THE TRUMPETER

I

When the trumpets at Bisuka barracks sound retreat, the girls in the

Meadows cottage, on the edge of the Reservation, begin to hurry with the

supper things, and Mrs. Meadows, who has been young herself, says to her

eldest daughter, "You go now, Callie; the girls and I can finish." Which

means that Callie's colors go up as the colors on the hill come down;

for soon the tidy infantrymen and the troopers with their yellow stripes

will be seen, in the first blush of the afterglow, tramping along the

paths that thread the sagebrush common between the barracks and the

town; and Callie's young man will be among them, and he will turn off at

the bridge that crosses the acéquia, and make for the cottage gate by a

path which he ought to know pretty well by this time.

Callie's young man is Henniker, one of the trumpeters of K troop, --th

cavalry; _the_ trumpeter, Callie would say, for though there are two of

the infantry and two of the cavalry who stand forth at sunset, in front

of the adjutant's office, and blow as one man the brazen call that

throbs against the hill, it is only Henniker whom Callie hears. That

trumpet blare, most masculine of all musical utterances, goes straight

from his big blue-clad chest to the heart of his girl, across the

clear-lit evening; but not to hers alone. There is only one Henniker,

but there is more than one girl in the cottage on the common.

At this hour, nightly, a small dark head, not so high above the sage as

Callie's auburn one, pursues its dreaming way, in the wake of two cows

and a half-grown heifer, towards the hills where the town herd pastures.

Punctually at the first call it starts out behind the cows from the home

corral; by the second it has passed, very slowly, the foot-bridge, and

is nearly to the corner post of the Reservation; but when "sound off" is

heard, the slow-moving head stops still. The cheek turns. A listening

eye is raised; it is black, heavily lashed; the tip of a silken eyebrow

shows against the narrow temple. The cheek is round and young, of a

smooth clear brown, richly under-tinted with rose,--a native wild flower

of the Northwest. As the trumpets cease, and the gun fires, and the

brief echo dies in the hill, the liquid eyes grow sad.

"Sweet, sweet! too sweet to be so short and so strong!" The dumb

childish heart swells in the constriction of a new and keener sense of

joy, an unspeakable new longing.

What that note of the deep-colored summer twilight means to her she

hardly understands. It awakens no thought of expectation for herself, no

definite desire. She knows that the trumpeter's sunset call is his

good-by to duty on the eve of joy; it is the pæan of his love for

Callie. Wonderful to be like Callie; who after all is just like any

other girl,--like herself, just as she was a year ago, before she had

ever spoken to Henniker.

Henniker was not only a trumpeter, one of four who made music for the

small two-company garrison; he was an artist with a personality. The

others blew according to tactics, and sometimes made mistakes; Henniker

never made mistakes, except that he sometimes blew too well. Nobody with

an ear, listening nightly for taps, could mistake when it was Henniker's

turn, as orderly trumpeter, to sound the calls. He had the temperament

of the joyous art: and with it the vanity, the passion, the

forgetfulness, the unconscious cruelty, the love of beauty, and the love

of being loved that made him the flirt constitutional as well as the

flirt military,--which not all soldiers are, but which all soldiers are

accused of being. He flirted not only with his fine gait and figure, and

bold roving glances from under his cap-peak with the gold sabres crossed

above it; he flirted in a particular and personal as well as promiscuous

manner, and was ever new to the dangers he incurred, not to mention

those to which his willing victims exposed themselves. For up to this

time in all his life Henniker had never yet pursued a girl. There had

been no need, and as yet no inducement, for him to take the offensive.

The girls all felt his irresponsible gift of pleasing, and forgot to be

afraid. Not one of the class of girls he met but envied Callie Meadows,

and showed it by pretending to wonder what he could see in her.

It was himself Henniker saw, so no wonder he was satisfied, until he

should see himself in a more flattering mirror still. The very first

night he met her, Callie had informed him, with the courage of her

bright eyes, that she thought him magnificent fun; and he had laughed in

his heart, and said, "Go ahead, my dear!" And ahead they went headlong,

and were engaged within a week.

Mother Meadows did not like it much, but it was the youthful way, in

pastoral frontier circles like their own; and Callie would do as she

pleased,--that was Callie's way. Father Meadows said it was the women's

business; if Callie and her mother were satisfied, so was he.

But he made inquiries at the post, and learned that Henniker's record

was good in a military sense. He stood well with his officers, had no

loose, unsoldierly habits, and never was drunk on duty. He did not save

his pay; but how much "pay" had Meadows ever saved when he was a single

man? And within two years, if he wanted it, the trumpeter was entitled

to his discharge. So he prospered in this as in former love affairs that

had stopped short of the conclusive step of marriage.

Meta, the little cow-girl, the youngest and fairest, though many shades

the darkest, of the Meadows household, was not of the Meadows blood. On

her father's side, her ancestry, doubtless, was uncertain; some said

carelessly, "Canada French." Her mother was pure squaw of the Bannock

breed. But Mother Meadows, whose warm Scotch-Irish heart nourished a

vein of romance together with a feudal love of family, upheld that Meta

was no chance slip of the murky half-bloods, neither clean wild nor

clean tame. Her father, she claimed to know, had been a man of education

and of honor, on the white side of his life, a well-born Scottish

gentleman, exiled to the wilderness of the Northwest in the service of

the Hudson's Bay Company. And Meta's mother had broken no law of her

rudimentary conscience. She had not swerved in her own wild allegiance,

nor suffered desertion by her white chief. He had been killed in some

obscure frontier fight, and his goods, including the woman and child,

were the stake for which he had perished. But Father Josette, who knew

all things and all people of those parts, and had baptized the infant by

the sainted name of Margaret, had traced his lost plant of grace and

conveyed it out of the forest shades into the sunshine of a Christian

white woman's home. Father Josette--so Mrs. Meadows maintained--had

known that the babe would prove worthy of transplantation.

She made room for the little black-headed stranger, with soft eyes like

a mouse (by the blessing of God she had never lost a child, and the nest

was full,) in the midst of her own fat, fair-haired brood, and cherished

her in her place, and gave her a daughter's privilege.

In a wild, woodlandish way Meta was a bit of an heiress in her own

right. She had inherited through her mother a share in the yearly

increase of a band of Bannock ponies down on the Salmon meadows; and

every season, after grand round-up, the settlement was made,--always

with distinct fairness, though it took some time, and a good deal of

eating, drinking, and diplomacy, before the business could be

accomplished.

"What is a matter of a field worth forty shekels betwixt thee and me?"

was the etiquette of the transaction, but the outcome was practically

the same as in the days of patriarchal transfers of real estate.

Father Meadows would say that it cost him twice over what the maiden's

claim was worth to have her cousins the Bannocks, with their wives and

children and horses, camped on his borders every summer; for Meta's

dark-skinned brethren never sent her the worth of her share in money,

but came themselves with her ponies in the flesh, and spare ponies of

their own, for sale in the town; and on Father Meadows was the burden of

keeping them all good-natured, of satisfying their primitive ideas of

hospitality, and of pasturing Meta's ponies until they could finally be

sold for her benefit. No account was kept, in this simple, generous

household, of what was done for Meta, but strict account was kept of

what was Meta's own.

The Bannock brethren were very proud of their fair kinswoman who dwelt

in the tents of Jacob. They called her, amongst themselves, by the name

they give to the mariposa lily, the closed bud of which is pure white as

the whitest garden lily; but as each Psyche-wing petal opens it is

mooned at the base with a dark, purplish stain which marks the flower

with startling beauty, yet to some eyes seems to mar it as well. With

every new bud the immaculate promise is renewed; but the leopard cannot

change his spots nor the wild hill lily her natal stain.

This year the sale of pony flesh amounted to nearly a hundred dollars,

which Father Meadows put away for Meta's future benefit,--all but one

gold piece, which the mother showed her, telling her that it represented

a new dress.

"You need a new white one for your best, and I shall have it made long.

You're filling out so, I don't believe you'll grow much taller."

Meta smiled sedately. In spite of the yearly object lesson her dark

kinsfolk presented, she never classed herself among the hybrids. She

accepted homage and tribute from the tribe, but in her consciousness, at

this time, she was all white. This was due partly to Mother Meadows's

large-hearted and romantic theories of training, and partly to an

accident of heredity. The woman who looks the squaw is the squaw, when

it comes to the flowering time of her life. To Meta had succeeded the

temperament of her mother expressed in the features of her father;

whether Canadian trapper or Scotch grandee, he had owned an admirable

profile.

A great social and musical event took place that summer in the town, and

Meta's first long dress was finished in time to play its part, as such

trifles will, in the simple fates of girlhood. It was by far the

prettiest dress she had ever put over her head: the work of a

professional, to begin with. Then its length persuaded one that she was

taller than nature had made her. Its short waist suited her youthful

bust and flat back and narrow shoulders. The sleeves were puffed and

stood out like wings, and were gathered on a ribbon which tied in a bow

just above the bend of her elbow. Her arms were round and soft as satin,

and pinkish-pale inside, like the palms of her small hands. All her

skin, though dark, was as clear as wine in a colored glass. The neck was

cut down in a circle below her throat, which she shyly clasped with her

hands, not being accustomed to feel it bare. And as naturally as a bird

would open its beak for a worm, she exclaimed to Mother Meadows, "Oh,

how I wish I had some beads!" And before night she had strung herself a

necklace of the gold-colored pom-pons with silver-gray stems that

spangle the dry hills in June,--"butter-balls" the Western children call

them,--and, in spite of the laughter and gibes of the other girls, she

wore her sylvan ornament on the gala night, and its amazing becomingness

was its best defense.

So Meta's first long dress went, in company with three other unenvious

white dresses and Father Meadows's best coat, to hear the "Coonville

Minstrels," a company of amateur performers representing the best

musical talent in the town, who would appear "for one night only," for

the benefit of the free circulating library fund.

Henniker was not in attendance on his girl as usual.

"What a pity," the sisters said, "that he should have to be on guard

to-night!" But Meta remembered, though she did not say so, that

Henniker had been on guard only two nights before, so it could not be

his turn again, and that could not explain his absence.

But Callie was as gay as ever, and did not seem put out, even at her

father's bantering insinuations about some other possible girl who might

be scoring in her place.

The sisters were enraptured over every number on the programme. The

performers had endeavored to conceal their identity under burnt cork and

names that were fictitious and humorous, but everybody was comparing

guesses as to which was which, and who was who. The house was packed,

and "society" was there. The feminine half of it did not wear its best

frock to the show and its head uncovered, but what of that! A girl knows

when she is looking her prettiest, and the young Meadowses were in no

way concerned for the propriety of their own appearance. Father Meadows,

looking along the row of smiling faces belonging to him, was as well

satisfied as any man in the house. His eyes rested longer than usual on

little Meta to-night. He saw for the first time that the child was a

beauty; not going to be,--she was one then and there. Her hair, which

she was accustomed to wear in two tightly braided pigtails down her

back, had been released and brushed out all its stately maiden length,

"crisped like a war steed's encolure." It fell below her waist, and made

her face and throat look pale against its blackness. A spot of white

electric light touched her chest where it rose and fell beneath the

chain of golden blossom balls,--orange gold, the cavalry color. She

looked like no other girl in the house, though nearly every girl in town

was there.

Part I. of the programme was finished; a brief wait,--the curtain rose,

and behold the colored gentlemen from Coonville had vanished. Only the

interlocutor remained, scratching his white wool wig over a letter which

he begged to read in apology for his predicament. His minstrelsy had

decamped, and spoilt his show. They wrote to inform him of the obvious

fact, and advised him facetiously to throw himself upon the indulgence

of the house, but "by no means to refund the money."

Poor little Meta believed that she was listening to the deplorable

truth, and wondered how Father Meadows and the girls could laugh.

"Oh, won't there be any second part, after all?" she despaired; at which

Father Meadows laughed still more, and pinched her cheek, and some

persons in the row of chairs in front half turned and smiled.

"Goosey," whispered Callie, "don't you see he's only gassing? This is

part of the fun."

"Oh, is it?" sighed Meta, and she waited for the secret of the fun to

develop.

"Look at your programme," Callie instructed her. "See, this is the

Impressario's Predicament. The Wandering Minstrel comes next. He will be

splendid, I can tell you."

"Mr. Piper Hide-and-Seek," murmured Meta, studying her programme. "What

a funny name!"

"Oh, you child!" Callie laughed aloud, but as suddenly hushed, for the

sensation of the evening, to the Meadows party, had begun.

A very handsome man, in the gala dress of a stage peasant, of the

Bavarian Highlands possibly, came forward with a short, military step,

and bowed impressively. There was a burst of applause from the bluecoats

in the gallery, and much whistling and stamping from the boys.

"Who is it?" the lady in front whispered to her neighbor.

"One of the soldiers from the post," was the answer.

"Really!"

But the lady's accent of surprise conveyed nothing, beside the

speechless admiration of the Meadows family. Callie, who had been in the

exciting secret all along, whispered violently with the other girls, but

Meta had become quite cold and shivery. She could not have uttered a

word.

Henniker made a little speech in an assumed accent which astonished his

friends almost more than his theatrical dress and bearing. He said he

was a stranger, piping his way through a foreign land, but he could

"spik ze Engleesh a leetle." Would the ladies and gentlemen permit him,

in the embarrassing absence of better performers, to present them with a

specimen of his poor skill upon a very simple instrument? Behold!

He flung back his short cloak, and filled his chest, standing lightly on

his feet, with his elbows raised.

No rattling trumpet blast from the artist's lips to-night, but, still

and small, sustained and clear, the pure reed note trilled forth. Willow

whistles piping in spring-time in the stillness of deep meadow lands

before the grass is long, or in flickering wood paths before the full

leaves darken the boughs--such was the pastoral simplicity of the

instrument with which Henniker beguiled his audience. Such was the

quality of sound, but the ingenuity, caprice, delicacy, and precision of

its management were quite his own. They procured him a wild encore.

Henniker had been nervous at the first time of playing; it would have

embarrassed him less to come before a strange house; for there were the

captain and the captain's lady, and the lieutenants with their best

girls; and forty men he knew were nudging and winking at one another;

and there were the bonny Meadowses, with their eyes upon him and their

faces all aglow. But who was she, the little big-eyed dark one in their

midst? He took her in more coolly as he came before the house the second

time; and this time he knew her, but not as he ever had known her

before.

Is it one of nature's revenges that in the beauty of their women lurks

the venom of the dark races which the white man has put beneath his

feet? The bruised serpent has its sting; and we know how, from Moab and

Midian down, the daughters of the heathen have been the unhappy

instruments of proud Israel's fall; but the shaft of his punishment

reaches him through the body of the woman who cleaves to his breast.

That one look of Henniker's at Meta, in her strange yet familiar beauty,

sitting captive to his spell, went through his flattered senses like the

intoxication of strong drink. He did not take his eyes off her again.

His face was pale with the complex excitement of a full house that was

all one girl and all hushed through joy of him. She sat so close to

Callie, his reckless glances might have been meant for either of them;

Callie thought at first they were for her, but she did not think so

long.

Something followed on the programme at which everybody laughed, but it

meant nothing at all to Meta. She thought the supreme moment had come

and gone, when a big Zouave in his barbaric reds and blues marched out

and took his stand, back from the footlights, between the wings, and

began that amazing performance with a rifle which is known as the

"Zouave drill."

The dress was less of a disguise than the minstrel's had been, and it

was a sterner, manlier transformation. It brought out the fighting look

in Henniker. The footlights were lowered, a smoke arose behind the

wings, strange lurid colors were cast upon the figure of the soldier

magician.

"The stage is burning!" gasped Meta, clutching Collie's arm.

"It's nothing but red fire. You mustn't give yourself away so, Meta;

folks will take us for a lot of sagebrushers."

Meta settled back in her place with a fluttering sigh, and poured her

soul into this new wonder.

But Henniker was not doing himself justice to-night, his comrades

thought. No one present was so critical of him or so proud of him as

they. A hundred times he had put himself through this drill before a

barrack audience, and it had seemed as if he could not make a break. But

to-night his nerve was not good. Once he actually dropped his piece, and

a groan escaped the row of uniforms in the gallery. This made him angry;

he pulled himself up and did some good work for a moment, and

then--"Great Scott! he's lost it again! No, he hasn't. Brace up, man!"

The rifle swerves, but Henniker's knee flies up to catch it; the sound

of the blow on the bone makes the women shiver; but he has his piece,

and sends it savagely whirling, and that miss was his last. His head was

like the centre of a spinning top or the hub of a flying wheel. He felt

ugly from the pain of his knee, but he made a dogged finish, and only

those who had seen him at his best would have said that his drill was a

failure.

Henniker knew, if no one else did, what had lost him his grip in the

rifle act. His eyes, which should have been glued to his work, had been

straying for another and yet one more look at Meta. Where she sat so

still was the storm centre of emotion in the house, and when his eyes

approached her they caught the nerve shock that shook his whole system

and spoiled his fine work. He cared nothing for the success of his

piping when he thought of the failure of his drill. The failure had come

last, and, with other things, it left its sting.

On the way home to barracks, the boys were all talking, in their free

way, about Meta Meadows,--the little broncho, they called her, in

allusion to her great mane of hair,--which made Henniker very hot.

He would not own that his knee pained him; he would not have it referred

to, and was ready, next day, to join the riders in squad drill, a new

feature of which was the hurdles and ditch-jumping and the mounted

exercises, in which as usual, Henniker had distinguished himself.

The Reservation is bounded on the south-east side, next the town, by an

irrigation ditch, which is crossed by as many little bridges as there

are streets that open out upon the common. (All this part of the town is

laid out in "additions," and is sparsely built up.) Close to this

division line, at right angles with it, are the dry ditches and hurdle

embankments over which the stern young corporals put their squads, under

the eye of the captain.

Out in the centre of the plain other squads are engaged in the athletics

of horsemanship,--a series of problems in action which embraces every

sort of emergency a mounted man may encounter in the rush and throng of

battle, and the means of instantly meeting it, and of saving his own

life or that of a comrade. So much more is made in these days of the

individual powers of the man and horse that it is wonderful to see what

an exact yet intelligently obedient combination they have become; no

less effective in a charge, as so many pounds of live momentum to be

hurled on the bayonet points, but much more self-reliant on scout

service, or when scattered singly, in defeat, over a wide, strange field

of danger.

On the regular afternoons for squad and troop drill, the ditch bank on

the town side would be lined with spectators: ladies in light cotton

dresses and beflowered hats, small bare-legged boys and muddy dogs, the

small boys' sisters dragging bonnetless babies by the hand, and

sometimes a tired mother who has come in a hurry to see where her little

truants have strayed to, or a cow-boy lounging sideways on his peaked

saddle, condescending to look on at the riding of Uncle Sam's boys. The

crowd assorts itself as the people do who line the barriers at a

bull-fight: those who have parasols, to the shadow; those who have

barely a hat, to the sun.

Here, on the field of the gray-green plain, under the glaring tent roof

of the desert sky, the national free circus goes on,--to the screaming

delight of the small boys, the fear and exultation of the ladies, and

the alternate pride and disgust of the officers who have it in charge.

A squad of the boldest riders are jumping, six in line. One can see by

the way they come that every man will go over: first the small ditch,

hardly a check in the pace; then a rush at the hurdle embankment, the

horses' heads very grand and Greek as they rear in a broken line to take

it. Their faces are as strong and wild as the faces of the men. Their

flanks are slippery with sweat. They clear the hurdles, and stretch out

for the wide ditch.

"Keep in line! Don't crowd!" the corporal shouts. They are doing well,

he thinks. Over they all go; and the ladies breathe again, and say to

each other how much finer this sport is because it is work, and has a

purpose in it.

Now the guidon comes, riding alone, and the whole troop is proud of him.

The signal flag flashes erect from the trooper's stirrup; the horse is

new to it, and fears it as if it were something pursuing him; but in the

face of horse and man is the same fixed expression, the sober

recklessness that goes straight to the finish. If these do not go over,

it will not be for want of the spur in the blood.

Next comes a pale young cavalryman just out of the hospital. He has had

a fall at the hurdle week before and strained his back. His captain sees

that he is nervous and not yet fit for the work, yet cannot spare him

openly. He invents an order, and sends him off to another part of the

field where the other squads are manoeuvring.

If it is not in the man to go over, it will not be in his horse, though

a poor horse may put a good rider to shame; but the measure of every man

and every horse is taken by those who have watched them day by day.

The ladies are much concerned for the man who fails,--"so sorry" they

are for him, as his horse blunders over the hurdle, and slackens when he

ought to go free; and of course he jibs at the wide ditch, and the rider

saws on his mouth.

"Give him his head! Where are your spurs, man?" the corporal shouts, and

adds something under his breath which cannot be said in the presence of

his captain. In they go, floundering, on their knees and noses, horse

and man, and the ladies cannot see, for the dust, which of them is on

top; but they come to the surface panting, and the man, whose uniform is

of the color of the ditch, climbs on again, and the corporal's disgust

is heard in his voice as he calls, "Ne-aaxt!"

It need not be said that no corporal ever asked Henniker where were

_his_ spurs. To-day the fret in his temper fretted his horse, a young,

nervous animal who did not need to know where his rider's heels were

quite so often as Henniker's informed him.

"Is that a non-commissioned officer who is off, and his horse scouring

away over the plain? What a dire mortification," the ladies say, "and

what a consolation to the bunglers!"

No, it is the trumpeter. He was taking the hurdle in a rush of the whole

squad; his check-strap broke, and his horse went wild, and slammed

himself into another man's horse, and ground his rider's knee against

his comrade's carbine. It is Henniker who is down in the dust, cursing

the carbine, and cursing his knee, and cursing the mischief generally.

The ladies strolled home through the heat, and said how glorious it was

and how awfully real, and how one man got badly hurt; and they described

in detail the sight of Henniker limping bareheaded in the sun, holding

on to a comrade's shoulder; how his face was a "ghastly brown white,"

and his eyes were bloodshot, and his black head dun with dust.

"It was the trumpeter who blew so beautifully the other night,--who hurt

his knee in the rifle drill," they said. "It was his knee that was hurt

to-day. I wonder if it was the same knee?"

It was the same knee, and this time Henniker went to hospital and stayed

there; and being no malingerer, his confinement was bitterly irksome and

a hurt to his physical pride.

The post surgeon's house is the last one on the line. Then comes the

hospital, but lower down the hill. The officer's walk reaches it by a

pair of steps that end in a slope of grass. There are moisture and shade

where the hospital stands, and a clump of box-elder trees is a boon to

the convalescents there. The road between barracks and canteen passes

the angle of the whitewashed fence; a wild syringa bush grows on the

hospital side, and thrusts its blossoms over the wall. There is a broken

board in the fence which the syringa partly hides.

After three o'clock in the afternoon this is the coolest corner of the

hospital grounds; and here, on the grass, Henniker was lying, one day of

the second week of his confinement.

He had been half asleep when a soft, light thump on the grass aroused

him. A stray kitten had crawled through the hole in the fence, and,

feeling her way down with her forepaws, had leaped to the ground beside

him.

"Hey, pussy!" Henniker welcomed her pleasantly, and then was silent. A

hand had followed the kitten through the hole in the fence,--a smooth

brown hand no bigger than a child's, but perfect in shape as a woman's.

The small fingers moved and curled enticingly.

"Pussy, pussy? Come, pussy!" a soft voice cooed. "Puss, puss, puss?

Come, pussy!" The fingers groped about in empty air. "Where are you,

pussy?"

Henniker had quietly possessed himself of the kitten, which, moved by

these siren tones, began to squirm a little and meekly to "miew." He

reached forth his hand and took the small questing one prisoner; then he

let the kitten go. There was a brief speechless struggle, quite a

useless one.

"Let me go! Who is it? Oh _dear_!"

Another pull. Plainly, from the tone, this last was feminine profanity.

Silence again, the hand struggling persistently, but in vain. The soft

bare arm, working against the fence, became an angry red.

"Softly now. It's only me. Didn't you know I was in hospital, Meta?"

"Is it you, Henniker?"

"Indeed it is. You wouldn't begrudge me a small shake of your hand,

after all these days?"

"But you are not in hospital now?"

"That's what I am. I'm not in bed, but I'm going on three legs when I'm

going at all. I'm a house-bound man." A heavy sigh from Henniker.

"Haven't you shaken hands enough now, Henniker?" beseechingly from the

other side. "I only wanted kitty; please put her through the fence."

"What's your hurry?"

"Have you got her there? Callie left her with me. I mustn't lose her.

Please?"

"Has Callie gone away?"

"Why, yes, didn't you know? She has gone to stay with Tim's wife." (Tim

Meadows was the eldest, the married son of the family.) "She has a

little baby, and they can't get any help, and father wouldn't let

mother go down because it's bad for her to be over a cook stove, you

know."

"Yes, I know the old lady feels the heat."

"We are quite busy at the house. I came of an errand to the

quartermaster-sergeant's, and kitty followed me, and the children chased

her. I must go home now," urged Meta. "Really, I did not think you would

be so foolish, Henniker. I can't see what fun there is in this!"

"Yes, but Meta, I've made a discovery,--here in your hand."

"In my hand? What is it? Let me see." A violent determined pull, and a

sound like a smothered explosion of laughter from Henniker.

"Softly, softly now. You'll hurt yourself, my dear."

"Is my hand dirty? It was the kitten, then; her paws were all over

sand."

"Oh, no. Great sign! It's worse than that. It'll not come off."

"I _will_ see what it is!"

"But you can't see unless I was to tell you. I'm a hand reader, did you

know it? I can tell your fortune by the lines on your palm. I'm reading

them off here just like a book."

"Good gracious! what do you see?"

"Why, it's a most extraordinary thing! Your head line is that mixed up

with your heart line, 'pon me word I can't tell which is which. Which is

it, Meta? Do you choose your friends with your head entirely, or is it

the other way with you, dear?"

"Oh, is that all? I thought you could tell fortunes really. I don't care

what I _am_; I want to know what I'm going to _do_. Don't you see

anything that's going to happen to me?"

"Lots of things. I see something that's going to happen to you right

now. I wonder did it ever happen to you before?"

"What is it? When is it coming?"

"It has come. I will put it right here in your hand. But I shall want it

back again, remember; and don't be giving it away, now, to anybody

else."

A mysterious pause. Meta felt a breath upon her wrist, and a kiss from a

mustached lip was pressed into the hollow of her hand.

"Keep that till I ask you for it," said Henniker quite sternly, and

closed her hand tight with his own. The hand became an expressive little

fist.

"I think you are just as mean and silly as you can be! I'll never

believe a word you say again."

"Pussy," remarked Henniker, in a mournful aside, "go ask your mistress

will she please forgive me. Tell her I'm not exactly sorry, but I

couldn't help it. Faith, I couldn't."

"I'm not her mistress," said Meta.

It was a keen reminder, but Henniker did not seem to feel it much.

"Go tell Meta," he corrected. "Ask her please to forgive me, and I'll

take it back,--the kiss, I mean."

"I'm going now," said Meta. "Keep the kitten, if you want her. She isn't

mine, anyway."

But now the kitten was softly crowded through the fence by Henniker, and

Meta, relenting, gathered her into her arms and carried her home.

It was certainly not his absence from Callie's side that put Henniker in

such a bad humor with his confinement. He grew morbid, and fell into

treacherous dreaming, and wondered jealously about the other boys, and

what they were doing with themselves these summer evenings, while he was

loafing on crutches under the hospital trees. He was frankly pining for

his freedom before Callie should return. He wanted a few evenings which

he need not account for to anybody but himself; and he got his freedom,

unhappily, in time to do the mischief of his dream,--to put vain,

selfish longings into the simple heart of Meta, and to spoil his own

conscience toward his promised wife.

Henniker knew the ways of the Meadows cottage as well as if he had been

one of the family. He knew that Meta, having less skill about the house

than the older girls, took the part of chore-boy, and fetched and drove

away the cows.

It were simple enough to cross her evening track through the pale

sagebrush, which betrayed every bit of contrasting color, the colors of

Meta's hair-ribbon and her evening frock; it were simple enough, had she

been willing to meet him. But Meta had lost confidence in the hero of

the household. She had seen Henniker in a new light; and whatever her

heart line said, her head line told her that she had best keep a good

breadth of sagebrush between herself and that particular pair of broad

blue shoulders that moved so fast above it. So as Henniker advanced the

girl retreated, obscurely, with shy doublings and turnings, carefully

managed not to reveal that she was running away; for that might vex

Henniker, and she was still too loyal to the family bond to wish to show

her sister's lover an open discourtesy. She did not dream of the

possibility of his becoming her own lover, but she thought him capable

of going great lengths in his very peculiar method of teasing.

As soon as he understood her tactics Henniker changed his own. Without

another glance in her direction he made off for the hills, but not too

far from the trail the cows were taking; and choosing a secluded spot,

behind a thick-set clump of sage, he took out his rustic pipe and

waited, and when he saw her he began to play.

Meta's heart jumped at the first note. She stole along, drinking in the

sounds, no one molesting or making her afraid. Ahead of her, as she

climbed, the first range of hills cast a glowing reflection in her

face; but the hills beyond were darker, cooler, and the blue-black pines

stood out against the sky-like trees of a far cloud-country cut off by

some aerial gulf from the most venturesome of living feet.

Henniker saw the girl coming, her face alight in the primrose glow, and

he threw away all moments but the present. His breath stopped; then he

took a deep inspiration, laid his lips to the pipe, and played, softly,

subtly, as one who thinks himself alone.

She had discovered him, but she could not drag herself very far away

from those sounds. At last she sat down upon the ground, and gave

herself up to listening. A springy sagebush supported her as she let

herself sink back; one arm was behind her head, to protect it from the

prickly shoots.

"Meta," said Henniker, "are you listening? I'm talking to you now."

It was all the same: his voice was like another phrase of music. He went

on playing, and Meta did not stir.

Another pause. "Are you there still, Meta? I was lonesome to-night, but

you ran away from me. Was that friendly? You like my music; then why

don't you like me? Well, here's for you again, ungrateful!" He went on

playing.

The cows were wandering wide of the trail, towards the upper valley.

Meta began to feel herself constrained, and not in the direction of her

duty. She rose, cast her long braids over her shoulder, and moved

resolutely away.

Henniker was absorbed in what he was saying to her with his pipe. When

he had made a most seductive finish he paused, and spoke. He rose and

looked about him. Meta was a long way off, down the valley, walking

fast. He bounded after her, and caught her rudely around the waist.

"See here, little girl, I won't be made game of like this! I was playing

to you, and you ran off and left me tooting like a fool. Was that

right?"

"I had to go; it is getting late. The music was too sweet. It made me

feel like I could cry." She lifted her long-lashed eyes swimming in

liquid brightness. Henniker caught her hand in his.

"I was playing to you, Meta, as I play to no one else. Does a person

steal away and leave another person discoursin' to the empty air? I

didn't think you would want to make a fool of me."

Meta drew away her hand and pressed it in silence on her heart. No woman

of Anglo-Saxon blood, without a vast amount of training, could have said

so much and said it so naturally with a gesture so hackneyed.

Henniker looked at her from under his eyebrows, biting his mustache. He

took a few steps away from her, and then came back.

"Meta," he said, in a different voice, "what was that thing you wore

around your neck, the other night, at the minstrels,--that filigree gold

thing, eh?"

The girl looked up, astonished; then her eyes fell, and she colored

angrily. No Indian or dog could hate to be laughed at more than Meta;

and she had been so teased about her innocent make-believe necklace! Had

the girls been spreading the joke? She had suddenly outgrown the

childish good faith that had made it possible for her to deck herself in

it, and she wished never to hear the thing mentioned again. She hung

her head and would not speak.

Henniker's suspicions were characteristic. Of course a girl like that

must have a lover. Her face confessed that he had touched upon a tender

spot.

"It was a pretty thing," he said coldly. "I wonder if I could get one

like it for Callie?"

"I don't think Callie would wear one even if you gave it to her," Meta

answered with spirit.

"I say, won't you tell me which of the boys it is, Meta?--Won't I wear

the life out of him, just!" he added to himself.

"Is what?"

"Your best fellah; the one who gave you that."

"There isn't any. It was nothing. I won't tell you what it was! I made

it myself, there! It was only 'butter-balls.'"

"Oh, good Lord!" laughed Henniker.

Meta thought he was laughing at her. It was too much! The sweetness of

his music was all jangled in her nerves. Tears would come, and then more

tears because of the first.

Had Meta been the child of her father, she might have been sitting that

night in one of the vine-shaded porches of the houses on the line, with

a brace of young lieutenants at her feet, and in her wildest follies

with them she would have been protected by all the traditions and

safeguards of her class. As she was the child of her mother, instead,

she was out on the hills with Henniker. And how should the squaw's

daughter know the difference between protection and pursuit?

When Henniker put his arm around her and kissed the tears from her eyes,

she would not have changed places with the proudest lady of the

line,--captain's wife, lieutenant's sweetheart, or colonel's daughter of

them all. Her chief, who blew the trumpet, was as great a man in Meta's

eyes as the officer who buckled on his sabre in obedience to the call.

As for Henniker, no girl's head against his breast had ever looked so

womanly dear as Meta's; no shut eyelids that he had ever kissed had

covered such wild, sweet eyes. He did not think of her at all in words,

any more than of the twilight afterglow in which they parted, with its

peculiar intensity, its pang of color. He simply felt her; and it was

nearest to the poetic passion of any emotion that he had ever known.

That night Meta deceived her foster-mother, and lying awake beside

Callie's empty cot, in the room which the two girls shared together, she

treacherously prayed that it might be long before her sister's return.

The wild white lily had opened, and behold the stain!

It had been a hard summer for Tim Meadows's family,--the second summer

on a sagebrush ranch, their small capital all in the ground, the first

hay crop ungathered, and the men to board as well as to pay. The

boarding was Mrs. Tim's part; yet many a young wife would have thought

that she had enough to do with her own family to cook and wash for, and

her first baby to take care of.

"You'll get along all right," the older mothers encouraged her. "A

summer baby is no trouble at all."

No trouble when the trouble is twenty years behind us, among the joys of

the past. But Tim's wife was wondering if she could hold out till cool

weather came, when the rush of the farm work would be over, and her

"summer baby" would be in short clothes and able to sit alone. The heat

in their four-roomed cabin, in the midst of the treeless land, was an

ordeal alone. To sleep in the house was impossible; the rooms and the

windows were too small to admit enough air. They moved their beds

outside, and slept like tramps under the stars; and the broad light

awoke them at earliest dawn, and the baby would never sleep till after

ten at night, when the dry Plains wind began to fan the face of the

weary land. Even Callie, whose part in the work was subsidiary, lost

flesh, and the roses in her cheeks turned sallow, in the month she

stayed on the ranch; but she would have been ashamed to complain, though

she was heartsick for a word from Henniker. He had written to her only

once.

It was Mrs. Meadows who thought it high time that Callie should come

home. She had found a good woman to take her daughter's place, and

arranged the matter of pay herself. Tim had said they could get no help,

but his mother knew what that meant; such help as they could afford to

pay for was worse than none.

It seemed a poor return to Callie, for her sisterly service in the

valley, to come home and find her lover a changed man. Mrs. Meadows said

he was like all the soldiers she had ever known,--light come, light go.

But this did not comfort Callie much, nor more to be reminded what a

good thing it was she had found him out in time.

Henniker was not scoundrel enough to make love to two girls at once, two

semi-sisters, who slept in the same room and watched each other's

movements in the same looking-glass. It was no use pretending that he

and Callie could "heat their broth over again;" so the coolness came

speedily to a breach, and Henniker no longer openly, in fair daylight,

took the path to the cottage gate. But there were other paths.

He had found a way to talk to Meta with his trumpet. He sent her

messages at guard-mounting, as the guard was forming, when, as senior

trumpeter, he was allowed a choice in the airs he played; and when he

was orderly trumpeter, and could not come himself to say it, he sent

her his good-night in the plaintive notes of taps.

This was the climax of Henniker's flirtations: all that went before had

been as nothing, all that came after was not much worse than nothing. It

was the one sincere as it was the one poetic passion of his life; and

had it not cost him his self-respect through his baseness to Callie, and

the treachery and dissimulation he was teaching to an innocent child, it

might have made him a faithful man. As it was, his soldier's honor

slept; it was the undisciplined part of him that spoke to the elemental

nature of the girl; and it was fit that a trumpet's reckless summons, or

its brief inarticulate call, like the note of a wild bird to its mate,

should be the language of his love.

* * * * *

Retreat had sounded, one evening in October, but it made no stir any

more in the cottage where the girls had been so gay. Callie, putting the

tea on the table, remembered, as she heard the gun fire, how in the the

spring Henniker had said that when "sound off" was at six he would drop

in to supper some night, and show her how to make _chili con carne_, a

dish that every soldier knows who has served on the Mexican border. Her

face grew hard, for these foolish, unsleeping reminders were as constant

as the bugle calls.

The women waited for the head of the house; but as he did not come, they

sat down and ate quickly, saving the best dish hot for him.

They had finished, and the room was growing dusk, when he came in

breezily, and called at once, as a man will, for a light. Meta rose to

fetch it. The door stood open between the fore-room and the kitchen,

where she was groping for a lamp. Mr. Meadows spoke in a voice too big

for the room. He had just been conversing across the common with the

quartermaster-sergeant, as the two men's footsteps diverged by separate

paths to their homes.

"I hear there's going to be a change at the post;" he shouted. "The --th

is going to leave this department, and C troop of the Second is coming

from Custer. Sergeant says they are looking for orders any day now."

Mrs. Meadows, before she thought, glanced at Callie. The girl winced,

for she hated to be looked at like that. She held up her head and began

to sing audaciously, drumming with her fingers on the table:--

"'When my mother comes to know

That I love the soldiers so,

She will lock me up all day,

Till the soldiers march away.'"

"What sort of a song is that?" asked her father sharply.

Callie looked him in the eyes. "Don't you know that tune?" said she.

"Henniker plays that at guard-mount; and sometimes he plays this:--

'Oh, whistle, and I'll come to you, my lad,

Though father and mither and a' should go mad.'"

"Let him play what he likes," said the father angrily. "His saucy jig

tunes are nothing to us. I'm thankful no girl of mine is following after

the army. It's a hard life for a woman, I can tell you, in the ranks."

Callie pushed her chair back, and looked out of the window as if she had

not heard.

"Where's Meta with that lamp? Go and see what's keeping her."

"Sit still," said Mrs. Meadows. She went herself into the kitchen, but

no one heard her speak a word; yet the kitchen was not empty.

There was a calico-covered lounge that stood across the end of the room;

Meta sat there, quite still, her back against the wall. Mrs. Meadows

took one look at her; then she lighted the lamp and carried it into the

dining-room, and went back and shut herself in with Meta.

"'When my mother comes to know,'"

hummed Callie. Her face was pale. She hardly knew that she was singing.

"Stop that song!" her father shouted. "Go and see what's the matter with

your sister."

"Sister?" repeated Callie. "Meta is no sister of mine."

"She's your tent-mate, then. Ye grew nest-ripe under the same mother's

wing."

"Meta can use her own wings now, you will find. She grew nest-ripe very

young."

Father Meadows knew that there was trouble inside of that closed door,

as there was trouble inside the white lips and shut heart of his frank

and joyous Callie, but it was "the women's business." He went out to

attend to his own.

Irrigation on the scale of a small cottage garden is tedious work. It

has intervals of silence and leaning on a hoe while one little channel

fills or trickles into the next one; and the water must be stopped out

here, and floated longer there, like the bath over the surface of an

etcher's plate. Water was scarce and the rates were high that summer,

and there was a good deal of "dry-point" work with a hoe in Father

Meadows's garden.

He had come to one of the discouraging places where the ground was

higher than the water could be made to reach without a deal of propping

and damming with shovelfuls of earth. This spot was close to the window

of the kitchen chamber, which was "mother's room." She was in there

talking to Meta. Her voice was deep with the maternal note of

remonstrance; Meta's was sharp and high with excitement and resistance.

Her faintness had passed, but Mother Meadows had been inquiring into

causes.

"I am married to him, mother! He is my husband as much as he can be."

"It was never Father Magrath married you, or I should be knowing to it

before now."

"No; we went before a judge, or a justice, in the town."

"In town! Well, that is something; but be sure there is a wrong or a

folly somewhere when a man takes a young girl out of her home and out of

her church to be married. If Henniker had taken you 'soberly, in the

fear of God'"--

"He _was_ sober!" cried Meta. "I never saw him any other way."

"Mercy on us! I was not thinking of the man's habits. He's too good to

have done the way he has. That's what I have against him. I don't know

what I shall say to Father Josette. The disgrace of this is on me, too,

for not looking after my house better. 'Never let her be humbled through

her not being all white,' the father said when he brought you to me, and

God knows I never forgot that your little heart was white. I trusted you

as I would one of my own, and was easier on you for fear of a mother's

natural bias toward her own flesh and blood; and now to think that you

would lie to me, and take a man in secret that had deceived your sister

before you,--as if nothing mattered so that you got what you wanted! And

down in the town, without the priest's blessing or a kiss from any of us

belonging to you! It's one way to get married, but it's not the right

way."

"Did no white girl ever do as I have?" asked Meta, with a touch of

sullenness.

"Plenty of them, but they didn't make their mothers happy."

Meta stirred restively on the bed. "Will Father Magrath have to talk to

me, and Father Josette, and _all_ the fathers?" she inquired. "He said

he never would have married Callie anyway,--not even if he couldn't

have had me."

"And the more shame to him to say such a thing to one sister of another!

Callie is much the best off of you two." Mrs. Meadows rose and moved

heavily away from the bed. "Well," she said, "most marriages are just

one couple more. It's very little of a sacrament there is about the

common run of such things, but I hoped for something better when it came

to my girls' turn. However, sorrow is the sacrament God sends us, to

give us a chance to learn a little something before we die. I expect

you'll learn your lesson."

She came back to the bed, and Meta moaned as she sat down again, to

signify that she had been talked to enough. But the mother had something

practical to say, though she could not say it without emotional

emphasis, for her outraged feelings were like a flood that has come

down, but has not yet subsided.

"If there's any way for you to go with Henniker when the troop goes,

it's with him you ought to be; but if he has married without his

captain's consent, he'll get no help at barracks. Do you know how that

is, Meta?"

Meta shook her head; but presently she forced herself to speak the

truth. She did know that Henniker had told no one at the post of his

marriage. She had never asked him why, nor had thought that it mattered.

"Oh my! I was afraid of that," said Mrs. Meadows. "The colonel knows it

was Callie he was engaged to. Father went up to see him about Henniker,

and the colonel as good as gave his word for him that he was a man we

could have in the family. A commanding officer doesn't like such

goings-on with respectable neighbors."

Mrs. Meadows possibly overestimated the post commandant's interest in

these matters, but she had gratefully remembered his civility to her

husband when he went to make fatherly inquiries. The colonel was a

father himself, and had seemed to appreciate their anxiety about

Callie's choice. It was just as well that Meta should know that none of

the constituted authorities were on the side of her lover's defection.

Meta said nothing to all this. It did not touch her, only as it bore on

the one question, Was Henniker going to leave her behind him?

"How long is it since you have seen him, that he hasn't told you this

news himself?" asked the mother.

"Last night; but perhaps he did not know."

Henniker had known, as Mrs. Meadows supposed, but having to shift for

himself in the matter of transportation for the wife he had never

acknowledged, and seeing no way of providing for her without

considerable inconvenience to himself, he had put off the pain of

breaking to her the parting that must come. In their later consultations

Meta had mentioned her "pony money," as she called it, and Henniker had

privately welcomed the existence of such a fund. It lightened the

pressure of his own responsibility in the future, in case--but he did

not formulate his doubts. There are more uncertainties than anything

else, except hard work, in the life of an enlisted man.

Father Meadows purposely would not speak of Meta's resources. He felt

that Henniker had not earned his confidence in this or any other respect

where his girls were concerned. Till Meta should come of age,--she was

barely sixteen,--or until it could be known what sort of a husband she

had got in Henniker, her bit of money was safest in her guardian's

hands.

So the orders came, and the transfer of troops was made; and now it was

the trumpeter of C troop that sounded the calls, and Henniker's bold

messages at guard-mounting and his tender good-night at taps called no

more across the plain. The summer lilies were all dead on the hills, and

the common was white with snow. But something in Meta's heart said,--

"'Weep no more! Oh, weep no more!

Young buds sleep in the root's white core.'"

And she dried her eyes. The mother was very gentle with her; and Callie,

hard-eyed, saying nothing, watched her, and did her little cruel

kindnesses that cut to the quick of her soreness and her pride.

When the Bannock brethren came, late in September, the next year, she

walked the sagebrush paths to their encampment with her young son in her

arms. They looked at the boy and said that it was good; but when they

asked after the father, and Meta told them that he had gone with his

troop to Fort Custer, and that she waited for word to join him, they

said it was not good, and they turned away their eyes in silence from

her shame. The men did, but the women looked at her in a silence that

said different things. Her heart went out to them, and their dumb soft

glances brought healing to her wounds. What sorrow, what humiliation,

was hers that they from all time had not known? The men took little

notice of her after that: she had lost caste both as maid and wife; she

was nothing now but a means of existence to her son. But between her

and her dark sisters the natural bond grew strong. Old lessons that had

lain dormant in her blood revived with the force of her keener

intelligence, and supplanted later teachings that were of no use now

except to make her suffer more.

It was impossible that Mother Meadows should not resent the wrong and

insult to her own child; she felt it increasingly as she came to realize

the girl's unhappiness. It grew upon her, and she could not feel the

same towards Meta, who kept herself more and more proudly and silently

aloof. She was one alone in the house, where no one spoke of the past to

reproach her, where nothing but kindness was ever shown. The kindness

was like the hand of pardon held out to her. Why did they think she

wanted their forgiveness? She was not sorry for what she had done. She

wanted nothing, only Henniker. So she crept away with her child and sat

among the Bannock women, and was at peace with them whom she had never

injured; who beheld her unhappiness, but did not call it her shame.

When she walked the paths across the common, her eyes were always on the

skyward range of hills that appeared to her farther away than

ever,--beyond a wider gulf, now that their tops were white, and the

clouds came low enough to hide them. Often yellow gleams shot out

beneath the clouds and turned the valleys green. It seemed to her that

Henniker was there; he was in the cold, bright north, and the trumpets

called her, but she could not go, for the way was very long. Such words

as these she would sometimes whisper to her dark sisters by the

camp-fire, and once they said to her, "Get strong and go; we will show

you the way."

* * * * *

Henniker was taking life as it comes to an enlisted man in barracks. He

thought of Meta many times, and of his boy, very tenderly and

shamefully; and if he could have whistled them to him, or if a wind of

luck could have blown them thither, he would have embraced them with

joy, and shared with them all that he had. There was the difficulty. He

had so little besides the very well fitting clothes on his back. His pay

seemed to melt away, month by month, and where it went to the mischief

only knew. Canteen got a good deal of it. Henniker was one of the

popular men in barracks, with his physical expertness, his piping and

singing and story-telling, and his high good humor at all times with

himself and everybody else. He did not drink much, except in the way of

comradeship, but he did a good deal of that. He was a model trumpeter,

and a very ornamental fellow when he rode behind his captain on

full-dress inspection, more bedight than the captain himself with gold

cords and tags and bullion; but he was not a domestic man, and the only

person in the world who might perhaps have made him one was a very

helpless, ignorant little person, and--she was not there.

It was a bad season for selling ponies. The Indians had arrived late

with a larger band than usual, which partly represented an unwise

investment they had made on the strength of their good fortune the year

before. Certain big ditch enterprises had been starting then, creating a

brisk demand for horses at prices unusual, especially in the latter end

of summer. This year the big ditch had closed down, and was selling its

own horses, or turning them out upon the range, and unbroken Indian

ponies could hardly be given away.

The disappointment of the Bannocks was very great, and their

comprehension of causes very slow. It took some time for them to satisfy

themselves that Father Meadows was telling them a straight tale. It took

still more time for consultations as to what should now be done with

their unsalable stock. The middle of October was near, and the grumbling

chiefs finally decided to accept their loss and go hunting. The squaws

and children were ordered home to the Reservation by rail, as wards of

the nation travel, to get permission of the agent for the hunt, and the

men, with ponies, were to ride overland and meet the women at Eagle

Rock.

Thus Meta learned how an Indian woman may pass unchallenged from one

part of the country to another, clothed in the freedom of her poverty.

In this way the nation acknowledges a part of its ancient indebtedness

to her people. No word had come from Henniker, though he had said that

he should get his discharge in October. Meta's resolve was taken. The

Bannock women encouraged her, and she saw how simple it would be to copy

their dress and slip away with them as far as their roads lay together;

and thence, having gained practice in her part and become accustomed to

its disguises, to go on alone to Custer, where her chief, her beautiful

trumpeter, was sounding his last calls. She was wise in this

resolution--to see her husband, at whatever cost, before the time of his

freedom should come; but she was late in carrying it out.

Long before, she had turned over fruitlessly in her mind every means of

getting money for this journey besides the obvious way of asking Father

Meadows for her own. She had guessed that her friends were suspicious of

Henniker's good faith, and believed that if they should come to know of

her intention of running away to follow him they would prevent her for

her own good,--which was quite the case.

That was the point Father Meadows made with his wife, when she argued

that Meta, being a married woman now, ought to learn the purchasing

power of money and its limitations by experimenting with a little of her

own.

"We shall do wrong if we keep her a child now," she said.

"But if she has money, she'll lay it by till she gets enough to slip off

to her soldier with. There's that much Injun about her; she'll follow to

heel like a dog."

Father Meadows could not have spoken in this way of Meta a year ago. She

had lost caste with him, also.

"Don't, father," the mother said, with a hurt look. "She'll not follow

far with ten dollars in her pocket; but that much I want to try her

with. She's like a child about shopping. She'll take anything at all, if

it looks right and the man persuades her. And those Jew clerks will

charge whatever they think they can get."

Mrs. Meadows had her way, and the trial sum was given to Meta one day,

and the next day she and the child were missing.

At dusk, that evening, a group of Bannock squaws, more or less

encumbered with packs, and children, climbed upon one of the flat cars

of a freight train bound for Pocatello. The engine steamed out of the

station, and down the valley, and away upon the autumn plains. The next

morning the Bannocks broke camp, and vanished before the hoar frost had

melted from the sage. Their leave-taking had been sullen, and their

answers to questions about Meta, with which Father Meadows had routed

them out in the night, had been so unsatisfactory that he took the first

train to the Fort Hall Agency. There he waited for the party of squaws

from Bisuka; but when they came, Meta was not with them. They knew

nothing of her, they said; even the agent was deceived by their

counterfeit ignorance. They could tell nothing, and were allowed to join

their men at Eagle Rock, to go hunting into the wild country around

Jackson's Hole.

Father Meadows went back and relieved his wife's worst fear,--that the

girl had fulfilled the wrong half of her destiny, and gone back to hide

her grief in the bosom of her tribe.

"Then you'll find her at Custer," said she. "You must write to the

quartermaster-sergeant. And be sure you tell him she's married to him.

He may be carrying on with some one else by this time."

Traveling as a ward of the nation travels; suffering as a white girl

would suffer, from exposure and squalor, weariness and dirt, but bearing

her misery like a squaw, Meta came at last to Custer station. In five

days, always on the outside of comforts that other travelers pay for,

she had passed from the lingering mildness of autumn in southern Idaho

into the early winter of the hard Montana north.

She was fit only for a sick-bed when she came into the empty station at

Custer, and learned that she was still thirty miles away from the fort.

In her make-believe broken English, she asked a humble question about

transportation. The station-keeper was called away that moment by a

summons from the wire. It was while she stood listening to the tapping

of the message, and waiting to repeat her question, that she felt a

frightening pain, sharp, like a knife sticking in her breast. She could

take only short breaths, yet longed for deep ones to brace her lungs and

strengthen her sick heart. She stepped outside and spoke to a man who

was wheeling freight down the platform. She dared not throw off her

fated disguise and say, "I am the wife of Trumpeter Henniker. How shall

I get to the fort?" for she had stolen a ride of a thousand miles, and

she knew not what the penalty of discovery might be. She had borrowed a

squaw's wretched immunity, and she must pay the price for that which she

had rashly coveted. She pulled her blanket about her face and muttered,

"Which way--Fort Custer?"

The freight man answered by pointing to the road. Dark wind clouds

rolled along the snow-white tops of the mountains. The plain was a

howling sea of dust.

"No stage?" she gasped.

The man laughed and shook his head. "There's the road. Injuns walk." He

went on with his baggage-truck, and did not look at her again. He had

not spoken unkindly: the fact and his blunt way of putting it were

equally a matter of course, Squaws who "beat" their way in on freight

trains do not go out by stage.

Meta crept away in the lee of a pile of freight, and sat down to nurse

her child. The infant, like herself, had taken harm from exposure to the

cold; his head passages were stopped, and when he tried to nurse he had

to fight with suffocation and hunger both, and threw himself back in the

visible act of screaming, but his hoarse little pipe was muted to a

squeak. This, which sounds grotesque in the telling, was acute anguish

for the mother to see. She covered her face with her blanket and sobbed

and coughed, and the pain tore her like a knife. But she rose, and began

her journey. She had little conception of what she was under-taking, but

it would have made no difference; she must get there on her feet, since

there was no other way.

She no longer carried her baby squaw fashion. She was out of sight of

the station, and she hugged it where the burden lay heaviest, on her

heart. Her hands were not free, but she had cast away her bundle of

food; she could eat no more; and the warmth of the child's nestling body

gave her all the strength she had,--that and her certainty of Henniker's

welcome. That he would be faithful to her presence she never doubted. He

would see her coming, perhaps, and he would run to catch her and the

child together in his arms. She could feel the thrill of his eyes upon

her, and the half groan of joy with which he would strain her to his

breast. Then she would take one deep, deep breath of happiness,--ah,

that pain!--and let the anguish of it kill her if it must.

The snows on the mountains had come down and encompassed the whole

plain; the winter's siege had begun. The winds were iced to the teeth,

and they smote like armed men. They encountered Meta carrying some

hidden, precious thing to the garrison at Custer; they seized her and

searched her rudely, and left her, trembling and disheveled, sobbing

along with her silly treasure in her arms. The dust rose in columns, and

traveled with mocking becks and bows before her, or burst like a bomb in

her face, or circled about her like a band of wild horses lashed by the

hooting winds.

Meantime, Henniker, in span-new civilian dress, was rattling across the

plain on the box seat of the ambulance, beside the soldier driver. The

ambulance was late to catch the east-bound train, and the pay-master was

inside; so the four stout mules laid back their ears and traveled, and

the heavy wheels bounded from stone to stone of the dust-buried road.

Henniker smoked hard in silence, and drew great breaths of cold air into

his splendid lungs. He was warm and clean and sound and fit, from top to

toe. He had been drinking bounteous farewells to a dozen good comrades,

and though sufficiently himself for all ordinary purposes, he was not

that self he would have wished to be had he known that one of the test

moments of his life was before him. It was a mood with him of headlong,

treacherous quiet, and the devil of all foolish desires was showing him

the pleasures of the world. He was in dangerously good health; he had

got his discharge, and was off duty and off guard, all at once. He was a

free man, though married. He was going to his wife, of course. Poor

little Meta! God bless the girl, how she loved him! Ah, those black-eyed

girls, with narrow temples and sallow, deep-fringed eyelids, they knew

how to love a man! He was going to her by way of Laramie, or perhaps the

coast. He might run upon a good thing over there, and start a bit of a

home before he sent for her or went to fetch her; it was all one. She

rested lightly on his mind, and he thought of her with a tender,

reminiscent sadness,--rather a curious feeling considering that he was

to see her now so soon. Why was she always "poor little Meta" in his

thoughts?

Poor little Meta was toiling on, for "Injuns walk." The dreadful pain of

coughing was incessant. The dust blinded and choked her, and there was a

roaring in her ears which she confused with the night and day burden of

the trains. She was in a burning fever that was fever and chill in one,

and her mind was not clear, except on the point of keeping on; for once

down, she felt that she could never get up again. At times she fancied

she was clinging to the rocking, roaring platforms she had ridden on so

long. The dust swirled around her--when had she breathed anything but

dust! The ground swam like water under her feet. She swayed, and seemed

to be falling,--perhaps she did fall. But she was up and on her feet,

the blanket cast from her head, when the ambulance drove straight

towards her, and she saw him--

She had seen it coming, the ambulance, down the long, dizzy rise. The

hills above were white as death; a crooked gash of color rent the sky;

the toothed pines stood black against that gleam, and through the

ringing in her ears, loud and sweet, she heard the trumpets call. The

cloud of delirium lifted, and she saw the uniform she loved; and beside

the soldier driver sat her white chief, looking down at her who came so

late with joy, bringing her babe,--her sheaves, the harvest of that

year's wild sowing. But he did not seem to see her. She had not the

power to speak or cry. She took one step forward and held up the child.

Then she fell down on her face in the road, for the beloved one had seen

her, and had not known her, and had passed her by. And God would not let

her make one sound.

How in Heaven's name could it have happened! Could any man believe it of

himself? Henniker put it to his reason, not to speak of conscience or

affection, and never could explain, even to himself, that most unhappy

moment of his life. If he had not a heart for any helpless thing in

trouble, who had? He was the joke of the garrison for his softness about

dogs and women and children. Yet he had met his wife and baby on the

open road, and passed them by, and owned them not, and still he called

himself a man.

What he had seen at first had been the abject figure of a little squaw

facing the wind, her bowed head shrouded in her blanket, carrying

something which her short arms could barely meet around,--a shapeless

bundle. He did not think it a child, for a squaw will pack her baby

always on her back. He had looked at her indifferently, but with

condescending pity; for the day was rough, and the road was long, even

for a squaw. Then, in all the disfigurement of her dirt and wretchedness

and wild attire, it broke upon him that this creature was his wife, the

rightful sharer of his life and freedom; and that animal-like thing she

held up, that wrung its face and squeaked like a blind kitten, was his

son.

Good God! He clutched the driver's arm, and the man swore and jerked his

mules out of the road, for the woman had stopped right in the track

where the wheels were going. The driver looked back, but could not see

her; he knew that he had not touched her, only with the wind of his

pace, so he pulled the mules into the road again, and the ambulance

rolled on.

"Stop; let me get off. That woman is my wife." Henniker heard himself

saying the words, but they were never spoken to the ear. "Stop; let me

get down," the inner voice prompted; but he did not make a sound, and

the curtains flapped and the wheels went bounding along. They were a

long way past the spot, and the station was in sight, when Henniker was

heard to say hoarsely, "Pick her up, as you go back, can't you?"

"Pick up which?" asked the driver.

"The--that woman we passed just now."

"I'll see how she's making it," the man answered coolly. "I ain't much

stuck on squaws. Acted like she was drunk or crazy."

Henniker's face flushed, but he shuddered as if he were cold.

"Pick her up, for the child's sake, by God!" No man was ever more

ashamed of himself than he as he took out a gold piece and handed it to

the soldier. "Give her this, Billy,--from yourself, you know. I ain't in

it."

Billy looked at Henniker, and then at the gold piece. It was a double

eagle; all that the husband had dared to offer as alms to his wife, but

more than enough to arouse the suspicions that he feared.

"Ain't in it, eh?" thought the soldier. "You knew the woman, and she

knew you. This is conscience money." But aloud he said, "A fool and his

money are soon parted. How do you know but I'll blow it in at canteen?"

"I'll trust you," said Henniker.

The men did not speak to each other again.

"She's one of them Bannocks that camped by old Pop Meadows's place, down

at Bisuka, I bet," said the soldier to himself.

Henniker went on fighting his fight as if it had not been lost forever

in that instant's hesitation. A man cannot bethink himself: "By the way,

it strikes me that was my wife and child we passed on the road!" What he

had done could never be explained without grotesque lying which would

deceive nobody.

It could not be undone; it must be lived down. Henniker was much better

at living things down than he was at explaining or trying to mend them.

After all, it was the girl's own fault, putting up that wretched squaw

act on him. To follow him publicly, and shame him before all the

garrison, in that beastly Bannock rig! Had she turned Bannock altogether

and gone back to the tribe? In that case let the tribe look after her;

he could have no more to do with her, of course.

He stepped into the smoking-car, and lost himself as quickly as possible

in the interest of new faces around him, and the agreeable impressions

of himself which he read in eyes that glanced and returned for another

look at so much magnificent health and color and virility. His spot of

turpitude did not show through. He was still good to look at; and to

look the man that one would be goes a long way toward feeling that one

is that man.