Chapter 8 No.8

The Rodneys At Home

All that long and never-to-be-forgotten night the stage lurched through the darkness with Mary Carmichael the solitary passenger. The fat lady had warned Johnnie Dax that he was on no account to replenish Chugg's flask, if he had the wherewithal for replenishment on the premises. Moreover, she threatened Dax with the fury of her son should he fail in this particular; and Johnnie, hurt to the quick by the unjust suspicion that he could fail so signally in his duty to a lady, not only refused to replenish the flask, but threatened Chugg with a conditional vengeance in the event of accident befalling the stage. It was with a partially sobered and much-threatened stage-driver, therefore, that Mary continued her journey after the supper at Johnnie Dax's, but the knowledge of it brought scant reassurance, and it is doubtful if the red stage ever harbored any one more wakeful than the pale, tired girl who watched all the changes from dark to dawn at the stage window.

Once or twice she caught a glimpse of distant camp-fires burning and knew that some cattle outfit [pg 105] was camped there for the night; and once they drove so close that she could hear the cow-boys' voices, enriched and mellowed by distance, borne to them on the cool, evening wind. It gave a sense of security to know that these big-hearted, manly lads were within call, and she watched the dwindling spark of their camp-fires and strained her ears to catch the last note of their singing, with something of the feeling of severed comradeship. Range cattle, startled from sleep by the stage, scrambled to their feet and bolted headlong in the blind impulse of panic, their horns and the confused massing of their bodies showing in sharp silhouette against the horizon for a moment, then all would settle into quiet again. There was no moon that night, but the stars were sown broadcast-softly yellow stars, lighting the darkness with a shaded luster, like lamps veiled in pale-yellow gauze. The chill electric glitter of the stars, as we know it from between the roofs of high houses, this world of far-flung distance knows not. There the stars are big and still, like the eyes of a contented woman.

The hoofs of the horses beat the night away as regularly as the ticking of a clock. It grew darker as the night wore on, and sometimes a coyote would yelp from the fringe of willows that bordered a creek in a way that made Mary recall tales of banshees. And once, when the first pale streak of dawn trembled in the east and the mountains looked like jagged rocks heaved against the sky and in danger of toppling, the whole dread picture brought [pg 106] before her one of Vedder's pictures that hung in the shabby old library at home.

They breakfasted somewhere, and Chugg put fresh horses to the stage. She knew this from their difference of color; the horses that they had left the second Dax ranch with had been white, and these that now toiled over the sand and desolation were apparently brown. She could not be certain that they were brown, or that they were toiling over the sand and desolation, or that her name was Mary Carmichael, or indeed of anything. Four days in the train, and what seemed like four centuries in the stage, eliminated any certainty as to anything. She could only sit huddled into a heap and wait for things to become adjusted by time.

Chugg was behaving in a most exemplary manner. He drove rigidly as an automaton, and apparently he looked no longer on the "lightning" when it was bottled. Once or twice he had applied his eye to the pane that separated him from his passenger, and asked questions relative to her comfort, but Mary was too utterly dejected to reply in more than monosyllables. As they crept along, the sun-dried timbers of the stage creaked and groaned in seeming protest at wearing its life away in endless journeyings over this desert waste, then settled down into one of those maddeningly monotonous reiterations to which certain inanimate things are given in seasons of nervous tension. This time it was: "All the world's-a stage-creak-screech-all-the world's a stage-creak-screech!" over and over till Mary found herself fast succumbing to the [pg 107] hypnotic effect of the constant repetition, listening for it, even, with the tyrannous eagerness of overwrought nerves, when the stage-driver broke the spell with, "This here stage gets to naggin' me along about here. She's hungry for her axle-grease-that's what ails her."

"I suppose," Mary roused herself to say, "you have quite a feeling of comradeship for the stage."

"Me and Clara"-the stage had this name painted on the side-"have been travelling together nigh onto four year. And while there's times that I would prefer a greater degree of reciprocity, these yere silent companions has their advantages. Why, compare Clara to them female blizzards-the two Mrs. Daxes-and you see Clara's good p'ints immejit. Yes, miss, the thirst-quenchers are on me if either one of the Dax boys wouldn't be glad to swap, but I'd have to be a heap more locoed than I am now to consent to the transaction."

At sunset the interminable monotony of the wilderness was broken by a house of curious architecture, the like of which the tired young traveller had never seen before, and whose singular candor of design made her doubt the evidence of her own thoroughly exhausted faculties. The house seemed to consist of a series of rooms thrown, or rather blown, together by some force of nature rather than by formal design of builder or carpenter. The original log-cabin of this composite dwelling looked better built, more finished, neater of aspect than those they had previously stopped at in crossing the Desert. Springing from the main building, like [pg 108] claws from a crustacean, were a series of rooms minus either side walls or flooring. Indeed, they might easily have passed for porches of more than usually commodious size had it not been for the beds, bureaus, chairs, stove with attendant pots, kettles, and supper in the course of preparation. Seen from any vantage-point in the surrounding country, the effect was that of an interior on the stage-the background of some homely drama where pioneer life was being realistically depicted. The dramatis persona who occupied the centre of the stage when Mary Carmichael drove up was an elderly woman in a rocking-chair. She was dressed in a faded pink calico gown, limp and bedraggled, whose color brought out the parchment-like hue and texture of her skin in merciless contrast. Perhaps because she still harbored illusions about the perishable quality of her complexion, which gave every evidence of having borne the brunt of merciless desert suns, snows, blizzards, and the ubiquitous alkali dust of all seasons, she wore a pink sun-bonnet, though the hour was one past sundown, and though she sat beneath her own roof-tree, even if lacking the protection of four walls. From the corner of her mouth protruded a snuff-brush, so constantly in this accustomed place that it had come to be regarded by members of her family as part and parcel of her attire-the first thing assumed in the morning, the last thing laid aside at night. Mary Carmichael had little difficulty in recognizing Judith Rodney's step-mother, née Tumlin-she who had been the heroine of the romance lately recorded.

[pg 109] Mrs. Rodney's interest in the girl alighting from the stage was evinced in the palsied motion of the chair as it quivered slightly back and forth in place of the swinging seesaw with which she was wont to wear the hours away. The snuff-brush was brought into more fiercely active commission, but she said nothing till Mary Carmichael was within a few inches of her. Then, shifting the snuff-brush to a position more favorable to enunciation, she said: "Howdy? Ye be Miz Yellett's gov'ment, ain't ye?" There was something threatening in her aspect, as if the office of governess to the Yelletts carried some challenging quality.

"Government?" repeated Mary, vaguely, her head still rumbling with the noise and motion of the stage; "I'm afraid I hardly understand."

"Ain't you-uns goin' to teach the Yellett outfit ther spellin', writin', and about George Washington, an' how the Yankees kem along arter he was in his grave an' fit us and broke up the kentry so we had ter leave our home in Tennessee an' kem to this yere outdacious place, where nobody knows the diffunce between aig-bread an' corn-dodger? I war a Miss Tumlin from Tennessee."

The rocking-chair now began to recover its accustomed momentum. This much-heralded educational expert was far from terrifying. Indeed, to Mrs. Rodney's hawklike gaze, that devoured every visible item of Mary's extremely modest travelling-dress, there was nothing so very wonderful about "the gov'ment from the East." With a deftness compatible only with long practice, Mrs. Rodney [pg 110] now put a foot on the round of an adjoining chair and shoved it towards Mary Carmichael in hospitable pantomime, never once relaxing her continual rocking the meantime. Mary took the chair, and Mrs. Rodney, after freshening up the snuff-brush from a small, tin box in her lap, put spurs to her rocking-chair, so to speak, and started off at a brisk canter.

"I 'low it's mighty queer you-uns don't recognize the job you-uns kem out yere to take, when I call it by name." From the sheltering flap of the pink sun-bonnet she turned a pair of black eyes full of ill-concealed suspicion. "Miz Yellett givin' herself as many airs 'bout hirin' a gov'ment 's if she wuz goin' to Congress. Queer you don't know whether you be one or not!" She withdrew into the sun-bonnet, muttering to herself. She could not be more than fifty, Mary thought, but her habit of muttering and exhibiting her depopulated gums while she was in the act of revivifying the snuff-brush gave her a cronish aspect.

A babel of voices came from the open-faced room on the opposite side of the house corresponding to the one in which Mary and Mrs. Rodney were sitting. Apparently supper was being prepared by some half-dozen young people, each of whom thought he or she was being imposed upon by the others. "Hand me that knife." "Git it yourself." "I'll tell maw how you air wolfing down the potatoes as fast as I can fry 'em." "Go on, tattle-tale." This was the repartee, mingled with the hiss of frying meat, the grinding of coffee, the thumping sound made by [pg 111] bread being hastily mixed in a wooden bowl standing on a wooden table. The babel grew in volume. Dogs added to it by yelping emotionally when the smell of the newly fried meat tempted them too near the platter and some one with a disengaged foot at his disposal would kick them out of doors. Personalities were exchanged more freely by members of the family, and the meat hissed harder as it was newly turned. "Laws-a-massy!" muttered Mrs. Rodney; and then, shoving back the sun-bonnet, she lifted her voice in a shrill, feminine shriek:

"Eudory! Eu-dory! You-do-ry!"

A Hebe-like creature, blond and pink-cheeked, in a blue-checked apron besmeared with grease and flour, came sulkily into her mother's presence. Seeing Mary Carmichael, she grasped the skirt of the greasy apron with the sleight of hand of a prestidigitateur and pleated it into a single handful. Her manner, too, was no slower of transformation. The family sulks were instantly replaced by a company bridle, aided and abetted by a company simper. "I didn't know the stage was in yet, maw. I been talking to Iry."

"This here be Miz Yellett's gov'ment. Maybe she'd like to pearten up some before she eats." She started the rocking-chair at a gallop, to signify to her daughter that she washed her hands of further responsibility. Being proficient in the sign language of Mrs. Rodney's second self, as indeed was every member of the family, Eudora led Mary to a bench placed in one of the rooms enjoying the distinction of a side wall, and indicated a family toilet service, [pg 112] which displayed every indication of having lately seen active service. A roll-towel, more frankly significant of the multitude of the Rodneys than had been the babel of voices, a discouraged fragment of comb, a tin basin, a slippery atom of soap, these Eudora proffered with an unction worthy of better things. "I declare Mist' Chugg have scarce left any soap, an' I don't believe thar's 'nother bit in the house." Eudora's accent was but faintly reminiscent of her mother's strong Smoky Mountain dialect, as a crude feature is sometimes softened in the second generation. It was not unpleasing on her full, rosy mouth. The girl had the seductiveness of her half-sister, Judith, without a hint of Judith's spiritual quality.

Mary told her not to mind about the soap, and went to fetch her hand-bag, which, consistent with the democratic spirit of its surroundings, was resting against a clump of sage-brush, whither it had been lifted by Chugg. Miss Carmichael's individual toilet service, which was neither handsome nor elaborate, impressed Eudora far more potently in ranking Mary as a personage than did her dignity of office as "gov'ment."

"I reckon you-uns must have seen Sist' Judy up to Miz Dax's. I hope she war lookin' right well." There was in the inquiry an unmistakable note of pride. The connection was plainly one to be flaunted. Judith, with her gentle bearing and her simple, convent accomplishments, was plainly the grande dame of the family. Eudora had now divested herself of the greasy, flour-smeared apron, flinging it [pg 113] under the wash-bench with a single all-sufficient movement, while Mary's look was directed towards her dressing-bag. In glancing up to make some remark about Judith, Mary was confronted by a radiant apparition whose lilac calico skirts looked fresh from the iron.

At the side of the house languished a wretched, abortive garden, running over with weeds and sage-brush, and here a man pottered with the purposeless energy of old age, working with an ear cocked in the direction of the house, as he turned a spade of earth again and again in hopeless, pusillanimous industry. But when his strained attention was presently rewarded by a shouted summons to supper, and he stood erect but for the slouching droop of shoulders that was more a matter of temperament than of age, one saw a tall man of massive build, whose keen glance and slightly grizzled hair belied his groping, ineffectual labor. The head, and face were finely modelled. Unless nature had fashioned them in some vagrant, prankish mood, such elegance of line betokened prior generations in which gentlemen and scholars had played some part-the vagabond scion of a good family, perhaps. A multitude of such had grafted on the pioneer stock of the West, under names that carried no significance in the places whence they came.

Weakness and self-indulgence there were, and those writ large and deep, on the face of Warren Rodney; and, in default of an expression of deeper significance, the wavering lines of instability produced a curiously ambiguous effect of a fine head [pg 114] modelled by a 'prentice hand; a lady's copy of the Belvidere, attempted in the ardors of the first lessons, might approximate it.

A smoking kerosene lamp revealed a supper-table of almost institutional proportions. There were four sons and two daughters of the Tumlin union, strapping lads and lasses all of them, with more than a common dower of lusty health and a beauty that was something deeper than the perishable iridescence of youth. There was Fremont, named for the explorer-soldier; there was Orlando, named from his mother's vague, idle musings over paper-backed literature at certain "unchancy" seasons; there was Richards, named from pure policy, for a local great man of whom Warren Rodney had anticipated a helping hand at the time; there was Eudora, whose nominal origin was uncertain, unless it bore affiliation to that of Orlando; there was Sadie, thus termed to avoid the painful distinctions of "old Sally" and "young Sally"; and, lastly, like a postscript, came Dan-with him, fancy, in the matter of names, seemed to have failed. Dan was now six, a plump little caricature of a man in blue overalls, which, as they had descended to him from Richards in the nature of an heirloom, reached high under his armpits and shortened the function of his suspenders to the vanishing point.

Eudora was now sixteen, and the woman-famine in all the land had gifted her with a surprising precocity. Eudora knew her value and meant to make the most of it. Unlike her mother in the old Black Hill days, she expected more than a "home [pg 115] of her own." To-night four suitors sat at table with Eudora, and she might have had forty had she desired it. Any one of the four would have cheerfully murdered the remaining three had opportunity presented itself. Supper was a mockery to them, a Barmecide feast. Each watched his rivals-and Eudora. This was a matter of life and death. There was no time for food. The girl revelled in the situation to the full of her untaught, unthinking, primitive nature. She gave the incident a tighter twist by languishing at them in turns. She smiled, she sighed, she drove them mad by taking crescent bites out of a slice of bread and exhibiting the havoc of her little, white teeth with a delectably dainty gluttony.

Her mother, mumbling her supper with toothless impotency, renewed her youth vicariously, and, while she quarrelled with her daughter from the rising of the sun to the setting of the same, she added the last straw to the burden of the distracted suitors by announcing what a comfort Eudora was to her and how handy she was about the house.

Warren Rodney supported the air of an exile at his own table. Beyond a preliminary greeting to his daughter's guests, he said nothing. His family, in their dealings with him, seemed to accord him the exemptions of extreme age. He ate with the enthusiasm of a man to whom meals have become the main business in life.

"How's your mine up to Bad Water comin' along, Iry?" Orlando inquired, not from any hospitable interest in Ira's claim, but because he had [pg 116] sundry romantic interests in that neighborhood and hoped to make use of the young prospector's interest in his sister by securing an invitation to return with him. Ira regarded the inquiry in the light of a special providence. Here was his chance to impress Eudora with the splendor of his prospects and at the same time smite the claims of his rivals, and behold! a brother of his lady had led the way.

Ira cleared his throat. "They tell me she air like to yield a million any day." At this Eudora gave him the wealth of her eyes, and her mother reached across two of the glowering suitors and dropped a hot flapjack on his plate.

"Who sez that she air likely to yield a million any day?" inquired Ben Swift, openly flouting such prophecy. "Yes, who sez it?" inquired Hawks and Taylor, joining forces for the overthrow of the common enemy.

"'They sez' is easy talkin', shore 'nuff," mumbled Mrs. Rodney, as she helped herself to butter with her own knife.

"A sharp from the Smithsonian Institute at Washington, he said it, and he has taken back speciments with him."

"Ye can't keep lackings from freightin' round speciments-naw, sir, ye can't, not till the fool-killer has finished his job." Ben Swift charged the table with the statement as the prosecution subtly appeals to the high grade of intelligence on the part of the jury. The point told. Eudora, wavering in her donation of hot flapjacks, gave them to Ben Swift.

[pg 117] Hawks now leaned across the table with a sinuous, beguiling motion, and, extending his long neck towards the prospector, with the air of a turkey-gobbler about to peck, he crooned, softly: "Ira, it's a heap risky puttin' your faith in maverick sharps that trail around the country, God-a'mightying it, renaming little, old rocks into precious stones, seein' gold mines in every gopher-hole they come to. They names your backyard and the rocks appertainin' thereunto a heap fashionable, and like as not some sucker gives him good money to float the trash back East."

Mrs. Rodney, whose partisanship in any discussion was analogous to the position of a hen perching on a fence unable to decide on which side to flutter, was visibly impressed by Hawks's presentation of the case. Looking towards her daughter from under the eaves of her sun-bonnet, she "'lowed she had hearn that Bad Water was hard on the skin, an' that it warn't much of a place arter all. Folks over thar war mostly half-livers."

Ira, now losing all semblance of policy at being thus grievously put down by his possible mother-in-law, "reckoned that herdin' sheep over to the Basin was a heap easier on the skin than livin' in a comf'table house over to Bad Water"-this as a fling at Hawks, who herded a small bunch of sheep "over in the Basin."

"Ai-yi," openly scoffed the former Miss Tumlin; "talk's cheap before-" She would have considered it indelicate to supply the word "marriage," but by breaking off her sentence before she came [pg 118] to the pith of it she continued to maintain the proprieties, and at the same time conveyed to her audience that she was too old and experienced to permit any fledgling from her nest to be caught, for want of a warning, by such obvious ante-matrimonial chaff as fair promises.

"Laws a massy!" she continued, reminiscently, working her toothless jaw to free it from an escaped splinter from the snuff-brush. "When me an' paw war keepin' comp'ny, satin warn't good enough for me. He lowed I wuz to have half creation. Sence we wuz married he 'ain't never found time, endurin' all these years, to build me a bird-house."

The unbuilt bird-house was the Banquo's ghost at the Rodney board, Mrs. Rodney hearkening back to it in and out of season. If the family made merry over a chance windfall of game or fresh vegetables, a prospect of possible employment for one of the boys, a donation of money from Judith, Mrs. Rodney remembered the unbuilt bird-house and indulged herself to the full of melancholy. It is not improbable that, if she had been asked to name the chiefest disappointment of her wretched married life, she would have mentioned the bird-house that was never built.

At mention of it Warren Rodney murmured broken, deprecatory excuses. His dull eyes nervously travelled about the table for some one to make excuses for him. The family broke into hearty peals of laughter; the tragedy of the first generation had grown to be the unfailing source of merriment for the second.

[pg 119] "Maw," began Orlando, "the reason you don't get no bird-house built out hyear is that they ain't no birds. We have offered time and time again to build you a house fo' buzzuds, they bein' the only birds hyearabouts, but you 'low that you ain't fav'ble to tamin' 'em."

"I wuz raised in Tennessee, an' we-uns had a house for martins made out'n gourds, an' it was pearty." The pride with which she repeated this particular claim to honor in an alien land never diminished with repetition. As she advanced further through the dim perspective of years, the little mountain town in Tennessee became more and more the centre of cultivation and civic importance. The desolate cabin that she had left for the interminable journey westward was recalled flatteringly through the hallowing mists of time. The children, by reason of these chronicles, had grown to regard their mother as a sort of princess in exile.

"Mrs. Rodney"-Swift leaned towards her and whispered something in her ear. She regarded him tentatively, then grinned. At her time of life, why should she put faith in the promises of men? "You fix it up, an' you get your bird-house," was the conclusion of his sentence.

While this discussion had been in progress the viands had not been neglected except by such members of the company as had been bereft of appetite by loftier emotions-in consequence of which the table appeared to have sustained a visitation of seventeen-year locusts. Eudora, ever economic in the value she placed not only upon herself but her [pg 120] environment, proposed to her guests that they should wash the dishes, an art in which they were by no means deficient, being no exception to the majority of range bachelors in their skill in homely pursuits. And thus it came to pass that Eudora's suitors, swathed in aprons, meekly washed dishes shoulder to shoulder, while their souls craved the performance of valorous deeds.

As this was the last stage station on the way to Lost Trail, Mary Carmichael was perforce obliged to content herself till Mrs. Yellett should call or send for her. After supper, Chugg, with fresh horses to the stage, left Rodney's, apparently for some port in that seemingly pathless sea of foot-hills. That there should be trails and defined routes over this vast, unvaried stretch of space seemed more wonderful to Mary than the charted high-roads of the Atlantic. The foot-hills seemed to have grown during the long journey till they were foot-hills no longer; they had come to be the smaller peaks of the towering range that had formed the spine of the desert. The air, that seemed to have lost some of its crystalline quality on the flat stretches of the plains, was again sparkling and heady in the clean hill country. It stirred the pulses like some rare vintage, some subtle distillation of sun-warmed fruit that had been mellowing for centuries.

Very lonely seemed the Rodney home among the great company of mountains. A brooding desolation had settled on it at close of day, and all the laughter and light footsteps and gayly ringing voices of the young folk could not dispel the feeling [pg 121] of being adrift in a tiny shell on the black waters of some unknown sea; or thus it seemed to the stranger within their gate.

Mrs. Rodney retired within the flap of her sun-bonnet after the evening meal, settling herself in the rocking-chair as if it were some sort of conveyance. Her family, who might have told the hour of day or her passing mood by the action of the chair, knew by her pacific gait that she would lament the unbuilt bird-house no more that night. The snuff-brush, newly replenished from the tin box, kept perfect time to the motion of the chair. With the lady of the house it was one of the brief seasons of passing content vouchsafed by an ample meal and a good digestion.

Warren Rodney took down a gun from the wall and began to clean it. His hands had the fumbling, indefinite movements, the obscure action, directed by a brain already begun to crumble. His industry with the gun was of a part with the impotent dawdling in the garden. His eyes would seek for the rag or the bottle of oil in a dull, glazed way, and, having found them, he would forget the reason of his quest. Not once that evening had they rested on his wife or any member of his family. He had shown no interest in any of the small happenings of home, the frank rivalry of Eudora's suitors, the bickerings of the girls and boys over the division of household labor. The one thing that had momentarily aroused his somnolent intelligence was a revival of his wife's plaint anent the unbuilt bird-house. That, and a certain furtive anxiety during [pg 122] supper lest his daughter Eudora should forget to keep his plate piled high, were the only signs of a participation in the life about him.

From one of the rooms that opened to the world like a stage to the audience, Mrs. Rodney kept her evening vigil. The last faint amethystine haze on the mountains was deepening. They towered about the valley where the house lay, with a challenging immensity, mocking the pitiful grasp of these pygmies on the thousand hills. The snow on the taller of the peaks still held the high lights. But all the valleys and the spaces between the mountains were wrapped in sombre shadows; the crazy house invading the great company of mountains, penetrating brazenly to the very threshold of their silent councils, seemed but a pitiful ant-hill at the mercy of some possible giant tread. The ill-adjusted family, disputing every inch of ground with the wilderness, became invested with a dignity quite out of keeping with its achievements. Their very weaknesses and vanities, old Sally still clinging to her sun-bonnet and her limp rose-colored skirts, an eternal requiem for the dead and gone complexion, lost the picturesqueness of the pioneer and ranked as universal qualities, admissible in the austerest setting. Perhaps in some far distant council of the Daughters of the Pioneers a prospective member of the house of Rodney would unctuously announce: "My great-great-grandmother was a Miss Tumlin of Tennessee; great-great-grandfather's first wife had been a Sioux squaw. Isn't it interesting and romantic?"

[pg 123] Eudora now came to her mother with great news. Hawks had taken the first opportunity of being alone with her to tell her of Jim's release from jail and of his abortive encounter with Simpson in the eating-house. He had not deferred the telling from any feeling of reticence regarding the disclosure of family affairs before strangers. News travels in the desert by some unknown agency. Twenty-four hours after a thing happened it would be safe to assume that every cow and sheep outfit in a radius of three hundred miles would be discussing it over their camp-fires; and this long before there was an inch of telegraph wire or a railroad tire in the country. Hawks had merely reserved the news for Eudora's private ear because he hoped thus to gain an advantage over his three rivals.

"Ai-yi!" said old Sally, sharply, and the chair came to an abrupt stand-still. "In the name o' Heaven, how kem they to let him out?" Mrs. Rodney's knowledge of the law was of the vaguest; and if incarceration would keep a prisoner out of more grievous trouble, she could not understand giving him his freedom. To her the case was analogous to releasing a child from the duress of a corner and turning him loose to play with matches. "How kem they to let him out?" she repeated, the still rocking-chair conveying the impersonal dignity of the pulpit or the justice-seat. "I 'ain't hearn tell of so pearty a couple as the jail an' Jim in years."

The meaning that she put into her words belied their harsh face-value. With Jim in jail, her mind [pg 124] was comparatively at rest about him. She knew he had been branding other men's cattle since the destruction of his sheep, and she knew the fate of cattle-thieves, and that Jim would be no exception to the rule. With her purely instinctive maternity, she had been fond of Jim. He had been one more boy to mother. She harbored no ill-feeling towards him that he was not her own. Moreover, she wanted no gallows-tree intermingled with the annals of her family. It suited her convenience at this particular time that Jim should stay in jail. That he had been given his freedom loosed the phials of her condemnation on the incompetents that released him.

"I 'low they wuz grudgin' him the mouthful they fed to him, that they ack so outdaciously plumb locoed as to tu'n a man out to get hisself hanged. An' Jim never wuz a hearty eater. He never seemed to relish his food, even when he wuz a growin' kid."

A pale, twinkling point of light, faintly glimmering in the vast solitudes above the billowing peaks, suddenly burst into a dazzling constellation before the girl and her mother. "It's a warning!" shivered the old woman. "Some'um's bound to happen." She began to rock herself slowly. The thing she dreaded had already come to pass in her imagination. Jim a free man was Jim a dead man. He was so dead that already his step-mother was going on with a full acceptance of the idea. She reviewed her relationship to him. No, she had nothing to blame herself for. He had been more troublesome than any of her own children and for that reason she had [pg 125] been more liberal with the rod. And yet-the face of the squaw rose before her, wraithlike, accusing! "Ai-yi!" she said; but this time her favorite expletive was hardly more than a sigh.

"I mind Jim when he first kem to us," she said, more to herself than to Eudora, who sat at her feet. The impending tragedy in the family had robbed her of all the joy in her suitors. They sat on a bench on the opposite side of the house, divided by the very nature of their interests yet companions in misery.

"He wuz scarce four, an' yet he had never been broke of the habit of sucking his thumb. Ef he'd ben my child, I'd a lammed it out'n him before he'd a seen two, but seem' he was aged for an infant havin' such practices, I tried to shame him out'n it. But, Lord a massy, men folks is hard to shame even at four. I hissed at him like a gyander every time I seen him do it. Now I'd a knowed better-I'd a sewed it up in a pepper rag."

"What's suckin' his thumb as an infant got to do with his gettin' lynched now?" demanded Eudora, with the scepticism of the second generation.

"Wait till you-uns has children of your own," sniffed her mother, from the assured position of maternal experience, "an' see the infant that's allowed to suck its thumb has the makin's in him of a felon or a unfortunit." She rocked a slow accompaniment to her dismal, prophecy.

Eudora's eyes, big with wonder, were fixed on the crouching flank of a distant mountain. Her mother broke the silence. Not often did they speak thus [pg 126] intimately. Old Sally belonged to that class of mothers who feel a pride in their reticent dealings with their daughters, and who consider the management of all affairs of the heart peculiarly the province of youth and inexperience.

But to-night she was prompted by a force beyond her ken to speak to the girl. "Eudory, in pickin' out one of them men," she jerked her thumb towards the opposite side of the house, "git one tha's clar o' the trick o' stampedin' round other wimming. It's bound to kem back to ye, same as counterfeit money."

Eudora giggled. She was of an age when the fascinations of curiosity as to the unknown male animal prompt lavish conjecture. "I 'lowed they all stampeded."

"Yes," leered the old woman-and she grinned the whole horrid length of her empty gums-"the most of 'em does. But you must shet your eyes to it. The moment they know you swallow it, they's wuthless, like horses that has run away once."

"Hark!" said Eudora. "Ain't that wheels?"

"It be," answered her mother. "It be that old Ma'am Yellett after her gov'ment."

[pg 127]

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