The Fighting Shepherdess

by Lockhart, Caroline

  While Mrs. Pantin’s bejewelled and rather clawlike fingers flew in and out of the embroidery hoop as she plied her needle, and while Mrs. Toomey adroitly selected the stockings which needed the least darning from her basket of mending, the latter came nearer really liking Priscilla Pantin than she had since she had known her.

  Mrs. Pantin exhibited a completed spray for Mrs. Toomey’s approval and commented upon the swiftness with which time sped in congenial company. A delightful afternoon was especially appreciated in a community where there were so few with whom one could really unbend and talk freely—to all of which Mrs. Toomey agreed thoroughly, understanding, as she did, what Mrs. Pantin meant exactly.

  “Even in a small community one must keep up the social bars and preserve the traditions of one’s up-bringing, mustn’t one?”

  “One is apt to become lax, too democratic—it’s the tendency of this western country,” Mrs. Toomey assented. She felt very exclusive and elegant at the moment.

  Mrs. Pantin’s eyes had been upon her work, now she raised them and looked at Mrs. Toomey squarely.

  “Have you seen—a—Miss Prentice lately?”

  Mrs. Toomey had the physical sensation of her heart flopping over. That was it, then! She had the feeling of having been trapped—hopelessly cornered. In a mental panic she answered:

  “Not lately.”

  “Are you expecting to see much of her?”

  There was something portentous in the sweetness with which Mrs. Pantin asked the question.

  It was a crisis—not only the test of her promised friendship and loyalty to Kate but to her own character and courage. Was she strong enough to meet it?

  It was one of Mrs. Toomey’s misfortunes to be not only self-analytical, but honest. She had no hallucinations whatever regarding her own weaknesses and shortcomings. As she called a spade a spade, so she knew herself to be by instinct and early training a toady. Of the same type, in appearance and characteristics, in this trait, lay the main difference in the two women: while Mrs. Pantin with her better intelligence was intensely selfish, Mrs. Toomey’s dominant trait was a moral cowardice that made her a natural sycophant.

  No quaking soldier ever exerted more will power to go into battle than did Mrs. Toomey to answer:

  “I hope so.”

  Mrs. Pantin’s bright blue eyes sharpened. “Ah-h, they must have money!” she reflected. Aloud she said:

  “Really?”

  “Certainly.”

  This was mutiny. Mrs. Pantin lifted a sparse eyebrow—the one which the application of a burnt match improved wonderfully.

  “Do you think that’s—wise?”

  Mrs. Toomey had a notion that if she attempted to stand her legs would behave like two sticks of wet macaroni, yet she questioned defiantly:

  “Why not?”

  Undoubtedly they had made a raise somewhere!

  “Why—my dear—her reputation!”

  “She doesn’t know any more about that murder than we do,” bluntly.

  “I wasn’t referring to the murder—her morals.”

  “I don’t question them, either.”

  “You are very charitable, Delia. She lived alone with Mormon Joe, didn’t she?”

  A frost seemed suddenly to have touched the perfect friendship between these kindred spirits.

  “I’m merely just,” Mrs. Toomey retorted, though her heart was beating furiously. “All we know is hearsay.”

  With the restraint and sweetness of one who knows her power, Mrs. Pantin replied:

  “I’m sure it’s lovely of you to defend her.”

  “Not at all—I like her personally,” Mrs. Toomey answered stoutly.

  It was time to lay on the lash; Mrs. Pantin saw that clearly.

  “Nevertheless, as a friend I wouldn’t advise you to take her up—to—er—hobnob with her.” Mrs. Pantin did not like the word, but the occasion required vigorous language.

  “I’m the best judge of that, Prissy.” Her hands were icy.

  “When you came to town a stranger I tried to guide you in social matters,” Mrs. Pantin reminded her. “I told you whose call to return and whose not to—you found my judgment good, didn’t you?”

  “You’ve been more than kind,” Mrs. Toomey murmured miserably, and added, “I’m so sorry for her.”

  “We all are that, Delia, but nevertheless I think you will do well to follow my suggestion in this matter.”

  Mrs. Toomey recognized the veiled threat instantly. It conveyed to her social ostracism—not being asked to serve on church committees—omitted when invitations for teas were being issued—cold-shouldered out of the Y.A.K. Society, which met monthly for purposes of mutual improvement—of being blackballed, perhaps, when she would become a Maccabee! She repressed a shudder; her work swam before her downcast eyes and she drew up the darn on the stocking she was repairing until it looked like a wen. The ordeal was worse than she had imagined it.

  And how she hated Priscilla Pantin!

  Always Mrs. Toomey had had a quaint conceit that if she listened attentively she would be able to hear Priscilla’s heart jingling in her body—rattling like a bit of ice in a tin bucket. Now the woman’s mean, chaste little soul laid bare before her filled Delia Toomey with a dumb fury.

  Mrs. Pantin waited patiently for her answer, though the experience was a new one. Usually she had only to reach for the whip when her satellites mutinied; almost never was it necessary to crack it.

  While Mrs. Toomey hesitated Mrs. Pantin folded her work—this, too, was significant.

  Mrs. Toomey replied, finally, in desperation:

  “I’ll think over what you’ve said, Priscilla. I appreciate your intentions, thoroughly, believe me.”

  There was a cowed note in her voice which Mrs. Pantin detected. She smiled faintly.

  “I don’t know when I’ve spent such a delightful afternoon,” and kissed her.

  Mrs. Toomey curbed an impulse to bite her friend as she returned the parting salute.

  “And I’ve so enjoyed having you,” she murmured.

  * * *

  Mrs. Toomey turned pale when she looked through the front window and saw Kate, a few days after Mrs. Pantin’s visit, dismount and tie her horse to the cottonwood sapling, for the threat, which held for her all the import of a Ku-Klux warning, had been hanging over her like the sword of Damocles.

  It had haunted her by day, and at night she could not sleep for thinking of it, and yet she was no nearer reaching a decision than when the struggle between her conscience and her cowardice had started.

  Quite instinctively she glanced again to see if the neighbors were looking. There were interested faces at several windows. Mrs. Toomey had a sudden feeling of irritation, not with the sentinels doing picket duty but with Kate for tying her horse in front so conspicuously. Mrs. Toomey shrank from the staring eyes as though she had found herself walking down the middle of the road in her underclothing.

  The feeling vanished when Kate came up the walk slowly and she saw how white and haggard the girl’s face was.

  Mrs. Toomey opened the door and asked her in nervously.

  Kate looked at her wistfully as though she yearned for some display of affection beyond the conventional greeting, but since Mrs. Toomey did not offer to kiss her she sank into a chair with a suggestion of weariness.

  “I hope you’re not busy—that I’m not bothering?”

  “Oh, no—not at all.”

  “I couldn’t help coming, somehow—I just couldn’t go back without seeing you. I wanted to see a friendly face—to hear a friendly voice.” She clasped her fingers tightly together: “Oh, you don’t know how much you mean to me! I feel so alone—adrift—and I long so for some one to lean on, just for a little, until I get my bearings. It seems as though every atom of courage and confidence had oozed out of me. I don’t believe that ever again in all my life I’ll long for sympathy as I do this minute.” She spoke slowly with breaths between, as though the heaviness of her heart made talking an e
ffort.

  “I presume you miss your—uncle.” There was a constraint in Mrs. Toomey’s voice and manner which Kate was too engrossed and wretched to notice.

  She put her hand to her throat as though to lessen the ache there.

  “I can’t tell you how much. And remorse—it’s like a knife turning, turning—his eyes with the pain and astonishment in them when I struck at him so viciously in my temper; they haunt me. It’s terrible.”

  Mrs. Toomey fidgeted.

  Kate went on as though she found relief in talking. Her voice sounded thick, somehow, and lifeless with suffering.

  “I have such a feeling of heaviness, of oppression”—she laid her hand upon her heart—“I can’t describe it. If I were superstitious I’d say it was a premonition.”

  “Of what, for instance?” Mrs. Toomey looked frightened.

  Kate shook her head.

  “I don’t know. The thought keeps coming that, bad as things have been, there are worse ahead of me—unhappiness—more unhappiness—like a preparation for something.”

  Distinctly impressed, Mrs. Toomey exclaimed inanely:

  “Oh, my! Do you think so?” Was she going to get “mixed up” in something, she wondered.

  “I have a dread of the future—a shrinking such as a blind person might have from a danger he feels but cannot see. Your friendship is the only bright spot in the blackness—it’s a peak, with the sun shining on it!” Kate’s eyes filled with quick tears. They were swimming as she raised them and looked at Mrs. Toomey.

  “I’m glad you feel that way,” Mrs. Toomey murmured.

  Something in the tone arrested Kate’s attention, an unconvincing, insincere note in it. She fixed her eyes upon her face searchingly, then she crossed the room swiftly and dropped upon her knees beside her. Taking one of her thin hands between both of hers she said, pleadingly:

  “You will be my friend, won’t you? You won’t go back on me, will you?” She could scarcely have begged for her life with more earnestness.

  “I am very fond of you,” Mrs. Toomey evaded. She did not look at her.

  Kate regarded her steadily. Laying down the hand she had taken she asked quietly:

  “Will you tell me something truthfully, Mrs. Toomey?”

  Mrs. Toomey’s mind, ratlike, scuttled hither and thither, wondering what was coming.

  “If I can,” uneasily.

  Kate laid her hand upon the older woman’s shoulder and searched her face:

  “Is my friendship an embarrassment to you?”

  Mrs. Toomey squirmed.

  “Tell me! The truth! You owe that to me!” Kate cried fiercely, her grip tightening on the woman’s shoulder.

  As Mrs. Toomey was a coward, so was she a petty liar by instinct. Her first impulse when in an uncomfortable position was to extricate herself by any plausible lie that occurred to her. But Kate’s voice and manner were too compelling, her eyes too penetrating, to admit of falsifying or even evading further. Then, too, she had a wild panicky feeling that she might as well tell the truth and have it over—though it was the last thing in the world she had contemplated doing.

  “It is—rather.”

  “Why?” Her voice sounded guttural.

  Like a hypnotic subject Mrs. Toomey heard herself whimpering:

  “People will talk about it—Mrs. Pantin has warned me—and I’ll—I’ll get left out of everything, and—and when Jap gets into something it will hurt us in our business.”

  Kate got up from her knees; involuntarily Mrs. Toomey did likewise.

  The girl did not speak but folded her arms and looked at her “friend.” Mrs. Toomey had the physical sensation of shrivelling: as though she were standing naked before the withering heat of a blast furnace.

  In the silence that seemed interminable, Kate’s eyes moved from her head to her shabby shoes and back again, slowly, as though she wished to impress her appearance upon her memory, to the minutest detail.

  As by divination, Mrs. Toomey saw herself as Kate saw her. Stripped of the virtues in which the girl had clothed her, she stood forth a scheming, inconsequential little coward in a weak ineffectual rack of a body—not strong enough to be vicious, without the courage to be dangerous. Thin-lipped, neutral-tinted, flat of chest and scrawny, without a womanly charm save the fragility that incited pity; to Kate who had idealized her she now seemed a stranger.

  Kate completed her scrutiny, and searched her mind for the word which best expressed the result of it. Her lip curled unconsciously when she found it. She said with deliberate scathing emphasis:

  “You—Judas Iscariot!”

  Then she walked out, feeling that the very earth had given way beneath her.

  Nothing was definite, nothing tangible or certain; there was not anybody or anything in the world, apparently, that one could count on. She had a feeling of nausea along with a curious calm that was like the calm of desperation. Yet her mind was alert, active, and she understood Mrs. Toomey with an uncanny clearness. She believed her when she had said that she liked her, just as she knew that she had lied when she had said that she was glad to see her. She understood now that Mrs. Toomey had accepted the loan hoping to carry water on both shoulders, and finding herself unable to do so, had eased herself of the burden which required the least courage. The perspicacity of years of experience seemed to come to Kate in a few minutes, so surely did she follow Mrs. Toomey’s motives and reasoning.

  Was this human nature when one understood it? Was this what the world was like if one were out in it? Wasn’t there anybody sincere or kind or disinterested? She asked herself these questions despairingly as she untied her horse and swung slowly into the saddle.

  “Poverty makes most people sordid, selfish, cowardly.” She fancied she heard Mormon Joe saying it, and herself expressing her disbelief in the statement. “There are few persons strong enough to stand the gaff of public opinion.” She had contradicted him, she remembered.

  She recalled—word for word, almost—a philosophical dissertation apropos of Prouty as he sat on the wagon tongue one evening smoking his pipe in the moonlight.

  “People who live without change in a small community grow to attach an exaggerated importance to the opinions of others. They come to live and breathe with a view to what their neighbors think of them. When life resolves itself into a struggle for a bare existence, it makes for cowardice and selfishness. In time the strongest characters deteriorate with inferior associates and only small interests to occupy their minds. Wills weaken, standards lower unconsciously, ideals grow misty or vanish. Youth, enthusiasm, hope, die together. Ambition turns to bitterness or stolid resignation. Suspicion, meanness, cruelty, are the natural offspring of small intelligences and narrow environment—and they flourish in a town like Prouty.”

  “I don’t believe it!” she had cried, shocked by his cynicism. He had shrugged a shoulder and replied solemnly:

  “I hope to God you’ll never know how true it is, Katie. I hope no combination of circumstances will ever place you at their mercy. It is to make any such condition impossible that I am bending all my energies to get on my feet again.”

  In this moment it seemed to Kate that his cynicism had the sweetness of honey compared to her own bitterness.

  Since the murder, curiosity had changed to unfriendliness, and unfriendliness in some instances to actual hostility. Her slightest advance was met by a barrier of coldness that froze her, and she quickly had come to wince under each fresh evidence of enmity as from a blow in the face. Thoughts of Mrs. Toomey’s friendship and the belief that this antagonism was only temporary and would disappear when the local authorities had brought out the truth concerning the murder, had sustained and comforted her. The last time she had questioned Lingle, the deputy had told her with much elation in his manner that “the trail was getting warmer.”

  Now, crushed, heartsick, staggering fairly under the brutal blow that Mrs. Toomey’s weak hand had dealt her, it was an ordeal to ride back to Main Street and run the gaunt
let.

  All that was left to her was the hope that Lingle might soon clear her, and she felt in her despair that she could not return to the ranch until he had given her some reassurance. She checked her horse at the corner and looked each way for him, but he was nowhere visible. Then, while she hesitated she saw him emerge from a doorway where a steep stairway led to the office of the mayor on the second floor of Prouty’s only two-story building.

  Kate received the swift impression that the deputy was agitated, and a closer view confirmed it. His face was pale, and the light that shone in his eyes was unmistakably due to anger. He walked to the edge of the sidewalk and stood there, too engrossed in thought to see Kate until she had ridden close to him.

  “Will you tell me what progress you’re making? It’s so hard, this waiting and not knowing.”

  The deputy’s eyes blazed anew when he recognized the girl, and under stress of feeling he blurted out harshly:

  “I’m called off, Miss Prentice!”

  “Called off!” she gasped. “You mean—”

  “Stopped!” fiercely. “I’ve been blocked at every turn by the authorities and others, and now it’s come straight from ‘Tinhorn’ himself—the mayor.”

  Speechless, Kate’s trembling hand sought the saddle horn and gripped it.

  “But why?” finally.

  Ineffable scorn was in the deputy’s answer:

  “It might hurt the town to have this murder stirred up and the story sent broadcast—make prospective settlers hesitate to invest in such a dangerous community—that’s what was given me, along with my instructions to quit. But another reason is that the man implicated belongs to one of them secret orders.”

  “I can’t believe it!” she cried piteously.

  “I couldn’t either, until I had to. But I’ve got sense enough to know that I’m done, with nobody to back up my hand. After all, I’m only a deputy,” he said savagely. “I’m all broke up, I can tell you!”

  “But aside from the way in which it leaves me it seems such a—such an insult to Uncle Joe—as though nobody cared—as though—” she could not finish.