The dash forward to the train, securely held in the saddle by the arms
of their deliverers, was a secret joy to the children that seemed only
too quickly over. The resistless gallop of the fiery mustangs, the rush
of the night wind, the gathering darkness in which the distant wagons,
now halted and facing them, looked like domed huts in the horizon--all
these seemed but a delightful and fitting climax to the events of the
day. In the sublime forgetfulness of youth, all they had gone through
had left no embarrassing record behind it; they were willing to repeat
their experiences on the morrow, confident of some equally happy end.
And when Clarence, timidly reaching his hand towards the horse-hair
reins lightly held by his companion, had them playfully yielded up to
him by that hold and confident rider, the boy felt himself indeed a man.
But a greater surprise was in store for them. As they neared the wagons,
now formed into a circle with a certain degree of military formality,
they could see that the appointments of the strange party were larger
and more liberal than their own, or indeed anything they had ever known
of the kind. Forty or fifty horses were tethered within the circle, and
the camp fires were already blazing. Before one of them a large tent
was erected, and through the parted flaps could be seen a table actually
spread with a white cloth. Was it a school feast, or was this their
ordinary household arrangement? Clarence and Susy thought of their own
dinners, usually laid on bare boards beneath the sky, or under the low
hood of the wagon in rainy weather, and marveled. And when they finally
halted, and were lifted from their horses, and passed one wagon fitted
up as a bedroom and another as a kitchen, they could only nudge each
other with silent appreciation. But here again the difference already
noted in the quality of the sensations of the two children was
observable. Both were equally and agreeably surprised. But Susy's wonder
was merely the sense of novelty and inexperience, and a slight disbelief
in the actual necessity of what she saw; while Clarence, whether from
some previous general experience or peculiar temperament, had the
conviction that what he saw here was the usual custom, and what he had
known with the Silsbees was the novelty. The feeling was attended with a
slight sense of wounded pride for Susy, as if her enthusiasm had exposed
her to ridicule.
The man who had carried him, and seemed to be the head of the party, had
already preceded them to the tent, and presently reappeared with a lady
with whom he had exchanged a dozen hurried words. They seemed to refer
to him and Susy; but Clarence was too much preoccupied with the fact
that the lady was pretty, that her clothes were neat and thoroughly
clean, that her hair was tidy and not rumpled, and that, although she
wore an apron, it was as clean as her gown, and even had ribbons on it,
to listen to what was said. And when she ran eagerly forward, and with
a fascinating smile lifted the astonished Susy in her arms, Clarence, in
his delight for his young charge, quite forgot that she had not noticed
him. The bearded man, who seemed to be the lady's husband, evidently
pointed out the omission, with some additions that Clarence could not
catch; for after saying, with a pretty pout, “Well, why shouldn't he?”
she came forward with the same dazzling smile, and laid her small and
clean white hand upon his shoulder.
“And so you took good care of the dear little thing? She's such an
angel, isn't she? and you must love her very much.”
Clarence colored with delight. It was true it had never occurred to him
to look at Susy in the light of a celestial visitant, and I fear he was
just then more struck with the fair complimenter than the compliment
to his companion, but he was pleased for her sake. He was not yet
old enough to be conscious of the sex's belief in its irresistible
domination over mankind at all ages, and that Johnny in his check apron
would be always a hopeless conquest of Jeannette in her pinafore, and
that he ought to have been in love with Susy.
Howbeit, the lady suddenly whisked her away to the recesses of her own
wagon, to reappear later, washed, curled, and beribboned like a new
doll, and Clarence was left alone with the husband and another of the
party.
“Well, my boy, you haven't told me your name yet.”
“Clarence, sir.”
“So Susy calls you, but what else?”
“Clarence Brant.”
“Any relation to Colonel Brant?” asked the second man carelessly.
“He was my father,” said the boy, brightening under this faint prospect
of recognition in his loneliness.
The two men glanced at each other. The leader looked at the boy
curiously, and said,--
“Are you the son of Colonel Brant, of Louisville?”
“Yes, sir,” said the boy, with a dim stirring of uneasiness in his
heart. “But he's dead now,” he added finally.
“Ah, when did he die?” said the man quickly.
“Oh, a long time ago. I don't remember him much. I was very little,”
said the boy, half apologetically.
“Ah, you don't remember him?”
“No,” said Clarence shortly. He was beginning to fall back upon that
certain dogged repetition which in sensitive children arises from their
hopeless inability to express their deeper feelings. He also had an
instinctive consciousness that this want of a knowledge of his father
was part of that vague wrong that had been done him. It did not help his
uneasiness that he could see that one of the two men, who turned away
with a half-laugh, misunderstood or did not believe him.
“How did you come with the Silsbees?” asked the first man.
Clarence repeated mechanically, with a child's distaste of practical
details, how he had lived with an aunt at St. Jo, and how his stepmother
had procured his passage with the Silsbees to California, where he was
to meet his cousin. All this with a lack of interest and abstraction
that he was miserably conscious told against him, but he was yet
helpless to resist.
The first man remained thoughtful, and then glanced at Clarence's
sunburnt hands. Presently his large, good-humored smile returned.
“Well, I suppose you are hungry?”
“Yes,” said Clarence shyly. “But--”
“But what?”
“I should like to wash myself a little,” he returned hesitatingly,
thinking of the clean tent, the clean lady, and Susy's ribbons.
“Certainly,” said his friend, with a pleased look. “Come with me.”
Instead of leading Clarence to the battered tin basin and bar of yellow
soap which had formed the toilet service of the Silsbee party, he
brought the boy into one of the wagons, where there was a washstand, a
china basin, and a cake of scented soap. Standing beside Clarence, he
watched him perform his ablutions with an approving air which rather
embarrassed his protege. Presently he said, almost abruptly,--
“Do you remember your father's house at Louisville?”
“Yes, sir; but it was a long time ago.”
Clarence remembered it as being very different from his home at St.
Joseph's, but from some innate feeling of diffidence he would have
shrunk from describing it in that way. He, however, said he thought it
was a large house. Yet the modest answer only made his new friend look
at him the more keenly.
“Your father was Colonel Hamilton Brant, of Louisville, wasn't he?” he
said, half-confidentially.
“Yes,” said Clarence hopelessly.
“Well,” said his friend cheerfully, as if dismissing an abstruse problem
from his mind, “Let's go to supper.”
When they reached the tent again, Clarence noticed that the supper was
laid only for his host and wife and the second man--who was familiarly
called “Harry,” but who spoke of the former always as “Mr. and Mrs.
Peyton”--while the remainder of the party, a dozen men, were at a second
camp fire, and evidently enjoying themselves in a picturesque fashion.
Had the boy been allowed to choose, he would have joined them, partly
because it seemed more “manly,” and partly that he dreaded a renewal of
the questioning.
But here, Susy, sitting bolt upright on an extemporized high stool,
happily diverted his attention by pointing to the empty chair beside
her.
“Kla'uns,” she said suddenly, with her usual clear and appalling
frankness, “they is chickens, and hamanaigs, and hot biksquits, and
lasses, and Mister Peyton says I kin have 'em all.”
Clarence, who had begun suddenly to feel that he was responsible for
Susy's deportment and was balefully conscious that she was holding her
plated fork in her chubby fist by its middle, and, from his previous
knowledge of her, was likely at any moment to plunge it into the dish
before her, said softly,--
“Hush!”
“Yes, you shall, dear,” said Mrs. Peyton, with tenderly beaming
assurance to Susy and a half-reproachful glance at the boy. “Eat what
you like, darling.”
“It's a fork,” whispered the still uneasy Clarence, as Susy now seemed
inclined to stir her bowl of milk with it.
“'Tain't, now, Kla'uns, it's only a split spoon,” said Susy.
But Mrs. Peyton, in her rapt admiration, took small note of these
irregularities, plying the child with food, forgetting her own meal, and
only stopping at times to lift back the forward straying curls on Susy's
shoulders. Mr. Peyton looked on gravely and contentedly. Suddenly the
eyes of husband and wife met.
“She'd have been nearly as old as this, John,” said Mrs. Peyton, in a
faint voice.
John Peyton nodded without speaking, and turned his eyes away into the
gathering darkness. The man “Harry” also looked abstractedly at his
plate, as if he was saying grace. Clarence wondered who “she” was, and
why two little tears dropped from Mrs. Peyton's lashes into Susy's milk,
and whether Susy might not violently object to it. He did not know until
later that the Peytons had lost their only child, and Susy comfortably
drained this mingled cup of a mother's grief and tenderness without
suspicion.
“I suppose we'll come up with their train early tomorrow, if some of
them don't find us to-night,” said Mrs. Peyton, with a long sigh and a
regretful glance at Susy. “Perhaps we might travel together for a little
while,” she added timidly.
Harry laughed, and Mr. Peyton replied gravely, “I am afraid we wouldn't
travel with them, even for company's sake; and,” he added, in a lower
and graver voice, “it's rather odd the search party hasn't come upon
us yet, though I'm keeping Pete and Hank patrolling the trail to meet
them.”
“It's heartless--so it is!” said Mrs. Peyton, with sudden indignation.
“It would be all very well if it was only this boy, who can take care of
himself; but to be so careless of a mere baby like this, it's shameful!”
For the first time Clarence tasted the cruelty of discrimination. All
the more keenly that he was beginning to worship, after his boyish
fashion, this sweet-faced, clean, and tender-hearted woman. Perhaps Mr.
Peyton noticed it, for he came quietly to his aid.
“Maybe they knew better than we in what careful hands they had left
her,” he said, with a cheerful nod towards Clarence. “And, again, they
may have been fooled as we were by Injin signs and left the straight
road.”
This suggestion instantly recalled to Clarence his vision in the
mesquite. Should he dare tell them? Would they believe him, or would
they laugh at him before her? He hesitated, and at last resolved to tell
it privately to the husband. When the meal was ended, and he was made
happy by Mrs. Peyton's laughing acceptance of his offer to help her
clear the table and wash the dishes, they all gathered comfortably in
front of the tent before the large camp fire. At the other fire the rest
of the party were playing cards and laughing, but Clarence no longer
cared to join them. He was quite tranquil in the maternal propinquity
of his hostess, albeit a little uneasy as to his reticence about the
Indian.
“Kla'uns,” said Susy, relieving a momentary pause, in her highest voice,
“knows how to speak. Speak, Kla'uns!”
It appearing from Clarence's blushing explanation that this gift was not
the ordinary faculty of speech, but a capacity to recite verse, he was
politely pressed by the company for a performance.
“Speak 'em, Kla'uns, the boy what stood unto the burnin' deck, and said,
'The boy, oh, where was he?'” said Susy, comfortably lying down on Mrs.
Peyton's lap, and contemplating her bare knees in the air. “It's 'bout
a boy,” she added confidentially to Mrs. Peyton, “whose father wouldn't
never, never stay with him on a burnin' ship, though he said, 'Stay,
father, stay,' ever so much.”
With this clear, lucid, and perfectly satisfactory explanation of
Mrs. Hemans's “Casabianca,” Clarence began. Unfortunately, his actual
rendering of this popular school performance was more an effort of
memory than anything else, and was illustrated by those wooden gestures
which a Western schoolmaster had taught him. He described the flames
that “roared around him,” by indicating with his hand a perfect circle,
of which he was the axis; he adjured his father, the late Admiral
Casabianca, by clasping his hands before his chin, as if wanting to
be manacled in an attitude which he was miserably conscious was unlike
anything he himself had ever felt or seen before; he described that
father “faint in death below,” and “the flag on high,” with one
single motion. Yet something that the verses had kindled in his
active imagination, perhaps, rather than an illustration of the verses
themselves, at times brightened his gray eyes, became tremulous in
his youthful voice, and I fear occasionally incoherent on his lips. At
times, when not conscious of his affected art, the plain and all upon it
seemed to him to slip away into the night, the blazing camp fire at
his feet to wrap him in a fateful glory, and a vague devotion to
something--he knew not what--so possessed him that he communicated it,
and probably some of his own youthful delight in extravagant voice, to
his hearers, until, when he ceased with a glowing face, he was surprised
to find that the card players had deserted their camp fires and gathered
round the tent.