Judith of the Godless Valley/Chapter 4
CHAPTER IV
THE HOUSE IN THE YELLOW CANYON
"Beauty; to see it, to hear it, to feel it: that's all that makes life worth while."
DOUGLAS was both elated and dejected by his conversation with Judith. He was elated to feel that at last Judith knew his feeling toward her. He was dejected because he felt that she had no understanding of the depth and sincerity of this feeling. And with that marvelously naive egotism of the male, he gave many hours of heavy thought to Judith's weaknesses and temptations, none at all to his own. Perhaps more than anything, Judith's friendship with Inez began to worry him. The more he pondered on it, the more perturbed he became; and finally, a week or so after the dance, he resolved to ask Inez to break with Judith.
The Rodman house was built against the sheer yellow stone facing at the base of Lost Chief range, known incorrectly as the Yellow Canyon. The house of half a dozen rooms was the most picturesque cabin in the valley, for Grandfather Rodman had built the roof with an overhang, giving the house the hospitable shadows of a little Swiss chalet. There were several hundred acres belonging to the ranch. Free range had grown small before Inez' father died and he had gotten his acres well into grass and alfalfa. But when he and Inez' mother were wiped out by smallpox, leaving the ranch to Inez, the fields rapidly returned to the wild. Inez, fifteen at the time of her parents' death, was unwilling to lead the life of a ranch woman and for ten years the ranch had been going to pieces.
When Douglas rode up to the outer corral in the dusk of the June evening, he was struck anew by the disorder of the place. Cattle tramped freely about the house. An old steer was poking his head in at the kitchen window. Chickens roosted on a saddle, which was flung in the stable muck. Tin cans, old wagon wheels, the ruin of a sheep wagon, were heaped in confusion at one end of the cabin. Three or four dogs barked as Doug rode up on old Mike. He called Prince in and looked inquiringly at two other horses tied to the dilapidated corral fence. They were Beauty, his father's horse, and Yankee, Peter's roan.
As Doug sat hesitating, John and Peter came out of the kitchen laughing. They swung, spurs clanking, up to the fence.
"What the devil are you doing here, Doug?" asked Peter Knight.
"Hasn't he got a right to call on the Harlot of the Canyon?" demanded John, with a chuckle. "Hustle up, Peter! The crowd'll be there for the game before you are."
"They can't get in till I unlock," replied Peter. "Here, John, take the key and ride on. I want to talk to Doug."
John caught the key and trotted off. Sister snarled at Prince, who wagged his tail apologetically.
"Sister's a shrew, all right," grinned Douglas.
"She sure can run coyotes, though," said Peter.
"She and Grandma Brown run this valley," added Douglas.
Peter laughed. "I'm strong for the ladies! Did you ever watch the moon rise, Doug, from the top of the bench back of the cabin there?"
"No," answered Douglas.
"Come on up! It's not a long ride. I've been wanting to make you a proposition for some time."
Douglas followed the postmaster silently. The horses were panting and sweating by the time they reached the top, and the rim of the moon was just peering over the edge of the Indian Range. All the valley lay in darkness. The two dismounted and threw themselves down on the ledge. Douglas lighted a cigarette while Peter filled his pipe.
"What are you planning to do with yourself now you're through school, Douglas?"
"Ride for Dad."
"How'd you like to go East to school?"
"Nothing doing! I've got more education now than I'll need as a rancher."
"Well, I guess that's not particularly so," said Peter. "I was thinking—you know I'm alone in the world—that I might help you out if you had any leaning toward college or a profession."
"Ranching is good enough for me, thank you all the same, Peter."
For some moments Peter did not speak again. Coyotes wailed in the peaks above them. The moon showed more of its golden face.
"Does your father ever talk to you about your own mother, Doug?"
"No; I quit asking him questions years ago. Peter, all I know about my mother is that her name was Esther, that the smallpox wiped her folks out, and that they owned the north half of our ranch. There's an old photograph of her in Dad's bureau drawer. She was awful pretty."
"She was more than that, Doug! I knew her well. You see, I'm the only man in the valley that's a stranger, as you might say. I've only lived here twenty years. So I could appreciate your mother more than the natives. I came here a roundabout way from Boston. So did your mother's folks, about forty-five years ago. She looked as Yankee as her blood, thin and delicate, with a refined face. And all the coarse work women have to do in Lost Chief didn't coarsen her."
"How do you mean, coarse work?" asked Doug.
Dimly in the moonlight he saw the postmaster rub his hand across his forehead.
"Why don't you put Buster to hauling and plowing?" asked Peter.
"Too light and nervous."
"So was your mother too light and nervous for the kind of ranch work women have to do here. Women with blood and brains like most of the Lost Chief women are best used to keep alive the decencies and gentler things of life. Men lose those things in a cattle country unless the women keep 'em alive. If you keep women too close to the details of handling cattle and horses, they get rough and coarse too. And I calculate that Lost Chief and the world needs some decency and delicacy."
Douglas pondered over this for a long time, his eyes on the glory of the Indian peaks. Then he said, "You knew my mother well?"
"Yes. I'd have married her, Doug, if she hadn't already married your father. She—she was so devilishly overworked and unhappy! But she never complained. Your father was crazy about her but he treats a woman like he does a horse. He doesn't know any different."
"O, don't tell me any more!" said Douglas brokenly. "The poor little thing! Seems as if I couldn't stand it. Peter, I'm glad she died!"
The older man was silent for a time, then went on. "Your mother came of good people. Her grandfather was a friend of Emerson's. Tucked away somewhere she had some letters the two men exchanged. Your grandfather dreamed dreams about establishing a new New England out here. Those letters should have been saved for you."
The radiant light now swept across Lost Chief creek and to the foot of the wall, drenching the Rodman ranch in beauty and mystery. Sister crowded against her master's back and snored. Prince whined dolefully as he always did at the moon.
"So taking one thing with another," Peter Knight explained, "I thought I might see if you had anything in your head except horse wrangling; whether you're as much your Dad inside as outside."
"I don't see why ranching isn't a good enough profession for any one!" protested the boy.
"In lots of places it is. But it's not in Lost Chief."
"I don't see why," repeated Douglas.
"It's awful hard here on the women is one reason. I never heard your mother swear or use a foul word," said Peter. "I've been on ranches in other places where the women would have been shocked at the idea. How about Judith?"
"You know she only curses like the other women do around here."
"Do you like it?" asked the postmaster.
"I never thought anything about it."
"There you are!" groaned Peter. "If I can only make you see! Doug, a woman lets down the first bar when she begins to swear and drink. She begins where Judith is beginning. She's mighty apt to end where Inez is ending. You just think about ranching in Lost Chief from your mother's point of view. It's a rough kind of a community, Douglas, compared with the same class of people in other communities. The talk itself is rough; how rough you can't appreciate because you've never heard anything else."
There was another silence. Then Douglas asked heavily: "Peter, what am I going to do to keep Judith from going to Inez for advice?"
"Might not be such bad advice! Inez has no illusions about what she's doing or what she's paying."
"You don't mean to say Judith ought to go there?"
"No, I don't! But if a kid like you goes there himself, how can you preach to Judith? And she only goes there for the dancing and fun."
"But I'm a man!"
"I don't care what you are. You can't preach good sermons with a foul tongue. You ought to have the nerve to look at yourself as you are before you try to bring up Judith. Lost Chief is still fairly honest. Even your father calls Inez Rodman by her right title. There's hope in that!"
"But what shall I do about Judith, Peter?"
"Might make a man of yourself, Doug!"
"What's the matter with me?" demanded Doug, indignantly.
"Douglas, you haven't a clean-cut idea to your name. And a kid of seventeen as self-satisfied as you are isn't worth baiting a coyote trap with."
"There's not a guy in the valley works harder than I do!"
"Right! Nor uses his brain less!"
"I suppose you mean I ought to go to college and let Judith go to the devil."
"Judith's pretty good stuff, herself," protested Peter. "A half-baked kid like you can't influence Judith!"
Douglas started to his feet. "By God, I will! You'll see!"
"There's only one way. Show yourself fit to influence her. Don't get a grouch at me, Doug. I've come a long, hard, lonely road. And all because I thought everybody was wrong but myself. I don't want your mother's son to make the same mistake, if I can help it."
"I'm the unhappiest guy in the world!" cried Douglas, passionately.
He mounted his horse and, followed joyfully by Prince, turned down the trail. Peter did not stir. For a long time he sat with his arm around Sister. The moon was high over the valley before he said aloud:
"O Esther! Esther! The years are long!" Then he too mounted and rode away.
As Doug trotted through Rodman's door-yard, Inez crossed toward the corral.
"Hello, Doug! Where've you been? What's the matter with Buster?"
Douglas drew up. "I gave him to Judith."
"Why, you blank little fool! It must have hurt you deep!"
"I guess Judith's worth it! Say, Inez, is there anything I can do for you to get you to keep Judith away from here?"
"I won't hurt her, Doug."
"Aw, Inez, what's the use of saying that! Make out you're sore at her."
"I could, but that won't do so much for her. Judith ought to have something to look forward to beside breeding calves and wrangling firewood for some lazy dog of a rancher, before she or any other Lost Chief girl will think keeping away from here is worth while."
There was a depth of bitterness in the woman's voice which Douglas felt rather than understood. He sat in awkward silence. Inez put her hand on his knee and looked up at him. Her face was tragically beautiful in the moonlight.
"Douglas, do you ever stop to think how beautiful Lost Chief country is?"
"Not often," admitted Doug.
Inez went on. "Peter Knight's been all over the United States and he says there's no place passes it in beauty. Sometimes when I see the valley looking like it does to-night, I cry. Doug, you are more promising than these other kids. When you ride round on the range try to keep your mind a little bit off cattle and horses and women and keep it on that line of the Forest Reserve the way it looks to-night. Or the way this yellow wall looks in the snow and the sunrise on it. And then, when you get that habit, tell Judith about it and get her to thinking the same way. Beauty can't live on rot, Douglas. I know that now. I don't care what Charleton quotes."
"Inez," asked Douglas huskily, "why don't you burn that old cabin up?"
"It's too late," replied Inez shortly; and she turned on her heel and left him.
Douglas rode thoughtfully along the home trail. He was angry with Peter and sorry for Inez, and he missed his mother as he never had missed her before. He had been only a baby at the time of her death. This was the first time that he had been told of the type of woman she was though he had heard much of his mother's father, old Bill Douglas. He went to bed that night with an entirely new set of thoughts.
The heaviest ranch work of the year was now at hand. The hay harvest was begun. From dawn until dusk, Doug and Judith worked in the fields and tumbled to bed at night as soon as the chores were done. They had many opportunities during the day for conversations, however, for after the hay was raked, Douglas and Judith drove one rick team, John and old Johnny Brown the other. Heavy work it certainly was, but work of what fragrance, under skies of what an unbelievably deep blue, in air of what tingling warmth and clearness ! What unthinkable distances were glimpsed from the wild hay patch on the flank of Dead Line Peak! It seemed to Douglas, lying at length, chin elbow-supported, on the top of the last load, which Judith had insisted on driving, that he never before had sensed the beauty of the haying season in Lost Chief Valley. And again he seemed to see Inez's tragic eyes, which had shed tears over the beauty of these very hills. He turned the memory of those eyes over in his mind with a memory of the sardonic twist of Charleton's mouth as he had uttered his philosophy of life, and suddenly Doug wished that he dared to talk to his father about these things. He had asked John about the Emerson letters but John professed never to have heard of them. And Douglas fell to wondering about his grandfather's dream for Lost Chief.
They were pulling through the swamp road above the home corral. It was heavy going and when they reached the shade of a little clump of blue spruce and aspen, Judith pulled the team up for a short rest. She pushed her broad straw hat back from her face and half turned to look at Douglas.
"Have you seen that new litter of pups of Sister's?" she asked Douglas.
He shook his head and Judith went on. "Peter says I can have the pick of the lot, but there's only one I'd look at. He's the image of Sister. I'm going to train him so's I can take him out to run wild horses with me when he grows up."
"Wild horses! The last time it was bronco busting you were going into. What's it all about, anyhow, Jude?"
"You don't suppose I'm going to spend my life in Lost Chief, do you?" demanded Judith.
Douglas swept the landscape with a lazy glance. "I don't see how you could beat it."
"O, for looks and stunts, yes!" Judith's voice was impatient. "But it's no place for a woman! I'm going to earn enough money to take me out where I can go on with my education and amount to something."
"I guess Peter's been talking to you," said Douglas.
Judith nodded. "Yes, and he offered to loan me the money for college. But I won't be beholden to a man outside the family. I'll earn it myself."
"What'll you do with a college education after you get it?" Doug's glance was not lazy now, as it rested on the young girl's eager face.
"I'll do something beside cooking and horse wrangling for some old Lost Chief rancher, I can tell you that!" cried Judith. "I'm going to get out and see the world and know life!"
"And give up your horses and dogs and the big old mountains? Jude, you'll never do it. I'd like to get out myself sometimes, but I know I'll never be happy anywhere else."
"I don't expect to be happy, but I've got to know things."
"What things, Judith?"
The girl turned from Douglas to gaze at the far light on Fire Mesa.
"The truth about things," she said at last. "Inez says there's just one big fact at the bottom of everything and that is sex, and that there's only one thing worth living for, to make sex beautiful."
"She's a liar!" exclaimed Douglas indignantly, as if Inez had said something shameful. "Where does she get that rotten stuff?"
"From Charleton and poetry, I guess. How do you know she's wrong, Doug?"
Douglas sat up, his clear eyes blazing like blue stars out of his sunburned face. "Because I know! I want to have the biggest, finest ranch in the Rockies. Is that sex? You want a good education. Is that sex? Peter wants me to carry on some dreams my mother and grandfather had. Is that sex? What does that woman think the world was made for, I'd like to know?"
"That's just it," Judith sighed with all the sadness of sixteen, "what is it made for?"
There was silence for a moment on the hay rick while the two young questioners gazed at the incomparable grandeur about them. And as he gazed there returned to Douglas the sense of panic that had harassed him after Oscar's death. What did it all mean? Whither was he directed and by what? How long before he too would be swept into the awful void beyond the grave?
"That's what religion did for folks all these years," he said suddenly. "They never asked these questions, I'll bet. I wish I had it."
"I don't want to believe fairy tales just because I'm scared!" Judith tossed her head stoutly.
"I don't either," agreed Douglas dejectedly.
"I'm going to drive on home and get something to eat," said Judith, lifting the reins. "Food's the only thing that'll rid me of the dumb horrors."
Douglas settled back against the hay, and the rest of the ride was continued in silence.
Old Johnny Brown stayed on for a day or so to clean up odd jobs neglected during the haying season. He was a gentle, timid little chap, the butt of the entire valley, of course, and particularly of John Spencer. Douglas often wondered why old Johnny consented to work each year at this season for his father. This wonderment was solved the day after Doug's and Jude's conversation on the load of hay and in a manner destined in a small way to have its influence on Douglas' affairs in the years to come.
Just before supper Judith returned from the post-office and rushed into the kitchen with a huge, long-legged, ugly puppy in her arms. She set him on the floor where his four knotty legs pointed in four different directions and where, his long back sagged like the letter U. He was covered with rough gray hair and his eyes were huge and brown.
"Isn't he a perfect lamb? He's mine!" cried Judith, squatting beside him.
"Oh! A lamb!" grunted John, who was combing his hair at the wash-basin in the corner. "I thought it was a buffalo calf."
"Don't be stupid!" cried Judith. "Of course, you're no judge of dogs, but Peter says he's just like Sister was at two months, only bigger."
Mary Spencer looked him over critically, coffee-pot in hand. "Isn't he awful homely, even for a mongrel, Judith?" she asked.
"Mongrel! What is the matter with all you folks?" exclaimed Judith. "He's no more mongrel than anybody else! Come here to your missis, you precious!" and she gathered the great pup into her lap, where he sat complacently, his legs in a hopeless tangle.
"What's his name?" asked old Johnny, mildly.
"Wolf Cub. And you wait till I'm through with him! You'll see the best trained dog in the valley, like Sioux will be the best trained bull and Buster the best trained horse. O, look, Doug!" as Douglas came in. "See what I've got!"
"I dare you to name its pedigree, Doug!"' chuckled John.
Douglas lifted the pup to the floor and ran his hands over its skull, along its back, and down its erratic legs. "Some dog, Judith! You'll have to muzzle him by the time he's six months old."
Judith smiled triumphantly. "No, I won't! Wait till you see how I train him."
"You get that from your mother, Judith. She was always gregus smart with critters," said old Johnny.
Judith laughed skeptically. "She was!" The little old man nodded his head. "I remember. I deponed that same thing to Peter the other day. How Mary could break anything when she was a girl, like you."
"Well, but Mother won't touch anything that isn't broke now!" exclaimed Judith.
"Just what I deponed," nodded Johnny. "John broke her just like he broke old Molly horse, so she lost her nerve. I deponed just that. An awful rough breaker. I deponed just that"
"O dry up, Johnny!" grunted John, drawing his chair up to the table. "I've put up with an awful lot of drool from you, and I'm getting sick of it."
Old Johnny was always most explanatory when he was most frightened. "I wasn't drooling, John. I was just deponing. Any one can do that, can't they? And Mary did used to be like Judith."
"Will you shut up!" shouted John.
The puppy, startled, gave a sudden loud howl.
"Put that thing out and come to supper, Jude! If he howls to-night, I'll shoot him." Judith left the house indignantly.
"No, you won't, Dad," said Douglas quietly, as he buttered a biscuit.
"If you're going to give me back talk, young fellow, you leave the table now, before I lose my temper."
"I'm not giving you any more back talk than you deserve," replied Douglas. "Any man that would threaten to shoot a pup because it howls deserves something more than back talk. Let's forget it. Johnny, how about this stunt of Mother's breaking horses?"
Old Johnny gave John a timid glance. "I don't remember," he muttered.
Mary laughed. "What's the use of a woman breaking horses when she's got a man to do it for her?"
"Did you ever see her break a horse, Johnny?" insisted Doug.
"Once," said the old man, "a lot of the boys tied me on a mule and the mule ran away. It wasn't broke, that mule. Seem like it had run a gregus long way when Mary come along. She was just a walking and she reached up and grabbed the mule and she rode him back with me. And she made them untie me. And I loved her ever since. I came up here every year to see how John is treating her. I depone—"
John rose and, striding around the table, he seized the old man by the collar. Douglas put his hand on his father's arm.
"Drop it, Dad, or I swear I'll think old Johnny is a better man than you. I asked him to tell. Throw me out if you want to. Keep your hands off this little chap. One thing is sure. He appreciates Mother more than any of the rest of us have."
"Get the half-wit out of my sight, then," growled John, returning to his seat.
"I wish a lot of folks with whole wits knew how to be as good a friend as Johnny," said Douglas stoutly.
"So do I!" Mary's voice trembled, but her glance at the little old man was very lovely.
The rest of the meal was finished in silence, Douglas turning over in his mind this strange new picture of Judith's mother. Could anything, he wondered, change Judith so? A curious anger against his father's stupidity was at that moment born in Douglas' heart, an anger that never was wholly to leave him.
That evening, as Douglas sat in his favorite place beside the alfalfa stack, old Johnny led up his little gray mare.
"I'll be cowling myself along home now, Doug," he said. "John is awful insidious to me. I just want to say, Doug, that you're the first man in this valley ever stuck up for me and some day I depone I'll get even with you."
"Good for you, Johnny!" nodded Douglas. "When I get my old ranch going, you come up and work for me."
"I will so do," replied the old man solemnly, and he rode away in the moonlight.
And Douglas returned to the new theme old Johnny had given him. Of what were women made that they could be over-broken as his father had over-broken Mary? And why should Lost Chief, so small that control was simple, permit such a thing to be?