“Those frightful trees, how can Alida stand them?” She looked back. “Oh, I wish they were cut down!”
Before them was the cabin, its ruined condition pitifully apparent even by night. It had been deserted ten years before Jim brought his family to it. Rumor said it was haunted. Grim stories were told of the death of a woman who had come there with a man, and had not lived to go away with him. The roof of the adjoining stable had fallen in, the bars of the corral were missing. The house was dark but for a feeble light that glimmered in one window, the beacon that had been lighted, night after night, against Jim’s coming. It added a further note of apprehension, peering through the dark, still valley like a wakeful, anxious eye, keeping a long and unrewarded vigil. Judith felt the consummation of the threatening tragedy after her first glimpse of the sentinel trees. She could not explain, but her heart cried, even as the wind in them had sung of death. Perhaps her mother’s spirit spoke to her, just as she had said, on that memorable drive, that the Great Mystery spoke to his people in the earth, the sky, and the frowning mountains.
“Peter”—she had slid from her horse and was clinging to his arm—“when it happens, Peter, you will have no part in it?”
“It won’t happen, Judith, if I can help it.”
She kissed his hand as it held the loose reins.
“Lord, I am not worthy!” was the thought in his heart. He sat graven in the saddle. Sir Knight of the Joyous Heart though he was, the unsought kiss of trust gifted him with a self-reverence that would not soon forsake him.
Judith was rapping on the door and calling to Alida not to be frightened. And presently it was opened. Peter wanted to leave Judith, now that she was safely at the end of her journey, but she would not hear of it till he had eaten.
“You would have had your comfortable supper five hours ago had you not been playing cavalier to me all over the wilderness.” And Peter yielded.
Judith busied herself about the kitchen. Her mood of racking apprehension had disappeared. Indian stoicism had again the guiding hand. She waved Peter from the fire that she was kindling, as if he were a blundering incompetent. But she let him slice the bacon and grind the coffee as one lets a child help. Alida came in, white-faced and anxious over the long absence of her husband, but conscientiously hospitable nevertheless. Peter noticed that Judith made a gallant pretence of eating, crumbling her bread and talking the meanwhile. The pale wife, who had little to say at the best of times, was put to the test to say anything at all. But, withal, their intent was so genuinely hospitable that Peter himself could not speak with the pity of it. Accustomed as he was to the roughness of these frontier cabins, never had he seen a human habitation so desolate as this. The mud plaster had fallen away from between the logs, showing cross sections of the melancholy prospect. An atmosphere of tragedy brooded over the place. Whether from its long period of emptiness, or from the vaguely hinted murder of the woman who had died there, or whether it took its character from the prevailing desolation, the cabin in the valley was an unlovely thing. Nor did the cleanliness, the conscientious making the best of things, soften the woful aspect of the place. Rather was the appeal the more poignant to the seeing eye, as the brave makeshift of the self-respecting poor strikes deeper than the beggar’s whine. The house was bare but for the few things that Alida could take in the wagon in which they made their flight. And all through the pinch of poverty and grinning emptiness there was visible the woman-touch, the brave making the best of nothing, the pitiful preparation for the coming of the man. Wild roses from the creek bloomed against the gnarled and weather-warped logs of the walls. Sprays of clematis trailed their white bridal beauty from cans rescued from the ashes of a camp-fire. But Alida was a strategist when it came to adorning her home, and the rusty receptacle was hid beneath trailing green leaves. There was at the window a muslin curtain that in its starched and ruffled estate was strongly suggestive of a child’s frock hastily converted into a window drapery. The curtain was drawn aside that the lamp might shed its beam farther on the way of the traveller who came not. There was but one other light in the place, a bit of candle. Alida apologized for the poor light by which they must eat, but she did not offer to take the lamp from the window.
Peter was no longer Sir Knight of the Joyous Heart as he watched the little, white-faced woman, who went so often to the door to look towards the road that entered the valley that she was no longer aware of what she did. He saw her wide eyes full of fear, the bow of the mouth strained taut with anxiety, her unconscious fear of him as one of the alien faction, and withal her concern for his comfort. Judith’s control was far greater, but though she hid it skilfully, he knew the sorrow that consumed her.