Judith of the Plains

Judith Of The Plains by Marie
Manning

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Manning
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Title: Judith Of The Plains
Author: Marie Manning
Release Date: April 2005 [EBook #15573]
Language: American English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK JUDITH OF
THE PLAINS***

Judith Of The Plains
By Marie Manning
Harper & Brothers Publishers New York And London

Copyright, 1903. By Harper & Brothers
Printed In The United States Of America

[Image: Image #1]
Peter's Hand Sought Hers, And All Her Woman's Fear Of The Vague
Terrors Of The Dreadful Night Spoke In Her Answering Pressure--See
p. 154.

Contents
Contents "Town" The Encounter Leander And His Lady Judith, The
Postmistress The Trail Of Sentiment A Daughter Of The Desert Chugg
Takes The Ribbons The Rodneys At Home Mrs. Yellett And Her
"Gov'ment" On Horse-thief Trail The Cabin In The Valley The
Round-up Mary's First Day In Camp Judith Adjusts The Situation The
Wolf-hunt In The Land Of The Red Silence Mrs. Yellett Contends
With A Cloudburst Foreshadowed "Rocked By A Hempen String" The
Ball Credits A Word from Project Gutenberg The Full Project
Gutenberg License

Judith Of The Plains

I
"Town"
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