Part 11 (1/2)
”I 'low they wuz grudgin' him the mouthful they fed to him, that they ack so outdaciously plumb locoed as to tu'n a man out to get hisself hanged.
An' Jim never wuz a hearty eater. He never seemed to relish his food, even when he wuz a growin' kid.”
A pale, twinkling point of light, faintly glimmering in the vast solitudes above the billowing peaks, suddenly burst into a dazzling constellation before the girl and her mother. ”It's a warning!” s.h.i.+vered the old woman.
”Some'um's bound to happen.” She began to rock herself slowly. The thing she dreaded had already come to pa.s.s in her imagination. Jim a free man was Jim a dead man. He was so dead that already his step-mother was going on with a full acceptance of the idea. She reviewed her relations.h.i.+p to him. No, she had nothing to blame herself for. He had been more troublesome than any of her own children and for that reason she had been more liberal with the rod. And yet-the face of the squaw rose before her, wraithlike, accusing! ”Ai-yi!” she said; but this time her favorite expletive was hardly more than a sigh.
”I mind Jim when he first kem to us,” she said, more to herself than to Eudora, who sat at her feet. The impending tragedy in the family had robbed her of all the joy in her suitors. They sat on a bench on the opposite side of the house, divided by the very nature of their interests yet companions in misery.
”He wuz scarce four, an' yet he had never been broke of the habit of sucking his thumb. Ef he'd ben my child, I'd a lammed it out'n him before he'd a seen two, but seem' he was aged for an infant havin' such practices, I tried to shame him out'n it. But, Lord a ma.s.sy, men folks is hard to shame even at four. I hissed at him like a gyander every time I seen him do it. Now I'd a knowed better-I'd a sewed it up in a pepper rag.”
”What's suckin' his thumb as an infant got to do with his gettin' lynched now?” demanded Eudora, with the scepticism of the second generation.
”Wait till you-uns has children of your own,” sniffed her mother, from the a.s.sured position of maternal experience, ”an' see the infant that's allowed to suck its thumb has the makin's in him of a felon or a unfortunit.” She rocked a slow accompaniment to her dismal, prophecy.
Eudora's eyes, big with wonder, were fixed on the crouching flank of a distant mountain. Her mother broke the silence. Not often did they speak thus intimately. Old Sally belonged to that cla.s.s of mothers who feel a pride in their reticent dealings with their daughters, and who consider the management of all affairs of the heart peculiarly the province of youth and inexperience.
But to-night she was prompted by a force beyond her ken to speak to the girl. ”Eudory, in pickin' out one of them men,” she jerked her thumb towards the opposite side of the house, ”git one tha's clar o' the trick o' stampedin' round other wimming. It's bound to kem back to ye, same as counterfeit money.”
Eudora giggled. She was of an age when the fascinations of curiosity as to the unknown male animal prompt lavish conjecture. ”I 'lowed they all stampeded.”
”Yes,” leered the old woman-and she grinned the whole horrid length of her empty gums-”the most of 'em does. But you must shet your eyes to it. The moment they know you swallow it, they's wuthless, like horses that has run away once.”
”Hark!” said Eudora. ”Ain't that wheels?”
”It be,” answered her mother. ”It be that old Ma'am Yellett after her gov'ment.”
IX
Mrs. Yellett And Her ”Gov'ment”
The buckboard drew up to the back or open-faced entrance of the Rodney house with a splendid sweep, terminating in a brilliantly staccato halt, as if to convey to the residents the flattering implication that their house was reached via a gravelled driveway, rather than across lumpish inequalities of prairie overgrown with cactus stumps and clumps of sage-brush. From the buckboard stepped a figure whose agility was compatible with her driving.
No sketchy outline can do justice to Mrs. Yellett or her costume. Like the bee, the ant, and other wonders of the economy of nature, she was not to be disposed of with a glance. And yet there was no attempt at subtlety on her part; on the contrary, no one could have an appearance of greater candor than the lady whose children Mary Carmichael had come West to teach. Her costume was a thing apart, suggesting neither s.e.x, epoch, nor personal vanity, but what it lacked of these more usual sartorial characteristics, it more than made up in a pa.s.sionate individualism; an excessively short skirt, so innocent of ”fit” or ”hang” in its wavering, indeterminate outline as to suggest the possible workmans.h.i.+p of teeth rather than of scissors; and riding-boots coming well to the knee, displaying a well-shaped, ample foot, perched aloft on the usual high heel that cow-punchers affect as the expression of their chiefest vanity. But Mrs. Yellett was not wholly mannish in her tastes, and to offset the boots she wore a bodice of the type that a generation ago used to be known as a ”basque.” It fitted her ample form as a cover fits a pin-cus.h.i.+on, the row of jet b.u.t.tons down the front looking as if a deep breath might cause them to shoot into s.p.a.ce at any moment with the force of Mauser bullets.
Such a garb was not, after all, incongruous with this original lady's weather-beaten face. Her skin was tanned to a fine russet, showing tiny, radiating lines about the eyes when they twinkled with laughter, which was often. No individual feature was especially striking, but the general impression of her countenance was of animation and activity, mingled with geniality and with native shrewdness.
”Howdy, Miz Yellett,” called out old Sally, hitching her rocker forward, in an excitement she could ill conceal. ”You-uns' gov'ment come, an' she ain't much bigger'n a lettle green gourd. Don't seem to have drawed all the growth comin' to her yit.”
”In roundin' up the p'ints of my gov'ment, Mis' Rodney, you don't want to forget that green gourds and green grapes is mighty apt to belong to the sour fambly, when they hangs beyant your reach.”
”Ai-yi!” grimaced old Sally. ”It's tol'able far to send East for green fruit. We can take our own pep'mint.”
The prospective advent of a governess in the Yellett family, moreover, one from that mysterious centre of culture, the East, had not only rent the neighborhood with bitter factions, but had submitted the Yelletts to the reproach of ostentation. In those days there were no schools in that portion of the Wind River country where the Yelletts grazed their flocks and herds. Parents anxious to obtain ”educational advantages”-that was the term, irrespective of the age of the student or the school he attended-sent them, often, with parental blindness as to the equivocal nature of the blessing thus conferred, to visit friends in the neighboring towns while they ”got their education.” Or they went uneducated, or they picked up such crumbs of knowledge as fell from the scant parental board.
But never, up to the present moment, had any one flown into the face of neighborly precedent except st.u.r.dy Sarah Yellett.
Old Sally, in her eagerness to convey that she was in no degree impressed with the pedagogical importation, like many another belligerent lost the first round of the battle through an excess of personal feeling. But though down, Sally was by no means out, and after a brief session with the snuff-brush she returned to the field prepared to maintain that the Yellett children, for all their pampering in the matter of having a governess imported for their benefit, were no better off than her own brood, who had taken the learning the G.o.ds provided.
”Too bad, Miz Yellett, that you-uns had to hire that gov'ment without lookin' over her p'ints. I've ben takin' her in durin' supper, and she'll never be able to thrash 'em past Clem. She mought be able to thrash Clem if she got plumb mad, these yere slim wimmin is tarrible wiry 'n' active at such times, but she'll never be able to thrash beyant her.” And having injected the vitriolic drop in her neighbor's cup of happiness, Old Sally struck a gait on her chair which was the equivalent of a gallop.