Under the cloudless heavens, under the starlit skies, blessing the
grateful dew that cools the upland air and moistens the bunch-grass that
has been bleaching all day in the fierce rays of the summer sun, a
little column of infantry is swinging steadily southward. Long and
toilsome has been the march; hot, dusty, and parching the day. Halts
have been few and far between, and every man, from the colonel down, is
coated with a gray mask of powdered alkali, the contribution of a two
hours' tramp through Deadman's Cañon just before the sun went down. Now,
however, they are climbing the range. The morrow will bring them to the
broad and beautiful valley of the Spirit Wolf, and there they must have
news. Officers and men are footsore and weary, but no one begs for rest.
Colonel Maynard, riding ahead on a sorry hack he picked up at the
station two days' long march behind them, is eager to reach the springs
at Forest Glade before ordering bivouac for the night. A week agone no
one who saw him at Sablon would have thought the colonel fit for a march
like this; but he seems rejuvenate. His head is high, his eye as bright,
his bearing as full of spirit, as man's could possibly be at sixty, and
the whole regiment cheered him when he caught the column at Omaha. A
talk with Chester and Armitage seemed to have made a new man of him, and
to-night he is full of an energy that inspires the entire command.
Though they were farther away than many other troops ordered to the
scene, the fact that their station was on the railway and that they
could be sent by special trains to Omaha and thence to the West enabled
them to begin their rescue-march ahead of all the other foot-troops and
behind only the powerful command of cavalry that was whirled to the
scene the moment the authorities woke up to the fact that it should have
been sent in the first place. Old Maynard would give his very ears to
get to Thornton's corral ahead of them, but the cavalry has thirty-six
hours' start and four legs to two. Every moment he looks ahead expectant
of tidings from the front that shall tell him the ----th were there and
the remnant rescued. Even then, he knows, he and his long Springfields
will be needed. The cavalry can fight their way in to the succor of the
besieged, but once there will be themselves surrounded and too few in
numbers to begin aggressive movements. He and his will indeed be welcome
reinforcements; and so they trudge ahead.
The moon is up and it is nearly ten o'clock when high up on the rolling
divide the springs are reached, and, barely waiting to quench their
thirst in the cooling waters, the wearied men roll themselves in their
blankets under the giant trees, and, guarded by a few outlying pickets,
are soon asleep. Most of the officers have sprawled around a little fire
and are burning their boot-leather thereat. The colonel, his adjutant,
and the doctor are curled up under a tent-fly that serves by day as a
wrap for the rations and cooking-kit they carry on pack-mule. Two
company commanders,--the Alpha and Omega of the ten, as Major Sloat
dubbed them,--the senior and junior in rank, Chester and Armitage by
name, have rolled themselves in their blankets under another tent-fly
and are chatting in low tones before dropping off to sleep. They have
been inseparable on the journey thus far, and the colonel has had two or
three long talks with them; but who knows what the morrow may bring
forth? There is still much to settle.
One officer, he of the guard, is still afoot, and trudging about among
the trees, looking after his sentries. Another officer, also alone, is
sitting in silence smoking a pipe: it is Mr. Jerrold.
Cleared though he is of the charges originally brought against him in
the minds of his colonel and Captain Chester, he has lost caste with his
fellows and with them. Only two or three men have been made aware of the
statement which acquitted him, but every one knows instinctively that he
was saved by Nina Beaubien, and that in accepting his release at her
hands he had put her to a cruel expense. Every man among his brother
officers knows in some way that he has been acquitted of having
compromised Alice Renwick's fair fame only by an _alibi_ that
correspondingly harmed another. The fact now generally known, that they
were betrothed, and that the engagement was openly announced, made no
difference. Without being able to analyze his conduct, the regiment was
satisfied that it had been selfish and contemptible; and that was enough
to warrant giving him the cold shoulder. He was quick to see and take
the hint, and, in bitter distress of mind, to withdraw himself from
their companionship. He had hoped and expected that his eagerness to go
with them on the wild and sudden campaign would reinstate him in their
good graces, but it failed utterly. "Any man would seek _that_," was the
verdict of the informal council held by the officers. "He would have
been a poltroon if he hadn't sought to go; but, while he isn't a
poltroon, he has done a contemptible thing." And so it stood. Rollins
had cut him dead, refused his hand, and denied him a chance to explain.
"Tell him he can't explain," was the savage reply he sent by the
adjutant, who consented to carry Jerrold's message in order that he
might have fair play. "He knows, without explanation, the wrong he has
done to more than one. I won't have anything to do with him."
Others avoided him, and only coldly spoke to him when speech was
necessary. Chester treated him with marked aversion; the colonel would
not look at him; only Armitage--his captain--had a decent word for him
at any time, and even he was stern and cold. The most envied and
careless of the entire command, the Adonis, the beau, the crack shot,
the graceful leader in all garrison gayeties, the beautiful dancer,
rider, tennis-player, the adored of so many sentimental women at Sibley,
poor Jerrold had found his level, and his proud and sensitive though
selfish heart was breaking.
Sitting alone under the trees, he had taken a sheet of paper from his
pocket-case and was writing by the light of the rising moon. One letter
was short and easily written, for with a few words he had brought it to
a close, then folded and in a bold and vigorous hand addressed it. The
other was far longer; and over this one, thinking deeply, erasing some
words and pondering much over others, he spent a long hour. It was
nearly midnight, and he was chilled to the heart, when he stiffly rose
and took his way among the blanketed groups to the camp-fire around
which so many of his wearied comrades were sleeping the sleep of the
tired soldier. Here he tore to fragments and scattered in the embers
some notes and letters that were in his pockets. They blazed up
brightly, and by the glare he stood one moment studying young Rollins's
smooth and placid features; then he looked around on the unconscious
circle of bronzed and bearded faces. There were many types of soldier
there,--men who had led brigades through the great war and gone back to
the humble bars of the line-officer at its close; men who had led fierce
charges against the swarming Indians in the rough old days of the first
prairie railways; men who had won distinction and honorable mention in
hard and trying frontier service; men who had their faults and foibles
and weaknesses like other men, and were aggressive or compliant,
strong-willed or yielding, overbearing or meek, as are their brethren in
other walks of life; men who were simple of heart, single in purpose and
ambition, diverse in characteristics, but unanimous in one trait,--no
meanness could live among them; and Jerrold's heart sank within him,
colder, lower, stonier than before, as he looked from face to face and
cast up mentally the sum of each man's character. His hospitality had
been boundless, his bounty lavish; one and all they had eaten of his
loaf and drunk of his cup; but was there among them one who could say of
him, "He is generous and I stand his friend"? Was there one of them, one
of theirs, for whom he had ever denied himself a pleasure, great or
small? He looked at poor old Gray, with his wrinkled, anxious face, and
thought of his distress of mind. Only a few thousands--not three years'
pay--had the veteran scraped and saved and stored away for his little
girl, whose heart was aching with its first cruel sorrow,--_his_ work,
_his_ undoing, his cursed, selfish greed for adulation, his reckless
love of love. The morrow's battle, if it came, might leave her orphaned
and alone, and, poor as it was, a father's pitying sympathy could not be
her help with the coming year. Would Gray mourn him if the fortune of
war made _him_ the victim? Would any one of those averted faces look
with pity and regret upon his stiffening form? Would there be any one on
earth to whom his death would be a sorrow, but Nina? Would it even be a
blow to her? She loved him wildly, he knew that; but _would_ she did she
but dream the truth? He knew her nature well. He knew how quickly such
burning love could turn to fiercest hate when convinced that the object
was utterly untrue. He had said nothing to her of the photograph,
nothing at all of Alice except to protest time and again that his
attentions to her were solely to win the good will of the colonel's
family and of the colonel himself, so that he might be proof against the
machinations of his foes. And yet had he not, that very night on which
he crossed the stream and let her peril her name and honor for one
stolen interview--had he not gone to her exultant welcome with a
traitorous knowledge gnawing at his heart? That very night, before they
parted at the colonel's door had he not lied to Alice Renwick?--had he
not denied the story of his devotion to Miss Beaubien, and was not his
practised eye watching eagerly the beautiful dark face for one sign that
the news was welcome, and so precipitate the avowal trembling on his
lips that it was _her_ he madly loved,--not Nina? Though she hurriedly
bade him good-night, though she was unprepared for any such
announcement, he well knew that Alice Renwick's heart fluttered at the
earnestness of his manner, and that he had indicated far more than he
had said. Fear--not love--had drawn him to Nina Beaubien that night, and
hope had centred on her more beautiful rival, when the discoveries of
the night involved him in the first trembling symptoms of the downfall
to come. And he was to have spent the morning with her, the woman to
whom he had lied in word, while she to whom he had lied in word and deed
was going from him, not to return until the german, and even then he
planned treachery. He meant to lead with Alice Renwick and claim that it
_must_ be with the colonel's daughter because the ladies of the garrison
were the givers. Then, he knew, Nina would not come at all, and,
possibly, might quarrel with him on that ground. What could have been an
easier solution of his troublous predicament? She would break their
secret engagement; he would refuse all reconciliation, and be free to
devote himself to Alice. But all these grave complications had arisen.
Alice would not come. Nina wrote demanding that he should lead with her,
and that he should meet her at St. Croix; and then came the crash. He
owed his safety to her self-sacrifice, and now must give up all hope of
Alice Renwick. He had accepted the announcement of their engagement. He
_could_ not do less, after all that had happened and the painful scene
at their parting. And yet would it not be a blessing to her if he were
killed? Even now in his self-abnegation and misery he did not fully
realize how mean he was,--how mean he seemed to others. He resented in
his heart what Sloat had said of him but the day before, little caring
whether he heard it or not: "It would be a mercy to that poor girl if
Jerrold were killed. He will break her heart with neglect, or drive her
mad with jealousy, inside of a year." But the regiment seemed to agree
with Sloat.
And so in all that little band of comrades he could call no man friend.
One after another he looked upon the unconscious faces, cold and averted
in the oblivion of sleep, but not more cold, not more distrustful, than
when he had vainly sought among them one relenting glance in the early
moonlight that battle eve in bivouac. He threw his arms upward, shook
his head with hopeless gesture, then buried his face in the sleeves of
his rough campaign overcoat and strode blindly from their midst.
Early in the morning, an hour before daybreak, the shivering out-post
crouching in a hollow to the southward catch sight of two dim figures
shooting suddenly up over a distant ridge,--horsemen, they know at a
glance,--and these two come loping down the moonlit trail over which two
nights before had marched the cavalry speeding to the rescue, over which
in an hour the regiment itself must be on the move. Old campaigners are
two of the picket, and they have been especially cautioned to be on the
lookout for couriers coming back along the trail. They spring to their
feet, in readiness to welcome or repel, as the sentry rings out his
sharp and sudden challenge.
"Couriers from the corral," is the jubilant answer. "This Colonel
Maynard's outfit?"
"Ay, ay, sonny," is the unmilitary but characteristic answer. "What's
your news?"
"Got there in time, and saved what's left of 'em; but it's a hell-hole,
and you fellows are wanted quick as you can come,--thirty miles ahead.
Where's the colonel?"
The corporal of the guard goes back to the bivouac, leading the two
arrivals. One is a scout, a plainsman born and bred, the other a
sergeant of cavalry. They dismount in the timber and picket their
horses, then follow on foot the lead of their companion of the guard.
While the corporal and the scout proceed to the wagon-fly and fumble at
the opening, the tall sergeant stands silently a little distance in
their rear, and the occupants of a neighboring shelter--the counterpart
of the colonel's--begin to stir, as though their light slumber had been
broken by the smothered sound of footsteps. One of them sits up and
peers out at the front, gazing earnestly at the tall figure standing
easily there in the flickering light. Then he hails in low tones:
"That you, Mr. Jerrold? What is the matter?"
And the tall figure faces promptly towards the hailing voice. The
spurred heels come together with a click, the gauntleted hand rises in
soldierly salute to the broad brim of the scouting-hat, and a deep voice
answers, respectfully,--
"It is not Mr. Jerrold, sir. It is Sergeant McLeod, ----th Cavalry, just
in with despatches."
Armitage springs to his feet, sheds his shell of blankets, and steps
forth into the glade with his eyes fixed eagerly on the shadowy form in
front. He peers under the broad brim, as though striving to see the eyes
and features of the tall dragoon.
"Did you get there in time?" he asks, half wondering whether that was
really the question uppermost in his mind.
"In time to save the survivors, sir; but no attack will be made until
the infantry get there."
"Were you not at Sibley last month?" asks the captain, quickly.
"Yes, sir,--with the competitors."
"You went back before your regimental team, did you not?"
"I--No, sir: I went back with them."
"You were relieved from duty at Sibley and ordered back before them,
were you not?"
Even in the pallid light Armitage could see the hesitation, the flurry
of surprise and distress, in the sergeant's face.
"Don't fear to tell me, man: I would rather hear it than any news you
could give me. I would rather know you were _not_ Sergeant McLeod than
any fact you could tell. Speak low, man, but tell me here and now.
Whatever motive you may have had for this disguise, whatever anger or
sorrows in the past, you must sink them now to save the honor of the
woman your madness has perilled. Answer me, for your sister's sake: are
you not Fred Renwick?"
"Do you swear to me she is in danger?"
"By all that's sacred; and you ought to know it."
"I _am_ Fred Renwick. Now what can I do?"