Chapter 10 No.10

On Horse-thief Trail

Judith, on her black mare, Dolly, left the Dax ranch after the mid-day meal to go in quest of her brother. He had left his comfortable cabin on the Bear Creek, when he had turned rustler, and moved into the "bad man's country," one of those remote mountain fastnesses that abound in Wyoming and furnish a natural protection to the fugitive from justice. Judith took the left fork of the road even as Peter Hamilton had chosen the right, the day she had watched him gallop towards Kitty Colebrooke with never a glance backward. Judith strove now to put him and the memory of that day from her mind by turning towards the open country without a glance in the direction he had taken. But her thoughts were weary of journeying over that trail that she would not look towards; in imagination she had travelled it with Peter a hundred times, saw each dip and turn of the yellow 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 Judith was more woman than saint, and in her heart there was a blending of joy and pain. For she knew-such [pg 142] skill has love in inference from detail-that the mysterious far-away girl, who was so powerful that she could have whatever she wanted, even to Peter, loved her own ambitions better than she did Peter or Peter's happiness, and that she would not marry him except as a makeshift. For Miss Colebrooke wrote verses; Peter had a white-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 Kitty had brewed for him. There was a heady quality in the very ring of her name. His first glimpse of her, on Class Day, in a white gown and a hat that to his manly indiscrimination looked as guileless as a sheaf of poppies nodding above the pale-yellow hair that had the sheen of corn-silk, had been a vision that stirred in him heroic promptings. He had no difficulty in securing an introduction. She was a connection of the Wetmores, as was he, though through opposite sides of the house. In the few minutes' talk that followed, he had the disconcerting sensation of being "talked down to." There was the indulgent tolerance of the woman of the world to the "nice boy" about this amazing young woman, who might have been eighteen. Hamilton had repudiated the very suggestion of being a "nice boy." But he felt himself blushing, groping for words, saying stupid things, supplying every requisite of the "nice boy" as if he were acting the part. Her chaperon bore her away presently, and he was left with a radiant impression of corn-silk hair and a complexion that justified Bouguereau's mother-of-pearl [pg 143] flesh tints. And when she had tilted the ruffled lace parasol over her shoulder, so that it framed her head like a fleecy halo, he had seen that her eyes were green as jade. Withal he had a sense of having acquitted himself stupidly.

Later, when he ran the gamut of some friends, they had chaffed him on his hardihood. By Jove! He had nerve to look at her! Didn't he know she was "the" Miss Colebrooke? Now Hamilton was absolutely ignorant of Miss Colebrooke's right of way to the definite article, but it was characteristic of him to make no inquiries. On the whole, he found the situation meeting with a greater number of the artistic requirements than such situations usually presented. He was still dallying with this pleasant vagueness of sensation when he picked up a copy of a magazine, and the name Katherine Colebrooke caught his eye and held it like the flight of a comet. Her contribution was a sonnet entitled "The Miracle." As a na?ve emotional confession, "The Miracle" interested him; as a sonnet, he rent it unmercifully.

Peter was to learn, however, that this sonnet was but a solitary flake in a poetic fall of more or less magnitude. He rather conspicuously avoided a reference to her poetry when they met again. To him it was the very least of her gifts. Her hair, that had the tender yellow of ripening corn, was worthy a cycle of sonnets, but pray leave the making of them to some one else! By daylight the jade-colored eyes seemed to shut out the world. The pupils shrank to pin-points. The green looked [pg 144] deep-as many fathoms as the sea. She was all Diana by daylight, a huntress, if you will, of the elusive epithet, but essentially a maiden goddess, who would add no sprightly romance to the chronicles of Olympus. By lamp-light she suggested quite another divinity. The pin-points expanded; they burned black, like coals newly breaking into flame.

When Hamilton knew her better, he did not like to think that he had thought her eighteen at their first meeting. It impugned his judgment as a man of the world. Young ladies of eighteen could not possibly be contributors of several years' standing to the various magazines. Disconcerting scraps of gossip floated to him. He heard of her as bridesmaid at a famous wedding of six years back, when she had deflected the admiration from the bride and remained the central figure of the picture. Her portrait by Sargent had been the sensation of the Salon when he had been a grubby-faced boy with his nose in a Latin grammar. An unusual situation was abhorrent to him. That he should marry an older woman, one, moreover, who had gained her public in a field to which he had not gained admission, was doubly distasteful by reason of his deference to the conventional. If she had flirted with him, his midsummer madness would have 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 Hamilton did not realize the [pg 145] keenness of his disappointment till he was swinging westward over the prairies. She had confided to him that her work claimed her and that she must renounce those sweet responsibilities that made the happiness of other women. It was with the protective mien of one who sought 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 adjusted his disappointment to the new life of the West. To say that he had fallen in love with the situation would be to misrepresent him. But the r?le of lonely cow-puncher loyally wedded to the thought of his first love was not without charm to Peter. How long his constancy would have survived the test of propinquity to a woman of Judith Rodney's compelling personality, other things being equal, it would be difficult to hazard a guess. The coming of Judith from the convent increased the perspective into which Kitty was retreating. With the vivid plainswoman in the foreground, the pale-haired writer of verse dwindled almost to reminiscence. But the reverence for the usual, that made up the underlying motive for so much of Hamilton's conduct, presented barriers alongside of which his previous quandary 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 to marry into a family like that of the Rodneys-the girl herself, for all her beauty and rare womanliness, a quarter Indian, her father the [pg 146] synonyme for obloquy, her brother a cattle thief. Hamilton preferred that other men should make the heroic marriages of a new country. He was prepared to applaud their hardihood of temperament, but in his own case such a thing was inconceivable. Similar arguments have ensnared multitudes in the web of caution and provided a rich feast for the arch-spider, convention, the shrivelled 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 of epithets, haunted by the phantom of a career, resigned to the slings and arrows of remorseful spinsterhood. An obvious regret, or, at least, resignation tempered with remembrance, was the unguent he anticipated at the hands of Kitty. But alas for sanctuaries built to refuge wounded pride! He found Kitty the pivot of an adoring coterie, the magazines flowing with the milk and honey of her verse and she looking younger, if possible, than when he had first known her. Time, experience, even the pangs of literary parturition had not writ a single character on that alabaster brow. The very atrophy of the forces of time which she had accomplished by unknown necromancy seemed to endow her with an elfin youth, making her seem smaller, more childlike, more radiantly elusive than when she had worn the poppy hat at Cambridge.

The tan and hardship of the prairie had adjusted the blunder of their ages. Stark conditions had overdrawn his account perhaps a decade; she retained [pg 147] a surplus it would be rude to estimate. Her greeting of him was radiant, her welcome panoplied in words that verged close to inspiration. A woman would have scented warning instantly, deep feeling and the curled and perfumed phrase being suspicious cronies and sure to rouse those lightly slumbering watch-dogs, the feminine wits. But Peter only turned the other cheek. More than once, in the days that followed, he devoutly thanked his patron saint, caution, that his relations with Judith had been governed 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! The irony of fate that compelled a class poet to punch cows may have tinctured his judgment.

A telegram recalled him to the ranch and prevented a final leave-taking with Miss Colebrooke. He made his adieux by letter, and they were frankly regretful. Miss Colebrooke's reply mingled sorrow in parting from her old friend with joy in having found him. Her letter, a masterpiece of phrase-spinning, presented to Peter the one significant fact that she would not be averse to the renewal of his suit. In reading her letter he made no allowance for the fact that the lady had made a fine art of saying things, and that her joy and regret at their meeting and parting might have been reminiscent of the printed passion that was so prominent a feature of magazinedom. Her letters-the like of them he had never seen outside printed volumes of [pg 148] letters that had achieved the distinction of classics-culminated in the one that Judith had given him that morning, announcing that unexpectedly she had decided to join the Wetmore girls and would be glad to see him at the ranch.

That he had flown at her bidding, Judith knew. What she would least have suspected was that Miss Colebrooke had received her visitor as if his breakneck ride across the desert had been in the nature of an afternoon call. If Judith, knowing what she did of this long-drawn-out romance, could have known likewise of her knight's chagrin, would she have pitied him?

Ignorant of the recent anticlimax, and with a burden of many heavy thoughts, Judith was penetrating a world of unleavened desolation. Beneath the scourge of the noon-day sun the desert lay, stripped of every illusion. Vegetation had almost ceased, nothing but sun-scorched, dust-choked sage-brush could spring from such sterility. The fruit of desolation, it gave back to desolation a quality more melancholy than utter barrenness. Glittering in the sunlight, the beds of alkali gleamed leper white; above them the agitated air was like the hot waves that dance and quiver about iron at white heat. From horizon to horizon the curse of God seemed to have fallen on the land; it was as if, cursing it, He had forgotten it, and left it as the abomination of desolation. Judith scarce heeded, her thoughts straying after first one then another of the group that made up her little world-Peter Hamilton, Kitty Colebrooke, Jim, his family-thoughts [pg 149] inconsequent as the dancing dust-devils that whirled over that infinity of space, and, whirling, disappeared and reappeared at some new corner of the compass.

The trail that she must take to Jim's camp in the mountain was known to but few honest men. Fugitives from justice-the grave, impersonal justice of the law, or the swift justice of the plains-found there an asylum. And while they sometimes suffered, in death by thirst or hunger, a sentence more dreadful than the law of the land or the law of the rope would have given them, the desert, like the sea, seldom gave up her own. It was more than probable that no woman except Alida Rodney had ever taken that trail before, and reasonably certain that no woman had ever taken it alone. Dolly, when she saw the beds of alkali grow more frequent, and that the trails of the range cattle turned back, sniffed the lack of water in the air, slackened her pace, and turned an interrogatory ear towards her mistress.

"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 infinite desolation yawning to the sky-line-"God knows what."

Dolly broke into a light canter; this evidently was not an occasion for dawdling. There was a touch of business about the way the reins were held that made the mare settle down to work. But her flying hoofs made little apparent progress against the space and silence of the desert. Five, ten, fifteen miles and the curving shoulder of the mountain, [pg 150] that she must cross, still mocked in the distance. Only the sun moved in that vast world of seemingly immutable forces.

There was no stoic Sioux in Judith now. The girl that breasted the crests of the foot-hills shrank in terror from the loneliness and the suggestion of foes lurking in ambush. The sun dropped behind the mountain, leaving a blood-red pool in his wake, like fugitive Cain. Already night was sweeping over the earth from mountain shadows that flowed imperceptibly together like blackened pools. To the girl following the trail the silence was more dreadful than a chorus of threatening voices. She listened till the stillness beat at her ears like the stamping of ten thousand hoofs, then pulled 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 night comes-a house, the fire burning clear, the kettle singing, and-" Dolly whinnied an affirmative without waiting for the picture to be completed. The wilderness was being gradually swallowed by the shadows, as deliberately as a snake swallows its victim. They were nearing the mountains. The hot blasts of air from the desert blew more and more intermittently. The breeze swept keen from the hills, towering higher and higher, and Judith breathed deep of the piny fragrance and felt the tension of things loosen a little.

Whitening cattle bones gleamed from the darkness, tragic reminders of hard winters and scant pasturage, [pg 151] and Judith, with the Indian superstition that was in the marrow of her bones, read ghostly warnings in the empty eye-sockets of the grinning skulls that stared up at her. She dared not think of the dangers that the looming darkness might conceal, or of what she might find at her journey's end, or-"Whoa, Dolly! softly, girl. Is it my 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 the heaving of the sweating horse. The blood beat at her temples, confusing what she actually heard with what her imagination pictured. She was half-way up a towering spur of the Wind River when she slid from the saddle, and putting her ear to the ground listened, Indian fashion. Above the throbbing stillness of the desert night, that came to her murmurously, like the imprisoned roar of the sea from a shell, she could hear the regular beat of horse's hoofs following up the steep mountain grade. She scrambled up with the desperate nimbleness of a hunted thing, but when she attempted to vault to the saddle her limbs failed and she sank clinging to the pommel. Twice she tried and twice the trembling of her limbs held her captive. With the loss of each moment the beat of the hoofs on the trail below became more distinct. The very desperation of her plight kept her clinging to the pommel, incapable of thought, so that when she finally flung herself to the saddle she was surprised to find herself [pg 152] there. To the left the trail dropped sharply to a precipice, choked by the close crowding of many scrub pines. To the right the snow-clad spires of the Wind 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 and give 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 the precipice below. She took advantage of the widening of the trail to urge Dolly forward. Her impulse was to put spurs to the mare and run, to take chances with loose stones, a narrowing trail, and the possibility of Dolly's stumbling and breaking a leg; but discretion prompted the showing of a brave front, the pleasantries of the road, with flight as the last resource of desperation.

Suddenly gaining what seemed to be a plateau, she wheeled and waited the coming of this possible friend or foe. The thudding of hoofs through the inferno of darkness stopped, as the rider below considered the latest move of the horseman above. They were so near that Judith could hear the labored breathing of the sweating horse. The blackness of the night had become a tangible thing. The towering mountains were one piece with the gaping precipice, the trail, the scrub pines, the gauntlet on her hand. The horse below resumed its stumbling gait. Judith crowded Dolly close to the rocky wall. If the chance comrade of the wilderness [pg 153] should pass her by in the darkness-God speed him!

"What the devil are you blocking the trail for?" sung out a voice from the darkness. At sound of it Judith's heart stopped beating. The voice was Peter Hamilton's.

[pg 154]

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