Part 7 (1/2)
Judith watched Hamilton with narrowing eyes. And now she was all Indian, the white woman in her dead. Only the Sioux watched, and, in the patient, Indian style, bided its time. ”Cattle thieves,” ”the girl at Wetmore's”-the words sang themselves in her head like an incantation.
”Cattle thieves” meant her brother, their recognized leader-her brother, who was dearer to her than the heart in her breast, the eye in her head, the right hand that held together the shambling, uncertain destiny of her people. Would he turn to the left, Justice, on a pale horse, hunting her brother gallowsward? Would he turn towards the right, the impetuous lover spurring his steed that he might come swiftly to the woman. A pulse in her bosom rose slowly until her breath was suspended, then fell again; she was still watching, without an outward quiver, long after he had turned to the right-and the woman.
VI
A Daughter Of The Desert
Judith knew that the name of the girl whose letter sent Peter Hamilton vaulting to the saddle was Katherine Colebrooke. There had been a deal of letter-writing between her and the young cow-puncher of late, of which perforce, by a singular irony of fate, the postmistress had been the involuntary instrument. The correspondence had followed a recent hasty journey to New York, undertaken somewhat unwillingly by Hamilton in the interest of certain affairs connected with the settlement of an estate.
The precipitancy of this latest turn of events bewildered Judith; but yet a little while-a matter of weeks and days-and her friends.h.i.+p with Hamilton had been of that pleasantly indefinite estate situated somewhere on the borderland of romance, a kingdom where there is no law but the mutual interest of the wayfarers. Judith and Peter had been pitifully new at the game of life when the G.o.ds vouchsafed them the equivocal blessing of propinquity. Judith was but lately come from the convent at Santa Fe, and Hamilton from the university whose honors availed him little in the trailing of cattle over the range or in the sweat and tumult of the branding-pen. It was a strange election of opportunity for a man who had been cla.s.s poet and had rather conspicuously avoided athletics during his entire college course. In pursuing fortune westward Hamilton did not lack for chroniclers who would not have missed a good story for the want of an authentic dramatic interpretation of his plans. His uncle, said they, who had put him through college, was disposed to let him sink or swim by his own efforts; or, again, he had quarrelled with this same omnipotent uncle and walked from his presence with no prospects but those within grasp of his own hand. Again, he had taken the negative of a fair lady more to heart than two-and-twenty is in the habit of taking negatives. Peter made no confidences. He went West to punch cows for the Wetmore outfit; he was a distant connection of the Wetmores through his mother's side of the family.
In those days Peter wore his rue-whether for lady fair or for towering prospects stricken down-with a tinge of wan melancholy not unbecoming to a gentle aquilinity of profile, softened by the grace of adolescence. His instinctive aristocracy of manners and taste would have availed him little with his new a.s.sociates had he been a whit less manly. But as he s.h.i.+rked no part of the universal hards.h.i.+p, they left him his reticence. He even came to enjoy a sort of remote popularity as one who was conversant with the best-a nonchalant social connoisseur-yet who realized the stern primitive beauties of the range life.
Judith's convent upbringing had conferred on her the doubtful advantage of a gentlewoman's tastes and bearing, making of her, therefore, an alien in her father's house. When Mrs. Atkins, who was responsible for her education, realized the equivocal good of these things, and saw moreover that the girl had grown to be a beauty, she offered to adopt her; but Judith, with the pitiful heroism of youth that understands little of what it is renouncing, thought herself strong enough to hold together a family, uncertain of purpose as quicksilver.
In those tragic days of readjustment came Peter Hamilton, as strange to the bald conditions of frontier life as the girl herself. From the beginning there had been between them the barrier of circ.u.mstance.
Hamilton was poor, Judith the mainstay of a household whose thriftlessness had become a proverb. He came of a family that numbered a signer of the Declaration of Independence, a famous chief-justice, and the dean of a great university; Judith was uncertain of her right to the very name she bore. And yet they were young, he a man, she a woman-eternal fountain of interest. A precocious sense of the fitness of things was the compa.s.s that enabled Peter to steer through the deep waters in the years that followed.
But the girl paid the penalty of her great heart; in that troublous sea of friends.h.i.+p, she was soon adrift without rudder, sail, or compa.s.s.
Judith was now eight-and-twenty, and a sculptor would have found a hundred statues in her. Long of limb, deep-bosomed, youth and health radiated from her as sparks fly upward. In sunlight, her black hair had the bluish iridescence of a ripe plum. The eyes were deep and questioning-the eyes of a young seraph whose wings had not yet brushed the far distant heights of paradise. Again, in her pagan gladness of living, she might have been a Valkyr come down from Valhalla on a shooting-star. And yet, in this wilderness that was famis.h.i.+ng for woman's love and tears and laughter, by a very perversity of fate she walked alone.
She was a true daughter of the desert, the child of stark, unlovely circ.u.mstance. No well-bred romance of book and bells and churchly benediction had ushered her into being. Her maternal grandfather had been the famous Sioux chief, Flying Hawk; her grandmother, a white woman, who knew no word of her people's tongue, nor yet her name or race. The Indians found the white baby sleeping by her dead mother after the ma.s.sacre of an emigrant train. They took her with them and she grew up, in the Black Hill country, a white-skinned Sioux, marrying a chief of the people that had slain her people. She accepted her squaw's portion uncomplainingly; slaved cheerfully at squaw's work while her brave made war on the whites, hunted, and smoked. She reared her half-breed children in the legends of their father's people, and died, a withered crone, cursing the pale-faces who had robbed the Sioux of the buffalo and their hunting-ground.
Her daughter, Singing Stream, who knew no word of English, but who could do better bead-work than any squaw in the tribe, went to live with Warren Rodney when he finished his cabin on Elder Creek. That was before the gold fever reached the Black Hills, and Rodney built the cabin that he might fish and hunt and forget the East and why he left it. There were reasons why he wanted to forget his ident.i.ty as a white man in his play at being an Indian. In the first flare of youth and the joy of having come into her woman's kingdom, the half-breed squaw was pretty; she was proud, too, of her white man, the house he had built her, and the girl pappoose with blue eyes. Furthermore, she had been taught to serve man meekly, for he was the lord of creation.
Rodney talked Sioux to her. He had all but forgotten he was a white man.
The girl pappoose ran about the cabin, brown and bare, but for the bead jacket Singing Stream had made for her in the pride of her maternity.
Rodney called the little girl ”Judith.” Her Indian mother never guessed the significance of the strange name that she could not say, but made at least ten soft singing syllables of, in the Indian way. The little Judith greeted her father in strange lispings; Warren Rodney was far from unhappy in playing at primitive man. This recessional into conditions primeval endured for ”seven snows,” as the Indian tongue hath it. Then the squaw began to break, after the manner of the women of her father's people. She had begun her race with time a decade after Warren Rodney, and she had outdistanced him by a decade.
And then the Tumlins came from Tennessee to the Black Hills. They came in an ox-cart, and the days of their journey were more than two years. They had stopped in Ohio, and again in Illinois; and, behold! neither was the promised land, the land that their excited imaginations had painted from the large talk of returning travellers, and that was further glorified through their own thriftless discontent with conditions at home. They had travelled on and on across half a continent in the wake of a vanis.h.i.+ng sky-line. The vague westward impulse was luring them to California, but they waited in Dakota that their starved stock might fatten, and while they rested themselves from the long journey, Warren Rodney made the acquaintance of Sally Tumlin, who rallied him on being a ”squaw man.”
Warren Rodney had almost forgotten the sorceries of the women of his people; he had lived so long with a brown woman, who spread no silken snares. Sally's blushes stirred a mult.i.tude of dead things-the wiles of pale women, all strength in weakness, fragile flowers for tender handling-the squaw had grown as withered as a raisin.
Now, Sally Tumlin had no convictions about life but that the world owed her ”a home of her own.” Her mother had forged the bolt of this particular maxim at an early date. And Sally saw from precocious observation that the business of women was home-getting, to which end they must be neat and sweet and sparing of speech. After the home was forthcoming, then, indeed, might a woman take ease in slippers and wrapper, and it is surely a wife's privilege to speak her mind. Sally knew that she hated travelling westward after the crawling oxen; each day the sun pursued them, caught up with them, outdistanced them, and at night left them stranded in the wilderness, and rose again and mocked them on the morrow. Her father and oafish brother loved the makes.h.i.+fts of the wagon life, with its chance shots at fleeing antelope, scurrying sage-hens, and bounding cotton-tails; a chance parley with a stray Indian but added zest to the game of chance.
But Sally hated it all. The cabin on Elder Creek had a tight roof; Warren Rodney had money in the bank. He had had uncommon luck at trapping. His talk to Sally was largely of his prospects.
Sally knew that the world owed her ”a home of her own”; and why should she let a squaw keep her from it? Sally's mother giggled when consulted. She plainly regarded the squaw as a rival of her daughter. The ethics of the case, as far as Mrs. Tumlin was concerned, was merely a question of white skin against brown, and which should carry the day. Singing Stream knew not one word of the talk, much of which occurred in her very presence, that threatened to pull her home about her ears, but she knew that Sally was taking her man from her. The white-skinned woman wore white ruffles about her neck and calico dresses that were the color of the wild roses that grew among the willows at the creek. Sally Tumlin's pink calico gowns sowed a crop of nettles in the mind of the squaw. It was the rainbow things, she felt, that were robbing her of her man. All her barbaric craving for glowing colors a.s.serted itself as a means towards the one great end of keeping him. Singing Stream began to scheme schemes. One day Rodney was splitting wood at the Tumlin camp-though why he should split wood where there were two women puzzled the squaw. But the ways of the pale-faces were beyond her ken. She only knew that she must make herself beautiful in the eyes of Warren Rodney, like this devil woman, and then perhaps the pappoose that she expected with the first snowfall would be a man-child; and she hoped great things of this happening.
With such primitive reasoning did Singing Stream put the horses to the light wagon, and, taking the little Judith with her, drove to Deadwood, a matter of two hundred miles, to buy the bright calicoes that were to make her like a white woman. It never occurred to the half-breed woman to make known her plans to Warren Rodney. In circ.u.mventing Sally Tumlin the man became the spoils of war, and it is not the Indian way to tell plans on the war-trail. So the squaw left her kingdom in the hands of the enemy, without a word.
Sally Tumlin and Warren Rodney looked upon the disappearance of the squaw in the light of a providential solution of the difficulties attending their romance. They admitted it was square of her to ”hit the trail,” and they decided to lose no time in going to the army post, where a chaplain, an Indian missionary, happened to be staying at the time, and have a real wedding, with a ring and a fee to the parson. The wedding party started for the post, old mother Tumlin fluttering about the bride as complacently as if the ceremony had been the culmination of the most decorous courts.h.i.+p. The oafish brother drove the bridal party, making crude jests by-the-way, to the frank delight of the prospective groom and the giggling protestations of the bride. The chaplain at the post was disposed to ask few questions. Parsons made queer marriages in those tumultuous days, and it was regarded as a patent of worthy motives that the pair should call in the man of the gospel at all. To the question whether or not he had been married before, Rodney answered:
”Well, parson, this is the first time I have ever stood up for a life sentence.” And the ceremony proceeded.
Some of the ladies at the post, hearing that there was to be a wedding, dropped in and added their smiles and flutterings to the rather grim party; among them, Mrs. Atkins, who had just come to the post as a bride.
They even added a trifle or two from their own store of pretty things, as presents to Sally. And Miss Tumlin left the post Mrs. Warren Rodney, with ”a home of her own” to go to.
Singing Stream did not hasten in her quest for bright fabrics with which to stay the hand of fate. To the half-breed woman the journey to town was not without a certain revivifying pleasure. The Indian in her stirred to the call of the open country. The tight roof to the cabin on Elder Creek had not the attractions for her that it had for Sally Tumlin. She had chafed sometimes at a house with four walls. But now the dead and gone braves rose in her as she followed the old trail where they had so often crept to battle against their old enemies, the Crows, before the white man's army had scattered them. And as she drove through the foot-hill country, she told the solemn-eyed little Judith the story of the Sioux, and what a great fighting people they had been before Rodney's people drove them from their land. Judith was holding a doll dressed exactly like herself, in soft buckskin s.h.i.+rt, little trousers, and moccasins, all beautifully beaded. In her turn she told the story to the doll.
Singing Stream told her daughter of the making of the world, as the Sioux believe the story of creation; of the ”Four who Never Die”-Sharper, or Bladder, Rabbit, Turtle, and Monster; likewise of the coming of a mighty flood on which swam the Turtle and a water-fowl in whose bill was the earth atom, from which presently the world began to grow, Turtle supporting the bird on his great back, which was hard like rock. The rest of the myth, that deals with the rising and setting of the sun, Singing Stream could not tell her daughter, as the old Sioux chiefs did not think it wise to let their women folk know too much about matters of theology.