growing excited was not a task for human minds. Already he was fighting
with Kolya. At night he lay awake, gleefully devising a thousand sly
schemes whereby, single-handed, Kolya should take captive a hundred
Germans; the days he spent in filling his letters to the boy with a
detailed description of these schemes. Each morning we were introduced
to marvels of unheard-of strategy, and called upon to translate from the
newspaper every word of the long and conflicting dispatches. He was
forgetting to eat, he had no time for exercise. An alarming shortness of
breath followed, and we sent for the doctor again. The latter’s visit
was short, his opinion no less so:--
'If he continues to live at this tension he will not last until winter.
Keep him quiet.'
And he left some pills.
And then came another letter from Kolya. I stepped into Babanchik’s room
a few minutes after he had read it and found him at his open window,
staring out at the sky. He brushed his hands across his eyes before he
turned and held out the letter to me.
'Read it, my dear.'
The uneven round handwriting was pathetically reminiscent of the letters
which used to deal with ducks and puppies, and there was boyish
heartbreak in every word of the curt, matter-of-fact sentences. Kolya’s
petition had not been granted.
'And now, father,' the letter ran on, 'you will have to come back. We
are the men of our family. And, since the Tsar has decided that I must
not help, the honor of that family rests with you. For, if you fail, I
also fail.'
I looked up over the page. What could he do, a sick old man, in a
country which was calling forth the finest of its young strength? He
answered my unspoken question, hastily.
'There is much for me. The wounded are coming home; I could read to them
in the hospitals, and tell stories--you know how well I tell stories.
And I can count cars--that is the logical work for one who had been so
long with the road. Right in Tiflis I can count them,--supply-trains go
out from there,--and release a younger man for the front. Will you get
me a schedule of the sailings of Japanese steamers, my dear?'
So came his decision. At dinner-time he could not eat. Morning found him
with a newspaper in his hand. Out of his meagre knowledge of English he
was trying to decipher the flaming headlines. He waved away the
suggestion of breakfast. Food interfered with his breathing, he said;
but would we not bring in his trunks and suitcases? By afternoon he was
shivering, and the tea I made for him failed to warm his hands. And once
more we called the doctor.
He fought with all the strength which was left him, our gentle
Babanchik, fought with tears of helpless fury coursing down his face,
when we took him from the chaos of his packing and put him to bed. And a
hard three months began for all of us.
It was a cold and cheerless autumn of early rains. The doctor came every
day. And every day I sat at the bedside, translating to him Babanchik’s
entreaties and commands. I had procured for him the schedule of Japanese
steamers, and he had marked the dates of their sailing with red ink.
'Tell him,' he would say, his unsteady forefinger on the first of these,
'that I must be fit for travel by this date. Tell him to give me more
medicine--I shall take two pills every half hour. Tell him I cannot
wait.'
And again, two or three days later, his finger back on the page,--
'There is no use in trying to catch this boat now. But tell him that the
next one goes two weeks later. Surely he can cure me in two weeks; tell
him that that’s fourteen days.'
The weeks crept by and, one after another, the Japanese steamers sailed
without him; but in his mind, which was slowly losing its clearness, a
new hope dawned each day. I began to dread the hours beside his bed. It
was hard to listen to the plans for his work which, under the stress of
mounting fever, often trailed off to incoherent muttering, and to watch
the thin profile of his face showing an ever sharper line against the
pillow; hard to follow the doctor to his car and hear his passionless,
hopeless words; harder still to go back and face the crazily bright eyes
of Babanchik and, in response to his questions, lie cheerfully and so
extravagantly that it seemed that only a madman could believe.
Yet he believed. For, one morning, I found him ruling a sheet of paper
on a lapboard--he had fumed until the nurse had given him his pen. The
vertical lines cut unsteadily across the page, and at the top of the
columns he had written:--
'Date.'--'Car Number.'--'Destination.'--'Cargo.'
'You see, my dear,' he explained eagerly, 'there will be a great deal of
purely mechanical work, such as this, to be done, and much of it I can
do beforehand. For I shall be too busy, in Tiflis, and I cannot expect
an assistant at this time.'
On that day I did not go back to his room. The doctor’s words had been
fewer than usual, and there are times when one does not lie.
But, before bedtime, seeing his light burning, I tiptoed in. He stared
dully.
'You have been talking long--I fell asleep waiting. And I wanted you to
tell your doctor that I am losing all patience. If he cannot make me
well enough to go at once, I shall find some other way to go--without
his help. Keeping me in a warm room, the rain shut out, while my boys
are lying in trenches! When I could be counting cars--' His breath
failed him and he closed his eyes. Only when I looked back at him, with
my hand on the door-knob, did he finish the sentence--'for Russia.'
When again I saw him he was neither old nor feeble nor ill. By some
untold magic he had become the undauntable Babanchik of twenty years
ago. Only, his pongee suit had been very carefully pressed, and this,
together with his unsmiling mouth, made him look strange--strange and a
little forbidding, as if the way for which he had been searching was one
with which we could have no concern. And, presently, one of the Japanese
steamers was taking him back to Russia.
ROSITA
ELLEN MACKUBIN
THERE are secrets which are never told, mysteries which are never
revealed, and questions which are never answered, even nowadays, when
the press and the police so vigorously supplement the public and private
interest in everybody’s affairs. It is another evidence of the superior
force of the natural human instincts to the mechanism of civilization,
that in country villages or isolated garrisons, unpermeated by press or
police, such phenomena are most rare. Yet even there they exist.
Fort Lawrence is a three-company post, possessing no neighbor, except a
few scattered ranches, within a radius of several hundred miles. Thus
thrown upon their own resources for amusement, the garrison’s knowledge
of one another’s business is exhaustive, and events in these dull,
peaceful days are picked as bare of detail as any bone acquired by some
long-hungry dog. Yet at Lawrence occurred the following events, the
inner relation of whose outward facts has never been fully understood.
A couple of years ago, Lawrence had been occupied for many months by
three companies from the---- th Cavalry, though the chances of army
promotion had recently brought it a commanding officer from another
regiment. Major Pryor, a middle-aged man, who sheltered shyness behind a
rampart of sternness, became immediately unpopular by tightening the
reins of government, which his predecessor had held somewhat slackly.
But the garrison and its feminine belongings were inclined to forgive
him when they perceived that he had fallen seriously in love with
Rosita. Now, nobody had ever considered Rosita seriously before; not
even her father, old Lawless the post-trader, in regard to whom the
suspicion that he was a rascal had been condoned by the certainty that
he was the jolliest of companions.
Old Lawless maintained complete silence as to his past; and as Rosita’s
mother formed part of that doubtful darkness when he, and his child, and
his stock in trade installed themselves at Lawrence, he had never been
heard to refer to her. That she had belonged to some mixed breed, part
Spanish, part Indian, was, however, written on each feature of her
daughter’s body and mind--if Rosita could be said to have a mind.
'Every woman, savage or civilized, will love some day to her own
sorrow,' her father had declared, with a cynical laugh. 'But Rosita’s
future is tolerably safe. Chocolate bonbons are her ruling passion, and
as she has the digestion of an ostrich, many years will elapse before
she is likely to suffer for her devotion!'
She was exceedingly pretty, with the beauty of bright eyes, lithe
figure, and a complexion so transparent that the most enthusiastic
admirer of fairness would not have wished her less dusky. Since she was
fifteen she had held gay and undisputed sway among the younger officers;
for Lawrence was so distant a post that feminine visitors were seldom
seen there, and in those days the garrison families possessed only
daughters in the nursery. The fame of her pretty looks and ways had
become widespread among the frontier forts; yet it was noticeable that
her admirers, while ransacking the realms of nature in eulogy of this
gazelle, this kitten, this lark, never called her an angel, or even
ascended high enough in the spiritual scale to compare her to a fairy,
though there was nothing known of her at which the sternest army matron
could take umbrage. She was as ignorant of evil as any of the wild
creatures with whose names she had been rebaptized, and Lawless kept a
keen though seemingly careless eye upon her amusements.
With this girl Duncan Pryor did not flirt. Plain, prosaic, and forty, he
loved her; while Rosita, instinctively discerning the difference between
his behavior and that of her other admirers, appeared rather repelled
than gratified--an attitude which became more obvious the more her
father encouraged this serious suitor, and was presently explained, to
the increasing interest of the spectators of the little drama, by the
discovery that Rosita had developed another love than that for
chocolates, and one which she concealed as slightly.
Gerald Breton, or 'Jerry,' as he was familiarly known, had, upon his
first coming to Lawrence, devoted to Rosita’s society every moment which
he could spare from military duties that were not numerous; but in so
doing he only fulfilled the manifest destiny of all his compeers at the
post. He was a big, fair young fellow, with jovial Irish blood in his
veins, and a smile which was perhaps more eloquent than he knew.
Certainly, when he returned from a two months' 'leave,' he announced his
engagement to the most adorable of women, met and won during his
absence, with a frank assurance of congratulation which bespoke a
conscience void of reproach.
Neither did Rosita reproach him. She preferred him to his brethren in a
manner flattering to masculine vanity. And Jerry, having placed the
colors of his _fiancée_ in his helmet, did not hesitate to enjoy such
amusement as was provided for him in a post that would have been dull
without Rosita. She was comrade as charmingly as coquette. She rode
hurdle-races, and shot at targets, and smoked cigarettes, as keenly as
Jerry himself, while she could sing a love-song to her guitar, or dance
to her castanets, with a grace and a fervor that no music-hall star of
a much-regretted civilization could surpass.
How soon Jerry guessed what it was that looked at him from under her
long lashes, which was absent when she bestowed her fearless glances
upon the other officers, is not made quite plain to his conscience yet.
But he was promptly aware of Major Pryor’s determination to prevent him
from keeping engagements which brought him into the society of Rosita.
No position of authority lends itself so readily to petty tyranny as
that of a post-commander, when the incumbent is thus disposed; and that
Pryor was thus disposed toward Lieutenant Breton, not only the victim,
but Rosita particularly, and the garrison generally, quickly perceived.
The adjutant, indeed, though a submissive person, ventured an occasional
remonstrance concerning orders manifestly over-exacting, but won nothing
by his presumption.
Was picnic or dinner arranged, at the last moment an orderly appeared,
presenting the major’s compliments and a special detail which required
Lieutenant Breton’s attention. When a much-talked-of fishing expedition,
involving several nights' camping, was about to set forth, Jerry was
appointed to the escort of some wagons just starting en route to the
nearest river-town for supplies; while reproofs, irritably delivered and
flagrantly undeserved, were a daily occurrence. Rosita’s wrath, the
jocular condolences of his chums, and the no less evident though
wordless sympathy of his superiors added fuel to the smouldering fire of
Jerry’s resentment. Upon a certain radiant June afternoon this fire
blazed.
A full-dress parade had been commanded, for the sole purpose, it was
growled, of giving scope to the major’s restless energies. Some trifling
fault in the demeanor of Jerry’s troop brought on him a scathing rebuke
in the presence of his men, of his comrades, and of the ladies who had
gathered to watch such small display of military pomp as their position
permitted. Temper conquered discipline. Instead of the silent salute
which was his duty, Lieutenant Breton began an angry expostulation, and
was sternly ordered to his quarters, under arrest for disrespect to the
commanding officer.
Lawrence reveled in its sensation across that evening’s supper-tables.
Pryor was right, of course: Jerry had been guilty of grave misbehavior
before the whole garrison. Yet love of justice is strong, even in the
strictest enforcer of discipline--when the enforcer is Anglo-Saxon. If
Jerry should refuse to apologize, or if Pryor should refuse to be thus
appeased, the two captains resolved that private statements of the case
should go to Washington before further complications should arise for
the victim of a personal prejudice.
Jerry, however, in the solitary confinement of his own sitting-room,
knew nothing of these plans, and faced a gloomy future through an
infuriating present. Dear as his career was to him, he determined to
sacrifice it rather than apologize to a man who, whatever his rank, was
egregiously wrong. But even if his resignation were accepted under the
circumstances of his breach of discipline, and he escaped court-martial,
how could he justify to his home people the enmity of his commanding
officer? Only by a story regarding its cause which he should feel
himself a cad in the telling. And would his proud sweetheart accept the
allegiance of the hero of such a story as unstained and unshaken?
When his wrath had cooled and his solitude remained undisturbed, Jerry
began to feel forsaken as well as ill used. Tired of the perpetual
turning which pacing his tiny quarters involved, he dropped
disconsolately into a chair, and covered his face with his hands.
There was a rustle of petticoats, and, with dismayed assurance, he
lifted his head. Yes, it was she, the pretty cause of his troubles,
gazing at him with eyes that glowed through tears.
'Rosita!' he muttered, in a tone instinctively lowered, even in his
surprise, for the sentry posted outside his door was probably within
hearing. 'How did you get here?'
'By that window,' she answered, her white teeth gleaming as she nodded
toward an open window that looked upon a rear veranda--a veranda which
extended the length of 'officers' row,' where the post-trader had rented
an unused set of quarters.
Suddenly she sank to her knees beside his chair, clasping both hands
over one of his.
'He is a wicked man!' she cried passionately. 'I hate him!'
Jerry rose hurriedly, lifting her as he did so.
'Speak lower. You should not have come,' he said.
'Why shouldn’t I come?' Rosita faltered, tears on her long lashes, her
lips quivering like a child’s. 'You are alone and in trouble.'
'Beastly trouble! It is awfully kind of you. By Jove!' he exclaimed, his
outraged sense of propriety yielding place to a yet more wounded sense
of his friends' desertion in this time of need; 'you are the only one of
the lot who cares what happens to any fellow after he is down.'
'It isn’t "any fellow." I care for you, Jerry,' she murmured wistfully.
'But he cannot hurt you, really? Just for to-night?'
'To-night!' he repeated, while discretion fled the field, routed by the
rush of a vision of the probable consequences of his wrongs which swept
over his soul. 'He intends to destroy my whole career. And he will do
it, too, for I shall never apologize to him!'
Sympathy is none the less sweet when it shines in brilliant eyes, and he
was not much more than a boy--a boy aghast in the presence of his first
trouble. He grew eloquent while he described the gloomy future which
Pryor’s tyranny stretched before him.
'The long and short of it is that I am ruined through his confounded
jealousy'--
He broke off his peroration abruptly, coloring hotly.
'You shall not be ruined! It is for my sake he hates you! But I will
save you!' she panted.
'Nonsense!' he exclaimed, half touched, half anxious. 'You cannot get
rid of Pryor; and as I cannot remain under his command without apology,
I must resign--which will mean ruin for me,' he ended, with almost a
groan of despondency.
She caught his hand, and pressed it to her breast, to her lips.
'Wait! Trust me!' she cried, running to the open window. 'He shall do
you no more harm!'
Jerry, his pulses thrilling to those trembling kisses, followed her.
'Rosita! Sweetest--truest'--he gasped, 'you must not interfere! This
matter concerns only Pryor and me. I forbid you!'
She turned when she had crossed the low ledge, and flashed a smile back
to him--a smile which both bewildered and repelled him.
'You shall forbid me anything--except to serve you,' she said, and
vanished among the shadows of the veranda.
For an instant he meditated pursuit, but gave it up as he remembered the
complications which would ensue should he be seen in apparent attempt to
evade his arrest.
Rosita was a dear little ignoramus, embarrassingly fond of him, he told
himself, grasping at his usual common sense, which was perplexed by
vague alarm. Yet surely she could intend nothing more than to make a
pretty scene as special pleader for his cause with Pryor--a pleader who,
unless that officer had utterly lost dignity, would produce no other
effect than to embitter the jealousy which was the foundation of this
persecution.
* * * * *
Fort Lawrence goes to bed early. By eleven o’clock sleep apparently
possessed the garrison, with the exception of the widely scattered
sentinels who cried the hour. But the clear calls had scarcely died upon
the vast surrounding stillness of the prairie night when they were
succeeded by the sharp, unmistakable report of a pistol-shot.
Jerry Breton, lounging, half-awake, beside the veranda window of his
sitting-room, was roused to full consciousness and a pang of foreboding.
The report came from a path which skirted the rampart immediately
beneath the veranda, at a point where the bluff beyond descended so
abruptly into the Yellowstone River, hundreds of feet below, that the
sentry rarely patrolled it, ingress or egress being impossible to any
one in a sane mood. Jerry sprang down the veranda steps, assuring
himself that there might be a dozen comparatively harmless reasons for
the shot, and that his terror was merely nightmare. Yet when he beheld
the body of a man prostrate, face forward, across the path, he knew him,
with a knowledge that anticipated sight. Shrinkingly he bent over him,
uttered a half-strangled cry, which was dismayed, not surprised, and
picked up a pistol, a tiny silver-mounted toy, horribly incongruous
beside that ghastly, motionless figure--a dainty, deadly thing that
Jerry had given months before to the 'best markswoman in the Northwest.'
There was a swift rush of footsteps from various directions: the sentry
to whose beat this stretch of rampart belonged, another sentry from his
station before the door of Jerry’s quarters, and three or four partly
clad officers roused out of their slumbers.
Jerry stood upright--a slight, erect figure, whose silhouette was
distinct against the blue moonlit sky. He swung his arm above his head,
and flung the pistol far over the edge of the bluff.
The next instant he was surrounded by a crowd; a tumult of exclamation
and question arose, as Pryor’s inanimate body was recognized, and
carefully examined for some sign of life. In the midst of the tumult he
leaned against the rampart, neither speaking nor apparently hearing,
until Blount, the captain of his troop, laid an admonitory hand on his
shoulder.
'You were here first--Don’t stare like an idiot! Tell us what you saw.'
'Is he dead?'
'We cannot be sure until the surgeon comes. Did you see any one?'
Jerry shuddered visibly.
'I saw nobody!'
'The major has been queer lately, poor chap. Perhaps he shot himself,'
Blount suggested eagerly.
'Was not that a pistol you threw away?' another officer asked sharply.
Jerry lifted his eyes. Those familiar faces were pale and stern.
'You saw'--he faltered.
'Speak, lad!' Blount entreated.
'I cannot talk. I must have time to think.'
'The truth doesn’t need thinking. It requires plain telling.'
There ensued a silence, through which creaked the hurried approach of
the surgeon’s boots.
Jerry’s fair head drooped; he caught uncertainly at Blount’s arm.
'I have nothing to say,' he muttered faintly.
Blount, who, as senior captain, succeeded to Pryor’s command in case of
that officer’s death or incapacity, turned from his young subordinate.
'Sergeant Jackson,' he said, in a voice that was not quite steady, 'take
Lieutenant Breton to his quarters. You will be responsible for him until
further instructions.' Then he knelt beside Pryor, over whom the surgeon
was bending. 'Is there life in him?' he asked.
There was life in him--life that lingered after they had carried him to
his bed and his wound had been dressed; a mere spark of life, which
might flicker out at any moment, although, the major being a healthy
man, in the prime of years, it might yet blaze up again into strength.
Such was the surgeon’s unchanging report during the next two days to the
post, where horror of the tragedy in its midst had silenced gossip, and
where even conjecture held its breath.
There is thus much resemblance between a small garrison and a family,
that the befalling of a calamity to one of their number softens all
judgments; quarrels, criticisms, envyings, are the corrupted fruit of a
too brilliant sunshine. Pryor had been unpopular, but only kindness was
spoken of him now that it seemed probable that he lay dying. If there
was a manifest desire, especially among the ladies, to foster a
suspicion that his evident wretchedness had led him to attempt suicide,
the desire merely expressed their hope that Jerry Breton’s innocence
might be proved, in spite of the young fellow’s stunned passiveness and
his strange flinging away of the pistol.
Proof either of guilt or of innocence depended vitally on Pryor’s
recovery, as no inquiry had elicited any of the facts which preceded
the catastrophe of that night. Shortly after ten o’clock the commanding
officer had passed the sentry for a solitary stroll along the rampart,
which was a daily habit with him; nobody else had been seen, and nothing
unusual had been heard until the pistol-shot.
Depression, black as the shadow of death which over-hung them, possessed
the little post which was wont to be so cheery. No one was surprised to
hear that Rosita had been added to the number of the surgeon’s patients,
nor did any one doubt the cause of the nervous collapse from which he
declared her to be suffering, and which forced him to veto Mrs. Blount’s
offer of a visit to her. Lawless, he said, had miraculously developed
into the most perfect of nurses, and Rosita, with the tendency to
delirium that belongs to volatile and undisciplined temperaments, was
better off under his undisturbed attendance.