XI

It was not quite an all-summer campaign. The United States government

drove the hostiles over the border into the provinces of the Mexican

government, which understood the problem rather better than ourselves,

and hunted the Apache, as we the coyote, with a bounty upon his scalp.

Thereafter some of the troops sat down at the water-holes along the

border to watch, and to write back pathetic requests for all the

delicacies supplied by the commissariat, from anchovy paste and caviare

to tinned mushrooms and cove oysters. A man may live upon bacon and

beans and camp bread, or upon even less, when his duty to his country

demands, but it is not in the Articles of War that he should continue to

do so any longer than lack of transportation compels.

Others of the troops were ordered in, and among them was Landor's. It

had gone out for a twenty days' scout, and had been in the field two

months. It was ragged and all but barefoot, and its pack-train was in a

pitiable way. Weeks of storm in the Mogollons and days of quivering heat

on the plains had brought its clothing and blankets to the last stages.

Moreover, Landor was very ill. In the Mogollons he had gathered and

pressed specimens of the gorgeous wild flowers that turn the plateaux

into a million-hued Eden, and one day there had lurked among the

blossoms a sprig of poison weed, with results which were threatening to

be serious. He rode at the head of his column, however, as it made for

home by way of the Aravaypa Cañon.

Were the cañon of the Aravaypa in any other place than Arizona, which,

as the intelligent public knows, is all one wide expanse of dry and

thirsty country, a parched place in the wilderness, a salt land, and not

inhabited; were it in any other place, it would be set forth in railway

folders, and there would be camping privileges and a hotel, and stages

would make regular trips to it, and one would come upon groups of

excursionists on burros, or lunching among its boulders. Already it has

been in a small way discovered, and is on the road to being vulgarized

by the camera. The lover of Nature, he who loves the soul as well as the

face of her, receives when he sees a photograph of a fine bit of scenery

he had felt in a way his own property until then, something the blow

that the lover of a woman does when he learns that other men than he

have known her caresses.

But in the days of Victorio and his predecessors and successors,

Aravaypa Cañon was a fastness. Men went in to hunt for gold, and

sometimes they came out alive, and sometimes they did not. Occasionally

Apaches met their end there as well.

There was one who had done so now. The troops looking up at him,

rejoiced. He was crucified upon an improvised cross of unbarked pine

branches, high up at the top of a sheer peak of rock. He stood out black

and strange against the whitish blue of the sky. His head was dropped

upon his fleshless breast, and there was a vulture perched upon it,

prying its hooked bill around in the eye sockets. Two more, gorged and

heavy, balanced half asleep upon points of stone.

It was all a most charming commentary upon the symbol and practice of

Christianity, in a Christian land, and the results thereof as regarded

the heathen of that land--if one happened to see it in that way.

But the men did not. It was hardly to be expected that they should, both

because the abstract and the ethical are foreign to the major part of

mankind, in any case; and also because, with this particular small group

of mankind, there was too fresh a memory of a dead woman lying by the

bodies of her two children in a smouldering log cabin among the

mountains and the pines.

They rode on, along the trail, at a walk and by file, and directly they

came upon the other side of the question. Landor's horse stopped, with

its forefeet planted, and a snort of fright. Landor had been bent far

back, looking up at a shaft of rock that rose straight from the bottom

and pierced the heavens hundreds of feet above, and he was very nearly

unseated. But he caught himself and held up his hand as a signal to

halt.

There were two bodies lying across the trail in front of him. He

dismounted, and throwing his reins to the trumpeter went forward to

investigate. It was not a pleasant task. The men had been dead some time

and their clothing was beginning to fall away in shreds. Some of their

outfit was scattered about, and he could guess from it that they had

been prospectors. A few feet away was the claim they had been working.

Only their arms had been stolen, otherwise nothing appeared to be

missing. There was even in the pockets considerable coin, in gold and

silver, which Landor found, when he took a long knife from his saddle

bags, and standing as far off as might be, slit the cloth open.

The knife was one he had brought from home, seizing it from the kitchen

table at the last minute. It was very sharp and had been Felipa's

treasured bread cutter. It came in very well just now, chiefly because

of its length.

He called the first sergeant to his aid. Brewster was in the rear of the

command, and, as had occurred with increasing frequency in the last two

months, showed no desire to be of any more use than necessary. As for

Cairness, who had been more of a lieutenant to Landor than the officer

himself, he had left the command two days before and gone back to the

San Carlos reservation.

So the captain and the first sergeant took up the money and the loose

papers, together with a couple of rings from the hands, and wrapping

them in a poncho, carried them off to serve as possible means of

identification, for it had got beyond all question of features. Then two

men moved the bodies from the trail, with long sticks, and covered them

with a pile of stones. Landor found a piece of board by the mouth of the

claim and drew on it, with an end of charred stick, a skull and cross

bones with a bow and arrow, and stood it up among the stones, in sign to

all who might chance to pass thereby that since men had here died at the

hands of the Apaches, other men might yet meet a like fate.

On the next day they were in the flat, nearing the post. There was a

dust storm. Earlier in the morning the air had grown suddenly more dry,

more close and lifeless than ever, suffocating, and a yellow cloud had

come in the western sky. Then a hot wind began to blow the horses' manes

and tails, to snarl through the greasewood bushes, and to snap the loose

ends of the men's handkerchiefs sharply. The cloud had thinned and

spread, high up in the sky, and the light had become almost that of a

sullen evening. Black bits floated and whirled high overhead, and birds

beat about in the gale. Gradually the gale and the dust had dropped

nearer to the earth, a sand mist had gone into every pore and choked and

parched. And now the tepid, thick wind was moaning across the plain,

meeting no point of resistance anywhere.

Landor still rode at the head of his column, but his chin was sunk down

on his red silk neckerchief, his face was swollen and distorted under

its thick beard, and his eyes were glazed. They stared straight ahead

into the sand whirl and the sulphurous glare. He had sent Brewster on

ahead some hours before. "You will want to see Miss McLane as soon as

possible," he had said, "and there is no need of both of us here."

Brewster had taken an escort and disappeared down the vista of white

sands and scrub growth, though it was Landor himself who should have

gone. He swayed now in the saddle, his thick lips hung open, and he

moved in a mental cloud as dense as the one of dust that poured round

him.

Brewster reached the post some eighteen hours ahead of him. He reported,

and saw Miss McLane; then he made himself again as other men and went

down to the post trader's, with a definite aim in view, that was hardly

to be guessed from his loitering walk. There were several already in the

officers' room, and they talked, as a matter of course, of the campaign.

"Seen the way Landor's been catching it?" they asked.

And Brewster said he had not.

They went on to tell him that it was all in the Tucson papers, which

Brewster knew, however, quite as well as they did themselves. He had

made friends among the citizen volunteers of San Tomaso on the night

they had camped by the old lake bed, and they had seen that he was kept

supplied with cuttings.

But he pleaded entire ignorance, and the others were at considerable

pains to enlighten him.

It appeared that Landor was accused of cowardice, and that his name was

handled with the delicate sarcasm usual with Western journalism--as fine

and pointed as a Stone-age axe.

Brewster poured himself a glass of beer and drank it contemplatively

and was silent. Then he set it down on the bare table with a sharp

little rap, suggesting determination made. It was suggestive of yet more

than this, and caused them to say "Well?" with a certain eagerness. He

shrugged his shoulders and changed the subject, refusing pointedly to be

brought back to it, and succeeding altogether in the aim which had

brought him down there.

But that same night he picked two for their reputation of repeating all

they knew, and took them into his own rooms and told his story to them.

And he met once again with such success that when Landor rode into the

post the next day at about guard-mounting, three officers, meeting him,

raised their caps and passed on.

It struck even through Landor's pain-blurred brain that it was odd. But

the few faculties he could command still were all engaged in keeping

himself in the saddle until he could reach his own house, where Ellton

and Felipa were waiting to get him to his room.

He went upon the sick report at once, and for three days thereafter

raved of crucified women with fair hair, of children lying dead in the

cañon, of the holes in his boot soles, and a missing aparejo, also of

certain cursed citizens, and the bad quality of the canned butter.

Then he began to come to himself and to listen to all that Felipa had to

tell him of the many things she had not put in her short and labored

letters. He saw that she looked more beautiful and less well than when

he had left her. There was a shadow of weariness on her face that gave

it a soft wistfulness which was altogether becoming. He supposed it was

because she had nursed him untiringly, as she had; but it did not occur

to him to thank her, because she had done only what was a wife's duty,

only what he would have done for her if the case had been reversed.

Toward the end of the day he began to wonder that no one had been to see

him, and he spoke of it.

"Mr. Ellton was here this morning," Felipa told him, "and he will be in

again before retreat."

But he was not satisfied. His entry into the post and the cool greeting

of the three officers began to come back to him.

Felipa could be untruthful with an untroubled soul and countenance to

those she disliked. In her inherited code, treachery to an enemy was not

only excusable, but right. But not even in order to save her husband

worry could she tell him a shadow of an untruth. She did her best, which

was far from good, to evade, however. The others would probably come,

now that he could see them.

But had they come? he insisted.

The commandant had sent his orderly with a note.

He raised himself from the pillows too abruptly for a very weak man.

"What is the matter, Felipa?" he demanded.

She told him that she did not know, and tried to coax him back to

quietness.

"There is something," he insisted, dropping his head down again

wearily.

"Perhaps there is," she admitted unwillingly.

He lay thinking for a while, then had her send the striker for Ellton,

who promptly, and awkwardly, replied to the anxious question as to what

might be the trouble, that he was not quite sure, but perhaps it had to

do with these--"these" being a small roll of newspaper clippings he took

from his portfolio.

Landor looked them over and gave them back contemptuously. "Well?" he

said, "there's nothing new in all that. It's devilish exasperating, but

it's old as Hamilcar. I made an enemy of a fellow from Tucson, reporter

named Stone, over at the San Carlos Agency a few years ago. He's been

waiting to roast me ever since. There must be something else."

The adjutant agreed reluctantly. "I think there is. It wouldn't surprise

me if some one had been talking. I can't get at it. But you must not

bother about it. It will blow over."

As an attempt at consolation, it failed. Landor fairly sprang into a

sitting posture, with a degree of impulsiveness that was most unusual

with him. His eyes glistened from the greenish circles around them.

"Blow over! Good Lord! do you suppose I'll let it blow over? It's got to

be sifted to the bottom. And you know that as well as I do." He lay

weakly back again, and Felipa came to the edge of the bed and, sitting

upon it, stroked his head with her cool hand.

Ellton ventured some assistance. "I do know this much, that the C. O.

got a telegram from some Eastern paper, asking if the reports of your

cowardice as given in the territorial press were true."

Landor asked eagerly what he had answered.

"I didn't see the telegram, but it was in effect that he had no

knowledge of anything of the sort, and put no faith in it."

"Doesn't he, though? Then why doesn't he come around and see me when I'm

lying here sick?" He was wrathful and working himself back into a fever

very fast.

Felipa shook her head at Ellton. "Don't get yourself excited about it,

Jack dear," she soothed, and Ellton also tried to quiet him.

"He will come, I dare say. And so will the others, now that you are able

to see them. Brewster inquired."

The captain's lips set.

Ellton wondered, but held his peace. And the commandant did go to

Landor's quarters within the next few hours. Which was Ellton's doings.

"I don't know what has been said, Major, but something more than just

what's in the papers must have gotten about. That sort of mud-slinging

is too common to cause comment, even. It must be some spite work.

There's no reason to suppose, surely, that after a quarter of a century

of gallant service he's been and shown the white feather. He's awfully

cut up, really he is. He's noticed it, of course, and it's too deuced

bad, kicking a man when he's down sick and can't help himself."

The major stopped abruptly in his walk to and fro and faced him. "Do

you know more about it, then, than Brewster who was with him?"

Ellton fairly leaped in the air. "Brewster! So it's Brewster! The in--"

Then he recollected that Brewster was going to be the major's

son-in-law, and he stopped short. "No wonder he keeps away from there,"

he simmered down.

"He told me it was because he and Landor had had some trouble in the

field, and weren't on the best of terms."

"I say, Major, if he's got any charges to prefer why doesn't he put them

on paper and send them in to you, or else shut up his head?" He was

losing his temper again.

The major resumed his walk and did not answer.

Ellton went on, lapsing into the judicial. "In the meantime, anyway, a

man's innocent until he's proven guilty. I say, do go round and see him.

The others will follow your lead. He's awfully cut up and worried, and

he's sick, you know."

So that evening when all the garrison was upon its front porches and the

sidewalk, the major and the lieutenant went down the line to Landor's

quarters. And their example was followed. But some hung back, and

constraint was in the air.

Because of which Landor, as soon as he was up, went in search of the

commanding officer, and found him in the adjutant's office, and the

adjutant with him. He demanded an explanation. "If any one has been

saying anything about me, I want to know it. I want to face him. It

can't be that newspaper rot. We are all too used to it."

"It seems, Landor," the major said, "to be rather that which is left

unsaid."

Landor asked what he meant by that. "I'm sick of all this speaking in

riddles," he said.

The major told him a little reluctantly. "Well, it's this, then:

Brewster will not, or cannot, defend your conduct in the matter of the

San Tomaso volunteers."

Landor sat speechless for a moment. Then he jumped up, knocking over a

pile of registers. He seized a bone ruler, much stained with official

inks, red and blue, and slapped it on the palm of his hand for emphasis.

"I'll demand a court of inquiry into my conduct. This shan't drop, not

until the strongest possible light has been turned on it. Why doesn't

Brewster prefer charges? Either my conduct was such that he can defend

it openly, or else it was such as to call for a court-martial, and to

justify him in preferring charges. Certainly nothing can justify him in

smirching me with damning silence. That is the part neither of an

officer nor of a man." He kicked one of the registers out of the way,

and it flapped across the floor and lay with its leaves crumpled under

the fair leather covers.

"By George! McLane, it strikes me as devilish odd that you should all

give ear to the insinuations of a shave-tail like Brewster, against an

old hand like myself. Be that as it may, however, until this thing has

been cleared up, I shall thank all of you to continue in your attitude

of suspicion, and not in any way draw on your charity by extending it to

me. I shall demand a court of inquiry." He laid the ruler back on the

desk. "I report for duty, sir," he added officially.

It was the beginning of a self-imposed Coventry. He sent in a demand for

a court of inquiry, and Brewster, with much show of reluctance and

leniency, preferred charges.

The post talked it over unceasingly, and commented on Landor's attitude.

"He stalks around in defiant dignity and makes everybody uncomfortable,"

they said.

"Everybody ought to be uncomfortable," Ellton told them; "everybody who

believed the first insinuation he heard ought to be confoundedly

uncomfortable." He resigned from the acting adjutancy and returned to

his troop duties, that Landor, who had relieved Brewster of most of the

routine duties, and who was still fit for the sick list himself, might

not be overburdened.

So the demand and the charges lay before the department commander, and

there was a lull, during which Landor came upon further trouble, and

worse. He undertook the examination of the papers he had found in the

dead men's pockets. They had been buried in earth for two weeks.

He found that it had been father and son come from the Eastern states in

search of the wealth that lay in that vague and prosperous, if uneasy,

region anywhere west of the Missouri. And among the papers was a letter

addressed to Felipa. Landor held it in the flat of his hand and

frowned, perplexed. He knew that it was Cairness's writing. More than

once on this last scout he had noticed its peculiarities. They were

unmistakable. Why was Cairness writing to Felipa? And why had he not

used the mails? The old, never yet justified, distrusts sprang broad

awake. But yet he was not the man to brood over them. He remembered

immediately that Felipa had never lied to him. And she would not now. So

he took the stained letter and went to find her.

She was sitting in her room, sewing. Of late she had become

domesticated, and she was fading under it. He had seen it already, and

he saw it more plainly than ever just now. She looked up and smiled. Her

smile had always been one of her greatest charms, because it was rare

and very sweet. "Jack," she greeted him, "what have you done with the

bread knife you took with you, dear? I have been lost without it."

"I have it," he said shortly, standing beside her and holding out the

letter.

She took it and looked from it to him, questioningly. "What is this?"

she asked.

Then it was the first, at any rate. His manner softened.

"It smells horribly," she exclaimed, dropping it on the floor, "it

smells of hospitals--disinfectants." But she stooped and picked it up

again.

"It is from Cairness," said Landor, watching her narrowly. Her hand

shook, and he saw it.

"From Cairness?" she faltered, looking up at him with frightened eyes;

"when did it come?" Her voice was as unsteady as her hands. She tore it

open and began to read it there before him. He stood and watched her

lips quiver and grow gray and fall helplessly open. If she had been

under physical torture, she could have kept them pressed together, but

not now.

"Where did you--" she began; but her voice failed, and she had to begin

again. "Where did you get this?"

He told her, and she held it out to him. He started to take it, then

pushed it away.

She put down her work and rose slowly to her feet before him. She could

be very regal sometimes. Brewster knew it, and Cairness guessed it; but

it was the first time it had come within Landor's experience, and he was

a little awed.

"I wish you to read it, John," she said quietly.

He hesitated still. "I don't doubt you," he told her.

"You do doubt me. If you did not, it would never occur to you to deny

it. You doubt me now, and you will doubt me still more if you don't read

it. In justice to me you must."

It was very short, but he held it a long time before he gave it back.

"And do you care for him, too?" he asked, looking her straight in the

eyes. It was a very calm question, put--he realized it with

exasperation--as a father might have put it.

She told him that she did, quite as calmly. Her manner and her tone

said it was very unfortunate, that the whole episode was unfortunate,

but that it was not her fault.

He went over to the window and stood looking out of it, his hands

clasped behind his back. Some children were playing tag around the

flag-staff, and he watched a long-limbed small daughter of the frontier

dodging and running, and was conscious of being glad that she touched

the goal.

It was characteristic of Felipa that she forgot him altogether and

reread the letter, her breath coming in audible gasps.

"I give this to a friend," it ran, "to be delivered into your own hands,

because I must tell you that, though I should never see you again--for

the life I lead is hazardous, and chance may at any time take you away

forever--I shall love you always. You will not be angry with me, I know.

You were not that night by the campfire, and it is not the unwaveringly

good woman who resents being told she is loved, in the spirit I have

said it to you. I do not ask for so much as your friendship in return,

but only that you remember that my life and devotion are yours, and

that, should the time ever come that you need me, you send for me. I

will come. I will never say this to you again, even should I see you;

but it is true, now and for all time."

Landor turned away from the window and looked at her. It was in human

nature that she had never seemed so beautiful before. Perhaps it was,

too, because there was warmth in her face, the stress of life that was

more than physical, at last.

It struck him that he was coolly analytical while his wife was reading

the love-letter (if that bald statement of fact could be called a

love-letter) of another man, and telling him frankly that she returned

the man's love. Why could not he have had love, he who had done so much

for her? There was always the subconsciousness of that sacrifice. He had

magnified it a little, too, and it is difficult to be altogether lovable

when one's mental attitude is "see what a good boy am I." But he had

never reflected upon that. He went on telling himself what--in all

justice to him--he had never thrown up to her, that his life had been

one long devotion to her; rather as a principle than as a personality,

to be sure, but then-- And yet she loved the fellow whom she had not

known twenty-four hours in all--a private, a government scout,

unnoticeably below her in station. In station, to be sure; but not in

birth, after all. It was that again. He was always brought up face to

face with her birth. He tried to reason it down, for the hundredth time.

It was not her fault, and he had taken her knowingly, chancing that and

the consequences of her not loving him. And these were the consequences:

that she was sitting rigid before him, staring straight ahead with the

pale eyes of suffering, and breathing through trembling lips.

But she would die before she would be faithless to him. He was sure of

that. Only--why should he exact so much? Why should he not make the last

of a long score of sacrifices? He had been unselfish with her always,

from the day he had found the little child, shy as one of the timid

fawns in the woods of the reservation, and pretty in a wild way, until

now when she sat there in front of him, a woman, and his wife, loving,

and beloved of, another man.

He went and stood beside her and laid his hand upon her hair.

She looked up and tried hard to smile again.

"Poor little girl," he said kindly. He could not help it that they were

the words of a compassionate friend, rather than of an injured husband.

She shook her head. "It is the first you have known of it, Jack," she

said; "but I have known it for a long while, and I have not been

unhappy."

"And you care for him?"

She nodded.

"Are you certain of it? You have seen so very little of him, and you may

be mistaken."

If he had had any hope, it vanished before her unhesitating, positive,

"No; I am not mistaken. Oh, no!"

He took a chair facing her, as she put the letter back in its envelope

and laid it in her work-basket. It was very unlike anything he had ever

imagined concerning situations of the sort. But then he was not

imaginative. "Should you be glad to be free to marry him?" he asked, in

a spirit of unbiassed discussion.

She looked at him in perplexity and surprise. "How could I be? There is

no use talking about it."

He hesitated, then blurted it out, in spite of the inward warning that

it would be unwise. "I could let you free yourself."

His glance fell before hers of dismay, disapproval, and anger--an anger

so righteous that he felt himself to be altogether in the wrong. "Do you

mean _divorce_?" She said it like an unholy word.

He had forgotten that the laws and rites of the Church of Rome had a

powerful hold upon her, though she was quite devoid of religious

sentiment. He admitted apologetically that he had meant divorce, and she

expressed her reproach. In spite of himself and what he felt ought

properly to be the tragedy of the affair, he smiled. The humor of her

majestic disapproval was irresistible under the circumstances. But she

had little sense of humor. "What would you suggest, then, if I may ask?"

he said. He had to give up all pathos in the light of her deadly

simplicity.

"Nothing," she answered; "I can't see why it should make any difference

to you, when it hasn't with me." She had altogether regained the

self-possession she had been surprised out of, with an added note of

reserve.

And so he had to accept it. He rose, with a slight sigh, and returned to

the examination of his spoils.

But when he was away from Felipa and her blighting matter of fact, the

pathos of it came uppermost again. Troubles seemed to thicken around

him. His voluntary Coventry was making him sensitive. He had thought

that his wife was at least giving him the best of her cool nature. Cool!

There was no coldness in that strained white face, as she read the

letter. The control she had over herself! It was admirable. He thought

that most women would have fainted, or have grown hysterical, or have

made a scene of some sort. Then he recalled the stoicism of the

Apache--and was back at her birth again.

He realized for the first time the injury his thought of it did her. It

was that which had kept them apart, no doubt, and the sympathy of

lawlessness that had drawn her and Cairness together. Yet he had just

begun to flatter himself that he was eradicating the savage. She had

been gratifyingly like other women since his return. But it was as

Brewster had said, after all,--the Apache strain was abhorrent to him as

the venom of a snake. Yet he was fond of Felipa, too.

Someway it had not occurred to him to be any more angry with Cairness

than he had been with her. The most he felt was resentful jealousy.

There was nothing more underhand about the man than there was about

Felipa. Sending the note by the prospectors had not been underhand. He

understood that it had been done only that it might make no trouble for

her, and give himself no needless pain. Cairness would have been willing

to admit to his face that he loved Felipa. That letter must have been

written in his own camp.

He heard his wife coming down the stairs, and directly she stood in the

doorway. "Will you let me have that knife, Jack dear?" she asked

amiably.

He turned his chair and studied her in a kind of hopeless amusement.

"Felipa," he said, "if you will insist upon being told, I cut open the

pockets of those dead men's clothes with it."

"But I can have it cleaned," she said.

He turned back abruptly. "You had better get another. You can't have

that one," he answered.

Was it possible that twenty minutes before he had risen to the

histrionic pitch of self-sacrifice of offering her her freedom to marry

another man?