Judith of the Plains. Marie Manning
never put her hand in dirty water any more than Mrs. Cleveland sittin' up in the White House parlor. Johnnie done the fancy cookin'; he could make a pie like any one's maw, and while you was lost to the world in the delights of masticatin' it, he'd have all his greasy dishes washed up and put away—"
[pg 041]
"No wonder she hated to lose a man like that," interrupted the fat lady, feelingly.
"But he took to pinin' and proclaimin' that he shore was a lone maverick, and he just stampeded round lookin' for trouble and bleatin' a song that went:
"'No one to love,
None to caress.'
"Well, the lady that answers his signal of distress don't bear none of the brands of this yere range. She lives back East, and him and her took up their claims in each other's affections through a matrimonial paper known as The Heart and Hand. So they takes their pens in hand and gets through a hard spell of courtin' on paper. Love plumb locoes Johnnie. His spellin' don't suit him, his handwritin' don't suit him, his natchral letters don't suit him. So off he sends to Denver for all the letter-writin' books he can buy—Handbook of Correspondence, The Epistolary Guide, The Ready Letter-Writer, and a stack more. There's no denyin' it, Johnnie certainly did sweat hisself over them letters."
"Land's sakes!" said the fat lady.
"Yes, marm; he used to read 'em to me, beginnin' how he had just seized five minutes to write to her, when he'd worked the whole day like a mule over it. She seemed to like the brand, an' when he sent her the money to come out here an' get married, she come as straight as if she had been mailed with a postage-stamp."
[pg 042]
"The brazen thing!" said the fat lady.
"They stopped here, goin' home to their place. My Lord! warn't she a high-flyer! She done her hair like a tied-up horse-tail—my wife called it a Sikey knot—and it stood out a foot from her head. Some of the boys, kinder playful, wanted to throw a hat at it and see if it wouldn't hang, but they refrained, out of respect to the feelin's of the groom.
"From the start," continued Leander, "the two Mrs. Daxes just hankered to get at each other; an' while I, as a slave to the fair sex"—here he bowed to the fat lady and to Miss Carmichael—"hesitates to use such langwidge in their presence, the attitood of them two female wimmin shorely reminds me of a couple of unfriendly dawgs just hankerin' to chaw each other.
"At first, Johnnie waited on her hand an' foot, and she just read novels and played stylish all the time and danced. She was the hardest dancer that ever struck this yere trail, and she could give lessons to any old war-dancin' chief up to the reservation. No dance she ever heard of was too far for her to go to. She just went and danced till broad daylight. Many a man would have took to dissipation, in his circumstances, but Johnnie just lost heart and grew slatterly. Why, he'd leave his dishes go from one day till the next—"
"There's more as would leave their dishes from one day till the next if they wasn't looked after." And the wife of his bosom stood in the door like a vengeful household goddess. Mr. Dax made a grab for the nearest plates.
[pg 043]
IV
Judith, The Postmistress
The arrival of Chugg's stage with the mail should have been coincident with the departure of the stage that brought the travellers from "Town," but Chugg was late—a tardiness ascribed to indulgence in local lethe waters, for Lemuel Chugg had survived a romance and drank to forget that woman is a variable and a changeable thing. In consequence of which the sober stage-driver departed without the mails, leaving Mary Carmichael and the fat lady to scan the horizon for the delinquent Chugg, and incidentally to hear a chapter of prairie romance.
Some sort of revolution seemed to be in progress in the room in which the travellers had breakfasted. Mrs. Dax had assumed the office of dictator, with absolute sway. Leander, as aide-de-camp, courier, and staff, executed marvellous feats of domestic engineering. The late breakfast-table, swept and garnished with pigeon-holes, became a United States post-office, prepared to transact postal business, and for the time being to become the social centre of the surrounding country.
Down the yellow road that climbed and dipped [pg 044] and climbed and dipped again over foot-hills and sprawling space till it was lost in a world without end, Mary Carmichael, standing in the doorway, watched an atom, so small that it might have been a leaf blowing along in the wind, turn into a horseman.
There was inspiration for a hundred pictures in the way that horse was ridden. No flashes of daylight between saddle and rider in the jolting, Eastern fashion, but the long, easy sweep that covers ground imperceptibly and is a delight to the eye. It needed but the solitary figure to signify the infinitude of space in the background. In all that great, wide world the only hint of life was the galloping horseman, the only sound the rhythmical ring of the nearing hoofs. The rider, now close enough for Miss Carmichael to distinguish the features, was a thorough dandy of the saddle. No slouching garb of exigence and comfort this, but a pretty display of doeskin gaiter, varnished boot, and smart riding-breeches. The lad—he could not have been, Miss Carmichael thought, more than twenty—was tanned a splendid color not unlike the bloomy shading on a nasturtium. And when the doughty horseman made out the girl standing in the doorway, he smiled with a lack of formality not suggested by the town-cut of his trappings. Throwing the reins over the neck of the horse with the real Western fling, he slid from the saddle in a trice, and—Mary Carmichael experienced something of the gasping horror of a shocked old lady as she made out two splendid braids of thick, black hair. Her doughty cavalier was no cavalier at all, but a surprisingly handsome young woman.
[pg 045]
Miss Carmichael gasped a little even as she extended her hand, for the masquerader had pulled off her gauntlet and held out hers as if she was conferring the freedom of the wilderness. It was impossible for a homesick girl not to respond to such heartiness, though it was with difficulty at first that Mary kept her eyes on the girl's face. Curiosity, agreeably piqued, urged her to take another glimpse of the riding clothes that this young woman wore with such supreme unconcern.
Now, "in the East" Mary Carmichael had not been in the habit of meeting black-haired goddesses who rode astride and whose assurance of the pleasure of meeting her made her as self-conscious as on her first day at dancing-school; and though she tried to prove her cosmopolitanism by not betraying this, the attempt was rather a failure.
"Are you surprised that I did not wait for an introduction?" the girl in the riding clothes asked, noticing Mary's evident uneasiness; "but you don't know how good it is to see a girl. I'm so tired of spurs and sombreros and cattle and dust and distance, and there's nothing else here."
"Where I come from it's just the other way—too many petticoats and hat-pins."
The horseman who was no horseman dropped Miss Carmichael's hand and went into the house. Mary wondered if she ought to have been more cordial.
From the back door came Leander, with dishcloths, which he began to hang on the line in a dumb, driven sort of way.
[pg 046]
"Who is she?" asked Mary.
"Her?" he interrogated, jerking his head in the direction of the house. "The postmistress, Judith Rodney; yes, that's her name." He dropped his voice in the manner of one imparting momentous things. "She never wears a skirt ridin', any more than a man."
Mary felt that she was tempting Leander into the paths of gossip, undoubtedly his besetting sin, but she could not resist the temptation to linger. He had disposed of his last dish-cloth, and he withdrew the remaining clothes-pin from his mouth in a way that was pathetically feminine.