It was a bitterly cold January morning. There had been a rain in the
night, and the clouds yet hung gray over Mt. Graham and the black gap.
The wet wind went howling over the valley, so that the little flag at
the top of the staff snapped and whipped as though it would be torn from
the halyards. Sunday inspection and guard mounting had been chilling
ceremonies, performed in overcoats that were hardly more blue than the
men's faces. Having finished them, Brewster hurried across the parade to
Captain Campbell's quarters.
He found Felipa curled on the blanket in front of a great fire, and
reading by the glare of the flames, which licked and roared up the wide
chimney, a history of the Jesuit missionaries. It was in French, and she
must have already known it by heart, for it seemed to be almost the only
book she cared about. She had become possessed of its three volumes from
a French priest who had passed through the post in the early winter and
had held services there. He had been charmed with Felipa and with her
knowledge of his own tongue. It was a truly remarkable knowledge,
considering that it had been gained at a boarding-school.
"You speak with the utmost fluency, my daughter," he had commended, and
she had explained that she found expression more easy in French.
"It is curious," she said, "but it has always seemed as though English
were not my native tongue."
When the father returned to Tucson, he had sent her the history, and she
had read and reread it. In a way she was something of a linguist, for
she had picked up a good deal of Spanish from Mexicans about the post,
chiefly from the nurse of the Campbell children.
There is a certain class of persons to whom it is always irritating to
find any one reading a book. It rubs them the wrong way instantly. They
will frequently argue that their own, and the best, manner of studying
life is from nature--an excellent theory in sound, and commonly accepted
as unanswerable, but about as practical in fact as the study of music on
the instrument alone, without primer or method.
The mere sight of Felipa on the buffalo robe before the fire, poring
over the old history, exasperated Brewster. "That book again?" he said
crossly, as he drew up a chair and held out his hands to the flames;
"you must know it by heart."
"I do," she answered, blinking lazily.
He reflected that it is a trait of the semi-civilized and of children
that they like their tales often retold. But he did not say so. He was
holding that in reserve. Instead, he changed the subject, with an abrupt
inquiry as to whether she meant to ride to-day. "I suppose not?" he
added.
"I do, though," she said perversely, as she bent her head and tried to
put into order the tumbled mass of her hair. "I am going at eleven
o'clock."
"Alone?"
"No, not alone."
"It is bitterly cold."
"I don't mind, and neither does Captain Landor." Her guardian had
recently gotten his captaincy.
Brewster's irritation waxed. "Landor again?" he queried suggestively.
"Landor again," she yawned, ignoring his meaning-fraught tone. But she
watched his face from under her long lashes.
He glanced over his shoulder at the door. It was closed; so he leaned
forward and spoke in a lower voice. "Felipa, are you going to marry
Landor, or are you not?"
It was more than a mere impertinent question, and she did not pretend to
ignore it any longer. She clasped her hands slowly about her knees and
looked straight at him.
But he was unabashed, "What is he to you?" he insisted.
She thought for a moment before she answered. Then she spoke
deliberately, and there was a purring snarl under her voice. "It is none
of your business that I can see. But I will tell you this much, he is a
man I respect; and that is more than I have said of you when I have been
asked the same question."
"It is not only my business," he said, overlooking the last, and bending
more eagerly forward, "it is not only my business, it is the business
of the whole post. You are being talked about, my dear young lady."
She sprang to her feet so suddenly that her arm struck him a blow in the
face, and stood close in front of him, digging her nails into her palms
and breathing hard. "If you--if you dare to say that again, I will kill
you. I can do it. You know that I can, and I will. I mean what I say, I
will kill you." And she did mean what she said, for the moment, at any
rate. There was just as surely murder in her soul as though those long,
strong hands had been closed on his throat. Her teeth were bared and her
whole face was distorted with fury and the effort of controlling it. She
drew up a chair, after a moment, and sat in it. It was she who was
leaning forward now, and he had shrunk back, a little cowed. "I know
what you are trying to do," she told him, more quietly, her lips
quivering into a sneer, "you are trying to frighten me into marrying
you. But you can't do it. I never meant to, and now I would die first."
He saw that the game had reached that stage where he must play his trump
card, if he were to have any chance. "You are a mean little thing," he
laughed. "It is the Apache blood, I suppose."
She sat for a moment without answering. It was less astonishment than
that she did not understand. She knitted her brow in a puzzled frown.
But he mistook her silence for dismay, and went on. "It is only what one
might expect from the daughter of a drunken private and a Mescalero
squaw."
She was still silent, but she leaned nearer, watching his face, her
lips drawn away from her sharp teeth, and her eyes narrowing. She
understood now.
In his growing uneasiness he blundered on rashly. "You didn't know it?
But it is true. Ask your guardian. Do you think he would have you for a
wife?" He gave a short laugh. "He hates an Apache as he does a Gila
monster. Very few men would be willing to risk it."
She leaned back in her chair, tapping her foot upon the floor. It was
the only sign of excitement, but the look of her face was not good.
Brewster avoided it, and became absorbed in making the tips of his
fingers meet as he pressed his hands together.
"Still," said Felipa, too quietly, "I would rather be the daughter of a
drunken private and a Mescalero squaw than the wife of a coward and
sneak."
He stood up and went nearer to her, shaking his finger in her face. He
knew that he had lost, and he was reckless. "You had better marry me, or
I will tell your birth from the housetops." But he was making the fatal
mistake of dealing with the child that had been, instead of with the
woman he had aroused.
She laughed at him--the first false laugh that had ever come from her
lips. "You had better go now," she said, rising and standing with her
arms at her side, and her head very erect.
He hesitated, opening his mouth to speak and shutting it again
irresolutely.
"I told you to go," she repeated, raising her brows.
He took up his cap from the table, and went.
When Landor came in half an hour later he found her in her riding habit,
sitting in front of the fire. She was still alone, and he felt instantly
that there was more softness than ever before in the smile she gave him,
more womanliness in the clinging of her hand. Altogether in her attitude
and manner there was less of the restlessly youthful. He drew a chair
beside hers, and settled back comfortably.
"Mr. Brewster has just been here," she said at length, and she played
with the lash of her whip, avoiding his eyes, which was also a new way
for her.
"I wish Brewster would not come so often," he said.
For answer she put out her hand and laid it upon his, not as she had
often done it before, in the unattentive eagerness of some argument, but
slowly, with a shadow of hesitation.
He was surprised, but he was pleased too, and he took the long fingers
in his and held them gently.
"Do you still want me to marry you?" she asked him.
He told her that he most certainly did, and she went on.
"Is it because you think you ought to, or because you really want me?"
She was looking at him steadily now, and he could not have lied to her.
But the slender hand was warm and clinging, the voice low and sweet, the
whole scene so cosey and domestic, and she herself seemed so much more
beautiful than ever, that he answered that it was because he wanted
her--and for the moment it was quite true. Had so much as a blush come
to her cheek, had she lowered her earnest gaze, had her voice trembled
ever so little, it might have been true for all time. But she threw him
back upon himself rudely, with an unfeminine lack of tact that was
common with her. "Then I will marry you whenever you wish," she said.
"I began to tell you," she resumed directly, "that Mr. Brewster was
here, and that he informed me that my mother was a squaw and my father a
drunken private."
Landor jumped up from his chair. "Felipa!" he cried. At first he was
more shocked and sorry for her than angry with Brewster.
"I don't mind," she began; and then her strict truthfulness coming
uppermost, she corrected herself: "At least, I don't mind very much, not
so much as you thought I would."
He strode up and down, his face black with rage, expressing his violent
opinion of Brewster. Then he came to a stop, in front of her. "How did
he happen to tell you?" he asked.
She explained. "He says he will tell it broadcast," she ended, "but he
won't. It wouldn't be safe, and he knows it." Her cool self-possession
had its effect on him. He studied her curiously and began to calm down.
She asked him about her father and mother. Going back to his chair he
told her everything that he knew, save only the manner of Cabot's death.
"Then I took you to Yuma," he finished, "and from there to the East, via
Panama." There was a pause. And then came the question he had most
dreaded.
"Did my father leave me any money?" she asked.
There was nothing for it but to admit that from the day of her father's
death she had been utterly Landor's dependant,--at a cost to him of how
many pleasures, she, who knew the inadequacy of a lieutenant's pay,
could easily guess.
She sat thinking, with her chin in her palm, and a quite new look of
loneliness deep in her eyes. He could see that in the last hour she had
grasped almost the fulness of her isolation--almost, but not all; only
the years could bring forth the rest. She gave a heavy sigh. "Well, I am
glad I love you," she said.
But he knew that she did not love him. She was grateful. It was
sometimes an Apache trait. He realized that it was his curse and hers
that he could not for an instant forget the strain. He read her
character by it, half unconsciously. He saw it in her honesty, her
sinewy grace, her features, her fearlessness, her kindness with
children,--they were all Apache characteristics; and they were all
repellent. From his youth on, he had associated the race with cruelty
and every ghastly sight he had come upon, on the plains and in the
mountains. It was a prejudice with more than the force of a heritage. He
went on with his study of her, as she sat there. He was always studying
her. But he could not decide whether it was that she lacked
sensitiveness and was really not greatly disturbed, or a savage sort of
pride in concealing emotions.
He rose to his feet, shaking off an impatience with her and with
himself. "Come," he said peremptorily; and they went out and mounted and
rode away in the face of a whipping wind up the gradual slope to the
mountains, black and weird beneath the heavy, low-hanging rain clouds.
Felipa had taught her horse to make its average gait a run, and she
would have started it running now, but that Landor checked her. It was
high time, he said, that he should teach her to ride. Now she was more
than a little proud of her horsemanship, so she was annoyed as well as
surprised.
But he went on, instructing her how it was not all of riding to stick
on, and rather a question of saving and seat and the bit.
"You give your horse a sore back whenever you go far, and you always
bring him back in a lather."
It was half because she felt it would prick him, and half in humility,
that she answered, "I suppose that is the Indian in me."
His horse started. He had dug it with the rowels. Then he reined it in
with a jerk that made it champ its curb. "Don't dwell on that all the
time," he said angrily; "forget it." And then it flashed across him, the
irreparable wrong he would be doing her if he taught her to consider the
Apache blood a taint.
She gave him an odd, furtive glance and did not answer for a time. He
was never quite able to divine with her just how much of his thoughts
she understood, and it put him at some disadvantage.
Presently she said: "I can't forget. And you can't. As for other
people--they don't matter anyway." In her scheme of things other people
rarely did matter. She hedged herself round with a barrier of
indifference that was very nearly contempt, and encouraged no
intimacies--not even with Landor. And he knew it.
She made it plainer to him by and by, as she went on to advise his
course about Brewster. "If I were you, I would ignore his having told
me, Jack. I ought to have pretended that I knew it, but I was taken by
surprise. He must not think you resent it as though it were an insult,
though. As for me, I won't have anything more to do with him; but that
is for reasons of my own."
He demanded that he be told the reasons, but she refused very sweetly
and very decidedly. And he was forced to accept the footing upon which
she placed him, for all time.
* * * * * * * *
It was quite in keeping with everything that had gone before that, the
day after a passing Franciscan priest had married them, Landor should
have been ordered off upon a scout, and Felipa should have taken it as a
matter of course, shedding no tears, and showing no especial emotion
beyond a decent regret.
They had not gone upon a wedding trip for the excellent reason that
there was no place to go; and as they sat at dinner together in their
sparsely furnished quarters, there was a timid ring at the door-bell,
and Landor's Chinaman, the cook of his bachelor days, ushered in the
commanding officer, who looked humble apology for the awkwardness of a
visit he could not delay. He went straight to the matter in hand, in
spite of the tactful intentions that had made him come himself instead
of sending a subordinate.
"I say, Landor," he began, after having outwardly greeted Felipa and
inwardly cursed his luck at being obliged to tear a man away from so
fair a bride, "I say, there's been the dickens of a row up at the
Agency."
Landor went on with his dinner coolly enough. "There's quite likely to
be that at any time," he said, "so long as a pious and humane Indian
Bureau sends out special agents of the devil who burn down the Agency
buildings of peaceful Apaches as a means of inducing them to seek
illness and death in malarious river bottoms."
"That," objected the major, testily, "is ancient history. This trouble
started the way of most of the troubles of this age--whiskey." In his
agitation he carefully spilled a spoonful of salt on the cloth and
scraped it into a little mound with a knife. Then recollecting that
spilled salt causes quarrels, he hurriedly threw a pinch of it over his
left shoulder. "And--and, the worst of the whole business is, old man,
that you've got to go. Your troop and one from Apache are ordered out.
I'm awfully sorry." He would not look at Felipa at all. But he stared
Landor fairly out of countenance, as he waited for a storm of tears and
protestations.
When, therefore, Mrs. Landor said, with the utmost composure, that it
was too bad, his gasp was audible.
The captain knitted his thick brows and interposed quickly, talking
against time. "If the Tucson ring and the Indian Bureau had one head, I
should like the detail of cutting it off." His annoyance seemed to be of
an impersonal sort, and the commandant began to feel that he must have
handled the thing rather well, after all. He gained in self-esteem and
equanimity.
Felipa rose from the table, and going over to her husband laid her hand
on his shoulder. She asked when he must go. "To-night, my dear lady, I
am afraid," soothed the commandant. But she appeared to be in no need of
humoring, as she turned to Landor and offered to do what she might to
help him.
He had dreaded a scene, but he was not so sure that this was not worse.
"You are the wife for a soldier," he said somewhat feebly; "no tears and
fuss and--all that kind of thing."
Landor winced as he folded his napkin and stood up. "I am ready," he
said, and going into the long hallway took his cap from the rack and
went with the major out into the night.
In half an hour he was back, and having produced his scouting togs from
the depths of a sky-blue chest, smelling horribly of tobacco and
camphor, he fell to dressing.
Felipa sat on the edge of the bunk and talked to him, a little excited,
and very anxious to try what a scout was like for herself.
As he put on his faded blouse he went and stood before her, holding out
his arms. She moved over to him and laid her head on his shoulder. "Are
you not sorry to have me go?" he asked, in the tones of one having a
grievance. He felt that he was entitled to something of the sort.
Of course she was sorry, she protested, a little indignant that he
should ask it. She would be horribly lonesome.
He tried hard to warm her to something more personal. "I might never
come back, you know, dear." He realized that he was absolutely begging
for affection, most futile and unavailing of all wastes of energy.
But she only answered that that was unlikely and slipped her arm around
his neck, as she added that if anything were to happen to him, she would
not have one real friend in the world. There was something pathetic in
the quiet realization of her loneliness.
He stroked her hair pityingly. After all, she was only a half-savage
creature bound to him by the ties of gratitude. He had seen the same
thing in a Chiricahua girl baby he had once rescued, horribly burned,
from the fire of an abandoned Indian camp, where she had been thrown by
the fleeing hostiles, because she was sickly and hampered their
progress. The hideous, scarred little thing had attached herself to him
like a dog, and had very nearly pined herself to death when he had had
to leave her for good. Afterward she had married--at the ripe age of
twelve--a buck of her own tribe. He thought of how she also had slipped
her hard, seamed arm around his neck, and he drew away from Felipa.
When, in the darkness of a cloudy night, he said good-by to her on the
road before his quarters, bending to kiss the warm mouth he could not
see, he knew that it would have been possible for him to have loved her,
had she been nearly all that she was not.
Then he mounted the horse the orderly held for him, and trotted off.
V
The Gila River cutting straight across the southern portion of Arizona,
from the Alkali flats on the east to the Colorado at Yuma on the west,
flowed then its whole course through desolation. Sometimes cottonwoods
and sycamore trees rose in the bottom, and there was a patch of green
around some irrigated land. But, for the most part, the basin was a
waste of glittering sand and white dust, and beyond, the low hills, bare
of every plant save a few stunted wild flowers, cacti and sage,
greasewood and mesquite, rolled for miles and miles of barrenness. The
chicken hawk and crow sailed through the fiercely blue sky, the air
waved and quivered with incredible heat. At night malaria rose from the
ground, the coyote barked and whined at the light of the brilliant
stars, and the polecat prowled deliberately.
Here, toward the eastern part of the territory, the government had
portioned off the San Carlos Agency for its Apache wards, and some
thirty miles away, not far from the banks of the river, Camp Thomas for
its faithful soldiery.
On a day when the mercury registered 120 degrees, Felipa Landor drove
into the camp. Her life, since her marriage three years before, had been
the usual nomadic one of the place and circumstances, rarely so much as
a twelvemonth in one place, never certain for one day where the next
would find her. Recently Landor had been stationed at the headquarters
of the Department of Arizona. But Felipa had made no complaint whatever
at having to leave the gayest post in the territories for the most
God-forsaken, and she refused flatly to go East. "I can stand anything
that you can," she told her husband when he suggested it, which was
apparently true enough, for now, in a heat that was playing out the very
mules, covered as she was with powdery, irritating dust, she was quite
cheerful as he helped her from the ambulance.
She stood looking round the post, across the white-hot parade ground, to
the adobe barracks and the sutler's store. Then she turned and
considered the officers' quarters. They were a row of hospital, wall,
and A tents, floored with rough boards and sheltered by ramadas of
willow branches.
In the middle of the line there was a one-room mud hut. This, with the
tents back of it, was her home. Landor had fitted up the hut with Navajo
blankets, Indian baskets, dolls, saddle bags, war bonnets, and quivers;
with stuffed birds and framed chromos, camp-chairs and some rough
quartermaster's furniture. A gray blanket, with a yellow Q. M. D. in the
centre, kept the glare out at the window, and the room was cool enough.
One advantage of adobe--and it has others--is that it retains all summer
the winter cold, and all winter the summer heat.
Felipa expressed decided approval, and set to work making herself
comfortable at once. Within ten minutes she had changed her travelling
things for a white wrapper, had brushed the dust from her hair, and left
it hanging straight and coarse and dead black, below her waist,--she was
given to loosing it whenever the smallest excuse offered,--and had
settled herself to rest in a canvas lounging chair.
Landor had come to agree with the major at Grant, that she was an
excellent wife for a soldier. Her tastes were simple as those of a
hermit. She asked only a tent and a bunk and enough to eat, and she
could do without even those if occasion arose. She saw the best of
everything, not with the exasperating optimism which insists upon
smiling idiotically on the pleasant and the distinctly disagreeable
alike, and upon being aggressively delighted over the most annoying
mishaps, but with a quiet, common-sense intention of making the
objectionable no more so for her own part. There were wives who made
their husbands' quarters more dainty and attractive, if not more neat;
but in the struggle--for it was necessarily a struggle--lost much peace
of mind and real comfort. Upon the whole, Landor was very well
satisfied, and Felipa was entirely so. She was utterly indifferent to
being set down at a three-company post, where her only companion was to
be a woman she disliked from the first, openly and without policy, as
was her way.
The woman called early in the blazing afternoon, appearing clad in
silks, waving a gorgeous fan of plumes, and sinking languidly into a
chair. Felipa sat bolt upright on a camp-stool, and before the close of
an hour they were at daggers' points. The commandant's wife used cheap
French phrases in every other breath, and Felipa retaliated in the end
by a long, glib sentence, which was not understood. She seemed
absolutely dense and unsmiling about it, but Landor was used to the mask
of stolidity. He got up and went to the window to arrange the gray
blanket, and hide a smile that came, even though he was perfectly aware
of the unwisdom of making an enemy of the C. O.'s wife.
From thenceforth the elegant creature troubled Felipa as little as the
nature of things would permit. She said that Mrs. Landor was _une
sauvage_ and so _brune_; and Mrs. Landor said she was a fool and dyed
her hair. She was not given to mincing words. And she had small patience
with a woman who lay in bed until the sun was high, and who spent her
days lounging under the ramada, displaying tiny, satin-shod feet for the
benefit of the enlisted men and the Indians who wandered over from the
reservation.
She herself was up before dawn, riding over the hills with her husband,
watching the sun rise above the blue mountains on the far-away horizon,
and strike with lights of gold and rose the sands and the clumps of
sage, visiting the herd where it struggled to graze, under well-armed
guard, and gathering the pitiful wild flowers from the baked, lifeless
soil. She shot quail and owls, and dressed their skins. She could
endure any amount of fatigue, and she could endure quite as well long
stretches of idleness.
Having no children of her own, she took for protégé a small White
Mountain, son of a buck who hung about the post most of the time, bought
him candy and peanuts at the sutler's store, taught him English, and
gathered snatches of his tribe's tongue in return.
Landor humored her, but did not quite approve. "If you begin that, every
papoose at the Agency will be brought down to us," he suggested; and
once when he had grown a little tired of having the noiseless, naked
little savage forever round, he offered him a piece of canned lobster.
Whereupon the boy fled wildly, and would not be coaxed back for many
days. Felipa seemed really to miss him, so Landor never teased him after
that, making only the reasonable request that the youngster be not
allowed to scratch his head near him.
Another of her pets was a little fawn a soldier had caught and given to
her. It followed her tamely about the post.
One morning, shortly before dinner call, she sat under the ramada, the
deer at her feet, asleep, the little Apache squatted beside her, amusing
himself with a collection of gorgeous pictorial labels, soaked from
commissary fruit and vegetable cans. The camp was absolutely silent,
even the drowsy scraping of the brooms of the police party having
stopped some time before. Landor was asleep in his tent, and presently
she herself began to doze. She was awakened by the sound of footsteps on
the gravel in front of the ramada, and in another moment a tall figure
stood in the opening, dark against the glare. Instantly she knew it was
the man with whom she had come face to face long before on the parade
ground at Grant, though from then until now she had not thought of him
once, nor remembered his existence.
She rose to her feet, standing slender and erect, the roused fawn on one
side and the naked savage on the other. And they faced each other,
disconcerted, caught mute in the reverberation, indefinite, quivering,
of a chord which had been struck somewhere in the depths of that Nature
to which we are willing enough to grant the power of causing the string
of an instrument to pulse to the singing of its own note, but whose laws
of sympathetic vibration we would fain deny beyond material things.
The man understood, and was dismayed. It is appalling to feel one's self
snatched from the shifting foothold of individuality and whirled on in
the current of the Force of Things. Felipa did not understand. And she
was annoyed. She crashed in with the discord of a deliberate
commonplace, and asked what she could do for him, speaking as to an
inferior; and he, with a stiff resentment, answered that he wished to
see Captain Landor.
She did not return to the ramada, but before long her husband came in
search of her.
"That man is going to stay to luncheon," he told her.
She echoed "To luncheon!" in amazement. "But, Jack, he was a soldier,
wasn't he?"
"He was, but he isn't. I sent for him about some business, and he is a
very decent sort of a fellow. He has a little ranch on the reservation."
"A squaw-man?" she asked.
"I dare say," he answered carelessly. "Come and meet him. You'll like
him."
She went, with none too good a grace.
Cairness said to himself that she was regal, and acknowledged her most
formal welcome with an ease he had fancied among the arts he had long
since lost.
"I have seen you before, Mrs. Landor," he said after a while.
"Yes?" she answered, and stroked the head of the fawn.
"Yes," he persisted, refusing to be thwarted, "once when you were
crossing the parade at Grant, at retreat, and two days afterward when
you shot a blue jay down by the creek."
She could not help looking at him now, and his eyes held hers through a
silence that seemed to them so enduring, so unreasonable, that Landor
must wonder at it. But he had seen men put at a disadvantage by her
beauty before, and he had grown too used to her lack of conventionality
to think much about it, one way or the other.
"Can't we send the hostile away?" he suggested, glancing at the small
Apache, who was digging viciously at his head and watching Cairness with
beady orbs. Felipa spoke to him, and he went.
"Do you like his kind?" the Englishman asked curiously.
"They have their good points," she answered, exactly as he himself had
answered Brewster's baiting long ago. Then she fastened her gaze on the
roof of the ramada.
It was evident that she had no intention of making herself agreeable.
Landor had learned the inadvisability and the futility of trying to
change her moods. She was as unaffected about them as a child. So he
took up the conversation he and Cairness had left off, concerning the
Indian situation, always a reliable topic. It was bad that year and had
been growing steadily worse, since the trouble at the time of his
marriage, when Arizona politicians had, for reasons related to their own
pockets, brought about the moving of the White Mountain band to the San
Carlos Agency. The White Mountains had been peaceable for years, and, if
not friendly to the government, at least too wise to oppose it. They had
cultivated land and were living on it inoffensively. But they were
trading across the territorial line into New Mexico, and that lost money
to Arizona. So they were persuaded by such gentle methods as the burning
of their Agency buildings and the destruction of their property, to move
down to San Carlos. The climate there was of a sort fatal to the
mountain Apaches,--the thing had been tried before with all the result
that could be desired, in the way of fevers, ague, and blindness,--and
also the White Mountains were hereditary enemies of the San Carlos
tribes. But a government with a policy, three thousand miles away, did
not know these things, nor yet seek to know them. Government is like the
gods, upon occasions: it first makes mad, then destroys. And if it is
given time enough, it can be very thorough in both.
In the period of madness, more or less enduring, of the victim of the
Great Powers' policy, somebody who is innocent usually suffers.
Sometimes the Powers know it, oftener they do not. Either way it does
not worry them. They set about doing their best to destroy, and that is
their whole duty.
Not having had enough of driving to madness in '75 and '76, they tried
it again three years later. They were dealing this time with other
material, not the friendly and the cowed, but with savages as cruel and
fierce and unscrupulous as those of the days of Coronado. Victorio, Juh,
and Geronimo were already a little known, but now they were to have
their names shrieked to the unhearing heavens in the agony of the
tortured and the dying.
The Powers said that a party of Indians had killed two American
citizens, and had thereby offended against their sacred laws. To be sure
the Americans had sold the Indians poisonous whiskey, so they had broken
the laws, too. But there is, as any one should be able to see, a
difference between a law-breaking Chiricahua and a law-breaking
territorial politician. Cairness refused to see it. He said things that
would have been seditious, if he had been of any importance in the
scheme of things. As it was, the Great Powers did not heed them,
preferring to take advice from men who did not know an Apache from a
Sioux--or either from the creation of the shilling shocker.
"I am not wasting any sympathy on the Apaches, nor on the Indians as a
whole. They have got to perish. It is in the law of advancement that
they should. But where is the use in making the process painful? Leave
them alone, and they'll die out. It isn't three hundred years since one
of the biggest continents of the globe was peopled with them, and now
there is the merest handful left, less as a result of war and slaughter
than of natural causes. Nature would see to it that they died, if we
didn't."
"The philanthropist doesn't look at it that way. He thinks that we
should strive to preserve the species."
"I don't," Cairness differed; "it's unreasonable. There is too much
sympathy expended on races that are undergoing the process of
extinction. They have outgrown their usefulness, if they ever had any.
It might do to keep a few in a park in the interests of science, and of
that class of people which enjoys seeing animals in cages. But as for
making citizens of the Indians, raising them to our level--it can't be
done. Even when they mix races, the red strain corrupts the white."
Landor glanced at his wife. She seemed to take it without offence, and
was listening intently.
"It's the old saying about a dog walking on its hind legs, when you come
to civilizing the Indian. You are surprised that he civilizes at all,
but he doesn't do it well, for all that. He can be galvanized into a
temporary semblance of national life, but he is dead at the core, and he
will decay before long."
"They could kill a good many of us before they died out, if we would
sit still and take it," Landor objected.
"It's six one, and half a dozen the other. They'd be willing enough to
die out in peace, if we'd let them. Even they have come to have a vague
sort of instinct that that's what it amounts to."
Landor interrupted by taking the slipper from Felipa's foot and killing
with it a centipede that crawled up the wall of the abode. "That's the
second," he said, as he put the shoe on again. "I killed one yesterday;
the third will come to-morrow." Then he went back to his chair and to
the discussion, and before long he was called to the adjutant's office.
Felipa forgot her contempt for Cairness. She was interested and suddenly
aroused herself to show it. "How do you come to be living with the
Indians?" she asked. It was rarely her way to arrive at a question
indirectly. "Have you married a squaw?"
He flushed angrily, then thought better of it, because after all the
question was not impertinent. So he only answered with short severity
that he most certainly had not.
Felipa could not help the light of relief that came on her face, but
realizing it, she was confused.
He helped her out. "I have drifted in a way," he went on to explain. "I
left home when I was a mere boy, and the spirit of savagery and unrest
laid hold of me. I can't break away. And I'm not even sure that I want
to. You, I dare say, can't understand." Yet he felt so sure, for some
reason, that she could that he merely nodded his head when she said
briefly, "I can." "Then, too," he went on, "there is something in the
Indian character that strikes a responsive chord in me. I come of
lawless stock myself. I was born in Sidney." Then he stopped short. What
business was it of hers where he had been born? He had never seen fit to
speak of it before. Nevertheless he intended that she should understand
now. So he made it quite plain. "Sidney was a convict settlement, you
know," he said deliberately, "and marriages were promiscuous. My
grandfather was an officer who was best away from England. My
grandmother poisoned her first husband. That is on my mother's side. On
my father's side it was about as mixed." He leaned back, crossing his
booted legs and running his fingers into his cartridge belt. His manner
asked with a certain defiance, what she was going to do about it, or to
think.
And what she did was to say, with a deliberation equal to his own, that
her mother had been a half-breed Mescalero and her father a private.
He looked at her steadily, in silence. It did not seem that there was
anything to say. He would have liked to tell her how beautiful she was.
But he did not do it. Instead, he did much worse. For he took a beaded
and fringed leather case from his pocket and held out to her the drawing
he had made of her four years before. She gave it back without a word,
and bent to play with the buckskin collar on the neck of the fawn.
Cairness put the sketch back in the case and stood up. "Will you tell
Captain Landor that I found that I could not wait, after all?" he said,
and bowing went out from the ramada.
She sat staring at the white glare of the opening, and listening to his
foot-falls upon the sand.