdling. There was a touch of business about the way the reins were heldthat made the mare settle down to work. But her flying hoofs made littleapparent progress against the space and silence of the desert. Five, ten,fifteen miles and the curving shoulder of the mountain, that she mustcross, still mocked in the distance. Only the sun moved in that vast worldof seemingly immutable forces.
There was no stoic Sioux in Judith now. The girl that breasted the crestsof the foot-hills shrank in terror from the loneliness and the suggestionof foes lurking in ambush. The sun dropped behind the mountain, leaving ablood-red pool in his wake, like fugitive Cain. Already night was sweepingover the earth from mountain shadows that flowed imperceptibly togetherlike blackened pools. To the girl following the trail the silence was moredreadful than a chorus of threatening voices. She listened till thestillness beat at her ears like the stamping of ten thousand hoofs, thenpulled up her horse, and the desert was as still as the chamber of death.
"Ah, Dolly, my dear, a house is the place for women folk when the nightcomes--a house, the fire burning clear, the kettle singing, and--" Dollywhinnied an affirmative without waiting for the picture to be completed.The wilderness was being gradually swallowed by the shadows, asdeliberately as a snake swallows its victim. They were nearing themountains. The hot blasts of air from the desert blew more and moreintermittently. The breeze swept keen from the hills, towering higher andhigher, and Judith breathed deep of the piny fragrance and felt thetension of things loosen a little.
Whitening cattle bones gleamed from the darkness, tragic reminders of hardwinters and scant pasturage, and Judith, with the Indian superstition thatwas in the marrow of her bones, read ghostly warnings in the emptyeye-sockets of the grinning skulls that stared up at her. She dared notthink of the dangers that the looming darkness might conceal, or of whatshe might find at her journey's end, or--"Whoa, Dolly! softly, girl. Is itmy foolish, white-blood nerves, or is some one following?"
The mare had been trained to respond to the slightest touch on her mouth,and stopped instantly. Judith swayed slightly in the saddle with theheaving of the sweating horse. The blood beat at her temples, confusingwhat she actually heard with what her imagination pictured. She washalf-way up a towering spur of the Wind River when she slid from thesaddle, and putting her ear to the ground listened, Indian fashion. Abovethe throbbing stillness of the desert night, that came to her murmurously,like the imprisoned roar of the sea from a shell, she could hear theregular beat of horse's hoofs following up the steep mountain grade. Shescrambled up with the desperate nimbleness of a hunted thing, but when sheattempted to vault to the saddle her limbs failed and she sank clinging tothe pommel. Twice she tried and twice the trembling of her limbs held hercaptive. With the loss of each moment the beat of the hoofs on the trailbelow became more distinct. The very desperation of her plight kept herclinging to the pommel, incapable of thought, so that when she finallyflung herself to the saddle she was surprised to find herself there. Tothe left the trail dropped sharply to a precipice, choked by the closecrowding of many scrub pines. To the right the snow-clad spires of theWind River kept their eternal vigil. If she should call aloud for help,these white, still mountains would echo the anguish of her woman's cry andgive no further heed to her plight.
The trail had begun to widen. The horse behind her again stumbled,loosening a stone that rolled with crashes and echoings down to theprecipice below. She took advantage of the widening of the trail to urgeDolly forward. Her impulse was to put spurs to the mare and run, to takechances with loose stones, a narrowing trail, and the possibility ofDolly's stumbling and breaking a leg; but discretion prompted the showingof a brave front, the pleasantries of the road, with flight as the lastresource of desperation.
Suddenly gaining what seemed to be a plateau, she wheeled and waited thecoming of this possible friend or foe. The thudding of hoofs through theinferno of darkness stopped, as the rider below considered the latest moveof the horseman above. They were so near that Judith could hear thelabored breathing of the sweating horse. The blackness of the night hadbecome a tangible thing. The towering mountains were one piece with thegaping precipice, the trail, the scrub pines, the gaun
tlet on her hand.The horse below resumed its stumbling gait. Judith crowded Dolly close tothe rocky wall. If the chance comrade of the wilderness should pass her byin the darkness--God speed him!
"What the devil are you blocking the trail for?" sung out a voice from thedarkness. At sound of it Judith's heart stopped beating. The voice wasPeter Hamilton's.
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