Landor said that he had put in a requisition for kippered mackerel and
anchovy paste, and that the commissary was running down so that one got
nothing fit to eat. He was in an unpleasant frame of mind, and his first
lieutenant, who messed with him, pulled apart a broiled quail that lay,
brown and juicy, on its couch of toast and cress, and asked wherein lay
the use of taking thought of what you should eat. "Every prospect is
vile, and man is worse, and the sooner heaven sends release the better.
What is there in a life like this? Six weeks from the nearest approach
to civilization, malaria in the air by night and fire by day. Even Mrs.
Landor is showing it."
"I didn't know that I had made any complaint," she said equably.
"You haven't, but the summer has told on you just the same. You are
thin, and your eyes are too big. Look at that!" He held out a hand that
shook visibly. "That's the Gila Valley for you."
"Sometimes it's the Gila Valley, and sometimes it's rum," said Landor.
"It's rum with a good many."
"Why shouldn't it be? What the deuce has a fellow got to do but drink
and gamble? You have to, to keep your mind off it."
The lieutenant himself did neither, but he argued that his mind was
never off it.
Felipa thought it was not quite so bad as that, and she poured herself
another cup of the Rio, strong as lye, with which she saturated her
system, to keep off the fever.
"You might marry," Landor suggested. "You can always do that when all
else fails."
"Who is there to marry hereabouts? And always supposing there were some
one, I'd be sent off on a scout next day, and have to ship her back East
for an indefinite time. It would be just my blamed luck."
The breakfast humor when the thermometer has been a hundred and fifteen
in the shade for long months, is pessimistic. "Don't get married then,
please," said Felipa, "not for a few days at any rate. I don't want
Captain Landor to go off until he gets over these chills and things."
There was a knock at the door of the tent, and it opened. The adjutant
came in. "I say, Landor--"
"I say, old man, shut that door! Look at the flies. Now go on," he
added, as the door banged; and he rose to draw a chair to the table.
"Can't stay," said the adjutant, all breathless. "The line's down
between here and the Agency; but a runner has just come in, and there's
trouble. The bucks are restless. Want to join Victorio in New Mexico.
You've both got to get right over there."
It was the always expected, the never ceasing. Landor looked at his wife
and stroked his mustache with a shaking hand. His face was yellow, and
his hair had grown noticeably grayer.
"You are not fit to go," Felipa said resignedly, "but that doesn't
matter, of course."
"No," he agreed, "it doesn't matter. And I shall do well enough." Then
the three went out, and she finished her breakfast alone.
In less than an hour the troop was ready, the men flannel-shirted and
gauntleted, their soft felt hats pulled over their eyes, standing reins
in hand, foot in stirrup, beside the fine, big horses that Crook had
substituted for the broncos of the plains cavalry of former years. Down
by the corrals the pack-mules were ready, too, grunting under their
aparejos and packs. A thick, hot wind, fraught with sand, was beginning,
presaging one of the fearful dust storms of the southwest. The air dried
the very blood in the veins. The flies, sticky and insistent, clung and
buzzed about the horses' eyes and nostrils. Bunches of tumbleweed and
hay went whirling across the parade.
Landor came trotting over from his quarters, followed by his orderly,
and the troops moved off across the flat, toward the river.
Felipa stood leaning listlessly against the post of the ramada, watching
them. After a time she went into the adobe and came out with a pair of
field-glasses, following the course of the command as it wound along
among the foot-hills. The day dragged dully along. She was uneasy about
her husband, her nerves were shaken with the coffee and quinine, and she
was filled, moreover, with a vague restlessness. She would have sent
for her horse and gone out even in the clouds of dust and the wind like
a hot oven, but Landor had forbidden her to leave the post. Death in the
tip of a poisoned arrow, at the point of a yucca lance, or from a more
merciful bullet of lead, might lurk behind any mesquite bush or gray
rock.
She set about cleaning the little revolver, self-cocking, with the
thumb-piece of the hammer filed away, that her husband had given her
before they were married. To-night she wanted no dinner. She was given
to eating irregularly; a good deal at a time, and again nothing for a
long stretch. That, too, was in the blood. So she sent the soldier cook
away, and he went over to the deserted barracks.
Then she tried to read, but the whisper of savagery was in the
loneliness and the night. She sat with the book open in her lap, staring
into a shadowy corner where there leaned an Indian lance, surmounted by
a war bonnet. Presently she stood up, and stretched her limbs slowly, as
a beast of prey does when it shakes off the lethargy of the day and
wakens for the darkness. Then she went out to the back of the tents.
The stars were bright chips of fire in a sky of polished blue. The wind
of the day had died at dusk, and the silence was deep, but up among the
bare graves the coyotes were barking weirdly. As she looked off across
the low hills, there was a quick, hissing rattle at her feet. She moved
hastily, but without a start, and glanced down at a rattler not three
feet away.
Landor's sabre stood just within the sitting room, and she went for it
and held the glittering blade in front of the snake. Its fangs struck
out viciously again and again, and a long fine stream of venom trickled
along the steel. Then she raised the sabre and brought it down in one
unerring sweep, severing the head from the body. In the morning she
would cut off the rattle and add it to the string of close upon fifty
that hung over her mirror. But now the night was calling to her, the
wild blood was pricking in her veins. Running the sabre into the ground,
she cleaned off the venom, and went back to the adobe to put it in its
scabbard.
After she had done that she stood hesitating for just a moment before
she threw off all restraint with a toss of her head, and strapped about
her waist a leather belt from which there hung a bowie knife and her
pistol in its holster. Then slipping on her moccasins, she glided into
the darkness. She took the way in the rear of the quarters, skirting the
post and making with swift, soundless tread for the river. Her eyes
gleamed from under her straight, black brows as she peered about her in
quick, darting glances.
Not a week before--and then the Agency had been officially at peace--a
Mexican packer had been shot down by an arrow from some unseen bow,
within a thousand yards of the post, in broad daylight. The Indians,
caking their bodies with clay, and binding sage or grass upon their
heads, could writhe unseen almost within arm's reach. But Felipa was not
afraid. Straight for the river bottom she made, passing amid the
dump-heaps, where a fire of brush was still smouldering, filling the
air with pungent smoke, where old cans and bottles shone in the
starlight, and two polecats, pretty white and black little creatures,
their bushy tails erect, sniffed with their sharp noses as they walked
stupidly along. Their bite meant hydrophobia, but though one came
blindly toward her, she barely moved aside. Her skirt brushed it, and it
made a low, whining, mean sound.
Down by the river a coyote scudded across her path as she made her way
through the willows, and when he was well beyond, rose up on his hind
legs and looked after her. At the water's edge she stopped and glanced
across to the opposite bank. The restlessness was going, and she meant
to return now, before she should be missed--if indeed she were not
missed already, as was very probable. Yet still she waited, her hands
clasped in front of her, looking down at the stream. Farther out, in the
middle, a ripple flashed. But where she stood among the bushes, it was
very dark. The water made no sound, there was not a breath of air, yet
suddenly there was a murmur, a rustle.
Felipa's revolver was in her hand, and cocked and pointed straight
between two eyes that shone out of the blackness. And so, for an
appreciable time, she stood. Then a long arm came feeling out; but
because she was looking along the sight into the face at the very end of
the muzzle, she failed to see it. When it closed fast about her waist,
she gave a quick gasp and fired. But the bullet, instead of going
straight through the forehead beneath the head band, as she had meant
it to do, ploughed down. The grasp on the body relaxed for an instant;
the next it had tightened, and a branch had struck the pistol from her
hand.
And now it was a struggle of sheer force and agility. She managed to
whip out the knife from her belt and to strike time and time again
through sinewy flesh, to the bone. The only noise was the dragging of
their feet on the sand, the cracking of the willows and the swishing of
the blade. It was savage against savage, two vicious, fearless beasts.
The Apache in Felipa was full awake now, awake in the bliss of killing,
the frenzy of fight, and awake too, in the instinct which told her how,
with a deep-drawn breath, a contraction, a sudden drop and writhing, she
would be free of the arms of steel. And she was free, but not to turn
and run--to lunge forward, once and again, her breath hissing between
her clenched, bared teeth.
The buck fell back before her fury, but she followed him thrusting and
slashing. Yet it might not, even then, have ended well for her, had
there not come from somewhere overhead the sound most dreaded as an omen
of harm by all Apaches--the hoot of an owl. The Indian gave a low cry of
dismay and turned and darted in among the bushes.
She stood alone, with the sticky, wet knife in her hand, catching her
breath, coming out of the madness. Then she stooped, and pushing the
branches aside felt about for her pistol. It lay at the root of a tree,
and when she had picked it up and put it back in the holster, there
occurred to her for the first time the thought that the shot in the dead
stillness must have roused the camp. And now she was sincerely
frightened. If she were found here, it would be more than disagreeable
for Landor. They must not find her. She started at a swift, long-limbed
run, making a wide detour, to avoid the sentries, bending low, and
flying silently among the bushes and across the shadowy sands.
She could hear voices confusedly, men hurriedly calling and hallooing as
she neared the back of the officers' line and crept into her tent. The
door was barely closed when there came a knock, and the voice of the
striker asking if she had heard the shot across the river.
"Yes," she said, "I heard it. But I was not frightened. What was it?" He
did not know, he said, and she sent him back to the barracks.
Then she lit a lamp and took off her blood-stained gown. There was
blood, too, on the knife and its case. She cleaned them as best she
could and looked into the chamber of her revolver with a contemplative
smile on the lips that less than half an hour before had been curled
back from her sharp teeth like those of a fighting wolf. She wondered
how badly the buck had been hurt.
And the next day she knew. When she came out in front of her quarters in
the morning, rather later than usual, there was a new tent beside the
hospital, and when she asked the reason for it, they told her that a
wounded Apache had been found down by the river soon after the shot had
been fired the night before. He was badly hurt, with a ball in his
shoulder, and he was half drunk with tizwin, as well as being cut in a
dozen places.
She listened attentively to the account of the traces of a struggle
among the willows, and asked who had fired the shot. It was not known,
they said, and the sullen buck would probably never tell.
When she saw the post surgeon come out from his house and start over to
the hospital, she called to him. "May I see your new patient?" she
asked.
He told her that he was going to operate at once, to remove the ball and
the shattered bone, but that she might come if she wished. His
disapproval was marked, but she went with him, nevertheless, and sat
watching while he picked and probed at the wound.
The Apache never quivered a muscle nor uttered a sound. It was fine
stoicism, and appealed to Felipa until she really felt sorry for him.
But presently she stood up to go away, and her eyes caught the lowering,
glazed ones of the Indian. Half involuntarily she made a motion of
striking with a knife. Neither the doctor nor the steward caught it, but
he did, and showed by a sudden start that he understood.
He watched her as she went out of the tent, and the surgeon and steward
worked with the shining little instruments.