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17. The words of a woman in a community where women are few carry
almost the weight of inspiration. Be she never so hideous or so vile,
she is in some measure a Deborah, and the more yet, if she be
moved to the lust and love of revenge of the prophetess who sang in
the frenzy of blood drunkenness, "Blessed above women shall Jael
the wife of Heber, the Kenite, be. Blessed shall she be above women
in the tent."
The Declaration of Independence roused the screeching eagle of
freedom in the breasts of all the white men. With the Mexicans it
was a slightly different sentiment. At best they could never be relied
upon for steady service. A couple of months' pay in their pockets,
and they must rest them for at least six. It is always to be taken into
consideration when they are hired. They had been paid only the day
before. And, moreover, the Greaser follows the Gringo's lead easily—
to his undoing.
The murmurs in the corral rose louder. It was not that Kirby and his
partners underpaid, underfed, or overworked the American citizens.
It was that their language was decent and moderate; and the lash of
the slave driver would have stung less than the sight of the black
coats and the seven o'clock dinner. In the midst of white savages
and red, the four clung to the forms of civilization with that dogged
persistence in the unessential, that worship of the memory of a
forsaken home, for which the Englishman, time and again, lays down
his life without hesitation. That was the grievance.
While Kirby went through the oppressive rite of afternoon tea within
the slant-roofed log cabin, and tried to hide from his wife the fear
which grew as the shadows lengthened across the clearing out in
the corral, the men had reached open mutiny. The smouldering
sullenness had at last burst into flaming defiance, blown by the gale
of the woman's wrath.
After he had had his tea Kirby got up, went out to the corral, and
called to one of the men, who hesitated for a moment, then
slouched over, kicking with his heavy booted toe as he passed at the
18. hocks of a horse in one of the stalls. Kirby saw him do it, but he
checked his wrath. He had learned to put up with many things.
"Don't you think," he suggested, "that it might be a good idea for
you and some other man to ride down the road a bit—"
The man interrupted, "I ain't going daown the road, nor anywheres
else before supper—nor after supper neither, if I don't feel like it."
He was bold enough in speech, but his eyes dropped before Kirby's
indignant ones.
It was a fatal want of tact perhaps, characteristic of the race, but
then the characteristic is so fine. "You will do whatever I tell you to
do," the voice was low and strained, but not wavering. It reached
the group by the harness-room door.
With one accord they strode forward to the support of their
somewhat browbeaten brother. What they would do was exactly as
they pleased, they told the tyrant. They shook their fists in his face.
It was all in the brutal speech of the frontier, mingled with the liquid
ripple of argot Spanish, and its vicious, musical oaths. The deep
voice of the woman carried above everything, less decent than the
men. It was a storm of injury.
Kirby was without fear, but he was also without redress. He turned
from them, his face contracted with the pain of his impotence, and
walked back to the house. "I could order them off the ranch to-
night," he told his wife, as he dropped on a chair, and taking up the
hearth brush made a feint of sweeping two or three cinders from the
floor; "but it's ten to one they wouldn't go and it would weaken my
authority—not that I have any, to be sure—and besides," he flung
down the brush desperately and turned to her, "I didn't want to tell
you before, but there is a pretty straight rumor that Victorio's band,
or a part of it, is in these hills. We may need the men at any time."
Neither spoke of the two who should have been back hours ago. The
night closed slowly down.
19. The Texan woman went back to the kitchen and finished cooking the
supper for the hands—a charred sort of Saturnalian feast. "She can
git her own dinner if she wants to," she proclaimed, and was
answered by a chorus of approval.
While the men sat at the long table, shovelling in with knife and
three-pronged fork the food of the master their pride forbade them
to serve, a horse came at a run, up to the quadrangle, and a cow-
boy rushed into the open doorway. "Apaches!" he gasped, clutching
at the lintel, wild-eyed, "Apaches!"
They sprang up, with a clatter of dishes and overturning of benches
and a simultaneous cry of "Whereabouts?"
He had seen a large band heading for the ranch, and had found a
dead white man on the north road, he said, and he gesticulated
madly, his voice choked with terror.
Had it been all arranged, planned, and rehearsed for months
beforehand, the action could not have been more united. They
crowded past him out of the door and ran for the corrals, and each
dragged a horse or a mule from the stalls, flinging on a halter or
rope or bridle, whatever came to hand, from the walls of the harness
room.
But there was more stock than was needed.
"Turn the rest loose," cried the woman, and set the example herself.
Kirby, hurrying from the house to learn the cause of the new uproar,
was all but knocked down and trodden under the hoofs of all his
stock, driven from the enclosure with cracking of whips and with
stones. Then a dozen ridden horses crowded over the dropped bars,
the woman in the lead astride, as were the men.
"What is this?" he shouted, grabbing at a halter-shank and clinging
to it until a knife slashed down on his wrist.
20. "Apaches on the north road," they called back; and the woman
screamed above it all a devilish farewell, "Better have 'em to dinner
in claw-hammer coats."
It was a sheer waste of good ammunition, and it might serve as a
signal to the Indians as well; Kirby knew it, and yet he emptied his
six-shooter into the deep shadows of the trees where they had
vanished, toward the south.
Then he ran into the corral, and, snatching up a lantern from the
harness room, looked around. It was empty. There was only a pack-
burro wandering loose and nosing at the grains in the mangers.
He turned and went back to the cabin, where his wife stood at the
door, with the children clinging to her. From down the north road
there came a blood-freezing yell, and a shot, reverberating, rattling
from hill to hill, muffling into silence among the crowding pines.
As he shut the door and bolted it with the great iron rods, there tore
into the clearing a score of vague, savage figures. It looked, when
he saw it for an instant, as he put up the wooden blinds, like some
phantom dance of the devils of the mountains, so silent they were,
with their unshod ponies, so quick moving. And then a short silence
was broken by cries and shots, the pinge of bullets, and the whizz of
arrows.
There were two rooms to the cabin where they were, the big sitting
room and the small bedchamber beyond. Kirby went into the
bedroom and came out with two rifles and a revolver. He put the
revolver into his wife's hands. "I'll do my best, you know, dear. But if
I'm done for, if there is no hope for you and the children, use it," he
said. And added, "You understand?"
Of a truth she understood only too well, that death with a bullet
through the brain could be a tender mercy.
"Not until there is no hope," he impressed, as he put the barrel of
his rifle through a knot hole and fired at random.
21. She reloaded for him, and fired from time to time herself, and he
moved from the little round hole in the wall to one in the window
blind, in the feeble, the faithless hope that the Indians might
perhaps be deceived, might fancy that there was more than the one
forsaken man fighting with unavailing courage for the quiet woman
who stayed close by his side, and for the two children, huddled
whimpering in one corner, their little trembling arms clasped round
each other's necks.
Twenty, yes ten, of those who, as the sound of the firing reached
their ears, were making off at a run down the south road for the
settlement in the valley, could have saved the fair-haired children
and the young mother, who helped in the fruitless fight without a
plaint of fear. Ten men could have done it, could have done it easily;
but not one man. And Kirby knew it now, as the light of flames
began to show through the chinks of the logs, and the weight of
heavy bodies thudded against the door.
It was a strong door, built of great thick boards and barred with iron,
but it must surely cede before fire and the blows. It wrenched on its
huge hinges.
Kirby set down his gun and turned to his wife, holding out his arms.
She went to him and he kissed her on the forehead and the lips, in
farewell. "Good-by," he said; "now take the children in there."
No need to tell her that her courage must not falter at that last
moment, which would soon come. He knew it, as he looked straight
into those steadfast, loving eyes. She clung to his hand and stooped
and kissed it, too; then she went to the children and took them,
quivering and crying, into the other room, and closed the dividing
door.
Kirby, with a revolver in each hand, placed himself before it. It would
avail nothing. But a man must needs fight to the end. And the end
was now.
22. There was a stronger blow at the door, as of a log used by way of a
ram. It gave, swayed, and fell crashing in, and the big room
swarmed with screaming fiends, their eyes gleaming wildly in the
light of the burning hay and the branches piled against the cabin, as
they waved their arms over their feathered heads.
The one man at bay whirled round twice, with a bullet in his heart
and an arrow through his neck. "Now!" he made one fierce effort to
cry, as he staggered again and dropped on his face, to be trampled
under forty feet.
It was the signal to the woman in that other room behind the locked
door, and above all the demoniacal sounds it reached her. Only an
instant she hesitated, until that door, too, began to give. Then a cold
muzzle of steel found, in the darkness, two little struggling, dodging
faces—and left them marred. And once again the trigger was
unflinchingly pulled, as greedy arms reached out to catch the white,
woman's figure that staggered and fell.
* * * * * * * *
Cairness and Landor and a detachment of troops that had ridden
hard all through the night, following an appalling trail, but coming
too late after all, found them so in the early dawn.
There was a mutilated thing that had once been a man's body on
the floor in the half-burned log cabin. And in another room lay two
children, whose smooth, baby foreheads were marked, each with a
round violet-edged hole. Beside them was their mother, with her
face turned to the rough boards—mercifully. For there had been no
time to choose the placing of that last shot, and it had disfigured
cruelly as it did its certain work.
23. XI
It was not quite an all-summer campaign. The United States
government drove the hostiles over the border into the provinces of
the Mexican government, which understood the problem rather
better than ourselves, and hunted the Apache, as we the coyote,
with a bounty upon his scalp.
Thereafter some of the troops sat down at the water-holes along the
border to watch, and to write back pathetic requests for all the
delicacies supplied by the commissariat, from anchovy paste and
caviare to tinned mushrooms and cove oysters. A man may live upon
bacon and beans and camp bread, or upon even less, when his duty
to his country demands, but it is not in the Articles of War that he
should continue to do so any longer than lack of transportation
compels.
Others of the troops were ordered in, and among them was
Landor's. It had gone out for a twenty days' scout, and had been in
the field two months. It was ragged and all but barefoot, and its
pack-train was in a pitiable way. Weeks of storm in the Mogollons
and days of quivering heat on the plains had brought its clothing and
blankets to the last stages.
Moreover, Landor was very ill. In the Mogollons he had gathered and
pressed specimens of the gorgeous wild flowers that turn the
plateaux into a million-hued Eden, and one day there had lurked
among the blossoms a sprig of poison weed, with results which were
threatening to be serious. He rode at the head of his column,
however, as it made for home by way of the Aravaypa Cañon.
Were the cañon of the Aravaypa in any other place than Arizona,
which, as the intelligent public knows, is all one wide expanse of dry
and thirsty country, a parched place in the wilderness, a salt land,
24. and not inhabited; were it in any other place, it would be set forth in
railway folders, and there would be camping privileges and a hotel,
and stages would make regular trips to it, and one would come upon
groups of excursionists on burros, or lunching among its boulders.
Already it has been in a small way discovered, and is on the road to
being vulgarized by the camera. The lover of Nature, he who loves
the soul as well as the face of her, receives when he sees a
photograph of a fine bit of scenery he had felt in a way his own
property until then, something the blow that the lover of a woman
does when he learns that other men than he have known her
caresses.
But in the days of Victorio and his predecessors and successors,
Aravaypa Cañon was a fastness. Men went in to hunt for gold, and
sometimes they came out alive, and sometimes they did not.
Occasionally Apaches met their end there as well.
There was one who had done so now. The troops looking up at him,
rejoiced. He was crucified upon an improvised cross of unbarked
pine branches, high up at the top of a sheer peak of rock. He stood
out black and strange against the whitish blue of the sky. His head
was dropped upon his fleshless breast, and there was a vulture
perched upon it, prying its hooked bill around in the eye sockets.
Two more, gorged and heavy, balanced half asleep upon points of
stone.
It was all a most charming commentary upon the symbol and
practice of Christianity, in a Christian land, and the results thereof as
regarded the heathen of that land—if one happened to see it in that
way.
But the men did not. It was hardly to be expected that they should,
both because the abstract and the ethical are foreign to the major
part of mankind, in any case; and also because, with this particular
small group of mankind, there was too fresh a memory of a dead
woman lying by the bodies of her two children in a smouldering log
cabin among the mountains and the pines.
25. They rode on, along the trail, at a walk and by file, and directly they
came upon the other side of the question. Landor's horse stopped,
with its forefeet planted, and a snort of fright. Landor had been bent
far back, looking up at a shaft of rock that rose straight from the
bottom and pierced the heavens hundreds of feet above, and he was
very nearly unseated. But he caught himself and held up his hand as
a signal to halt.
There were two bodies lying across the trail in front of him. He
dismounted, and throwing his reins to the trumpeter went forward to
investigate. It was not a pleasant task. The men had been dead
some time and their clothing was beginning to fall away in shreds.
Some of their outfit was scattered about, and he could guess from it
that they had been prospectors. A few feet away was the claim they
had been working. Only their arms had been stolen, otherwise
nothing appeared to be missing. There was even in the pockets
considerable coin, in gold and silver, which Landor found, when he
took a long knife from his saddle bags, and standing as far off as
might be, slit the cloth open.
The knife was one he had brought from home, seizing it from the
kitchen table at the last minute. It was very sharp and had been
Felipa's treasured bread cutter. It came in very well just now, chiefly
because of its length.
He called the first sergeant to his aid. Brewster was in the rear of
the command, and, as had occurred with increasing frequency in the
last two months, showed no desire to be of any more use than
necessary. As for Cairness, who had been more of a lieutenant to
Landor than the officer himself, he had left the command two days
before and gone back to the San Carlos reservation.
So the captain and the first sergeant took up the money and the
loose papers, together with a couple of rings from the hands, and
wrapping them in a poncho, carried them off to serve as possible
means of identification, for it had got beyond all question of
features. Then two men moved the bodies from the trail, with long
26. sticks, and covered them with a pile of stones. Landor found a piece
of board by the mouth of the claim and drew on it, with an end of
charred stick, a skull and cross bones with a bow and arrow, and
stood it up among the stones, in sign to all who might chance to
pass thereby that since men had here died at the hands of the
Apaches, other men might yet meet a like fate.
On the next day they were in the flat, nearing the post. There was a
dust storm. Earlier in the morning the air had grown suddenly more
dry, more close and lifeless than ever, suffocating, and a yellow
cloud had come in the western sky. Then a hot wind began to blow
the horses' manes and tails, to snarl through the greasewood
bushes, and to snap the loose ends of the men's handkerchiefs
sharply. The cloud had thinned and spread, high up in the sky, and
the light had become almost that of a sullen evening. Black bits
floated and whirled high overhead, and birds beat about in the gale.
Gradually the gale and the dust had dropped nearer to the earth, a
sand mist had gone into every pore and choked and parched. And
now the tepid, thick wind was moaning across the plain, meeting no
point of resistance anywhere.
Landor still rode at the head of his column, but his chin was sunk
down on his red silk neckerchief, his face was swollen and distorted
under its thick beard, and his eyes were glazed. They stared straight
ahead into the sand whirl and the sulphurous glare. He had sent
Brewster on ahead some hours before. "You will want to see Miss
McLane as soon as possible," he had said, "and there is no need of
both of us here."
Brewster had taken an escort and disappeared down the vista of
white sands and scrub growth, though it was Landor himself who
should have gone. He swayed now in the saddle, his thick lips hung
open, and he moved in a mental cloud as dense as the one of dust
that poured round him.
Brewster reached the post some eighteen hours ahead of him. He
reported, and saw Miss McLane; then he made himself again as
27. other men and went down to the post trader's, with a definite aim in
view, that was hardly to be guessed from his loitering walk. There
were several already in the officers' room, and they talked, as a
matter of course, of the campaign.
"Seen the way Landor's been catching it?" they asked.
And Brewster said he had not.
They went on to tell him that it was all in the Tucson papers, which
Brewster knew, however, quite as well as they did themselves. He
had made friends among the citizen volunteers of San Tomaso on
the night they had camped by the old lake bed, and they had seen
that he was kept supplied with cuttings.
But he pleaded entire ignorance, and the others were at
considerable pains to enlighten him.
It appeared that Landor was accused of cowardice, and that his
name was handled with the delicate sarcasm usual with Western
journalism—as fine and pointed as a Stone-age axe.
Brewster poured himself a glass of beer and drank it contemplatively
and was silent. Then he set it down on the bare table with a sharp
little rap, suggesting determination made. It was suggestive of yet
more than this, and caused them to say "Well?" with a certain
eagerness. He shrugged his shoulders and changed the subject,
refusing pointedly to be brought back to it, and succeeding
altogether in the aim which had brought him down there.
But that same night he picked two for their reputation of repeating
all they knew, and took them into his own rooms and told his story
to them. And he met once again with such success that when
Landor rode into the post the next day at about guard-mounting,
three officers, meeting him, raised their caps and passed on.
It struck even through Landor's pain-blurred brain that it was odd.
But the few faculties he could command still were all engaged in
28. keeping himself in the saddle until he could reach his own house,
where Ellton and Felipa were waiting to get him to his room.
He went upon the sick report at once, and for three days thereafter
raved of crucified women with fair hair, of children lying dead in the
cañon, of the holes in his boot soles, and a missing aparejo, also of
certain cursed citizens, and the bad quality of the canned butter.
Then he began to come to himself and to listen to all that Felipa had
to tell him of the many things she had not put in her short and
labored letters. He saw that she looked more beautiful and less well
than when he had left her. There was a shadow of weariness on her
face that gave it a soft wistfulness which was altogether becoming.
He supposed it was because she had nursed him untiringly, as she
had; but it did not occur to him to thank her, because she had done
only what was a wife's duty, only what he would have done for her if
the case had been reversed. Toward the end of the day he began to
wonder that no one had been to see him, and he spoke of it.
"Mr. Ellton was here this morning," Felipa told him, "and he will be in
again before retreat."
But he was not satisfied. His entry into the post and the cool
greeting of the three officers began to come back to him.
Felipa could be untruthful with an untroubled soul and countenance
to those she disliked. In her inherited code, treachery to an enemy
was not only excusable, but right. But not even in order to save her
husband worry could she tell him a shadow of an untruth. She did
her best, which was far from good, to evade, however. The others
would probably come, now that he could see them.
But had they come? he insisted.
The commandant had sent his orderly with a note.
He raised himself from the pillows too abruptly for a very weak man.
"What is the matter, Felipa?" he demanded.
29. She told him that she did not know, and tried to coax him back to
quietness.
"There is something," he insisted, dropping his head down again
wearily.
"Perhaps there is," she admitted unwillingly.
He lay thinking for a while, then had her send the striker for Ellton,
who promptly, and awkwardly, replied to the anxious question as to
what might be the trouble, that he was not quite sure, but perhaps it
had to do with these—"these" being a small roll of newspaper
clippings he took from his portfolio.
Landor looked them over and gave them back contemptuously.
"Well?" he said, "there's nothing new in all that. It's devilish
exasperating, but it's old as Hamilcar. I made an enemy of a fellow
from Tucson, reporter named Stone, over at the San Carlos Agency a
few years ago. He's been waiting to roast me ever since. There must
be something else."
The adjutant agreed reluctantly. "I think there is. It wouldn't surprise
me if some one had been talking. I can't get at it. But you must not
bother about it. It will blow over."
As an attempt at consolation, it failed. Landor fairly sprang into a
sitting posture, with a degree of impulsiveness that was most
unusual with him. His eyes glistened from the greenish circles
around them. "Blow over! Good Lord! do you suppose I'll let it blow
over? It's got to be sifted to the bottom. And you know that as well
as I do." He lay weakly back again, and Felipa came to the edge of
the bed and, sitting upon it, stroked his head with her cool hand.
Ellton ventured some assistance. "I do know this much, that the C.
O. got a telegram from some Eastern paper, asking if the reports of
your cowardice as given in the territorial press were true."
Landor asked eagerly what he had answered.
30. "I didn't see the telegram, but it was in effect that he had no
knowledge of anything of the sort, and put no faith in it."
"Doesn't he, though? Then why doesn't he come around and see me
when I'm lying here sick?" He was wrathful and working himself
back into a fever very fast.
Felipa shook her head at Ellton. "Don't get yourself excited about it,
Jack dear," she soothed, and Ellton also tried to quiet him.
"He will come, I dare say. And so will the others, now that you are
able to see them. Brewster inquired."
The captain's lips set.
Ellton wondered, but held his peace. And the commandant did go to
Landor's quarters within the next few hours. Which was Ellton's
doings.
"I don't know what has been said, Major, but something more than
just what's in the papers must have gotten about. That sort of mud-
slinging is too common to cause comment, even. It must be some
spite work. There's no reason to suppose, surely, that after a quarter
of a century of gallant service he's been and shown the white
feather. He's awfully cut up, really he is. He's noticed it, of course,
and it's too deuced bad, kicking a man when he's down sick and
can't help himself."
The major stopped abruptly in his walk to and fro and faced him.
"Do you know more about it, then, than Brewster who was with
him?"
Ellton fairly leaped in the air. "Brewster! So it's Brewster! The in—"
Then he recollected that Brewster was going to be the major's son-
in-law, and he stopped short. "No wonder he keeps away from
there," he simmered down.
"He told me it was because he and Landor had had some trouble in
the field, and weren't on the best of terms."
31. "I say, Major, if he's got any charges to prefer why doesn't he put
them on paper and send them in to you, or else shut up his head?"
He was losing his temper again.
The major resumed his walk and did not answer.
Ellton went on, lapsing into the judicial. "In the meantime, anyway, a
man's innocent until he's proven guilty. I say, do go round and see
him. The others will follow your lead. He's awfully cut up and
worried, and he's sick, you know."
So that evening when all the garrison was upon its front porches and
the sidewalk, the major and the lieutenant went down the line to
Landor's quarters. And their example was followed. But some hung
back, and constraint was in the air.
Because of which Landor, as soon as he was up, went in search of
the commanding officer, and found him in the adjutant's office, and
the adjutant with him. He demanded an explanation. "If any one has
been saying anything about me, I want to know it. I want to face
him. It can't be that newspaper rot. We are all too used to it."
"It seems, Landor," the major said, "to be rather that which is left
unsaid."
Landor asked what he meant by that. "I'm sick of all this speaking in
riddles," he said.
The major told him a little reluctantly. "Well, it's this, then: Brewster
will not, or cannot, defend your conduct in the matter of the San
Tomaso volunteers."
Landor sat speechless for a moment. Then he jumped up, knocking
over a pile of registers. He seized a bone ruler, much stained with
official inks, red and blue, and slapped it on the palm of his hand for
emphasis. "I'll demand a court of inquiry into my conduct. This
shan't drop, not until the strongest possible light has been turned on
it. Why doesn't Brewster prefer charges? Either my conduct was
such that he can defend it openly, or else it was such as to call for a
32. court-martial, and to justify him in preferring charges. Certainly
nothing can justify him in smirching me with damning silence. That
is the part neither of an officer nor of a man." He kicked one of the
registers out of the way, and it flapped across the floor and lay with
its leaves crumpled under the fair leather covers.
"By George! McLane, it strikes me as devilish odd that you should all
give ear to the insinuations of a shave-tail like Brewster, against an
old hand like myself. Be that as it may, however, until this thing has
been cleared up, I shall thank all of you to continue in your attitude
of suspicion, and not in any way draw on your charity by extending
it to me. I shall demand a court of inquiry." He laid the ruler back on
the desk. "I report for duty, sir," he added officially.
It was the beginning of a self-imposed Coventry. He sent in a
demand for a court of inquiry, and Brewster, with much show of
reluctance and leniency, preferred charges.
The post talked it over unceasingly, and commented on Landor's
attitude. "He stalks around in defiant dignity and makes everybody
uncomfortable," they said.
"Everybody ought to be uncomfortable," Ellton told them;
"everybody who believed the first insinuation he heard ought to be
confoundedly uncomfortable." He resigned from the acting adjutancy
and returned to his troop duties, that Landor, who had relieved
Brewster of most of the routine duties, and who was still fit for the
sick list himself, might not be overburdened.
So the demand and the charges lay before the department
commander, and there was a lull, during which Landor came upon
further trouble, and worse. He undertook the examination of the
papers he had found in the dead men's pockets. They had been
buried in earth for two weeks.
He found that it had been father and son come from the Eastern
states in search of the wealth that lay in that vague and prosperous,
if uneasy, region anywhere west of the Missouri. And among the
33. papers was a letter addressed to Felipa. Landor held it in the flat of
his hand and frowned, perplexed. He knew that it was Cairness's
writing. More than once on this last scout he had noticed its
peculiarities. They were unmistakable. Why was Cairness writing to
Felipa? And why had he not used the mails? The old, never yet
justified, distrusts sprang broad awake. But yet he was not the man
to brood over them. He remembered immediately that Felipa had
never lied to him. And she would not now. So he took the stained
letter and went to find her.
She was sitting in her room, sewing. Of late she had become
domesticated, and she was fading under it. He had seen it already,
and he saw it more plainly than ever just now. She looked up and
smiled. Her smile had always been one of her greatest charms,
because it was rare and very sweet. "Jack," she greeted him, "what
have you done with the bread knife you took with you, dear? I have
been lost without it."
"I have it," he said shortly, standing beside her and holding out the
letter.
She took it and looked from it to him, questioningly. "What is this?"
she asked.
Then it was the first, at any rate. His manner softened.
"It smells horribly," she exclaimed, dropping it on the floor, "it smells
of hospitals—disinfectants." But she stooped and picked it up again.
"It is from Cairness," said Landor, watching her narrowly. Her hand
shook, and he saw it.
"From Cairness?" she faltered, looking up at him with frightened
eyes; "when did it come?" Her voice was as unsteady as her hands.
She tore it open and began to read it there before him. He stood
and watched her lips quiver and grow gray and fall helplessly open.
If she had been under physical torture, she could have kept them
pressed together, but not now.
34. "Where did you—" she began; but her voice failed, and she had to
begin again. "Where did you get this?"
He told her, and she held it out to him. He started to take it, then
pushed it away.
She put down her work and rose slowly to her feet before him. She
could be very regal sometimes. Brewster knew it, and Cairness
guessed it; but it was the first time it had come within Landor's
experience, and he was a little awed.
"I wish you to read it, John," she said quietly.
He hesitated still. "I don't doubt you," he told her.
"You do doubt me. If you did not, it would never occur to you to
deny it. You doubt me now, and you will doubt me still more if you
don't read it. In justice to me you must."
It was very short, but he held it a long time before he gave it back.
"And do you care for him, too?" he asked, looking her straight in the
eyes. It was a very calm question, put—he realized it with
exasperation—as a father might have put it.
She told him that she did, quite as calmly. Her manner and her tone
said it was very unfortunate, that the whole episode was
unfortunate, but that it was not her fault.
He went over to the window and stood looking out of it, his hands
clasped behind his back. Some children were playing tag around the
flag-staff, and he watched a long-limbed small daughter of the
frontier dodging and running, and was conscious of being glad that
she touched the goal.
It was characteristic of Felipa that she forgot him altogether and
reread the letter, her breath coming in audible gasps.
"I give this to a friend," it ran, "to be delivered into your own hands,
because I must tell you that, though I should never see you again—
35. for the life I lead is hazardous, and chance may at any time take you
away forever—I shall love you always. You will not be angry with
me, I know. You were not that night by the campfire, and it is not
the unwaveringly good woman who resents being told she is loved,
in the spirit I have said it to you. I do not ask for so much as your
friendship in return, but only that you remember that my life and
devotion are yours, and that, should the time ever come that you
need me, you send for me. I will come. I will never say this to you
again, even should I see you; but it is true, now and for all time."
Landor turned away from the window and looked at her. It was in
human nature that she had never seemed so beautiful before.
Perhaps it was, too, because there was warmth in her face, the
stress of life that was more than physical, at last.
It struck him that he was coolly analytical while his wife was reading
the love-letter (if that bald statement of fact could be called a love-
letter) of another man, and telling him frankly that she returned the
man's love. Why could not he have had love, he who had done so
much for her? There was always the subconsciousness of that
sacrifice. He had magnified it a little, too, and it is difficult to be
altogether lovable when one's mental attitude is "see what a good
boy am I." But he had never reflected upon that. He went on telling
himself what—in all justice to him—he had never thrown up to her,
that his life had been one long devotion to her; rather as a principle
than as a personality, to be sure, but then— And yet she loved the
fellow whom she had not known twenty-four hours in all—a private,
a government scout, unnoticeably below her in station. In station, to
be sure; but not in birth, after all. It was that again. He was always
brought up face to face with her birth. He tried to reason it down,
for the hundredth time. It was not her fault, and he had taken her
knowingly, chancing that and the consequences of her not loving
him. And these were the consequences: that she was sitting rigid
before him, staring straight ahead with the pale eyes of suffering,
and breathing through trembling lips.
36. But she would die before she would be faithless to him. He was sure
of that. Only—why should he exact so much? Why should he not
make the last of a long score of sacrifices? He had been unselfish
with her always, from the day he had found the little child, shy as
one of the timid fawns in the woods of the reservation, and pretty in
a wild way, until now when she sat there in front of him, a woman,
and his wife, loving, and beloved of, another man.
He went and stood beside her and laid his hand upon her hair.
She looked up and tried hard to smile again.
"Poor little girl," he said kindly. He could not help it that they were
the words of a compassionate friend, rather than of an injured
husband.
She shook her head. "It is the first you have known of it, Jack," she
said; "but I have known it for a long while, and I have not been
unhappy."
"And you care for him?"
She nodded.
"Are you certain of it? You have seen so very little of him, and you
may be mistaken."
If he had had any hope, it vanished before her unhesitating,
positive, "No; I am not mistaken. Oh, no!"
He took a chair facing her, as she put the letter back in its envelope
and laid it in her work-basket. It was very unlike anything he had
ever imagined concerning situations of the sort. But then he was not
imaginative. "Should you be glad to be free to marry him?" he
asked, in a spirit of unbiassed discussion.
She looked at him in perplexity and surprise. "How could I be? There
is no use talking about it."
37. He hesitated, then blurted it out, in spite of the inward warning that
it would be unwise. "I could let you free yourself."
His glance fell before hers of dismay, disapproval, and anger—an
anger so righteous that he felt himself to be altogether in the wrong.
"Do you mean divorce?" She said it like an unholy word.
He had forgotten that the laws and rites of the Church of Rome had
a powerful hold upon her, though she was quite devoid of religious
sentiment. He admitted apologetically that he had meant divorce,
and she expressed her reproach. In spite of himself and what he felt
ought properly to be the tragedy of the affair, he smiled. The humor
of her majestic disapproval was irresistible under the circumstances.
But she had little sense of humor. "What would you suggest, then, if
I may ask?" he said. He had to give up all pathos in the light of her
deadly simplicity.
"Nothing," she answered; "I can't see why it should make any
difference to you, when it hasn't with me." She had altogether
regained the self-possession she had been surprised out of, with an
added note of reserve.
And so he had to accept it. He rose, with a slight sigh, and returned
to the examination of his spoils.
But when he was away from Felipa and her blighting matter of fact,
the pathos of it came uppermost again. Troubles seemed to thicken
around him. His voluntary Coventry was making him sensitive. He
had thought that his wife was at least giving him the best of her cool
nature. Cool! There was no coldness in that strained white face, as
she read the letter. The control she had over herself! It was
admirable. He thought that most women would have fainted, or
have grown hysterical, or have made a scene of some sort. Then he
recalled the stoicism of the Apache—and was back at her birth
again.
He realized for the first time the injury his thought of it did her. It
was that which had kept them apart, no doubt, and the sympathy of
38. lawlessness that had drawn her and Cairness together. Yet he had
just begun to flatter himself that he was eradicating the savage. She
had been gratifyingly like other women since his return. But it was
as Brewster had said, after all,—the Apache strain was abhorrent to
him as the venom of a snake. Yet he was fond of Felipa, too.
Someway it had not occurred to him to be any more angry with
Cairness than he had been with her. The most he felt was resentful
jealousy. There was nothing more underhand about the man than
there was about Felipa. Sending the note by the prospectors had not
been underhand. He understood that it had been done only that it
might make no trouble for her, and give himself no needless pain.
Cairness would have been willing to admit to his face that he loved
Felipa. That letter must have been written in his own camp.
He heard his wife coming down the stairs, and directly she stood in
the doorway. "Will you let me have that knife, Jack dear?" she asked
amiably.
He turned his chair and studied her in a kind of hopeless
amusement. "Felipa," he said, "if you will insist upon being told, I
cut open the pockets of those dead men's clothes with it."
"But I can have it cleaned," she said.
He turned back abruptly. "You had better get another. You can't have
that one," he answered.
Was it possible that twenty minutes before he had risen to the
histrionic pitch of self-sacrifice of offering her her freedom to marry
another man?
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