“A good many does, when you ain’t watchin’; horses in these parts ain’t broke for no such lopsided foolishness as side-saddles. But you see she does it becomin’, and that’s where the grudge comes in. You can’t stir about these foot-hills without coming across a woman, like as not, holdin’ on to a posse of kids, and ridin’ clothes-pin fashion in a looped-up skirt; when she sees you comin’ she’ll p’r’aps upset a kid or two assoomin’ a decorous attitood. That’s feeminine, and as such is approved by the ladies, but”—and here Leander put his head on one side and gave a grotesque impression of outraged decorum—“pants is considered unwomanly.”
“Leander! Leander!” came in accusing accents from the kitchen.
“Run!” gasped Mrs. Dax’s handmaiden; “don’t let her catch us chinnin’.”
Mary Carmichael ran round one side of the house as she was bidden, but, like Lot’s wife, could not resist the temptation of looking back. Leander, with incredible rapidity, grabbed two clothes-pins off the line, clutched a dish-towel, shook it. “Comin’! comin’!” he called, as he went through the farce of rehanging it.
The lonesomeness of plain and foot-hill, the utter lack of the human element that gives to this country its character of penetrating desolation, had been changed while Mary Carmichael forgathered with Leander by the clothes-line. From the four quarters of the compass, men in sombreros, flannel shirts, and all manner of strange habiliments came galloping over the roads as if their horses were as keen on reaching Dax’s as their riders. They came towards the house at full tilt, their horses stretching flat with ears laid back viciously, and Mary, who was unused to the tricks of cow-ponies, expected to see them ride through the front door, merely by way of demonstrating their sense of humor. Not so; the little pintos, buckskins, bays, and chestnuts dashed to the door and stopped short in a full gallop; as a bit of staccato equestrianism it was superb.
And then the wherefore of all this dashing horsemanship, this curveting, prancing, galloping revival of knightly tourney effects was apparent—Judith Rodney had opened post-office. She had changed her riding clothes; or, rather, that portion of them to which the ladies took exception was now concealed by a long, black skirt. Her wonderful braids of black hair had been twisted high on her head. She was well worth a trip across the alkali wastes to see. The room was packed with men. One unconsciously got the impression that a fire, a fight, or some crowd-collecting casualty had happened. Above the continual clinking of spurs there arose every idiom and peculiarity of speech of which these United States are capable. There is no Western dialect, properly speaking. Men bring their modes of expression with them from Maine or Minnesota, as the case may be, but their figures of speech, which give an essential picturesqueness to their language, are almost entirely local—the cattle and sheep industries, prospecting, the Indians, poker, faro, the dance-halls, all contribute their printable or unprintable embellishment.
Judith managed them all—cow-punchers, sheep-herders, prospectors, freighters—with an impersonal skill that suggested a little solitary exercise in the bowling-alley. The ten-pins took their tumbles in good part—no one could congratulate himself on escaping the levelling ball—and where there’s a universal lack of luck, doubtless also there will be found a sort of grim fellowship.
That they were all more or less in love with her there could be no doubt. As a matter of fact, Judith Rodney did not depend on the scarcity of women in the desert for her pre-eminence in the interests of this hot-headed group. Her personality—and through no conscious effort of hers—would have been pre-eminent anywhere. As it was, in this woman-forsaken wilderness she might have stirred up a modern edition of the Trojan war at any moment. That she did not, despite the lurking suggestion of temptation written all over her, brought back the words of Leander: “If Judy wasn’t a good girl, these boys would just nacherally become extinct shooting each other upon account of her.”
And yet what a woman she was! It struck Miss Carmichael, as she watched Judith hold these warring elements in the hollow of her hand, that her interest might be due to a certain temperamental fusion; that there might lie, at the essence of her being, a subtle combination of saint and devil. One could fancy her leading an army on a crusade or provoking a bar-room brawl. The challenging quality of her beauty, the vividness of color, the suggestion of endurance and radiating health in every line, were comparable to the great primeval forces about her. She was cast to be the mother of men of brawn and muscle, who would make this vast, unclaimed wilderness subject to them.
At present neither pole of her character, as it had been hastily estimated, was even remotely suggested. The atmosphere in the post-office was, considering the potential violence of its visitors, singularly calm. And Judith, feeding these wild border lads on scraps of chaff and banter, and retaining their absolute loyalty, was a sight worth seeing. She had the alertness of a lion-tamer locked in a cage with the lords of the jungle; the rashly confident she humbled, the meek she exalted, and all with such genuine good-fellowship, such an absence of coquetry in the genial game of give and take, that one ceased to wonder at even the devotion of Leander. And since they were to her, on her own confession, but “spurs and sombreros,” one wondered at the elaboration of the comedy, the endless wire-pulling in the manipulation of these most picturesque marionettes—until one remembered the outlaw brother and felt that what she did she did for him.