Judith of the Plains

It was June, and a little past sunrise, but there was no hint of early summer freshness in the noxious air of the sleeping-car as it toiled like a snail over the infinity of prairie. From behind the green-striped curtains of the berths, now the sound of restless turning and now a long-drawn sigh signified the uneasy slumber due to stifling air and discomfort.

The only passenger stirring was a girl whose youth drooped under the unfavorable influences of foul air, fatigue, and a strained anxiety to come to the end of this fateful journey. She had been up while it was yet dark, and her hand—luggage, locked, strapped, and as pitifully new at the art of travelling as the girl herself, clustered about the hem of her blue serge skirt like chicks about a hen. The engine shrieked, but its voice sounded weak and far off in that still ocean of space; the girl tightened her grasp on the largest of the satchels and looked at the approaching porter tentatively.

“We’re late twenty-fi’e minutes,” he reassured her, with the hopeless patience of one who has lost heart in curbing travellers’ enthusiasms.

She turned towards the window a pair of shoulders plainly significant of the burdensome last straw.

“Four days and nights in this train”—they were slower in those days—“and now this extra twenty-five minutes!”

Miss Carmichael’s famous dimple hid itself in disgust. The demure lines of mouth and chin, that could always be relied upon for special pleading when sentence was about to be passed on the dimple by those who disapproved of dimples, drooped with disappointment. But the light-brown hair continued to curl facetiously—it was the sort of hair whose spontaneous rippling conveys to the seeing eye a sense of humor.

The train plodded across the spacious vacancy that unrolled itself farther and farther in quest of the fugitive horizon. The scrap of view that came within a closer range of vision spun past the car windows like a bit of stage mechanism, a gigantic panorama rotating to simulate a race at breakneck speed. But Miss Carmichael looked with unseeing eyes; the whirling prairie with its golden flecks of cactus bloom was but part of the universal strangeness, and the dull ache of homesickness was in it all.

“My dear! my dear!”—a head in crimpers was thrust from between the curtains of the section opposite—“I’ve been awake half the night. I was so afraid I wouldn’t see you before you got off.”

The head was followed, almost instinctively, by a hand travelling furtively to the crimpers that gripped the lady’s brow like barnacles clinging to a keel.

Mary expressed a grieved appreciation at the loss of rest in behalf of her early departure, and conspicuously forbore to glance in the direction of the barnacles, that being a first principle as between woman and woman.

“And, oh, my dear, it gets worse and worse. I’ve looked at it this morning, and it’s worse in Wyoming than it was in Colorado. What it ’ll be before I reach California, I shudder to think.”

“It’s bound to improve,” suggested Mary, with the easy optimism of one who was leaving it. “It couldn’t be any worse than this, could it?”

The neuter pronoun, it might be well to state, signified the prairie; its melancholy personality having penetrated the very marrow of their train existence, they had come to refer to it by the monosyllable, as in certain nether circles the head of the house receives his superlative distinction in “He.”

Again the locomotive shrieked, again the girl mechanically clutched the suit-case, as presenting the most difficult item in the problem of transportation, and this time the shriek was not an idle formality. The train slowed down; the uneasy sleepers behind the green-striped curtains stirred restlessly with the lessening motion of their uncouth cradle. The porter came to help her, with the chastened mien of one whose hopes of largess are small, the lady with the barnacles called after her redundant farewells, and a moment later Miss Carmichael was standing on the station platform looking helplessly after the train that toiled and puffed, yet seemed, in that crystalline atmosphere, still within arm’s-reach. She watched it till its floating pennant of smoke was nothing but a gray feather blowing farther and farther out of sight on the flat prairie.

The town—it would be unkind to mention its name—had made merry the night before at the comprehensive invitation of a sheepman who had just disposed of his wool-clip, and who said, by way of general summons, “What’s the use of temptin’ the bank?” “Town,” therefore, when Mary Carmichael first made its acquaintance, was still sleeping the sleep of the unjust. Those among last night’s roisterers who had had to make an early start for their camps were well into the foot-hills by this time, and would remember with exhilaration the cracked tinkle of the dance-hall piano as inspiring music when the lonesomeness of the desert menaced and the young blood again clamored for its own.

“Town”—it contained in all some two dozen buildings—was very unlovely in slumber. It sprawled in the lap of the prairies, a grimy-faced urchin, with the lines of dismal sophistication writ deep. Yet where in all the “health resorts” of the East did air sweep from the clean hill-country with such revivifying power? It seemed a glad world of abiding youth. Surely “Town” was but a dreary illusion, a mirage that hung in the unmapped spaces of this new world that God had made and called good; an omen of the abominations that men would make when they grew blind to the beauty of God’s world.

Mary Carmichael, with much the feelings of a cat in a strange garret, wandered about the sluggard town; and presently the blue-and-white sign of a telegraph office, with the mythological figure of a hastening messenger, suggested to her that a reassuring telegram was only Aunt Adelaide’s due. Whereupon she began to rap on the door of the office, a scared pianissimo which naturally had little effect on the operator, who was at home and asleep some three blocks distant. But the West is the place for woman if she would be waited upon. No seven-to-one ratio of the sexes has tempered the chivalry of her sons of the saddle. A loitering something in a sombrero saw rather than heard the rapping, and, at the sight, went in quest of the dreaming operator without so much as embarrassing Miss Carmichael with an offer of his services. And presently the operator, whose official day did not begin for some two hours yet, appeared, much dishevelled from running and the cursory nature of his toilet, prepared to receive a message of life and death.