“He is her lover,” said Kitty; and all the wilderness before her was no lonelier than her heart.
Swift, intent, Judith traced Kitty’s footprints. They followed the game trail, the one she herself had taken earlier in the day. She traced them back through the pine wood about a hundred rods, and then the trail-marks grew confused. This was unquestionably the place where the horses had taken fright, circled, reared, then dashed in different directions. She traced the other horse, whose tracks led under low-hanging boughs. It would have been a difficult matter for a horse with a rider to clear; and now the impression of the horse’s shoes grew fainter, from the lighter footfalls of a horse at full gallop.
“Ah!” A cry broke from her as she saw the marks had become almost eliminated by something that had dragged, something heavy. Those long-drawn lines were finger-prints, where a hand had dragged in its vain endeavor to grasp at something. A sickening image came persistently before her eyes—Peter’s upturned face, blood-smeared and disfigured.
“Sh-sh-sh!” She put her hand to her breast to still the beating of her heart. She could hear the sound of hoofs falling muffled on the soft ground, and a man’s voice speaking in a soothing sing-song. She listened. It was Peter’s voice, reassuring the horse, asking him what kind of a bag of nerves he was for a cow pony, to get frightened at a bear? Judith stood tall and straight among the pines. Surely he could not blindly pass her by. He must feel the joy in her heart that all was well with him. The hoofs came nearer, the man’s voice sounded but intermittently, as he got his horse under better control. She felt as if he must come to her, as if some overpowering consciousness of her presence would speak from her heart to his; but his eyes scanned the distant trail for a glimpse of Kitty or Kitty’s horse. Judith saw that his head was bound in something white and that it bore a red stain, but he held himself well in the saddle. He was not the man to heed a tumble. He urged the horse forward, never looking towards the tree-trunks, his face white and strained with anxiety as he scoured the trail for evidences of Kitty. The horse, with a keener sense than his master, shied slightly as he passed the group of pines where Judith stood; but Peter’s glance was for the open trail, and as she heard him canter by, so close that she could have touched his stirrup with her hand, it seemed as if he must hear the beating of her heart.
“Oh, blind eyes, and ears that will not hear, and heart that has forgotten how to beat! Yes, go to that pale, cold girl! You speak one language, and life for you is the way of little things!”
She waited till the last sound of the horse’s hoofs had died away and all was still in the tremulous green of the forest. Judith’s mind was busy with the image of their meeting, the man bringing the joy of his youth to the calm divinity who could feel no thrill of fear in his absence. She broke into the running gait and hurried through the forest to the Daxes’.
XVI.
In The Land Of The Red Silence
The beef-herd, that had been the pivotal point of the round-up and had made the mighty plain echo to its stampings and bellowings, beating up simooms that choked it with thirst, blinded it with dust, confounding itself on every side by the very fury of its blind force, had trailed for a week, tractable as toys in the hands of children. Little had happened to vary the monotony for the cow-punchers that handled the herd—they grazed, guarded, watered, night-herded the cattle day after day, night after night. Pasturage had been sufficient, if not abundant. The creeks were running low and slimy with the advance of summer, but there had been sufficient water to let the herd drink its fill at least once a day.
The outfit ate its “sow-belly,” soda-biscuit, and coffee three times a day, and smoked its pipes, but was a little shy on yarns round the camp-fire.
“This yere outfit don’t lather none,” commented the cook to the horse-wrangler, over the smoke of an early morning fire.