And then the wherefore of all this dashing horsemanship, this curveting, prancing, galloping revival of knightly tourney effects was apparent—­ Judith Rodney had opened post-office.  She had changed her riding clothes; or, rather, that portion of them to which the ladies took exception was now concealed by a long, black skirt.  Her wonderful braids of black hair had been twisted high on her head.  She was well worth a trip across the alkali wastes to see.  The room was packed with men.  One unconsciously got the impression that a fire, a fight, or some crowd-collecting casualty had happened.  Above the continual clinking of spurs there arose every idiom and peculiarity of speech of which these United States are capable.  There is no Western dialect, properly speaking.  Men bring their modes of expression with them from Maine or Minnesota, as the case may be, but their figures of speech, which give an essential picturesqueness to their language, are almost entirely local—­the cattle and sheep industries, prospecting, the 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.