He did not answer at once, but sat watching the trumpeter come out of
the adjutant's office to sound recall. "Yes, she will marry," he agreed;
"if no one else marries her, I will. I am as old as her father would
have been but it would save telling some fellow about her birth."
"Did the girl know her own story?" she asked.
She did not. He had merely told her that her father was his friend and
had died on the plains. "She thinks her mother died at Stanton. It is so
near the Mescalero Agency that I let it go at that."
They argued it from all sides during the whole of a day, and Campbell
lent his advice, and the end of it was that Felipa Cabot came out to the
land of her forbears.
Pending her arrival, Landor brought himself to look upon it as his
plain duty and only course to marry her. It would save her, and any man
who might otherwise happen to love her, from learning what she was. That
she might refuse to look at it in that way, did not much enter into his
calculations. It required a strong effort for him to decide it so, but
it was his way to pick out the roughest possible path before him, to
settle within himself that it was that of duty, and to follow it without
fagging or complaint. He dreaded any taint of Apache blood as he dreaded
the venom of a rattler. He had seen its manifestations for twenty odd
years, had seen the hostile savage and the civilized one, and shrank
most from the latter. But he had promised Cabot to do his best by the
waif, and the best he could see was to marry her. There was always
before him, to urge him on to the sacrifice, the stalwart figure of his
boyhood's friend, standing forsaken in the stretch of desert with the
buzzards hovering over him in the burning sky. He permitted himself to
hope, however, that she was not too obviously a squaw.
When the day came he rode out with most of the garrison to meet her. He
was anxious. He recalled Anne of Cleves, and had a fellow-feeling for
the King. By the time they came in sight of the marching troops, he had
worked himself to such an implicit faith in the worst that he decided
that the wide figure, heavily blue-veiled, and linen-dustered, on the
back seat of the Dougherty was she. It is one of the strongest arguments
of the pessimist in favor of his philosophy, that the advantage of
expecting the disagreeable lies in the fact that, if he meets with
disappointment, it is necessarily a pleasant one.
Felipa Cabot proved to be a lithe creature, who rode beside the
ambulance with the officers, and who, in spite of the dust and tan and
traces of a hard march, was beautiful. In the reaction of the moment
Landor thought her the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. But she
froze the consequent warmth of his greeting with a certain indefinable
stolidity, and she eyed him with an unabashed intention of determining
whether he were satisfactory or not, which changed his position to that
of the one upon approbation. If she had been less handsome, it would
have been repellent.
Before they had reached the post, he had learned a good deal about her.
The elderly major who had come with her from Kansas told him that a
lieutenant by the name of Brewster was insanely in love with her, that
the same Brewster was a good deal of an ass,--the two facts having no
connection, however,--that she was an excellent travelling companion,
always satisfied and always well. What the major did not tell him, but
what he gathered almost at once, was that the girl had not endeared
herself to any one; she was neither loved nor disliked--the lieutenant's
infatuation was not to be taken as an indication of her character, of
course. But then she was beautiful, with her long, intent eyes, and
strong brows and features cut on classic lines of perfection. So Landor
left the major and cantered ahead to join her, where she rode with
Brewster.
"Has the trip been hard?" he asked.
She answered that she had enjoyed it all, every day of it, and Brewster
joined in with ecstatic praises of her horsemanship and endurance,
finishing with the unlucky comment that she rode like an Indian.
"Apaches ride badly, don't they?" she said, with calm matter of fact.
"If you mean that I am hard on my horse, though, you are right." Her
voice was exquisitely sweet, without modulation.
In the weeks that followed, Landor spent days and some nights--those
when he sat up to visit the guard, as a rule--attempting to decide why
his ward repelled him. She seemed to be quite like any other contented
and natural young girl. She danced, and courted admiration, within the
bounds of propriety; she was fond of dress, and rather above the average
in intelligence. Usually she was excellent company, whimsical and
sweet-humored. She rode well enough, and learned--to his intense
annoyance--to shoot with a bow and arrow quite remarkably, so much so
that they nicknamed her Diana. He had remonstrated at first, but there
was no reason to urge, after all. Archery was quite a feminine sport.
When his analysis of her failed, he went to Mrs. Campbell again. "Do you
grow fond of Felipa?" he asked point blank.
She tried to parry and evade, but he would not have it, and obliged her
to admit that she did not. "Not that I dislike her," she explained. "I
like to have her round. I dare say it is a whim."
He shook his head. "It is not a whim. It is the same with every one. Of
course Brewster has lost his head, but that argues nothing. The
endearing quality seems to be lacking in her."
She sat considering deeply. She was rocking the baby, with its little
fair head lying in the hollow of her shoulder, and Landor found himself
wondering whether Felipa could ever develop motherliness. "It is quite
intangible," Mrs. Campbell half crooned, for the baby's lids were
drooping heavily. "I can't find that she lacks a good characteristic. I
study her all the time. Perhaps the fault is in ourselves, as much as
anything, because we insist upon studying her as a problem, instead of
simply a very young girl. She is absolutely truthful,--unless she
happens to have a grudge against some one, and then she lies without any
scruple at all,--and she is generous and unselfish, and very amiable
with the children, too."
Landor asked, with a gleam of hope, if they were attached to her.
"Yes," she told him, "they are, and it is that makes me think that the
fault may be ours. She is so patient with them."
At that moment Felipa herself came up the steps and joined them on the
porch. She walked with the gait of a young athlete. Her skirts were
short enough to leave her movements unhampered, and she wore on her feet
a pair of embroidered moccasins. She seemed to be drawing the very
breath of life into her quivering nostrils, and she smiled on them both
good-humoredly.
"Look," she said, going up to Landor with a noiseless tread that made
him shiver almost visibly. Mrs. Campbell watched them. She was sorry for
him.
Felipa held out her hand and showed a little brown bird that struggled
feebly. She explained that its leg was broken, and he drew back
instinctively. There was not a trace of softness or pity in her sweet
voice. Then he took the bird in his own big hand and asked her how it
had happened. "I did it with an arrow," said Diana, unslinging her
quiver, which was a barbaric affair of mountain-lion skin, red flannel,
and beads.
"I can't see why you should take pleasure in shooting these harmless
things," he said impatiently; "the foot-hills are full of quail, and
there are ducks along the creek. For that matter you might try your
skill on prairie dogs, it seems to me."
She looked down at the curled toe of her moccasin with a certain air of
repentance, and answered his question as to what she meant to do with it
by explaining that she meant to keep it for a pet.
He stroked its head with his finger as it lay still, opening and
shutting its bright little eyes. "It won't live," he told her, and then
the thought occurred to him to put her to the test. He held the bird out
to her. "Wring its neck," he said, "and end its misery."
She showed no especial repugnance at the idea, but refused flatly,
nevertheless. "I can't do that," she said, dropping down into the
hammock and swinging herself with the tip of her foot on the floor.
"I fail to see why not. You can wound it."
"But that is sport," she answered carelessly.
He felt that he ought to dislike her cordially, but he did not. He
admired her, on the contrary, as he would have admired a fine boy. She
seemed to have no religion, no ideals, and no petty vanity; therefore,
from his point of judgment, she was not feminine. Perhaps the least
feminine thing about her was the manner in which she appeared to take it
for granted that he was going to marry her, without his having said, as
yet, a word to that effect. In a certain way it simplified matters, and
in another it made them more difficult. It is not easy to ask a woman to
marry you where she looks into your eyes unhesitatingly. But Landor
decided that it had to be done. She had been in the post four months,
and with the standing exception of Brewster, whom she discouraged
resolutely, none of the officers cared for her beyond the flirtation
limit.
So one night when they were sitting upon the Campbells' steps, he took
the plunge. She had been talking earnestly, discussing the advisability
of filing off the hammer of the pistol he had given her, to prevent its
catching on the holster when she wanted to draw it quickly. One of her
long, brown hands was laid on his knee, with the most admirable lack of
self-consciousness. He put his own hand upon it, and she looked up
questioningly. She was unused to caresses from any but the two Campbell
children, and her frank surprise held a reproach that softened his voice
almost to tenderness.
"Do you think you could love me, Felipa?" he asked, without any preface
at all.
She said "Yes" as frankly as she would have said it to the children. It
was blighting to any budding romance, but he tried hard nevertheless to
save the next question from absolute baldness. He had a resentful sort
of feeling that he was entitled to at least a little idealism. As she
would not give it, he tried to find it for himself, noting the grace of
her long free neck, the wealth of her coarse black hair, and the beauty
of her smiling mouth. But the smiling mouth answered his low-spoken
"Will you marry me then, dear?" with the same frank assent. "Not for a
good while, though," she added. "I am too young." That was all, and in a
moment she was telling him some of Brewster's absurdities, with a
certain appreciation of the droll that kept it from being malicious.
As he had made Mrs. Campbell his confidante from the first, he told her
about this too, now, and finished with the half-helpless, half-amused
query as to what he should do. "It may be any length of time before she
decides that she is old enough, and it never seems to occur to her that
this state of things can't go on forever, that she is imposing upon
you." "And the most serious part of it," he added after a while, "is
that she does not love me."
"You don't love her, for that matter, either," Mrs. Campbell reminded
him. But she advised the inevitable,--to wait and let it work itself
out.
So he waited and stood aside somewhat, to watch the course of
Brewster's suit. He derived some little amusement from it, too, but he
wondered with rather a deeper tinge of anxiety than was altogether
necessary what the final outcome would be.
One morning Brewster met Felipa coming from the hospital and carrying a
wide-mouthed bottle. He joined her and asked if the little lady were
going to grow flowers in it. The little lady, who was quite as tall as
and a good deal more imposing than himself, answered that it was for a
vinagrone. He remonstrated. She was surely not going to make a pet of
one of those villanous insects. No. She had caught a tarantula, too, and
she was going to make them fight.
"Were you catching the tarantula yesterday when I saw you lying upon the
ground by the dump heap?"
"Yes," she said, "did you see me? I dare say you thought I was communing
with Nature in the midst of the old tin cans and horseshoes. Well, I
wasn't. I was watching the trap of a tarantula nest, and I caught him
when he came out. I've watched that hole for three days," she announced
triumphantly. "As for the vinagrone, the cook found him in his tent, and
I bottled him. Come and see the fight," she invited amiably.
Presently she returned with two bottles. In one was the tarantula, an
especially large and hideous specimen, hairy and black, with dull red
tinges. In the other the vinagrone, yet more hideous. She went down to
the side of the house and emptied both into the wide-mouthed bottle.
Brewster was in agony. He reached out and caught her hand. "My
darling," he cried, "take care!"
She turned on him quickly. "Let me be," she commanded, and he obeyed
humbly. Then she corked the bottle and shook it so that the animals
rolled on top of each other, and laying it on the ground bent over it
with the deepest interest. Brewster watched too, fascinated in spite of
himself. It was so very ugly. The two wicked little creatures fought
desperately. But after a time they withdrew to the sides of the bottle,
and were quite still. The tarantula had left a leg lying loose.
Felipa turned from them and waited, clasping her hands and smiling up at
Brewster. He, misinterpreting, felt encouraged and begged her to leave
the disgusting insects. He had something very different to talk about.
She said that she did not want to hear it, and would he bet on the
tarantula or the vinagrone?
"Don't bring them into it," he implored. "If you will not come away, I
will tell you now, Felipa, that I love you." He was more in earnest than
Landor had been. She felt that herself. His voice broke, and he paled.
But she only considered the insects, which were beginning to move again,
and answered absently that she knew it, that he had said it before. "Oh!
Mr. Brewster, bet quickly," she urged.
He caught her by the arm, exasperated past all civility, and shook her.
"Do you hear me, Felipa Cabot? I tell you that I love you."
She was strong, slender as she was, and she freed herself almost
without effort. And yet he would not be warned. "Don't you love me?" he
insisted, as though she had not already made it plain enough.
"No," she said shortly. "You had better bet."
He made as if to kick the bottle away, but quick as a flash she was on
her feet and facing him.
"You touch that," she said resolutely, "and I'll let them both loose on
you."
He turned on his heel and left her.
Landor and the adjutant came by, and she called to them. The adjutant
backed the vinagrone with a bag of sutler's candy, and Felipa took the
tarantula. It was mainly legless trunk, but still furious. Landor
studied her. She was quiet, but her eyes had grown narrow, and they
gleamed curiously at the sight of the torn legs and feelers scattering
around the bottle, wriggling and writhing. She was at her very worst.
It ended in victory for the vinagrone, but he died from his wounds an
hour later. Felipa told Landor so, as they started for a ride, early in
the afternoon. "The vinagrone is dead," she said; "Mr. Brewster didn't
like my fighting them." Then she assumed the lofty dignity that
contrasted so oddly sometimes with her childish simplicity. "He lacks
tact awfully. Think of it! He took the occasion to say that he loved me.
As though he had not told me so a dozen times before."
"And you--what did you say?" asked Landor. He was a little surprised to
find how anxiously he waited, and the extent of his relief when she
answered, "I told him to let me be, or I would set them loose on him."
Official business called Brewster to the Agency next day. He stopped
overnight, on the way, at a ranch whose owners depended more upon
passing travellers than upon the bad soil and the thin cattle. And here
fate threw in his way one whom he would have gone well out of that way
to find.
It was a civilian with whom he was obliged to share his room. He did not
fancy having to share his room at all, in the first place, and this and
other things made his temper bad. The civilian, on the other hand, was
in good temper, and inclined to be communicative. He tried several ways
of opening a conversation, and undaunted by rebuffs tried yet once more.
Like Bruce and the spider, it was exactly the seventh time that he
succeeded.
"How's things up at Grant?" he drawled through his beard, as he took off
that sacred and ceremonious garment known to the true frontiersman as
his vest, and without which he feels as lost as without his high-heeled
boots.
Brewster mumbled out of a towel that he guessed they were all right, and
implied what the dickens did it matter to him how they were.
"I hear you got Jack Landor up there?"
Then Brewster began to listen.
"Yes," he said, emptying the soap-caked water from the Indian basket
wash basin upon the earth floor; "why?"--"I used to know him in '61. He
came up to the Mescalero Agency then, not long before the Texans overran
the place. I recollect there was a sort of blizzard and it was seventeen
below. He came after a kid me and another feller'd been looking after.
Pretty little cuss, about four years old. I gave her her first bow'n
arrow."
Brewster took on an elaborate and entirely unnecessary air of
indifference, and yawned to heighten the effect. "What did he want of
the child?" he asked negligently.
"Her father was dead. He left her to him."
"Who was her father?" Brewster wanted to know.
The man told him. "He'd been a private up to Stanton, and had been
killed by some of Cochise's people that summer. Her mother was a
half-breed by the name of Felipa. Good-looking squaw, but dead,
too--killed by Mexicans. Do you happen to know whatever became of the
kid?"
Brewster told him that she was with Landor at the post now.
"She must be a woman by this time," reflected the civilian. "Is she
married to him?"
Brewster explained that she was visiting Captain Campbell's family.
Did she show the squaw? he asked. "Not unless you knew it was there,"
the officer said tolerantly. Then he went to bed and slept with that
peace of mind which comes of a proud consciousness of holding the handle
of the whip. In the morning he got the man's name and address before he
went on up to the Agency.
There he heard of Landor again. This time it was through Barnwell, and
the descriptions were picturesque. Brewster encouraged them, paying a
good deal more heed to them than to the little complaints of the Indians
he had been sent up to investigate. Then he returned to Grant, taking
with him in the ambulance an enlisted man returning to receive his
discharge.
Barnwell had told Brewster about him also. "His name is
Cairness,--Charles Cairness,--and he's got a lot of fool theories too,"
he explained. "He goes in for art, makes some pretty good paintings of
the Indians, and has picked up some of their lingo. Made himself
agreeable to the squaws, I guess. The interpreter says there's one got
her nose cut off by her buck, on his account."
Brewster suggested that he thought Crook had put a stop to those
mutilations, but the official shrugged his shoulders.
"I don't know how true it was, and I certainly ain't going to look her
up in her rancheria to find out."
The hero of the episode rode in the ambulance, sitting on the front
seat, holding his carbine across his knees, and peering with sharp,
far-sighted blue eyes over the alkali flats. Occasionally he took a shot
at a jack rabbit and brought it down unfailingly, but the frontiersman
has no relish for rabbit meat, and it was left where it dropped, for the
crows. He also brought down a sparrow hawk wounded in the wing, and,
having bound up the wound, offered it to Brewster, who took it as an
opening to a conversation and tried to draw him out.
"Barnwell tells me," he began, "that you have picked up a good deal of
Apache."
"Some Sierra Blanca, sir," said the soldier. It was respectful enough,
and yet there was somewhere in the man's whole manner an air of
equality, even superiority, that exasperated the lieutenant. It was
contrary to good order and military discipline that a private should
speak without hesitation, or without offence to the English tongue.
Brewster resented it, and so the next thing he said was calculated to
annoy. "He says you are quite one of them."
"He is mistaken, sir."
"Have you an Indian policy?"
Cairness's eyes turned from a little ground owl on the top of a mound
and looked him full in the face. "I really can't see, sir," he said,
"how it can matter to any one."
It did not in the least matter to Brewster, but he was one of those
trying people whom Nature has deprived of the instinct for knowing when
to stop. A very perceptible sneer twitched his lips. "You seem to be
English," he said.
"I am," announced the soldier.
Now it is a hazardous undertaking to question an Englishman who does not
care to be questioned. A person of good judgment would about as lief try
to poke up a cross lion to play. But Brewster persisted, and asked if
Cairness would be willing to live among the Apaches.
"They have their good traits, sir," said the man, civilly, "and chief
among them is that they mind their own business."
It was impossible to misunderstand, and Brewster was vexed beyond the
bounds of all wisdom. "The squaws have their good traits, too, I guess.
I hear one had her nose cut off on your account." He should not have
said it. He knew it, and he knew that the private knew it, but the man
made no reply whatever.
The remainder of the drive Cairness devoted to caring for the broken
wing of the hawk, and, during halts, to sketching anything that
presented itself,--the mules, the driver, passing Mexicans, or the cows
trying to graze from ground where the alkali formed patches of white
scum. He also accomplished a fine caricature of the lieutenant, and
derived considerable silent amusement therefrom.
The night of their return to the post, Cairness, crossing the parade
ground shortly before retreat, saw Felipa. He had been walking with his
eyes on the earth, debating within himself the question of his future,
whether he should reënlist, succumb to the habit of the service, which
is to ambition and endeavor what opium is to the system, or drop back
into the yet more aimless life he had been leading five years before,
when a fit of self-disgust had caused him to decide that he was good for
nothing but a trooper, if even that.
A long sunset shadow fell across his path, and he looked up. Felipa was
walking beside a little white burro, and holding Mrs. Campbell's
golden-curled baby upon its back. She carried her head superbly erect,
and her step, because of the moccasins, was quite noiseless. The glow of
the sunset shone in her unflinching eyes, and lost itself in the dull
black mass of her hair. She studied his face calmly, with a perfectly
impersonal approval.
Cairness went on, back to the barracks, and sitting at the troop clerk's
desk, made a memory sketch of her. It did not by any means satisfy him,
but he kept it nevertheless.
That night he sat upon the edge of his bunk, in the darkness, after
taps, with his elbows on his knees and his chin in his hand, and thought
the matter to a conclusion. The conclusion was that he would not
reënlist, and the reason for it was the girl he had met on the parade
ground. He knew the power that beauty had over him. It was as real, as
irresistible, as a physical sensation. And he thought Felipa Cabot the
most beautiful woman he had ever seen. "She should be done in a heroic
bronze," he told himself; "but as I can't do it, and as I haven't the
right to so much as think about her, I shall be considerably happier at
a distance, so I'll go."
He went the next day but one, riding out of the post at daylight. And he
saw Felipa once more. She was standing by the creek, drawing an arrow
from her quiver and fitting it to her bow. Then she poised the toe of
her left foot lightly upon the ground, bent back, and drew the bow
almost to a semicircle. The arrow flew straight up into the shimmering
air, straight through the body of a little jay, which came whirling,
spinning down among the trees. Felipa gave a quick leap of delight at
having made such a shot, then she darted down in search of the bird. And
Cairness rode on.