A BOLD CIVILIAN
Colonel Landcraft was a slight man, and short of stature for a
soldierly figure when out of the saddle. His gray hair was thinning in
front, and his sharp querulous face was seamed in frowning pattern
about the eyes. His forehead was fashioned on an intention of
massiveness out of keeping with his tapering face, which ran out in a
disappointing chin, and under the shadow of that projecting brow his
cold blue eyes seemed as unfriendly as a winter sky.
Early in his soldiering days the colonel had felt the want of inches
and pounds, a shortage which he tried to overcome by carrying himself
pulled up stiffly, giving him a strutting effect that had fastened
upon him and become inseparable from his mien. This air of superior
brusqueness was sharpened by the small fierceness of his visage, in
which his large iron-gray mustache branched like horns.
Smallness of stature, disappointment in his ambition for preferment,
and a natural narrowness of soul, had turned Colonel Landcraft into a
military martinet of the most pronounced character. He was the
grandfather of colonels in the service, rank won in the old Indian
days. That he was not a brigadier-general was a circumstance puzzling
only to himself. He was a man of small bickerings, exactions, forms.
He fussed with civilians as a regular thing when in command of posts
within the precincts of civilization, and to serve under him, as
officer or man, was a chafing and galling experience.
If ever there was an unpopular man in the service, then that man was
Colonel John Hancock Landcraft, direct descendant--he could figure it
out as straight as a bayonet--of the heavy-handed signer himself. His
years and his empty desires bore heavily on the colonel. The trespass
of time he resented; the barrenness of his hope he grieved.
There he was in those Septembral days, galloping along toward the age
limit and retirement. Within a few weeks he would be subject to call
before the retiring board any day, and there was nothing in his
short-remaining time of service to shore up longer the hope of
advancement in rank as compensatory honor in his retirement. He was a
testy little old man, charged for instant explosion, and it was
generally understood by everybody but the colonel himself that the
department had sent him off to Fort Shakie to get him out of the way.
On the afternoon of the day following Nola Chadron's ball, when Major
King returned to Frances the glove that Alan Macdonald had carried
away from the garden, Colonel Landcraft was a passenger on the mail
stage from Meander to the post. The colonel had been on official
business to the army post at Cheyenne. Instead of telegraphing to his
own post the intelligence of his return, and calling for a proper
equipage to meet him at the railroad end, he had chosen to come back
in this secret and unexpected way.
That was true to the colonel's manner. Perhaps he hoped to catch
somebody overstepping the line of decorum, regulations, forms, either
in the conduct of the post's business or his own household. For the
colonel was as much a tyrant in one place as the other. So he
eliminated himself, wrapped to the bushy eyebrows in his greatcoat,
for there was a chilliness in the afternoon, and clouds were driving
over the sun.
His austerity silenced the talkative driver, and when the stage
reached the hotel the colonel parted from him without a word and
clicked away briskly on his military heels--built up to give him
stature--to see what he might surprise out of joint at the post.
Perhaps it was a shock to his valuation of his own indispensability to
find everything in proper form at the post. The sentry paced before
the flagstaff, decorum prevailed. There was not one small particular
loose to give him ground for flying at the culpable person and raking
him with his blistering fire.
Colonel Landcraft turned into his own house with a countenance
somewhat fallen as a consequence of this discovery. It seemed to bear
home to him the fact that the United States Army would get along very
neatly and placidly without him.
The colonel occupied one wing of his sprawling, commodious, and
somewhat impressive house as official headquarters. This room was full
of stiff bookcases, letter files, severe chairs. The colonel's desk
stood near the fireplace in a strong light, with nothing ever
unfinished left upon it. It was one of the colonel's greatest
satisfactions in life that he always was ready to snap down the cover
of that desk at a moment's notice and march away upon a campaign to
the world's end--and his own--leaving everything clear behind him.
A private walk led up to a private door in the colonel's quarters,
where a private in uniform, with a rifle on his shoulder, made a
formal parade when the colonel was within, and accessible to the
military world for the transaction of business. This sentinel was not
on duty now, the return of the colonel being unlooked-for, and nobody
was the wiser in that household when the master of it let himself into
the room with his key.
The day was merging into dusk, or the colonel probably would have been
aware that a man was hastening after him along the leaf-strewn walk as
he passed up the avenue to his home. He was not many rods behind the
colonel, and was gaining on him rapidly, when the crabbed old
gentleman closed his office door softly behind him.
The unmilitary visitor--this fact was betrayed by both his gait and
his dress--turned sharply in upon the private walk and followed the
colonel to his door. He was turning through the letters and telegrams
which had arrived during his absence when the visitor laid hand to the
bell.
No sound of ringing followed this application to the thumbscrew
arrangement on the door, for the colonel had taken the bell away long
ago. But there resulted a clucking, which brought the colonel to the
portal frowning and alert, warming in the expectation of having
somebody whom he might dress down at last.
"Colonel Landcraft, I beg the favor of a word in private," said the
stranger at the door.
The colonel opened the door wider, and peered sharply at the visitor,
a frown gathering on his unfriendly face.
"I haven't the honor"--he began stiffly, seeing that it was an
inferior civilian, for all civilians, except the president, were
inferior to the colonel.
"Macdonald is my name. I am a rancher in this country; you will have
heard of me," the visitor replied.
"Nothing to your credit, young man," said the colonel, tartly. "What
do you want?"
"A man's chance," said Macdonald, earnestly. "Will you let me
explain?"
Colonel Landcraft stood out of the doorway; Macdonald entered.
"I'll make a light," said the colonel, lowering the window-shades
before he struck the match. When he had the flame of the student's
lamp on top of his desk regulated to conform to his exactions, the
colonel faced about suddenly.
"I am listening, sir."
"At the beginning, sir, I want you to know who I am," said Macdonald,
producing papers. "My father, Senator Hampden Macdonald of Maine, now
lives in Washington. You have heard of him. I am Alan Macdonald, late
of the United States consular service. It is unlikely that you ever
heard of me in that connection."
"I never heard of you before I came here," said the colonel,
unfavorably, unfolding the credentials which the visitor had placed on
his desk, and skimming them with cursory eye. Now he looked up from
his reading with a sudden little jerk of the head, and stood at severe
attention. "And the purpose of this visit, sir?"
"First, to prove to you that the notorious character given me by the
cattlemen of this country is slanderous and unwarranted; secondly, to
ask you to give me a man's chance, as I have said, in a matter to
which I shall come without loss of words. I am a gentleman, and the
son of a gentleman; I do not acknowledge any moral or social superiors
in this land."
The colonel, drew himself up a notch, and seemed to grow a little at
that. He looked hard at the tall, fair-haired, sober-faced man in
front of him, as if searching out his points to justify the bold claim
upon respectability that he had made. Macdonald was dressed in almost
military precision; the colonel could find no fault with that. His
riding-breeches told that they had been cut for no other legs, his
coat set to his shoulders with gentlemanly ease. Only his rather
greasy sombrero, with its weighty leather band, and the bulging
revolvers under his coat seemed out of place in the general trimness
of his attire.
"Go on, sir," the colonel said.
"I had the honor of meeting Miss Landcraft last night at the
masquerade given by Miss Chadron--"
"How was that, sir? Did you have the effrontery to force yourself into
a company which despises you, at the risk of your life and the decorum
of the assemblage?"
"I was drawn there," Macdonald spoke slowly, meeting the colonel's
cold eye with steady gaze, "by a hope that was miraculously realized.
I did risk my life, and I almost lost it. But that is nothing
unusual--I risk it every day."
"You saw Miss Landcraft at the ball, danced with her, I suppose,
talked with her," nodded the colonel, understandingly. "Macdonald, you
are a bold, a foolishly bold, man."
"I saw Miss Landcraft, I danced with her, I talked with her, and I
have come to you, sir, after a desperate ride through the night to
save my life as the penalty of those few minutes of pleasure, to
request the privilege of calling upon Miss Landcraft and paying my
court to her. I ask you to give me a man's chance to win her hand."
The audacity of the request almost tied the colonel's sharp old
tongue. For a moment he stood with his mouth open, his face red in the
gathering storm of his sudden passion.
"Sir!" said he, in amazed, unbelieving voice.
"There are my credentials--they will bear investigation," Macdonald
said.
"Damn your credentials, sir! I'll have nothing to do with them, you
blackguard, you scoundrel!"
"I ask you to consider--"
"I can consider nothing but the present fact that you are accused of
deeds of outlawry and violence, and are an outcast of society, even
the crude society of this wild country, sir. No matter who you are or
whence you sprung, the evidence in this country is against you. You
are a brigand and a thief, sir--this act of barbaric impetuosity in
itself condemns you--no civilized man would have the effrontery to
force himself into my presence in such a manner and make this insane
demand."
"I am exercising a gentleman's prerogative, Colonel Landcraft."
"You are a vulture aspiring to soar among eagles, sir!"
"You have heard only the cattlemen's side of the story, Colonel
Landcraft," said Macdonald, with patience and restraint. "You know
that every man who attempts to build a fence around his cabin in this
country, and strikes a furrow in the ground, is a rustler according to
their creed."
"I am aware that there is narrowness, injustice even, on the drovers'
side," the colonel admitted, softening a little, it seemed. "But for
all that, even if you were an equal, and an honest man, the road to
Miss Landcraft's heart is closed to assault, no matter how wild and
sudden. She is plighted to another man."
"Sir--"
"It is true; she will be married in the Christmas holidays. Go your
way now, Macdonald, and dismiss this romantic dream. You build too
high on the slight favor of a thoughtless girl. A dance or two is
nothing, sir; a whispered word is less. If you were the broad man of
the world that you would have me believe, you have known this.
Instead, you come dashing in here like a savage and claim the right to
woo her. Preposterous! She is beyond your world, sir. Go back to your
wild riding, Macdonald, and try to live an honest man."
Macdonald stood with his head bent, brows gathered in stubborn
expression of resistance. Colonel Landcraft could read in his face
that there was no surrender, no acknowledgment of defeat, in that wild
rider's heart. The old warrior felt a warming of admiration for him,
as one brave man feels for another, no matter what differences lie
between them. Now Macdonald lifted his face, and there was that deep
movement of laughter in his eyes that Frances had found so marvelous
on the day of their first meeting.
"Perhaps her heart is untouched, sir, in spite of the barricade that
has been raised between it and the world," he said.
The colonel studied him shrewdly a little while before replying.
"Macdonald, you're a strange man, a stubborn man, and a strong one.
There is work for a man like you in this life; why are you wasting it
here?"
"If I live six months longer the world beyond these mountains will
know," was all that Macdonald said, taking up the papers which he had
submitted to the colonel, and placing them again in his pocket.
Colonel Landcraft shook his head doubtfully.
"Running off other men's cattle never will do it, Macdonald."
The door of the colonel's room which gave into the hall of the main
entrance opened without the formality of announcement. Frances drew
back in quick confusion, speaking her apology from behind the door.
"I ask your pardon, father. I heard voices here and wondered who it
could be--I didn't know you had come home."
"Your appearance is opportune, Miss Landcraft," her father told her,
with no trace of ill-humor. "Come in. Here is this wild Alan Macdonald
come bursting in upon us from his hills."
The colonel indicated him with a wave of the hand, and Macdonald
bowed, his heart shrinking when he saw how coldly she returned his
greeting from her place at the door.
"He has come riding," the colonel continued, "with a demand on me to
be allowed to woo you, and carry you off to his cave among the rocks.
Show him the door, and add your testimony to my assurance--which seems
inadequate to satisfy the impetuous gentleman--that his case is
hopeless."
The colonel waved them away with that, and turned again, with his
jerky suddenness, to his telegrams and letters. The colonel had not
meant for Macdonald to pass out of the door through which he had
entered. That was the military portal; the other one, opening into the
hall from which Frances came, was the world's door for entering that
house. And it was in that direction Colonel Landcraft had waved them
when he ordered Frances to take the visitor away.
"This way, Mr. Macdonald, please," said she, politely cold,
unfeelingly formal. For all the warmth that he could discover in her
voice and eyes, or in her white face, so unaccountably severe and
hard, there might never have been a garden with white gravel path, or
a hot hasty kiss given in it--and received.
In the hall the gloom of evening was deepened into darkness that made
her face indistinct, like the glimmering whiteness of the hydrangea
blooms in that past romantic night. She marched straight to the street
door and opened it, and he had no strength in his words to lift even a
small one up to stay her. He believed that he had taken the man's
course and the way of honor in the matter. That it had not been
indorsed by her was evident, he believed.
"There was nothing for me to conceal," said he, as the door opened
upon the gray twilight and glooming trees along the street; "I came in
a man's way, as I thought--"
"You came in a man's way, Mr. Macdonald, to ask the privilege of
attempting to win a woman's hand, when you lack the man's strength or
the man's courage to defend even the glove that covers it," she said.
Her voice was low; it was accusingly scornful.
Macdonald started. "Then it has come back to you?"
"It has come back to me, through a channel that I would have given the
hand that wore it"--she stretched it out as she spoke; it glimmered
like a nebulous star in misty skies there in the gloom before his
eyes--"to have kept the knowledge from!"
"I lost it," said he, drawing himself up as if to withstand a blow,
"and in this hour I can plead no mitigation. A man should have put his
life down for it."
"It might have been expected--of a man," said she.
"But I ask you not to borrow trouble over the circumstance of its
return to you, Miss Landcraft," he said, cold now in his word, and
lofty. "You dropped it on the ballroom floor or in the garden path,
and I, the cattle thief, found it and carried it away, to show it as
evidence of a shadowy conquest, maybe, among my wild and lawless kind.
Beyond that you know nothing--you lost it, that was all."
In the door he turned.
"Good-bye, Mr. Macdonald," she said.
"If time and events prove so unkind to me that I never come to a
vindication in this country," he said, "just go on thinking of me as a
thief and a wild rider, and a man of the night. Good-bye, Miss
Landcraft."
She closed the door, and stood cooling from her sudden resentment at
seeing him there alive when her heart had told her that he must be
lying dead in the dust of the river trail. She should not have been so
suddenly resentful, she now believed. Perhaps there were mitigating
circumstances which he would not stoop to explain unasked. Her heart
bounded with the thought; warm blood came spreading in her cheeks.
But Alan Macdonald was gone; misjudged and unjustly condemned, she now
believed, remorse assailing her. Now the fault could not be repaired,
for he was not the man to come back. But there was much in knowing
that she had not been mistaken in the beginning; comfort and pride in
the full knowledge that he was a _man!_ Only a man would have come,
bravely and sincerely, in that manner to her father; only a man would
have put his hurt behind him like that and marched away from her, too
proud to stoop to the mean expedient of begging her to allow him to
explain.
She sighed as she turned back into the room where the colonel sat at
his desk, but her cheek was hot, her bosom agitated by an uplifting of
pride. The colonel turned, with inquiring impatience, a letter in his
hand.
"He is gone," she said.
"Very well," he nodded, shortly.
"I have just come back to tell you, father, that I have broken my
engagement with Major King, to--"
"Impossible! nonsense!"
"To save you embarrassment in your future relations with him," she
concluded, unshaken.
The colonel was standing now; his face reflecting the anger that
boiled in his breast.
"I tell you, miss, you can't break your engagement to Major King! That
is out of your power, beyond you, entirely. It rests with me, and with
me solely, to terminate any such obligation. I have pledged a
soldier's word and a soldier's honor in this matter, miss. It is
incumbent on you to see that both are redeemed."
"I'm in a mind to do my own thinking now, father; I'm old enough."
"A woman is never old enough to know her own mind! What's the occasion
of this change in the wind? Surely not--"
Colonel Landcraft's brows drew together over his thin nose, making
small glaring points of his blue eyes among the gathered wrinkles and
bristling hair. He held his words suspended while he searched her face
for justification of his pent arraignment.
"Nonsense!" said he at last, letting his breath go with the word, as
if relief had come. "Put the notion out of your head, for you are
going to marry Major King."
"I tell you, father, you must adjust yourself to my decision in this
matter. I am not going to marry Major King. I have told him so, and it
is final."
His own stubbornness, his own fire, was reflected in her as she spoke.
But Colonel Landcraft was not to be moved from what he considered his
right to dispose of her in a way that he believed would be an honor to
the army and a glory to the nation.
"You'll marry Major King, or die a maid!" he declared.
"Very well, father," she returned, in ambiguous concession.
She left him frowning among his papers. In his small, tyrannical way
he had settled that case, finally and completely, to his own thinking,
as he had disposed of wild-riding Alan Macdonald and his bold,
outlandish petition.