Part 20 (1/2)

Kitty knew that she had treated her long-suffering cavalier with scant consideration the day he had spurred across the desert to see her. True, she had written him on her arrival, but, with feminine perversity of logic, thought it a trifle inconsiderate of him to come so soon after that trying railroad journey. An ardent resumption of his suit-and Peter could be depended on for renewing it early and often-was farthest from her inclination at that particular time. She intended to salve her conscience at the wolf-hunt for her casual reception of his impetuous visit. But apparently Peter did not intend to be prodigal of opportunity.

”How garrulous you people are this morning!” Nannie Wetmore challenged them. Peter came out of his brown study with the look of one who has again returned to earth.

”You don't find it like the drop-curtain of a theatre, now that you've seen it?” he questioned Kitty. For she had doubted her pleasure in the mountains, in the conviction that they would be too dramatic for her simple taste.

Kitty closed her eyes and sighted the peaks as if she were getting the color scheme for an afternoon toilet.

”Ma.s.s, bulk, rather than line-no, it's not like a drop-curtain, but it's distinctly 'hand-painted.' All it needs is a stag surveying the prospect from that great cliff. It's the kind of thing that would sound well in a description. Oh, I a.s.sure you I intend to make lavish use of it, but it leaves nothing to one's poor imagination!”

Peter had a distinct feeling of being annoyed. No, she could not appreciate the mountains any more than they could appreciate her. They were incongruous, antipathetic, antipodal. Kitty, in her pink and white and flaxen prettiness and her trim habit, was in harmony with the bridle-path of a city park; in this great, lonely country she was an alien. He thought of Judith and the night they had climbed Horse-Thief Trail, of her quiet endurance, her keen pleasure in the wild beauty of the night, her quality of companions.h.i.+p, her loyalty, her silent bearing of many burdens. Yet until he had seen them both against the same relentless background, he had never been conscious of comparing the two women.

Nannie Wetmore had fallen behind. She was riding with a bronzed young lieutenant from Fort Washakie. The two ahead rode long without speaking.

Then Peter broke the silence impatiently:

”You did not really mean that, did you?” He was boyishly hurt at her flippant summing up of his beloved blue country. And Kitty, tired with the long, hard ride, and missing that something in Peter that had always been hers, turned on him a pair of blue eyes in which the tears were br.i.m.m.i.n.g suspiciously. They were well out of sight of the others, and had come to the heavy fringes of a pine wood. Was it the psychological moment at last?

Then suddenly their horses, that had been sniffing the air suspiciously, stopped. Kitty's horse, which was in advance of Peter's, rushed towards the thicker growth of pines as if all Bedlam were in pursuit. Peter's horse, swerving from the cause of alarm, bolted back across the trail over which they had just made their way. A large brown bear, feeding with her cub, and hidden by the trees till they were directly in front of her, had caused the alarm.

And presently the hush of the shadowy green world in which Judith lay was broken by a light, sobbing sound. It had been so still that, lying on her bed of pine-needles, she had likened it to great waves of silence, rolling up from the valley, breaking over her and sweeping back again, noiseless, green from the billowing ocean of pine branches, and sunlit. Judith bent over the rocky ledge and saw a girl making her way down the game trail, dishevelled and tearful. Her hat was gone, her pale-yellow hair, that in shadow had the greenish tinge of corn-silk, blew about her shoulders, her trim skirt was torn and dusty, and she looked about, bewildered, hardly realizing that through the unexpected course of things she had been stranded in this great world of sunlit splendor and loneliness. She closed her eyes. The awful vastness and solitude oppressed her with a deepening sense of calamity. Suppose they never found her? How could she find her way in this endless wilderness, afoot? She sank to the turf and began to cry hysterically.

Judith knew in a flash of instant cognition that this was Miss Colebrooke.

Amazement seemed to have dulled her powers of action-amazement that she, who had stolen to this place and crouched close to earth that she might see the triumph of this preferred woman, and, having seen and paid her grievous dole, steal away and take up the thread of endless little things that spun for her the web of life, was forced instead to be an unwilling witness of the other's distress. Judith had risen with her first impulse, which had been to go to Kitty, but half-way through the thicket she hesitated and reconsidered. Undoubtedly Peter would come soon, and Peter's consolation would be more potent than any she could offer. She shrank in shuddering self-consciousness at the thought of her presence at their meeting, the uninvited guest, the outgrown friend and confidante, blundering in at such a time, pitifully full of good intentions. She recoiled from the picture as from a precipice that all unwittingly she had escaped. What madness had induced her to come on this expedition? A sudden panic at the possibility of discovery possessed her; suppose Peter should find her skulking like a beggar, waiting for broken meats? She looked at the image of herself that she carried in her heart. It was that of a proud woman who made no moan at the scourge of the inevitable. Many burdens had she carried in her proud, lonely heart, but of them her lips gave no sign.

In her contemplative stoicism she felt with pride that she was no unworthy daughter of her mother's people, and catching a glimpse through the trees of the abjectly waiting woman who, though safe and sound, could but wait, wretched and dispirited, for some one to come and adjust her to the situation, Judith felt for her a wondering pity at her helplessness. She waited, expectant, for the sound of Peter's horse. Surely he must come at any moment, overcome with apologies, and she-Judith hid her face in her hands at the thought-she would steal away through the thicket at the first sound of hoofs. But as the minutes slipped by and still no sign of Peter, a sickening anxiety began to gnaw at her heart. Had something happened to him?

She did not wait to ask herself the question twice. She crawled the length of the thicket with incredible rapidity, gained the pine forest, and made her way beneath the low-hanging boughs; without stopping to protect herself from them she gained the open s.p.a.ce and ran quickly to Kitty.

”Are you hurt? What has happened?”

Kitty looked up, startled at the voice. She had not heard the sound of the moccasined feet. Her wandering, forlorn thoughts crystallized at sight of the woman before her. A new lightning leaped into her eyes as she recognized Judith. There was between them a thrilling consciousness that gave to their mutual perception a something sharp and fine, that grasped the drama of the moment with the precision and fidelity of a camera. And through all the wonder of the meeting there was in the heart of each an outflowing that met and mingled and understood the potential tragedy element of the situation.

”You are Miss Rodney, I believe?”

Kitty was conscious of something strange in her voice as she looked into the dark eyes, wide with questioning fear. Ah, but she had amazing beauty, and a something that seemed of the very essence of deep-souled womanliness! The two women presented a fine bit of ant.i.thesis, Kitty, flower-like, small, delicately wrought, the finished product of the town, exotic as some rare transplanted orchid growth. And in Judith there was a gemlike quality: it was in the bloom of her skin, the iridescent radiance of her hair, that was bluish, like a plum in sunlight; it was in the warm, red life in her lips, in the pulsing vitality of the slim, brown throat; in every line was sensuous force restrained by spiritual pa.s.sion.

Kitty told of the accident in which her horse had thrown her and disappeared in the pine fringes, leaving her stunned for a moment or two; and how she had finally pulled herself together and followed what appeared to be a trail, in the hope of finding some one. She dwelt long on the details of the accident.

”Yes, but Peter, what has happened him?” Judith chose her words impatiently. She was racked with anxiety at his long delay, and now she hung over Kitty, waiting for her answer, without the semblance of a cloak for her alarm.

There was reproof in Kitty's amendment. ”I don't know which way Mr.

Hamilton's horse went. It started back over the trail, I think.”

Judith clasped her hands. ”Let us go and look for him. Why do we waste time?” But Kitty hung back. She was shaken from her fall, and upset by the events of the morning. Besides, her faith in Peter's ability to cope with all the exigencies of this country was supreme. And chiefest reason of all for her not going was a something within her that winced at the thought of this fellows.h.i.+p that had for its object the quest of Peter.

”Oh, don't you see,” pleaded Judith, ”that if something had not happened to him he would have been here long ago?”

Judith's anxiety awoke in Kitty a new consciousness. What was she to him, that at the possibility of harm, a fear not shared by Kitty, she should throw off a reserve that every line of her face p.r.o.nounced habitual? In her very energy of att.i.tude, an energy that all unconsciously communicated itself to Kitty, there was the power that belongs to all elemental human emotion-the power that compels. Kitty rose to follow Judith, then hesitated.

”I'm sure nothing has happened him. No, I'm really too unstrung by my fall to walk.” She sank again to the bowlder on which she had been sitting.