Landor came in a few weeks later. He had had an indecisive skirmish in
New Mexico with certain bucks who had incurred the displeasure of the
paternal government by killing and eating their horses, to the glory of
their gods and ancestors, and thereafter working off their enthusiasm by
a few excursions beyond the confines of the reservation, with intent to
murder and destroy.
Being shaved of the thick iron-gray beard, and once again in seemly
uniform, and having reported to the commandant, he sat down to talk with
his wife.
She herself lay at full length upon a couch she had devised out of
packing cases. It occurred to Landor that she often dropped down to rest
now, and that she was sallow and uneasy.
He looked at her uncomfortably. "I am going to get you out of this, up
into the mountains somewhere," he said abruptly; "you look peaked."
She did not show the enthusiasm he had rather expected. "I dare say it
is my bad conscience," she answered with some indifference. "I have a
sin to confess."
He naturally did not foresee anything serious, and he only said, "Well?"
and began to fill his pipe from a buckskin pouch, cleverly sketched in
inks with Indian scenes. "By the way," he interrupted as she started to
speak, "what do you think of this?" He held it out to her. "That fellow
Cairness, who wouldn't stay to luncheon that day, did it for me. We
camped near his place a couple of days. And he sent you a needle-case,
or some such concern. It's in my kit." She looked at the pouch carefully
before she gave it back; then she clasped her hands under her head again
and gazed up at the manta of the ceiling, which sagged and was stained
where the last cloud-burst had leaked through the roof.
"Well?" repeated Landor.
"I disobeyed orders," said Felipa.
"Did you, though?"
"And I went outside the post the night after you left, down to the
river. Some one will probably tell you about a wounded Sierra Blanca
found down among the bushes in the river bottom that same night. I shot
him, and then I hacked him up with my knife." He had taken his pipe from
his mouth and was looking at her incredulously, perplexed. He did not
understand whether it was a joke on her part, or exactly what it was.
But she sat up suddenly, with one of her quick movements of conscious
strength and perfect control over every muscle, clasped her hands about
her knees, and went on. "It was very curious," and there came on her
face the watchful, alert, wild look, with the narrowing of the eyes. "It
was very curious, I could not have stayed indoors that night if it had
cost me my life--and it very nearly did, too. I had to get out. So I
took my revolver and my knife, and I went the back way, down to the
river. While I was standing on the bank and thinking about going home,
an Indian stole out on me. I had an awful struggle. First I shot. I
aimed at his forehead, but the bullet struck his shoulder; and then I
fought with the knife. As soon as I could slip out of his grasp, I went
at him and drove him off. But I didn't know how badly he was hurt until
the next day. The shot had roused them up here, and they went down to
the river and found him bleeding on the sand.
"They put him in a tent beside the hospital, and the next morning I went
over with the doctor to see him. He was all cut up on the arms and neck
and shoulders. I must have been very strong." She stopped, and he still
sat with the puzzled look on his face, but a light of understanding
beginning to show through.
"Are you joking," he asked, "or what?"
"Indeed, I am not joking," she assured him earnestly. "It is quite true.
Ask any one. Only don't let them know it was I who wounded him. They
have never so much as suspected it. Fortunately I thought of you and ran
home all the way, and was in my tent before it occurred to any one to
come for me." She burst into a low laugh at his countenance of wrath and
dismay. "Oh! come, Jack dear, it is not so perfectly, unspeakably
horrible after all. I was disobedient. But then I am so sorry and
promise never, never to do it again."
"You might have killed the Indian," he said, in a strained voice. It
did not occur to either of them, just then, that it was not the danger
she had been in that appalled him.
She was astonished in her turn. "Killed him! Why, of course I might have
killed him," she said blankly, frowning, in a kind of hopeless
perplexity over his want of understanding. "I came very near it, I tell
you. The ball made shivers of his shoulder. But he was brave," she grew
enthusiastic now, "he let the doctor probe and pick, and never moved a
muscle. Of course he was half drunk with tizwin, even then."
"You didn't stay to see the operation?" His voice was ominously quiet.
"For a while, yes. And before I came away I made a sign to show him it
was I. You should have seen his surprise."
There followed a fury-fraught silence. Landor's face was distorted with
the effort he was making to contain himself, and Felipa began to be a
little uneasy. So she did the most unwise thing possible, having been
deprived by nature of the good gift of tact. She got up from the couch
and drew the knife from its case, and took it to him. "That," she said,
showing the red-brown stains on the handle, "that is his blood."
He snatched it from her then, with a force that threw her to one side,
and sent it flying across the room, smashing a water jug to bits. Then
he pushed her away and going out, banged the door until the whitewash
fell down from the cracks.
Felipa was very thoroughly frightened now. She stood in wholesome awe
of her husband, and it was the first time she had ever made him really
angry, although frequently he was vaguely irritated by her. She had had
no idea the thing would infuriate him so, or she would probably have
kept it to herself. And she wished now that she had, as she went back to
the couch and sat on the edge of it, dejectedly.
When he returned at the end of a couple of hours she was all humility,
and she had moreover done something that was rare for her: made capital
of her beauty, putting on her most becoming white gown, and piling her
hair loosely on the top of her head, with a cap of lace and a ribbon
atop of it. Landor liked the little morning caps, probably because they
were a sort of badge of civilization, but they were incongruous for all
that, and took from the character of her head. His anger was well in
leash, and he gave her the mail which had just come in by the stage,
quite as though nothing had occurred. "And now," he commenced, when he
had glanced over the Eastern papers, "I have seen the C. O.; he wants
the line between here and Apache fixed. He will give me the detail if
you care to go." He plainly meant to make no further reference to her
confession, but she would have been more than woman if she had known
when to let a matter drop.
Her face lighted with the relief of a forgiven child, and she went to
him and put her arms around his neck.
"You are so good to me," she said penitently, "and I was so
disobedient."
He bit his lip and did not reply, either to the words or to the caress.
"You need a month of the mountains, I think," he said.
The telegraph between Thomas and Apache always gave something to think
about. The Indians had learned the use of the White-eye's talking wire
very promptly. In the early '70's, when it first came to their notice,
they put it to good use. As when an Apache chief sent to a Yuma chief
the message that if the Yumas did not hold to a certain promise, the
Apaches would go on the war-path and destroy them, root and branch.
The Indians and the cow-boys used the insulators to try their
marksmanship upon, and occasionally--in much the same spirit that the
college man takes gates from their hinges and pulls down street
signs--the young bucks cut the wires and tied the ends with rubber
bands. Also trees blown down by storms fell crashing across the line,
and some scheme for making it a little less tempting and a little more
secure was much needed. Landor had long nursed such an one. So a week
later he and Felipa, with a detail of twenty men and a six-mule wagon,
started across the Gila Valley to the White Mountains.
By day Felipa was left in camp with the cook, while Landor and the men
worked on ahead, returning at sundown. At times she went with them, but
as a rule she wandered among the trees and rocks, shooting with pistol
and bow, but always keeping close to the tents. She had no intention of
disobeying her husband again. Sometimes, too, she read, and sometimes
cooked biscuits and game over the campfire in the Dutch oven. Her
strength began to return almost from the first, and she had gone back,
for comfort's sake, to the short skirts of her girlhood.
The Indians who came round talked with her amicably enough, mainly by
signs. She played with the children too, and one day there appeared
among them her protégé of the post, who thereafter became a camp
follower.
And on another morning there lounged into the space in front of the
tents, with the indolent swing of a mountain lion, a big Sierra Blanca
buck. He was wrapped from neck to moccasins in a red blanket, and
carried an elaborate calf's-hide quiver. He stopped in front of Felipa,
who was sitting on the ground with her back against the trunk of a
fallen tree reading, and held out the quiver to her.
"How," he said gruffly.
"How," answered Felipa, as unconcernedly as though she had not
recognized him almost at once for the buck she had last seen in the A
tent beside the hospital, with the doctor picking pieces of bone and
flesh from his shoulder. Then she took the quiver and examined it. There
was a bow as tall as herself, and pliable as fine steel, not a thing for
children to play with, but a warrior's arm. Also there were a number of
thin, smooth, gayly feathered arrows. "_Malas_," he told her, touching
the heads. "_Venadas_" and she knew that he meant that they were
poisoned by the process of dipping them in putrid liver, into which a
rattler had been made to inject its venom. Even then the sort was
becoming rare, though the arrow was still in use as a weapon and not
merely as an attraction for tourists.
The buck sat down upon the ground in front of Felipa and considered her.
By the etiquette of the tribe she could not ask him his name, but the
boy, her protégé, told her that it was Alchesay. All the afternoon he
hung around the camp, taciturn, apparently aimless, while she went about
her usual amusements and slept in the tent. Once in a way he spoke to
her in Spanish. And for days thereafter, as they moved up along the
rough and dangerous road,--where the wagon upset with monotonous
regularity, big and heavy though it was,--he appeared from time to time.
For some days Felipa had noticed a change, indefinable and slight, yet
still to be felt, in the manner of the Indians all about. Not that they
were ever especially gracious, but now the mothers discouraged the
children from playing hide-and-seek with her, and although there were
quite as many squaws, fewer bucks came around than before. But Alchesay
could always be relied upon to stalk in, at regular intervals, and seat
himself near the fire, or the hot ashes thereof.
They had been four days camping on Black River, a mountain stream
rushing between the steep hills, with the roar of a Niagara, hunting
deer and small game, fishing with indifferent success,--to the disgust
of the Apaches, who would much rather have eaten worms than fish,--and
entertaining visitors. There were any number of these. One party had
come out from Fort Apache, another from a camp of troops on the New
Mexico road, and some civilians from Boston, who were in search of a
favorable route for a projected railway.
In the opinion of Landor, who knew the impracticable country foot for
foot, they were well-intentioned lunatics. But they were agreeable
guests, who exchanged the topics of the happy East for the wild turkey
and commissary supplies of the Far West, and in departing took with them
a picturesque, if inexact, notion of army life on the frontier, and left
behind a large number of books for Felipa, who had dazzled their
imaginations.
She had read one of the books one afternoon when she was left alone,
until the sun began to sink behind the mountain tops, and the cook to
drag branches to the fire preparatory to getting supper. Then she marked
her place with a twig, and rose up from the ground to go to the tent and
dress, against Landor's return. The squaws and bucks who had been all
day wandering around the outskirts of the camp, speaking together in low
voices, and watching the cook furtively, crowded about the opening.
She warned them off with a careless "_ukishee_." But they did not go.
Some ten pairs of eyes, full of unmistakable menace, followed her every
movement. She let down the tent flaps and tied them together, taking her
time about it. She was angry, and growing angrier. It was unendurable to
her to be disobeyed, to have her authority put at naught on the few
occasions when she chose to exercise it. She could keep her temper over
anything but that. And her temper was of the silent sort, rolling on and
on, like a great cold swell at sea, to break finally against the first
obstacle with an uncontrollable force. She had never been really angry
but twice in her life. Once when she was in school, and when a teacher
she liked, judging her by her frequent and unblushing lies to a teacher
she disliked, doubted her word upon an occasion when she was really
speaking the truth. It was after that that she had written to her
guardian that she would run away. The second time had been when Brewster
had tried to bully her. She knew that it would soon be a third time, if
the Indians went on annoying her. And she was far more afraid of what
she might do than of what they might do. But she took off the waist of
her gown and began to brush her hair, not being in the least squeamish
about letting the Apaches see her fine white arms and neck, if they were
to open the flaps again.
Which was what they presently did. She expected it. A long, wrinkled
hand reached in, feeling about for the knots of the tape. She stood
still with the brush in her hands, watching. Another hand came, and
another. She caught up her quirt from the cot, then realizing that the
sting of the lash would only prove an exasperation and weaken her
authority, if she had any whatever,--and she believed that she had,--she
threw it down. The cook was probably in the kitchen tent and did not
know what was going on. And she would have died before she would have
called for help.
The lean hands found the knots, untied them, and threw back the flaps
defiantly. The ten pairs of eyes were fastened on her again. She
returned the gaze steadily, backing to a little camp table and slipping
her hand under a newspaper that lay upon it. "_Ukishee, pronto_," she
commanded, in the accepted argot. They stood quite still and unyielding;
and she knew that if she were to be obeyed at all, it must be now. Or if
she were to die, it must be now also. But the hand that drew from
beneath the newspaper the little black-butted Smith and Wesson, which
was never out of her reach, did not so much as tremble as she aimed it
straight between the eyes of the foremost buck. "_Ukishee_," she said
once again, not loudly, but without the shadow of hesitation or
wavering. There answered a low muttering, evil and rising, and the buck
started forward. Her finger pressed against the trigger, but before the
hammer had snapped down, she threw up the barrel and fired into the air,
for a big, sinewy arm, seamed with new scars, had reached out suddenly
and struck the buck aside. It was all done in an instant, so quickly
that Felipa hardly knew she had changed her aim, and that it was
Alchesay who had come forward only just in time.
The cook came running, six-shooter in hand, but Alchesay was driving
them away and lowering the canvas flaps. Felipa told the cook that it
was all right, and went on with her dressing. Although she had no gifts
for guessing the moods and humors of her father's race, she understood
her mother's considerably better, and so she did not even call a
"_gracias_" after Alchesay. She merely nodded amicably when she went out
and found him sitting on the ground waiting for her. He returned the
nod, a degree less graciously, if possible, and began to talk to her in
bad Spanish, evidently putting small faith in her command of the White
Mountain idiom, marvellous, to be sure, in a White-eye squaw, for such
were of even greater uselessness than the average woman, but of no
account whatever in a crisis. And such he plainly considered this to be.
"_Usted, vaya prontisimo_," he directed with the assumption of right of
one to whom she owed her life.
She looked down at him in a somewhat indignant surprise. "_Pues
porque?_" she asked, maintaining the haughtiness of the dominant race,
and refusing to acknowledge any indebtedness. "Why should I go away?"
"_Hombre!_" grunted the Indian, puffing at a straw-paper cigarette,
"_excesivamente peligroso aqui_."
"Why is it dangerous?" she wanted to know, and shrugged her shoulders.
She was plainly not to be terrorized.
"_Matarán á Usted._"
"They will kill me? Who will kill me, and what for?"
He gave another grunt. "Go away to-morrow. Go to the Fort." He pointed
with the hand that held the bit of cigarette in the direction of Apache.
"Tell your man."
She threw him an indifferent "I am not afraid, not of anything." It was
a boast, but he had reason to know that it was one she could make good.
He rolled another cigarette, and sat smoking it unmoved. And she went
into the mess tent.
Nevertheless she decided that it might be best to tell her husband, and
she did so as they sat together by the fire after the moon had risen
into the small stretch of sky above the mountain peaks. They had bought
a live sheep that day from a Mexican herder who had passed along the
road, and they were now cutting ribs from the carcass that hung from the
branch of a near-by tree, and broiling them on the coals. Felipa
finished an unimpassioned account of the afternoon's happenings and of
Alchesay's advice, and Landor did not answer at once. He sat thinking.
Of a sudden there was a rustle and a step among the pines, and from
behind a big rock a figure came out into the half shadow. Felipa was on
her feet with a spring, and Landor scrambled up almost as quickly.
The figure moved into the circle of red firelight and spoke, "It is
Cairness."
Felipa started back so violently that she struck against the log she had
been sitting upon, and lost her balance.
Cairness jumped forward, and his arm went around her, steadying her. For
a short moment she leaned against his shoulder. Then she drew away, and
her voice was quite steady as she greeted him. He could never have
guessed that in that moment she had learned the meaning of her life,
that there had flashed burningly through her brain a wild, unreasoning
desire to stand forever backed against that rock of strength, to defy
the world and all its restrictions.
There was a bright I. D. blanket spread on the ground a little way back
from the fire, and she threw herself down upon it. All that was
picturesque in his memories of history flashed back to Cairness, as he
took his place beside Landor on the log and looked at her. Boadicea
might have sat so in the depths of the Icenean forests, in the light of
the torches of the Druids. So the Babylonian queen might have rested in
the midst of her victorious armies, or she of Palmyra, after the lion
hunt in the deserts of Syria. Her eyes, red lighted beneath the
shadowing lashes, met his. Then she glanced away into the blackness of
the pine forest, and calling her dog to lie down beside her, stroked its
silky red head.
"I knew," Cairness said, turning to Landor after a very short silence,
"that you and Mrs. Landor were somewhere along here. So I left my horse
at a rancheria across the hill there," he nodded over his shoulder in
the direction of the looming pile just behind, "and walked to where I
saw the fire. I saw you for some time before I was near, but I ought to
have called out. I really didn't think about startling you."
"That's all right," Landor said; "are you hunting?"
He hesitated. "I have done some shooting. I am always shooting more or
less, for that matter."
Landor went to the tree and cut another rib from the mutton and threw
it on the coals. Then he walked across the clearing to the tent.
Cairness and Felipa were alone, and he leaned nearer to her. "Do you
know," he asked in a low voice, "that there have been all sorts of
rumors of trouble among the Indians for some time?"
She nodded.
"I have kept near you for a week, to warn you, or to help you if
necessary."
Her lips parted, and quivered, and closed again. The winds from the wide
heavens above the gap whined through the pines, the river roared
steadily down below, and the great, irresistible hand of Nature crushed
without heeding it the thin, hollow shell of convention. The child of a
savage and a black sheep looked straight and long into the face of the
child of rovers and criminals. They were man and woman, and in the
freemasonry of outlawry made no pretence.
"You know that I love you?" he said unevenly.
"I know it," she whispered, but she took her shaking hand from the dog's
head, and, without another word, pointed to the shadow of Landor's
figure, thrown distorted by the candle light against the side of the
tent.
And he understood that the shadow must rise always between them. He had
never expected it to be otherwise. It was bound to be so, and he bowed
his head in unquestioning acceptance.
The shadow was swallowed up in darkness. The candle had been blown out,
and Landor came back to the fire.
"You must get Mrs. Landor into the post to-morrow," Cairness said
abruptly; "Victorio's band is about."
Landor asked him to spend the night at the camp, and he did so, being
given a cot in the mess tent.
About an hour after midnight there came thundering through the quiet of
the night the sound of galloping hoofs along the road at the foot of the
ravine. Cairness, lying broad awake, was the first to hear it. He sprang
up and ran to the opening of the tent. He guessed that it was a courier
even before the gallop changed to a trot, and a voice called from the
invisible depths below, "Captain Landor?" with a rising intonation of
uncertainty.
"Yes," Cairness called back.
"Is that Captain Landor's camp?"
A score of voices answered "Yes." They were all aroused now. Landor went
down to meet the man, who had dismounted and was climbing up toward him,
leading his horse. It was a courier, sent out from Apache, as Cairness
had supposed.
"Sixty of Victorio's hostiles have been at the Agency, and are on their
way back to New Mexico. Will probably cross your camp," the captain read
aloud to the men, who crowded as near as was compatible with discipline.
Then he went off to inspect the stock and the pickets, and to double the
sentries. "You had better sleep on your arms," he told the soldiers, and
returned to his cot to lie down upon it, dressed, but feigning sleep,
that Felipa might not be uneasy. He need not have resorted to deception.
Felipa had not so much as pretended to close her eyes that night.
Before dawn Cairness was out, hastening the cook with the breakfast,
helping with it himself, indeed, and rather enjoying the revival of the
days when he had been one of the best cooks in the troop and forever
pottering about the mess chests and the Dutch oven, in the field. As the
sun rose,--though daybreak was fairly late there in the cañon,--the
cold, crisp air was redolent of coffee and bacon and broiling fresh
meat.
Felipa, lifting her long riding skirt, stepped out from the tent, and
stood with hand upraised holding back the flap. A ray of sun, piercing
white through the pines, fell full on her face. She had the look of some
mysterious priestess of the sun god, and Cairness, standing by the
crackling fire, prodding it with a long, charred stick, watched her
without a word.
Then she came forward, holding out her hand in the most matter-of-fact
way, if, indeed, any action of a very beautiful woman can be matter of
fact.
"I shall ride into Apache with you in Captain Landor's stead, if he will
allow me," he told her, and added, "and if you will."