Judith of the Plains

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n 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

lton from the [pg 075] 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 class 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 ha

ence. His instinctive aristocracy of manners and taste would have availed him little with his new associates had he been a whit less manly. But as he shirked no part of the universal hardship, they left him h

kins, 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 Judi

ecome 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 in

r 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 liv

tongue, nor yet her name or race. The Indians found the white baby sleeping by her dead mother after the massacre 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

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 identity as a white man in his play at being an Indian. In the first flare of youth and the joy of havin

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 i

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 vanishing sky-line. The vag

n woman, who spread no silken snares. Sally's blushes stirred a multitude of dead things-the wiles of pale wo

t 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 ma

r 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 [pg 081] 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 asserted itself as a means towards the one great end o

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 circumventing Sall

ime, 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 courtship. The oafish brother drove the bridal party, making crude jests by-the-way, to the frank delight of the prospect

e I have ever stood up for a life se

ather 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 ow

hat 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

om, 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 thei

s he lies gasping on the bank of the stream, he sees the fruit on the branches above his head. It is this same Bladder who is one of the dramatis person? in the moon myth, and that is told to women as safely without the limits of that little learning that is a dangerous thing. Bladder met Rabbit hunting; and Bladder kept throwing his eye up into the tree-tops to look for game. The Rabbit watched him enviously, thinking what a saving of effort it would be if he could do the same thing. Wherefore Bladder promised to instruct him, t

not trust them fully, and they could only speak to man in dreams, or in some passing mood, when they could communicate to him the feeling of one of the Great Spirits, and warn man of what was about to befall him. Judith was not quite four when she took this memorable drive with her mother, bu

devil woman. Over these she wore a shirt of buckskin, broidered with beads of many colors, and a necklace of elk teeth, wound twice about the throat. On her feet she wore new moccasins of tanned elk-hide, and these, too, were beaded in many colors. Her hair, now braided wi

nd a strand of pale-brown hair, crinkly as sea-weed, had blown across the rose of her cheek, when she felt rather than saw a shadow fall across her path, and, glancing up, she saw facing her the woman whom she had supplanted, and the solemn-eyed little girl holding tight to her doll. Now, neither woman knew a word of the other's speech, but Sally was proficient in the language of femininity, and she was not at a loss to grasp the significance

of purple calico, not even hemmed, was a matter for merriment. Sally put her hands on her hips, arms akimbo, and laughed a dry cackle. The light in the brown woman's eyes, as she looked at t

y frightened, as mere man inevitably is when he sniffs a woman's battle in the air. The bride, at sight of her husband, took to hysterics. She wept, she laughed, and down t

"You must go away from here. The pale-faced woman is my wife by

to Judith. She asked Rodney had

] could only repeat: "You got to keep away from her

amination. Warren Rodney was a man of few words. It had become his unpleasant duty to act, and to act quickly. He snatched Jud

at him with the dumb wonder of a forest thing. "I was a good squaw to you," she said; and did not eve

wife to make room for a white is not a heroic figure. It had been done before, but it would not hand down well in the traditions of the settling of this great country. Trespass of law and order, with their swift, red-handed reckoning, [pg 089] were but moves of the great game of colonization. But to shove out a brown woman for a white was a mean move. Few stopped at the Rodneys' ranch, though it marked the first break in the journey from town to the go

usband? Had there ever been a word against her character? What was the use of making all that fuss over a squaw? It was not as if she was a white

entures of the road, were the only home they craved. The spring after Sally's marriage they set forth for California, the year following for New Mexico, and still sighed for new worlds to visit. [pg 090] They were happier now that Sally, the one element of dis

rvant. Her son Jim grew up with their own children. When he was four years of age his mother, Singing Stream, died, and Sally persuaded her husband to take young Jim into their own home, partly as a

of Satan." He was an Ishmael by every instinct of his being. And Mrs. Warren Rodney, née Tumlin, felt that in deal

country. She felt that it knew too much about her. The neighborly inquisition had fallen like a blight on the family fortunes. A vague migratory impulse was on her. She wanted to go somewhere and begin all over again. By dint of persistent nagging she persuaded her husband to move to Wyoming, then in the golden age of the cattle industry. Those were days when steers, to sp

y blotch of the United States map that is marked "Great Alkali Desert" blossom into settlements. When the last word has been said about the pioneers of these United States, let the cow-boy be rem

s happiness. In Wyoming she was destined to find an old friend, Mrs. Atkins, who, as the bride of the young lieutenant, had been present at the marriage of Sally Tumlin and Warren Rodney, and who had always felt a wholly unreasonable sense of guilt at witnessing the ceremony and contributing a lace handkerchief to the bride. Her husband, now Major Atkins, was sta

but Judith by this time knew her family history in all its sordid ramifications, and felt that duty called her to her broth

g