The Wrong Woman | Page 6

up her mind to the Somewhere in front of her, she simply went ahead; for the afternoon was going and the night was sure to come--a prospect that filled her with dread.
It is no wonder that Lot's wife looked back when she was well out on the plain. Probably she wanted to see where she was going--so Janet thought, as she trudged wearily along. Or possibly the poor woman wanted to make sure that she was going at all; for when you are walking always at the middle of things, and not coming to anything, there is no progress. Janet thought--for she had to think something--that she knew just how stationary Lot's wife felt when she was turned into a pillar of salt. Possibly, if the truth were known, Lot's wife desired to be turned into a pillar of salt--who can tell? Janet, walking along so unrelated and ineffectual, rather fancied that she herself might want to be turned into a salt-lick (she had passed one all worn hollow as the stone of Mecca by the tongues of many Pilgrims); because if she were such a thing she would not be so utterly useless and foolish under the eye of heaven. But still she kept trudging along, feeling the growing weight of the slicker in her arms, for Janet was not much of a hand to carry anything on her shoulder.
Janet walked and walked, but her walking did not seem to have any effect upon that endless land. The fence did not put in its appearance, neither did a house nor a path, nor anything else which would make it different from the sky-covered plain that it was. It persisted in being itself, world without end, amen. To make matters worse, her shoe began to hurt (she had suspected it would and taken the man's promise that it would n't), and the more she persevered the more it clamped her toe and wrung her heel and drew fire to her instep. But there was nothing to do but walk; and she kept on with her footsteps till the operation became monotonous. Still that roadless scene was unmoved. The world was "round like an apple"; that she could plainly see. And as to her feelings, this globe was just a big treadmill under her aching feet.
The only escape from such tyranny is to rise superior to it, withdrawing the mind from its service; so she decided to think of something else. And now, as she went on with no company but her own thoughts, she had a growing realization, more and more vivid, of her fall from the horse and what the consequences might have been. It was a miraculous escape, due to no management of hers. Suppose she had been disabled!--and in such a place! What a thought! She became frightened at what was past. She had not really thought of it before; and now that she did, her imagination was thrown wide open to the future, and she looked into the possibilities ahead of her. A cow, she recalled, has been known to attack even a horse and rider. And these wild range cattle; how might they take the presence of a woman, never having seen one before? There were thousands of them wandering about this big place, with horns that spread like the reach of a man's arms. Her only recourse was to wish she were a man. This was a favorite wish of hers, indulged in upon those occasions when she discovered that she had been a "silly coward" or a "perfect fool." After all, she considered, a woman is n't much loss.
"And it came to pass, when they had brought them forth abroad, that he said. Escape for thy life; look not behind thee, neither stay thou in all the plain; escape to the mountain, lest thou be consumed. . . . But his wife looked back from behind him, and she became a pillar of salt." It was an old Sunday-school lesson. And Janet had to think something.
CHAPTER II
While Janet was determinedly putting her foot down on pain and keeping up the light of faith on the distant sky-line, another and quite separate horizon was witnessing a little incident of its own. On a spot on the prairie which was no more a particular place than any other part of it, a lamb was born. The two occupants of those parts, a man and a dog (not to mention a flock of sheep), were soon at the spot where it lay, its small body marking down in white the beginning of the Season. Nature had thus dropped her card announcing that lambing-time was now here; and so the little white form in the grass, meaning so much, claimed all the attention due to an important