X.
On Horse-thief Trail
Judith, on her black mare, Dolly, left the Dax ranch after the mid-day meal to go in quest of her brother. He had left his comfortable cabin on the Bear Creek, when he had turned rustler, and moved into the “bad man’s country,” one of those remote mountain fastnesses that abound in Wyoming and furnish a natural protection to the fugitive from justice. Judith took the left fork of the road even as Peter Hamilton had chosen the right, the day she had watched him gallop towards Kitty Colebrooke with never a glance backward. Judith strove now to put him and the memory of that day from her mind by turning towards the open country without a glance in the direction he had taken. But her thoughts were weary of journeying over that trail that she would not look towards; in imagination she had travelled it with Peter a hundred times, saw each dip and turn of the yellow road, each feature of the landscape as he rode exultant to Kitty, to be turned, tried, taken or left as her mood should prompt. But Judith was more woman than saint, and in her heart there was a blending of joy and pain. For she knew—such skill has love in inference from detail—that the mysterious far-away girl, who was so powerful that she could have whatever she wanted, even to Peter, loved her own ambitions better than she did Peter or Peter’s happiness, and that she would not marry him except as a makeshift. For Miss Colebrooke wrote verses; Peter had a white-and-gold volume of them that Judith fancied he said his prayers to.
As for Peter himself, he had never been able to explain the magic Kitty had brewed for him. There was a heady quality in the very ring of her name. His first glimpse of her, on Class Day, in a white gown and a hat that to his manly indiscrimination looked as guileless as a sheaf of poppies nodding above the pale-yellow hair that had the sheen of corn-silk, had been a vision that stirred in him heroic promptings. He had no difficulty in securing an introduction. She was a connection of the Wetmores, as was he, though through opposite sides of the house. In the few minutes’ talk that followed, he had the disconcerting sensation of being “talked down to.” There was the indulgent tolerance of the woman of the world to the “nice boy” about this amazing young woman, who might have been eighteen. Hamilton had repudiated the very suggestion of being a “nice boy.” But he felt himself blushing, groping for words, saying stupid things, supplying every requisite of the “nice boy” as if he were acting the part. Her chaperon bore her away presently, and he was left with a radiant impression of corn-silk hair and a complexion that justified Bouguereau’s mother-of-pearl flesh tints. And when she had tilted the ruffled lace parasol over her shoulder, so that it framed her head like a fleecy halo, he had seen that her eyes were green as jade. Withal he had a sense of having acquitted himself stupidly.
Later, when he ran the gamut of some friends, they had chaffed him on his hardihood. By Jove! He had nerve to look at her! Didn’t he know she was “the” Miss Colebrooke? Now Hamilton was absolutely ignorant of Miss Colebrooke’s right of way to the definite article, but it was characteristic of him to make no inquiries. On the whole, he found the situation meeting with a greater number of the artistic requirements than such situations usually presented. He was still dallying with this pleasant vagueness of sensation when he picked up a copy of a magazine, and the name Katherine Colebrooke caught his eye and held it like the flight of a comet. Her contribution was a sonnet entitled “The Miracle.” As a naïve emotional confession, “The Miracle” interested him; as a sonnet, he rent it unmercifully.
Peter was to learn, however, that this sonnet was but a solitary flake in a poetic fall of more or less magnitude. He rather conspicuously avoided a reference to her poetry when they met again. To him it was the very least of her gifts. Her hair, that had the tender yellow of ripening corn, was worthy a cycle of sonnets, but pray leave the making of them to some one else! By daylight the jade-colored eyes seemed to shut out the world. The pupils shrank to pin-points. The green looked deep—as many fathoms as the sea. She was all Diana by daylight, a huntress, if you will, of the elusive epithet, but essentially a maiden goddess, who would add no sprightly romance to the chronicles of Olympus. By lamp-light she suggested quite another divinity. The pin-points expanded; they burned black, like coals newly breaking into flame.
When Hamilton knew her better, he did not like to think that he had thought her eighteen at their first meeting. It impugned his judgment as a man of the world. Young ladies of eighteen could not possibly be contributors of several years’ standing to the various magazines. Disconcerting scraps of gossip floated to him. He heard of her as bridesmaid at a famous wedding of six years back, when she had deflected the admiration from the bride and remained the central figure of the picture. Her portrait by Sargent had been the sensation of the Salon when he had been a grubby-faced boy with his nose in a Latin grammar. An unusual situation was abhorrent to him. That he should marry an older woman, one, moreover, who had gained her public in a field to which he had not gained admission, was doubly distasteful by reason of his deference to the conventional. If she had flirted with him, his midsummer madness would have evaporated into thin air; but she kept him at arm’s-length, ostensibly took him seriously, and the boy proposed.
Her rejection of him was a matter of such consummate skill that Hamilton did not realize the keenness of his disappointment till he was swinging westward over the prairies. She had confided to him that her work claimed her and that she must renounce those sweet responsibilities that made the happiness of other women. It was with the protective mien of one who sought to shield him from an adverse destiny that she declined his suit.
This had all happened seven years ago. In the mean time he had adjusted his disappointment to the new life of the West. To say that he had fallen in love with the situation would be to misrepresent him. But the rôle of lonely cow-puncher loyally wedded to the thought of his first love was not without charm to Peter. How long his constancy would have survived the test of propinquity to a woman of Judith Rodney’s compelling personality, other things being equal, it would be difficult to hazard a guess. The coming of Judith from the convent increased the perspective into which Kitty was retreating. With the vivid plainswoman in the foreground, the pale-haired writer of verse dwindled almost to reminiscence. But the reverence for the usual, that made up the underlying motive for so much of Hamilton’s conduct, presented barriers alongside of which his previous quandary regarding Miss Colebrooke’s seniority shrank to insignificance. He might marry a woman older than himself and swallow the grimace of it, but by no conceivable system of argument could he persuade himself to marry into a family like that of the Rodneys—the girl herself, for all her beauty and rare womanliness, a quarter Indian, her father the synonyme for obloquy, her brother a cattle thief. Hamilton preferred that other men should make the heroic marriages of a new country. He was prepared to applaud their hardihood of temperament, but in his own case such a thing was inconceivable. Similar arguments have ensnared multitudes in the web of caution and provided a rich feast for the arch-spider, convention, the shrivelled flies dangling in the web conveying no significance, apparently, beyond that of advertising the system.
When Peter went East, he had expected to find Kitty worn by the pursuit of epithets, haunted by the phantom of a career, resigned to the slings and arrows of remorseful spinsterhood. An obvious regret, or, at least, resignation tempered with remembrance, was the unguent he anticipated at the hands of Kitty. But alas for sanctuaries built to refuge wounded pride! He found Kitty the pivot of an adoring coterie, the magazines flowing with the milk and honey of her verse and she looking younger, if possible, than when he had first known her. Time, experience, even the pangs of literary parturition had not writ a single character on that alabaster brow. The very atrophy of the forces of time which she had accomplished by unknown necromancy seemed to endow her with an elfin youth, making her seem smaller, more childlike, more radiantly elusive than when she had worn the poppy hat at Cambridge.
The tan and hardship of the prairie had adjusted the blunder of their ages. Stark conditions had overdrawn his account perhaps a decade; she retained a surplus it would be rude to estimate. Her greeting of him was radiant, her welcome panoplied in words that verged close to inspiration. A woman would have scented warning instantly, deep feeling and the curled and perfumed phrase being suspicious cronies and sure to rouse those lightly slumbering watch-dogs, the feminine wits. But Peter only turned the other cheek. More than once, in the days that followed, he devoutly thanked his patron saint, caution, that his relations with Judith had been governed by characteristic prudence. Kitty admitted him to her coterie, but he had lost nothing of his attitude of grand Turk towards her verses. The sin be upon the heads of whomever took such things seriously! The irony of fate that compelled a class poet to punch cows may have tinctured his judgment.