VIII.
The Rodneys At Home
All that long and never-to-be-forgotten night the stage lurched through the darkness with Mary Carmichael the solitary passenger. The fat lady had warned Johnnie Dax that he was on no account to replenish Chugg’s flask, if he had the wherewithal for replenishment on the premises. Moreover, she threatened Dax with the fury of her son should he fail in this particular; and Johnnie, hurt to the quick by the unjust suspicion that he could fail so signally in his duty to a lady, not only refused to replenish the flask, but threatened Chugg with a conditional vengeance in the event of accident befalling the stage. It was with a partially sobered and much-threatened stage-driver, therefore, that Mary continued her journey after the supper at Johnnie Dax’s, but the knowledge of it brought scant reassurance, and it is doubtful if the red stage ever harbored any one more wakeful than the pale, tired girl who watched all the changes from dark to dawn at the stage window.
Once or twice she caught a glimpse of distant camp-fires burning and knew that some cattle outfit was camped there for the night; and once they drove so close that she could hear the cow-boys’ voices, enriched and mellowed by distance, borne to them on the cool, evening wind. It gave a sense of security to know that these big-hearted, manly lads were within call, and she watched the dwindling spark of their camp-fires and strained her ears to catch the last note of their singing, with something of the feeling of severed comradeship. Range cattle, startled from sleep by the stage, scrambled to their feet and bolted headlong in the blind impulse of panic, their horns and the confused massing of their bodies showing in sharp silhouette against the horizon for a moment, then all would settle into quiet again. There was no moon that night, but the stars were sown broadcast—softly yellow stars, lighting the darkness with a shaded luster, like lamps veiled in pale-yellow gauze. The chill electric glitter of the stars, as we know it from between the roofs of high houses, this world of far-flung distance knows not. There the stars are big and still, like the eyes of a contented woman.
The hoofs of the horses beat the night away as regularly as the ticking of a clock. It grew darker as the night wore on, and sometimes a coyote would yelp from the fringe of willows that bordered a creek in a way that made Mary recall tales of banshees. And once, when the first pale streak of dawn trembled in the east and the mountains looked like jagged rocks heaved against the sky and in danger of toppling, the whole dread picture brought before her one of Vedder’s pictures that hung in the shabby old library at home.
They breakfasted somewhere, and Chugg put fresh horses to the stage. She knew this from their difference of color; the horses that they had left the second Dax ranch with had been white, and these that now toiled over the sand and desolation were apparently brown. She could not be certain that they were brown, or that they were toiling over the sand and desolation, or that her name was Mary Carmichael, or indeed of anything. Four days in the train, and what seemed like four centuries in the stage, eliminated any certainty as to anything. She could only sit huddled into a heap and wait for things to become adjusted by time.
Chugg was behaving in a most exemplary manner. He drove rigidly as an automaton, and apparently he looked no longer on the “lightning” when it was bottled. Once or twice he had applied his eye to the pane that separated him from his passenger, and asked questions relative to her comfort, but Mary was too utterly dejected to reply in more than monosyllables. As they crept along, the sun-dried timbers of the stage creaked and groaned in seeming protest at wearing its life away in endless journeyings over this desert waste, then settled down into one of those maddeningly monotonous reiterations to which certain inanimate things are given in seasons of nervous tension. This time it was: “All the world’s—a stage—creak—screech—all—the world’s a stage—creak—screech!” over and over till Mary found herself fast succumbing to the hypnotic effect of the constant repetition, listening for it, even, with the tyrannous eagerness of overwrought nerves, when the stage-driver broke the spell with, “This here stage gets to naggin’ me along about here. She’s hungry for her axle-grease—that’s what ails her.”
“I suppose,” Mary roused herself to say, “you have quite a feeling of comradeship for the stage.”
“Me and Clara”—the stage had this name painted on the side—“have been travelling together nigh onto four year. And while there’s times that I would prefer a greater degree of reciprocity, these yere silent companions has their advantages. Why, compare Clara to them female blizzards—the two Mrs. Daxes—and you see Clara’s good p’ints immejit. Yes, miss, the thirst-quenchers are on me if either one of the Dax boys wouldn’t be glad to swap, but I’d have to be a heap more locoed than I am now to consent to the transaction.”
At sunset the interminable monotony of the wilderness was broken by a house of curious architecture, the like of which the tired young traveller had never seen before, and whose singular candor of design made her doubt the evidence of her own thoroughly exhausted faculties. The house seemed to consist of a series of rooms thrown, or rather blown, together by some force of nature rather than by formal design of builder or carpenter. The original log-cabin of this composite dwelling looked better built, more finished, neater of aspect than those they had previously stopped at in crossing the Desert. Springing from the main building, like claws from a crustacean, were a series of rooms minus either side walls or flooring. Indeed, they might easily have passed for porches of more than usually commodious size had it not been for the beds, bureaus, chairs, stove with attendant pots, kettles, and supper in the course of preparation. Seen from any vantage-point in the surrounding country, the effect was that of an interior on the stage—the background of some homely drama where pioneer life was being realistically depicted. The dramatis persona who occupied the centre of the stage when Mary Carmichael drove up was an elderly woman in a rocking-chair. She was dressed in a faded pink calico gown, limp and bedraggled, whose color brought out the parchment-like hue and texture of her skin in merciless contrast. Perhaps because she still harbored illusions about the perishable quality of her complexion, which gave every evidence of having borne the brunt of merciless desert suns, snows, blizzards, and the ubiquitous alkali dust of all seasons, she wore a pink sun-bonnet, though the hour was one past sundown, and though she sat beneath her own roof-tree, even if lacking the protection of four walls. From the corner of her mouth protruded a snuff-brush, so constantly in this accustomed place that it had come to be regarded by members of her family as part and parcel of her attire—the first thing assumed in the morning, the last thing laid aside at night. Mary Carmichael had little difficulty in recognizing Judith Rodney’s step-mother, née Tumlin—she who had been the heroine of the romance lately recorded.
Mrs. Rodney’s interest in the girl alighting from the stage was evinced in the palsied motion of the chair as it quivered slightly back and forth in place of the swinging seesaw with which she was wont to wear the hours away. The snuff-brush was brought into more fiercely active commission, but she said nothing till Mary Carmichael was within a few inches of her. Then, shifting the snuff-brush to a position more favorable to enunciation, she said: “Howdy? Ye be Miz Yellett’s gov’ment, ain’t ye?” There was something threatening in her aspect, as if the office of governess to the Yelletts carried some challenging quality.