Judith of the Godless Valley. Honoré Morrow
as long as you live in that house, there, you'll obey and take the lickings I give you. My father built that house and I was born in it and so were you. Hemen come from our breed and only a sissy refuses to obey. I may not be as well educated as my ancestors back East were, but I'm just as well trained as any of 'em and you're going to be too. We Spencers boss our own households. Go get me that whip!"
"No, sir, I won't do it," replied Douglas, a steady burning light in his eyes.
"You mean you'll stand up to me and fight after you saw the way I could handle you a few minutes ago?"
"Yes, sir, I do."
For a long moment there was silence, while Mrs. Spencer twisted her hands together and Doug and his father stared at each other. Then John gave a short laugh.
"By Sitting Bull! if you haven't got nerve, Doug! Go saddle Buster and get up to the old ranch after those three-year-olds." Then he climbed into the hay wagon, shouted at the team and was off.
Douglas' lips parted. The color returned to his face. Then he sat down weakly on the lower bar of the buck fence and burst into tears, and he was more frightened by his own tears than he had been by his father's anger. Mary Spencer knelt in the snow before him and tried to pull his head to her shoulder.
"Doug! Doug! You are a man!" she whispered. "You are a man!"
Douglas struggled heavily with the strangling sobs and after a moment sat erect and embarrassed.
"Douglas, what happened? How did you come to do it?"
"Something he said to Jude last night scared me," mumbled Doug.
Mary tightened her hold on the boy's arm. "I've been so afraid! So afraid! And no one to talk to!"
"Haven't you ever warned Jude about it?" demanded Douglas, with a sudden sensing of a debt mothers owed to daughters that Mary might not be discharging.
Mary shrank. "O, I couldn't, Doug!"
Douglas looked at her scornfully. "I don't see why that isn't your job."
Mary rose from her knees. She twisted her work-scarred hands together and looked at the boy with pathetic wistfulness.
"Don't you see, Doug, that I couldn't make her understand? She's still such a child she'd just laugh at me."
"Child!" scoffed Douglas, forgetting his own previous estimate of Judith.
"She knows a whole lot more than you do!"
Mary laughed drearily. "Now you're talking like a child!" Then her voice cleared with unwonted purposefulness. "No one who hasn't been married can possibly understand men, or fear them or despise them, like they ought to be feared and despised. When I think what I was before I married and what I am now, I feel like I wanted to put Judith where she never could see a man. It's not right that a woman should suffer so. It's not right to lose all your dreams like I've lost mine. Marriage was never meant to be so."
Douglas scowled in his astonishment. Mary had been feeling like this all along when he'd been thinking of her as without nerve! Here, then, was somebody else lonely, like himself and Judith.
"I'm sorry, Mother," he said awkwardly. "I'll do what I can to change it."
"You can't do anything, my dear. What I'm suffering is in the nature of things."
"Well, anyhow, you ought to warn Jude," repeated Douglas.
"I can't!" said Mary. "Doug, if I do she'd guess how cowardly I am and how I suffer—in my mind, I mean," and she put her hands over her face with a dry sob.
Douglas put his long young arm about her. "I'll take care of it for you,"
he said huskily. "Judith don't know it but she's got somebody besides old
Peter ridin' herd on her now. And you know I'm some little old herder,
Mother!"
"I know you're a man!" exclaimed Mary. "The kind of a man that's mighty scarce in Lost Chief Valley." She turned away toward the house.
Douglas picked a bridle from the fence and started after Buster.
It was nearly supper time and Doug and his father were reading in the living-room when Judith returned. The wind had risen and fine particles of snow sifted under the eaves and over the table. The wood stove glowed red hot and the smell of cedar mingled with that of frying beef in the kitchen.
Judith, without waiting to take off her mackinaw, cheeks scarlet, eyes brilliant, stood before her father.
"Here I am, Dad."
John looked up from his book. "Have you milked yet?"
"No, sir."
"Go out and do it."
"I want to know if you're going to lick me, Dad?"
"What did I promise you, last night?" he demanded.
"Do you mean to keep that promise?" asked Judith.
"Go out and tend to your milking!" roared John, rising to his feet and throwing the book across the room. "Get out of my sight, you little fool, you blankety-blank—" But Judith had fled and Douglas retired to the kitchen.
Supper was a silent affair. But that evening when the family had gathered under the lamp to read, Douglas said, "Scott Parsons wants me to take the mail stage for him Wednesday."
"Where's he going?" asked John.
"Out after his registered bull. It's strayed again."
"Huh!" grunted John. "Are he and Oscar Jefferson still fighting over that bull?"
"I guess so," replied Douglas. "Can I go, Dad?"
"It will put the dehorning off another day, but I guess you can go. That extra money will come in handy. How would you like to drive the mail regularly next winter, Douglas?"
The boy tossed "Treasure Island" on the table. "Do you mean you'd let me have it?"
"What would you do with the money?"
Douglas hesitated.
Judith spoke. "I know what I'd do. I'd put half the money into books. The other half I'd use to buy me some buckers and I'd go into training as a lady bronco buster."
Everybody laughed, and Mrs. Spencer said, "You won't have time to keep your nose in a book if you start in that line, Judith!"
"I'll always read," retorted Judith loftily.
"I'd buy me a silver-mounted saddle and silver spurs," said Douglas, "and that dapple gray of Oscar Jefferson's and a good greyhound, and I'd go into the wild horse catching business."
John groaned. "We've sure-gawd got an ambitious pair of kids here, Mary!
What about the money you get from this trip, Doug?"
"Will you let me keep it?" asked Douglas, eagerly.
"I'll see!" John picked up his book again.
"Let me go with you, Doug!" pleaded Judith.
"Nothing doing!" exclaimed her stepfather succinctly. "You go to bed now before you get me aggravated."
Judith tossed her head but obediently retired to her corner of the room, undressed and crawled into her bed. Douglas was not long in following her example.
It was about eight o'clock Wednesday morning and twenty below zero when the mail buckboard driven by Douglas took the rising trail from Black Gorge eastward over the Mesa Pass. The snow was heavy and the trail only indifferently opened. To add to the difficulties, Scott had hitched Polly, a half-broken mule, to the stage in place of the mare who had gone lame. James, the remaining horse, was steady, however, and Douglas had only a moderate amount of trouble until the long steep grade up to the Pass began. Here, after a quarter of an hour of reluctant going, the mule balked. James did what he could to pull her along, Douglas plied the blacksnake;