She remembered how the nuns at Santa Fé had been shocked at her for praying to Indian gods, and how once she had built a little mound of stones, which was the Sioux way of making petition, in the shadow of the statue of the Virgin Mary, and how Sister Angela had scattered the stones and told her to pray instead to the Blessed Lady. She still prayed to the Blessed Lady every day; but sometimes, too, she reared little mounds of stones in the desert when she was very sad and the kinship between her and the dead gods of her mother’s people seemed the closer for their common sorrow.
Peter, coming up with a much-blown horse, found her still chanting the Indian song.
“Sing him a verse for me, Judith. Heaven knows I need something to straighten out my infernal luck. Tell the Hayoka that I’m a good fellow and need only half a chance. Tell him to prosper my present venture.”
She had begun to chant the invocation, then stopped suddenly. “I must not; you know I am a Catholic.” Suspicion that had been scotched, not killed, raised its head. “What was his present venture?” Her eye had not changed in expression, nor a tone of her voice, but in her heart was a sickening distrust for all things.
A belated moon had come up. The level plain, on which their horses threw grotesque, elongated shadows, was flooded with honey-colored light. Each straggling clump of sage-brush, whitening bone and bowlder, gleamed mysterious, ghostly in the radiant flood-tide. They seemed to be riding through a world that had no kinship with that black, formless void through which they had groped but yet a little while. Then darkness had been upon the face of the deep. Now there was a miracle of light such as only the desert, in its desolation, knows. To Judith, with a soul attuned to every passing expression of nature, there was significance in this transition from darkness to light. The sudden radiance was emblematic of her belated perception, coming as it did after a blindness so dense as to appear almost wilful. Her mind was busy with a multitude of schemes. Fool though she had been, she would not be the instrument of her brother’s undoing.
“I’ve come too far,” she cried, in sudden dismay. “I should have stopped at the foot of the divide. I’ve never been over the trail before.”
“You foolish child, why should you stop in the middle of the wilderness?”
She wheeled the mare about and faced him, a figure of graven resolution.
“I promised to meet Tom Lorimer there—now you know.”
With which she cracked Dolly sharply with her heel and began to retrace her way over the trail. Peter turned his horse and followed, with the feeling of utter helplessness that a man has when confronted with the granite obstinacy of women. Judith had meanwhile expected that the announcement of her mythical appointment with Tom Lorimer would be received differently. Tom Lorimer’s reputation was of the worst. An Eastern man formerly, an absconder from justice, rumor was busy with tales of ungodly merrymaking that went on at his ranch, where no woman went except painted wisps from the dance-halls. But Peter was too loyal a friend, despite his shortcomings as a lover, to see in Judith’s statement anything more than a sisterly devotion so deeply unselfish that it failed to take into account the danger to which she subjected herself.