he Indians, poker, faro, the
dance-halls, all contribute their printable or unprintable embellishment.

Judith managed them all--cow-punchers, sheep-herders, prospectors,
freighters--with an impersonal skill that suggested a little solitary
exercise in the bowling-alley. The ten-pins took their tumbles in good
part--no one could congratulate himself on escaping the levelling ball--and
where there's a universal lack of luck, doubtless also there will be found
a sort of grim fellowship.

That they were all more or less in love with her there could be no doubt.
As a matter of fact, Judith Rodney did not depend on the scarcity of women
in the desert for her pre-eminence in the interests of this hot-headed
group. Her personality--and through no conscious effort of hers--would have
been pre-eminent anywhere. As it was, in this woman-forsaken wilderness
she might have stirred up a modern edition of the Trojan war at any
moment. That she did not, despite the lurking suggestion of temptation
written all over her, brought back the words of Leander: "If Judy wasn't a
good girl, these boys would just nacherally become extinct shooting each
other upon account of her."

And yet what a woman she was! It struck Miss Carmichael, as she watched
Judith hold these warring elements in the hollow of her hand, that her
interest might be due to a certain temperamental fusion; that there might
lie, at the essence of her being, a subtle combination of saint and devil.
One could fancy her leading an army on a crusade or provoking a bar-room
brawl. The challenging quality of her beauty, the vividness of color, the
suggestion of endurance and radiating health in every line, were
comparable to the great primeval forces about her. She was cast to be the
mother of men of brawn and muscle, who would make this vast, unclaimed
wilderness subject to them.

At present neither pole of her character, as it had been hastily
estimated, was even remotely suggested. The atmosphere in the post-office
was, considering the potential violence of its visitors, singularly calm.
And Judith, feeding these wild border lads on scraps of chaff and banter,
and retaining their absolute loyalty, was a sight worth seeing. She had
the alertness of a lion-tamer locked in a cage with the lords of the
jungle; the rashly confident she humbled, the meek she exalted, and all
with such genuine good-fellowship, such an absence of coquetry in the
genial game of give and take, that on