Judith of the Plains

by Marie Manning

  XVII

  Mrs. Yellett Contends With A Cloudburst

  The matriarch had delayed longer in moving camp than was consistent withher habitual watchfulness where the interests of the sheep were involved.Mary Carmichael, who had already become inured to the experience ofmoving, was even conscious of a certain impatience at the delay, and couldonly explain the apathy with which Mrs. Yellett received reports of thedearth of pasturage on the ground that she wished each fresh educationalgerm to take as deep root as possible before transplantation. So that whenMrs. Yellett, shortly after Leander Dax's arrival at camp in the capacityof herder, announced that she and Leander were to make a trip to thedipping-vat that had kept Ben from his classes for the past ten days, andinvited the "gov'ment" to join the expedition, Mary accepted with fervor.

  The Yelletts' "bunch" of sheep did not exceed three thousand head, and thematriarch had wisely decreed that it should be restricted to that number,as she wished always to give the flock her personal supervision.

  "'The hen that's the surest of her chicks is the one that does her ownsettin','" was the adage from the Book of Hiram with which Mrs. Yellettsuccinctly summed up the case.

  Each autumn, therefore, the wethers and the dry-bag ewes were sent to themarket, and as the result of continual weeding of the stock the matriarchhad as promising a herd of its size as could be found in Wyoming. Oftenshe had explained to Mary, who was learning of the wonders of this newworld with remarkable aptness, that she had constantly to fight againstthe inclination to increase her business of sheep-raising, but that assoon as she should begin to hire herders or depend on strangers thingswould go wrong. With the assistance of her sons, she therefore managed theentire details of the herd, with the exception of those occasions on whichLeander lent his semi-professional co-operation.

  As a workman Leander was, considering his size and apparent weakness,surprisingly efficient. It was as a dispenser of anti-theological doctrinethat Mrs. Dax's husband annoyed his temporary employer. Freed from hiswife's masterful presence, Leander dared to be an "agnostic," as he calledhimself, of an unprecedentedly violent order. His iconoclasm was not of apattern with paw's gusty protests against life in general, but it wasLeander's way of asserting himself, on the rare occasions when he got achance, to deny clamorously every tenet advanced by every religion. Themere use of certain familiar expletives drove him, ordinarily mild andsubmissive though he was, to frantic gesticulation and diatribe. MaryCarmichael could not make out, as she watched the comedy with growingamusement, whether poor Leander really believed that he was the first ofdoubting Thomases, or whether he took an unfair advantage of the lack ofgeneral information in his casual audiences to set forth well-knownopinions as his own. Whatever its basis may have been, Leander sustainedthe role of doubter with passionate zeal, wearing himself to tatters ofrage and hoarseness over arguments maliciously contrived beforehand bycow-punchers and sheep-herders in need of amusement; and yet he never sawthe traps, going out of his way, apparently, to fall into them, tumblingheadlong into the identical pits time after time. Jonah and the whaleconstituted one bait by means of which Leander could be lured from food,sleep, or work of the most pressing nature.

  "The poor fool would stop in the middle of shearing a sheep to argue thatJonah never come out of the whale's belly," the matriarch had told MaryCarmichael, in summing up Leander's disadvantages as a herder. And thefirst remark she had addressed to him on his arrival was: "Leander Dax,you'd have to be made over, and made different, to keep you from bein' ainfidel, but there's one p'int on which you are particularly locoed, andthat's Jonah and the whale. Now at this particular time in the hist'ry ofthe United States, nobody in his faculties has got no call to fret hisselfover Jonah and his whereabouts--none whatever. There's a lot of businessround this here camp that's a heap more pressin'. Now, Leander Dax, if Ido hereby undertake to hire, engage, and employ you to herd sheep, do youagree to renounce discussions, arguments, and debates on the late Jonahand his whereabouts durin' them three days? God A'mighty, man, any onewould think you was Jonah's wife, the interest you have in his absence!"

  "I come here to herd sheep," Leander had brazenly retaliated. "I 'ain'tcome to try to make you think."

  Nevertheless, he appeared docile enough as the time came for the journeyto the dipping-vat, and did his part in making ready. The wagon was therudest of structures; it consisted merely of one long, stout pole. Thoughshe saw the horses being harnessed to this pole, Mary Carmichael,discreetly exercising her newly acquired wisdom, forbore to ask where shewas going to sit, and listened with interest to a discussion between Mrs.Yellett and Leander as to the number of horses it would take to get thedip up the mountain. Leander, who loved pomp and splendor, was for takingsix, but Mrs. Yellett, who carried simplicity to a fault, was in favor ofonly two. They finally compromised on four, and Leander went to fetch theextra two.

  Mrs. Yellett, ever economical of the flitting moment, took advantage ofthe delay to give Mr. Yellett a dose of "Brainard's BeneficialBlackthorn."

  "Paw's as hard to manage as a bent pin," she remarked, in an aside toMary, while he protested and fought her off with his stick. But she, withthe agility of an acrobat, got directly back of him, took his head underher arm, pried open his mouth, and poured down the unwelcome, ifbeneficial, dose.

  "There, there, paw," she said, wiping his mouth as if he had been a baby,"don't take on so! It's all gone, and I can't have you sick on my hands."

  But Mr. Yellett continued to splutter and flare and use violent language,whereupon the matriarch went into the tent and returned with a drink ofcondensed-milk and water, "to wash down the nasty taste," she told him,soothingly.

  A moment afterwards she and Leander were engaged in rolling the barrels ofsheep-dip to the wagon, Mary Carmichael helplessly looking on while Mrs.Yellett looked doubtfully at a "gov'ment" who could not handle barrels.Finally, under the skilful manipulation of Mrs. Yellett and Leander, thelong pole took on the aspect of a colossal vertebral column, from whichhuge barrel-ribs projected horizontally, leaving at the rear a foot or soof bare pole as a smart caudal appendage, bearing about the sameproportion to the wagon as the neatly bitten tail of a fox-terrier does tothe dog.

  Mrs. Yellett kissed "paw" good-bye, explaining to Mary, in extenuation ofher weakness, that she would never forgive herself if she neglected it andanything happened to him during her absence. She then climbed to the frontbarrel and secured the ribbons. Leander had brought out three rolls ofbedding of the inevitable bed-quilt variety, but Mrs. Yellett scorned suchluxury while driving, and accordingly gave hers to the "gov'ment" for aback-rest. Mary sat on the lower row of barrels, with her feet dangling,using one roll of bedding for a seat and the other comfortably arranged ather back as a cushion.

  Madam called sharply to the horses, "Hi-hi-hi-kerat! hi-kerat-kerat!" andthey started off at a rattling pace, the barrels of dip creaking andsqueaking as they swayed under their rope lashings. Mary bounced aboutlike a bean in a bag, working loose from between the bed-quilt rolls ateach gulley, clinging frantically to barrel ends, shaken back and forthlike a shuttle. Indeed, the drive seemed to combine every known form ofphysical exercise. Mrs. Yellett herself was in fine fettle; she drovesitting for a while, then rose, standing on a narrow ledge while she heldthe four ribbons lightly in one hand and tickled the leaders with a longwhip carried in the other. She drove her four horses over the rough roadwith the skill of a circus equestrienne, balancing easily on the crazyledge, shifting her weight from side to side as the wagon rattled downgullies and up ridges, the horses responding gallantly to the shrill"Hi-hi-kerat! hi-kerat! hi-kerat!" Her costume on this occasionrepresented joint concessions to her sex and the work that was before her,as the head of a family at the dipping-vat. She still wore the drum-shapedrabbit-skin cap pulled well down over her forehead for driving. The great,cable-like braids of hair stood out well below the cap, giving her head anappearance of denseness and solidity, but the rambling curls were stillblowing about her face,
perhaps adding to the sum total of grotesqueness.She wore a man's shirt of gray flannel, well open at the neck, from whichthe bronzed column of the throat rose in austere dignity. A pair of Mr.Yellett's trousers, stuffed into high, cow-puncher's boots, that met thehem of a skirt coming barely to the knees, contributed to the originalityof her dress.

  The wagon had been pitching like a ship at sea through the desertdreariness for about an hour, when Mary Carmichael suddenly becameconscious that the prods she had been receiving from time to time in herback were not due either to their manner of locomotion or to the freightcarried. Clinging to two barrels, she waited for the next lurch of thewagon to shake her free from the rolls of bedding, and, at the peril oflife and limb, looked round. Leander hung over the top row of barrels,gesticulating wildly. The change in the man, since leaving camp some twohours previous, was appalling. He seemed to have shrivelled away to awraith of his former self. His cheeks, his chin, had waned to thevanishing point. He opened his lips and mouthed horribly, yet hisfrightful grimacings conveyed no meaning. Mary called to Mrs. Yellett, buther voice was drowned in the rattle of the wagon, the clatter of fourhorses' hoofs, and the continual "Hi-hi-hi-kerat! hi-kerat!" of thedriver. In the mean time Leander pointed to his mouth and back to the roadin indescribably pathetic pantomime. "Perhaps the poor creature wants toturn back and die in his bed, like a Christian, even if he isn't one,"thought Mary, as she called and called, Leander still emitting the mostinhuman of cries, like the sounds made by deaf mutes in distress.Presently Mrs. Yellett drew up, and asked in the name of many profanethings what was the matter with her companions.

  Leander resumed his mouthings and his dumb show, but Mrs. Yellett proved abetter interpreter than Mary Carmichael.

  "God A'mighty!" she said, "he's lost his false teeth!" And without anotherword she turned the four horses and the wagon with a skill that felllittle short of sleight-of-hand.

  The dialogue that followed between Mrs. Yellett and Leander as to how farback he had dropped his teeth, cannot be given, owing to the inadequacy ofthe English language to reproduce his toothless enunciation. Catching, asMary did, the meaning of Mrs. Yellett's remarks only, she receivedsomething of the one-sided impression given by overhearing a telephoneconversation:

  "What did you have 'em out for?... You didn't have 'em out?... I justshook 'em out? Then what made you have your mouth open? Ef your mouth hadbeen shut, you couldn't have lost 'em.... You was a-yawnin', eh? Well, youare a plumb fool to yawn on this kind of a waggin, with your mouth full o'china teeth. Your yawnin' 'll put us back a good hour an' we won't reachcamp before sundown."

  At this point of the diatribe the Infidel left the wagon and began tosearch along the road. He said he had noticed a buffalo skull near theplace where he had dropped the teeth, and thought he could trace them bythis landmark. Mrs. Yellett held the ribbons and suggested that Mary getdown "and help to prospect for them teeth." As Mary clambered down sheheard a fragment of the matriarch's monologue, which, being dulyexpurgated for polite ears, was to the effect that she would rather taketen babies anywhere than one grown man, and that as for getting in theway, hindering, obstructing, and being a nuisance, generally speaking, manhad not his counterpart in the scheme of creation.

  "Talk about a woman bein' at the bottom of everything!" sniffed Mrs.Yellett; "I be so sick of always hearin' about 'the woman in the case!'Half the time the case would be a blame sight worse if it was leftexclusive to the men. The Book of Hiram says: 'A skunk may have his goodp'ints, but few folks is takin' the risk of waitin' round to getacquainted with 'em.'"

  While Mary was still "prospecting," a glad cry roused her attention, andLeander came up smiling, with his dental treasures nicely adjusted.

  "Quit smilin' like a rattlesnake, you plumb fool!" called out Mrs.Yellett. "Do you want to lose 'em again?"

  So, curtailing the muscular contraction indicative of his pleasure, theInfidel again took his place among the bed-quilts and the journey wasresumed.

  It was now about five in the afternoon. The heat, which had beenoppressive all day, suddenly relaxed its blistering grip, and a keenlypenetrating dampness, not unlike that of a sea-fog, came from some unknownquarter of the arid wastes and chilled the three travellers to the marrow.The horses flung up their heads and sniffed it, rearing and plunging as ifthey had scent of something menacing. Across the horizon a dark cloudscudded, no bigger than your hand.

  "Cloud-burst!" announced Mrs. Yellett.

  "Cloud-burst, all right enough," agreed Leander, and he turned up hiscoat-collar in simple preparation for the deluge.

  There flashed into Mary Carmichael's mind a sentence from her physicalgeography that she had been obliged to commit to heart in her school-days:"A cloud-burst is a sudden, capricious rainfall, as if the whole cloud hadbeen precipitated at once." She wanted to question her companions as tothe accuracy of this definition, but before she had time to frame asentence the real cloud-burst came, with a splitting crack of thunder;then the lightning flashed out its message in the short-hand of the storm,across the inky blackness, and the water fell as if the ocean had beeninverted. In the fraction of a second all three were drenched to the skin,the water pouring from them in sheets, as if they had been some slightobstruction in the path of a waterfall. The wagon was soon in a deepgully, with frothing, foaming, yellow water up to the hubs of the wheels.Mrs. Yellett, like some goddess of the storm, lashed her horses forward tokeep them from foundering in the mud, and the wagon creaked and groaned inall its timbers as it lurched and jolted through the angry torrents.

  Each moment Mary expected to be flung from the barrels, and clung till herfinger-tips were white and aching. From the drenched red bedquilts asticky crimson trail ran over the barrel heads, as well as over Mary'shands, face, and dress. Still they forged on through the deluge, Mrs.Yellett shouting and lashing the horses, holding them erect and safe withthe skill she never lost. The fur on her rabbit-skin cap was beaten flat.The great, wet braids had fallen from the force of the water and hungstraight and black, like huge snakes uncoiled. She was far from losing hergrip on either the horses or the situation, and from the inspiring ring ofher voice as she urged them forward it was plain that she took a fiercejoy in this conflict of the elements.

  It was bitterly cold, and Mary reflected that if Leander's teeth chatteredhalf as hard as hers did, without breaking, they must, indeed, be ofexcellent quality. The storm began to abate, and the sky became lighter,though the water still poured in torrents. As soon as her responsibilityas driver left her time to speak, Mrs. Yellett lost no time in fasteningthe cloud-burst to Leander.

  "This here is what comes of settin' up your back against God A'mighty andencouragin' the heathen and the infidel in his idolatry. I might 'a'knowed somethin' would happen, takin' you along! 'And the heathen and theinfidel went out, and the Lord God sent a cloud-burst to wet him,'" quotedMrs. Yellett from the apocryphal Scriptures that never yet failed tofurnish her with verse and text.

  The infidel, from his side of the wagon, began to display agitation. Hisjaws worked, but he said nothing.

  "You 'ain't lost them teeth again, have you?"

  He nodded his head wretchedly.

  "'And the Lord took away the teeth of his enemy, so that he could neitherbite nor talk,'" quoted Mrs. Yellett to the miserable man, who could makeno reply.

  "Wonder you wouldn't see the foolishness o' being a heathen and a infidel,and turn to the Lord! You 'ain't got no teeth, and it takes your wife toherd you. 'And the Lord multiplied the tribulations of his enemy.' You gotno more show standin' up agin the Lord than an insect would have standin'up agin me."

  She had Leander, at last, just where she wanted him. He was forced tolisten, and he could make no reply. She alternately abused him for hislack of faith and urged him to repentance. Leander raged, gesticulated,turned his back on her, mouthed, and finally put his fingers in his ears.But nothing stemmed the tide of Mrs. Yellett's eloquence; it was asinexhaustible and as remorseless as the cloud-burst.

  I
t continued bitterly cold, even after the rain had stopped falling, andthe heap of sodden bedclothes furnished no protection against the chillingdampness. It was growing dark; there was no red in the sunset, only astreak of vivid orange along the horizon, chill and clear as the empty,soulless flame of burning paper. There were no deep, glowing coals, noamethystine opalescence, fading into gold and violet. All was cold andsubdued, and the scrub pines on the mountain-tops stood out sharplyagainst this cold background like an etching on yellow paper.

  Mrs. Yellett's self-inspired scriptural maxims were discontinued after awhile, either because she could think of no more, or because therain-soaked, shivering, chattering object towards which they were directedwas too abject to inspire further efforts. Leander huddled on the barrelthat was farthest from Mrs. Yellett, and wrapped himself in the soaked redbedquilt. The dye smeared his face till he looked like an Indian braveready for battle, but there was no further suggestion of the fighting redman in the utter desolation of his attitude. Mary Carmichael, on herbarrel, shivered with grim patience and longed for a cup of tea. Only Mrs.Yellett gave no sign of anxiety or discomfort; she drove along, sometimeswhistling, sometimes swearing, erect as an Indian, and to all appearancesas oblivious of cold and wet as if she were in her own home.

  The gathering darkness into which the horses were plunging was mysteriousand appalling. Objects stood out enormously magnified, or distortedgrotesquely, in the uncertain light. It was like penetrating into the realInferno, like stumbling across the inspiration of Dante in all itssinister splendor. It was the Inferno of his dream rather than the Infernoof his poem; it had the ghastly reality of the unreal.

  "It wouldn't surprise me if we had a smash-up in Clear Creek," said Mrs.Yellett, just by way of adding her quota of cheerful speculation. Sheducked her head and whispered in Mary's ear:

  "It's all along of me hirin' _him_! I wouldn't be surprised if paw died.I'm thinkin' of shakin' him out after his teeth. 'Take not up with theenemy of the Lord, lest he make of you also an enemy.'"

  But there was no accent of apprehension in Mrs. Yellett's dismalprognostications of the evil that might befall her for employing Leander.She spoke more with the air of one who produces incidents to prove anargument than of one who anticipates a calamity.

  Leander, toothless and wretched, sitting on the side of the wagon, beganto show symptoms of joy comparable to that of the vanguard of theIsraelites, catching their first glimpse of the Promised Land. TouchingMary Carmichael on the shoulder, he pointed to a white tent and theremains of a camp-fire. Already Mrs. Yellett had begun to "Hallo, Ben!"But Ben was at work at the vat, which was still a quarter of a milefurther up the mountain; so Mrs. Yellett, throwing the reins to Leanderand bidding him turn out the horses, lost no time in building a fire,putting on coffee, and making her little party comfortable. So various washer efficiency that she seemed no less at home in these simple domestictasks than when guiding her horses, goddess-like, through the cloud-burst.And Mary Carmichael, succumbing gradually to the revivifying influence ofthe fire and the hot coffee, acknowledged honestly to herself a warmth ofaffection for her hostess and for the atmosphere Mrs. Yellett createdabout her that made even Virginia and her aunts seem less the only pivotof rational existence. She felt that she had come West with but one eye,as it were, and countless prejudices, whereas her powers of vision werefast becoming increased a hundredfold. How very tame life must be, shereflected, as she sat smiling to herself, to those who did not know Mrs.Yellett, how over-serious to those who did not know Leander! Yet, afterall, she knew that the real basis of her readjusted vision was her briefbut illuminating acquaintance with Judith Rodney. To Mary, freed for thefirst time in her life from the most elegantly provincial of surroundings,Judith seemed the incarnation of all the splendor and heroism of the West.And in the glow of her enthusiasm she decided then and there not toabandon the Yellett educational problem till she should have solved itsuccessfully. She might not be born to valiant achievement, like thesesturdy folk about her, but she might as well prove to them that an Easterntenderfoot was not all feebleness and inefficiency.

  "Leander!" called Mrs. Yellett. "Just act as if you was to home and washup these dishes."