Judith of the Plains, Page 3

  III

  Leander And His Lady

  The only stage passenger besides Miss Carmichael was a fat lady, whoseentire luggage seemed to consist of luncheon--pasteboard boxes ofsandwiches, baskets of fruit, napkins of cake. These she began to disposeof, before the stage had fairly started, with an industry almostautomatic, continuing faithful to her post as long as the supplies lasted.Then she dozed, sleeping the sleep of the just and those who keep theirmouths open. From time to time the stage-driver invoked his team incabalistic words, and each time the horses toiled forward with freshenergy; but progress became a mockery in that ocean of space, theirdriving seemed as futile as the sport of children who crack a whip andplay at stage-coach with a couple of chairs; the mountains still mocked inthe distance.

  A flat, unbroken sweep of country, a tangle of straggling sage-brush, aglimpse of foot-hills in the distance, was the outlook mile after mile.The day grew pitilessly hot. Clouds of alkaline dust swept aimlessly overthe desert or whirled into spirals till lost in space. From horizon tohorizon the sky was one cloudless span of blue that paled as it dippedearthward. Mary Carmichael dozed and wakened, but the prospect was alwaysthe same--the red stage crawling over the wilderness, making no evidentprogress, and always the sun, the sage-brush, and the silence.

  It was all so overwhelmingly different from the peaceful atmosphere ofthings at home. The mellow Virginia country, with its winding, red roads,wealth of woodland, and its grave old houses that were the more haughtilyaloof for the poverty that gnawed at their vitals. This wilderness was sogaunt, so parched; she closed her eyes and thought of a bit of landscapeat home. A young forest of silver beeches growing straight and fine as thethreads on a loom; and through the gray perspective of their satin-smoothtrunks you caught the white gleam of a fairy cascade as it tumbled overthe moss-grown stones to the brook below. It was like a bit from aJapanese garden in its delicate artificiality.

  And harder to leave than these cherished bits of landscape had been theold house Runnymede, that always seemed dozing in the peaceful comatose ofsenility. It was beyond the worry of debt; the succession of mortgagesthat sapped its vitality and wrote anxious lines on the faces of AuntAdelaide and Aunt Martha was nothing to the old house. Had it notsheltered Carmichaels for over a century?--it had faith in the name. ButMary could never remember when the need of money to pay the mortgage hadnot invaded the gentle routine of their home-life, robbing the sangaree ofits delicate flavor in the long, sleepy summer afternoons, invading thevery dining-room, an unwelcome guest at the old mahogany table, promptingAunt Adelaide to cast anxious glances at the worn silver--would it go topay that blood-sucking mortgage next?

  But hardest of all to leave had been Archie, best and most promising ofyoung brothers--Archie, who had come out ahead of his class in thehigh-school, all ready to go to The University--the University of Virginiais always "The University"; but who, it had seemed at a certain darkseason, must give up this long-cherished hope for lack of the wherewithal.Mary, being four years older than her brother and quite twenty, had longfelt a maternal obligation to administer his affairs. If he did not go tothe university, like his father and grandfather before him, it would bebecause she had failed in her duty. At this particular phase of thedomestic problem there had appeared, in a certain churchly periodical, acarefully worded advertisement for a governess, and the subsequentbusiness of references, salary, and information to be imparted andreceived proving eminently satisfactory, Mary had finally received atearful permission from her aunts to depart for some place in Wyoming, thename of which was not even to be found on the map. She was to considerherself quite one of the family, and the compensation was to be fiftydollars a month. Archie would now be able to go to "The University."

  As the day wore on the sage-brush became scarcer and grayer, there werefewer flowering cacti, and the great white patches of alkali grew more andmore frequent. In the distance there was a riot of rainbow tints--violet,pink, and pale orange. It seemed inconceivable that such barrenness couldproduce such wealth of color; nothing could have been more beautiful--noteven the changing colors on a pigeon's neck--than the coppery iridescence,shading to cobalt and blue on some of the buttes.

  Night had fallen before they made the first break in their journey. Thelow, beetle-browed cabin that faced them in the wilderness carried in itsrude completeness a hint of the prestidigitateur's art--a world ofdesolation, and behold a log cabin with smoke issuing from the chimney andcurtains at the windows! The interior was unplastered, but thisshortcoming was surmounted by tacking cheesecloth neatly over the logs, adevice at once simple and strategic, as in the lamplight the effect wasthat of plaster. Miss Carmichael, suddenly released from the actualrumbling of the stage, felt its confused motion the more strongly inimagination, and hardly knew whether she was eating canned tomatoes,served uncooked directly from the tin, fried steak, black coffee, and sodabiscuit, in company with the fat lady, the stage-driver, and the woman whokept the road ranch, or if it was all some Alice in Wonderland delusion.

  The fat lady had brought her own bedding--an apoplectic roll ofbedquilts--and these she insisted on making a bed of, despite the protestsof the ranch-woman, who seemed to detect a covert insinuation against heraccommodations in the precedent. Miss Carmichael profited by thecontroversy. The landlady, touched no doubt by the simple faith of atraveller who trusted to the beds of a road-ranch, or because she wasyoung or a girl, led the way in triumph to her own bedroom, and indicatingan imposing affair with pillow-shams, she defied Miss Carmichael to find amore comfortable bed "in the East."

  In the unaccountable manner of these desert conveyances, that creak andgroan across the arid wastes with an apparently lumbering inconsequence,the stage that brought the travellers to the Dax ranch left at sunrise topursue a seemingly erratic career along the North Platte, while MissCarmichael and the fat lady were to continue their journey with one LemuelChugg, who drove a stage northward towards the Red Desert, when he wassober enough to handle the ribbons.

  Breakfast was largely devoted to speculation regarding the approximatecondition of Mr. Chugg--would he be wholly or partially incapacitated forhis job? Mrs. Dax, flirting a feather-duster in the neighborhood of MissCarmichael in a futile effort to beguile her into giving a reason for hersolitary journey across the desert, took a gloomy view of the situation.

  But Miss Carmichael kept her own counsel. Not so the fat lady. Fallinginto the snare ingenuously set for another, she divulged her name, placeof residence, and the object of her travels, which was to visit a son onSweetwater. Furthermore, she stated the probable cause of every death inher family for the past thirty-five years. Miss Carmichael felt anespecial interest in an Uncle Henry who "died of a Friday along of eatingclams." He stood out with such refreshing vividness against a backgroundof neutralities who succumbed to consumption, bile colic, and other morefamiliar ailments of the patent-medicine litany. But loquacity,apparently, like virtue, is its own reward, for the landlady scarcevouchsafed a comment on this dismal recitative, while Miss Carmichaelremained the object of her persistent attentions.

  But there seemed to be no topic of universal interest but Chugg'scondition, Mrs. Dax finally asserting, "Before I'd trust my precious neckto him, I'd get Mr. Dax to shoot me."

  Meditating on this Spartan statement, Mary and the fat lady became awarefor the first time of a subtle, silent force in the domestic economy. Butso unobtrusive was this influence that one had to scrutinize very closely,indeed, to detect the evanescent personality of Mrs. Dax's husband.Leander was his name, but it is safe to say that he swam no Hellespontsfor the masterful wife of his bosom. Otherwise he was slender, willowy,bald; if he ever stood straight enough to get the habitually apologeticcrooks out of his knees, he would be tall; but so in the habit was he ofrepressing himself in the marital presence that Leander passed for middleheight. He waited on the table at breakfast with the dumb submissivenessof a trained dog that has been taught to give pathetic imitations of humanservility. Bu
t no sooner had his lady left the room than Leander beganquite brazenly to call attention to himself as a man and an individual,coughing, rattling his dishes, and clearing his throat. Mary and the fatlady, out of very pity, responded to these crude signals with overturesequally frank, and Leander ventured finally to inquire if they aimed tospend the night at his brother's ranch, it being the next mess-box betweenhere and nowhere. They admitted that his brother's ranch was their nextstopping-place, and Leander went through perfect contortions of apologyand self-effacement before he could bring himself to ask them to do him afavor. It would have taken a very stern order of womankind to refuseanything so abject, and they blindly committed themselves to the pledge.

  "Tell him I send my compliments," he whispered, and, looking about himfurtively, he repeated the blood-curdling request.

  "Is that all?" sniffed the fat lady, at no pains to conceal herdisappointment.

  "It's enough, if it was known, to raise a war-whoop and stampede this yerefamily." His glance at the door through which his wife had disappeared waspregnant with meaning.

  "Family troubles?" asked the fat lady, as a gourmet might say "Truffles."

  "Looks like it," said Leander, dismally. "Me and Johnnie don't ask fornothin' better than to bask in each other's company; but our wives insistson keepin' up the manoeuvres of a war-dance the whole endoorin' time."

  "So," said the fat lady, as a gourmet might tell of a favorite way ofpreparing truffles, "it's a case of wives?"

  "Yes, marm, an' teeth an' nails an' husbands thrown in, when they get asight of each other's petticoats."

  "I've known sisters-in-law not to agree," helped on the fat lady, by wayof an encouraging parallel.

  "While I deplores usin' such a comparison to the refinin' and softenin'inflooance of wimmen, the meetin' of the Dax ladies by chanst anywhereshas all the elements of danger and excitement that accompanies an Injunuprisin'."

  The travellers looked all manner of encouragement.

  "You see, my wife's a great housekeeper; her talent lies"--and here Leanderwinked knowingly--"in managin' the help."

  "Land's sake!" interrupted the fat lady. "Why don't you kick?"

  Leander sighed softly. "I tried to once. As an experiment it partook ofthe trustfulness of a mule kickin' against the stony walls of BadgerCanon. But to resoom about the difficulties that split the Dax family.Before Johnnie got mislaid in that matrimonial landslide o' his, he herdswith us. Me an' him does the work of this yere shack, and my wife justroominates and gives her accomplishments as manager full play. She neverput her hand in dirty water any more than Mrs. Cleveland sittin' up in theWhite House parlor. Johnnie done the fancy cookin'; he could make a pielike any one's maw, and while you was lost to the world in the delights ofmasticatin' it, he'd have all his greasy dishes washed up and put away--"

  "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 thatwent:

  "'No one to love, None to caress.'

  "Well, the lady that answers his signal of distress don't bear none of thebrands of this yere range. She lives back East, and him and her took uptheir claims in each other's affections through a matrimonial paper knownas _The Heart and Hand_. So they takes their pens in hand and gets througha 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'tsuit him. So off he sends to Denver for all the letter-writin' books hecan buy--_Handbook of Correspondence, The Epistolary Guide, The ReadyLetter-Writer_, and a stack more. There's no denyin' it, Johnnie certainlydid 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 seizedfive minutes to write to her, when he'd worked the whole day like a muleover it. She seemed to like the brand, an' when he sent her the money tocome out here an' get married, she come as straight as if she had beenmailed with a postage-stamp."

  "The brazen thing!" said the fat lady.

  "They stopped here, goin' home to their place. My Lord! warn't she ahigh-flyer! She done her hair like a tied-up horse-tail--my wife called ita 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 toget at each other; an' while I, as a slave to the fair sex"--here he bowedto the fat lady and to Miss Carmichael--"hesitates to use such langwidge intheir presence, the attitood of them two female wimmin shorely reminds meof a couple of unfriendly dawgs just hankerin' to chaw each other.

  "At first, Johnnie waited on her hand an' foot, and she just read novelsand played stylish all the time and danced. She was the hardest dancerthat ever struck this yere trail, and she could give lessons to any oldwar-dancin' chief up to the reservation. No dance she ever heard of wastoo 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, butJohnnie just lost heart and grew slatterly. Why, he'd leave his dishes gofrom one day till the next--"

  "There's more as would leave their dishes from one day till the next ifthey wasn't looked after." And the wife of his bosom stood in the doorlike a vengeful household goddess. Mr. Dax made a grab for the nearestplates.