The contract went to a needy and honest contractor when the bids were
opened. And by night the whole garrison was in excitement over
Brewster's inexplicable resignation. It was inexplicable, but not
unexplained. He went around to all the officers with the exception only
of Landor and Ellton, and told that he had some time since decided to
give up the service and to read and practise law in Tucson. No one was
inclined to believe it. But no one knew what to believe, for Ellton and
his captain held their tongues. They left the commandant himself in
ignorance.
Brewster got hunting leave, pending the acceptance of his resignation,
and went to the railway. In less than a week he was all but forgotten in
a newer interest.
A raiding party of hostiles had passed near the fort, and had killed,
with particular atrocity, a family of settlers. The man and his wife had
been tortured to death, the baby had had its brains beaten out against
the trunk of a tree, a very young child had been hung by the wrist
tendons to two meat hooks on the walls of the ranch-house, and left
there to die. One big boy had had his eyelids and lips and nose cut off,
and had been staked down to the ground with his remains of a face lying
over a red-ant hole. Only two had managed to escape,--a child of ten,
who had carried his tiny sister in his arms, twenty miles of cañons and
hills, to the post.
Felipa had taken charge of the two, being the only woman in the place
not already provided with children of her own, and had roused herself to
an amount of capability her husband had never suspected her of. She
belonged to the tribe of unoccupied women, as a rule, not that she was
indolent so much as that she appeared to have no sense of time nor of
the value of it. Landor, who had always one absorbing interest or
another to expend his whole energy upon, even if it were nothing larger
than running the troop kitchen, thought her quite aimless, though he
never addressed that or any other reproach to her. He was contented at
the advent of the hapless orphans for one thing, that they superseded
the Ellton baby, which he secretly detested with a kind of unreasonable
jealousy.
His contentment was not to last for long, however. The quartermaster
broke in upon it rudely as he sat on the porch one morning after
guard-mounting, "Have you seen the man who came up with the scouts from
Grant?"
Landor knew that the scouts had come in the afternoon before, and were
in camp across the creek; but he had not seen their chief, and he said
so.
"Handsome fellow," went on the quartermaster, "and looks like a
gentleman. Glories in the Ouida-esque name of Charles Morely Cairness,
and signs it in full."
"Sounds rather like a family magazine novel hero, doesn't it?" Landor
said, with a hint of a sneer, then repented, and added that Cairness had
been with him as guide, and was really a fine fellow. He turned his eyes
slowly, without moving, and looked at Felipa. She was sitting near them
in a patch of sun-sifted shade behind the madeira vines, sewing on a
pinafore for the little girl who was just then, with her brother,
crossing the parade to the post school, as school call sounded. He knew
well enough that she must have heard, her ears were so preternaturally
sharp. But the only sign she gave was that her lips had set a little. So
he waited in considerable uneasiness for what might happen. He
understood her no more than he had that first day he had met her riding
with the troops from Kansas, when her indifferent manner had chilled
him, and it was perhaps because he insisted upon working his reasoning
from the basis that her character was complicated, whereas it was
absolutely simple. He met constantly with her with much the same sort of
mental sensation that one has physically, where one takes a step in the
dark, expecting a fall in the ground, and comes down upon a level. The
jar always bewildered him. He was never sure what she would do next,
though she had never yet, save once, done anything flagrantly unwise. He
dreaded, however, the moment when she might chance to meet Cairness face
to face.
Which happened upon the following day. And he was there to see it all,
so that the question he had not cared to ask was answered forever beyond
the possibility of a misunderstanding. It was stable time, and she
walked down to the corrals with him. He left her for a moment by the
gate of the quartermaster's corral while he went over to the picket
line. The bright clear air of a mountain afternoon hummed with the swish
click-clock, swish click-clock of the curry-combs and brushes, and the
busy scraping of the stable brooms in the stalls.
Felipa stood leaning against the gate post, her bare head outlined in
bold black and white against the white parasol that hung over her
shoulders. She was watching one of the troop herds coming up from
water,--the fine, big horses, trotting, bucking, rearing, kicking,
biting at each other with squeals and whinnyings, tossing their manes
and whisking their tails. Some of them had rolled in the creek bed, and
then in the dust, and were caked with mud from neck to croup. They
frisked over to their own picket line, and got into rows for the
grooming.
She was looking at them with such absorbed delight that she started
violently when close behind her a voice she had not heard in four long,
repressed years spoke with the well-remembered intonation: "He had
better go to the farrier the first thing in the morning. I can't have
him stove-up," and Cairness came out of the gate.
He saw her, and without the hesitation of an instant raised his slouch
hat and kept on. A government scout does not stop to pass the time of
day with an officer's wife.
It would have been best so, and she knew it, had indeed meant to make
it like this on her part, but a feeling swept over her that if they did
not speak now, they would pass down to their deaths in silence. She
reached out her hand to stop him, and spoke.
He turned about and stood still, with his head uncovered, looking
straight into her face. Another man might have wished it a little less
open and earnest, a little more downcast and modest, but he liked it so.
Yet he waited, erect and immovable, and she saw that he meant that every
advance should come from her. He was determined to force her to remember
that he was a chief of scouts.
She waited, too, made silent by sudden realization of how futile
anything that she might say would be. "I am glad to see you again," she
faltered; "it is four years since Black River and the cloud-burst." She
was angry at her own stupidity and want of resource, and her tone was
more casual than she meant it to be.
His own was instantly as cold. "I supposed you had quite forgotten all
that," he said.
She had done very well, up to then, but she was at the end of her
strength. It had been strained to the snapping for a long while, and now
it snapped. Slowly, painfully, a hot, dark flush spread over her face to
the black line of her hair. The squaw was manifested in the changed
color. It altered her whole face, while it lasted, then it dropped back
and left a dead gray pallor. Her lips were quivering and yellow, and her
eyes paled oddly, as those of a frightened wild beast do. But still they
were not lowered.
Cairness could not take his own from them, and they stood so for what
seemed to them both a dumb and horrible eternity, until Landor came up,
and she caught at his arm to steady herself. The parasol whirled around
on its stick and fell. Cairness picked it up, knocked off the dust, and
handed it to Landor. He could see that he knew, and it was a vast
relief.
It is only a feeble love in need of stimulants and spicing that craves
secrecy. A strong one seeks the open and a chance to fight to the end,
whatever that may be, before the judges of earth and heaven. They stood
facing each other, challenging across the woman with the look in their
eyes that men have worn since long ere ever the warriors of old disputed
the captive before the walls of Troy.
It made it none the better that only Landor had the right to give her
the strength of his arm, and that only Cairness had the right to the
desperate, imploring look she threw him. It was a swift glance of a
moment, and then she reached out a steady enough hand for the parasol,
and smiled. It had been much too tragic to last--and in those
surroundings. It was a flash of the naked swords of pain, and then they
were sheathed. But each had left a sharp gash. No one had seen it.
Perhaps to many there would have been nothing to see.
Landor was the first to find speech. In the harsh light of the pause he
saw that it was foolish as well as useless to beg the issue. "Has Mrs.
Landor told you that I found your letter to her on the body of the
prospector, and delivered it to her?" The words were sufficiently
overbearing, but the manner was unendurable.
It occurred to Cairness that it was ungenerous of Landor to revenge
himself by a shot from the safe intrenchment of his rank. "Mrs. Landor
has had time to tell me nothing," he said, and turned on his spurred
heel and went off in the direction of the post. But it was not a
situation, after all, into which one could infuse much dignity. He was
retreating, anyway it might be looked at, and there is bound to be more
or less ignominy in the most creditable retreat.
As they walked back to the post, Landor did not speak to Felipa. There
was nothing he could say unless he were to storm unavailingly, and that
was by no means his way. And there was nothing for which he could, with
reason, blame her. All things considered, she had acted very well. She
moved beside him serenely, not in the least cowed.
Later, when he came in from dress parade, he found her reading in the
sitting room. She looked up and smiled, but his face was very angry, and
the chin strap of his helmet below his mouth and the barbaric yellow
plume added to the effect of awful and outraged majesty. He stopped in
front of her. "I have been thinking things over," he said. She waited.
"Three years ago I offered you your liberty to marry that man. I repeat
the offer now."
She stood up very deliberately and faced him with a look he had never
seen before in her eyes, dark and almost murderous. But she had her fury
under control. He had guessed that her rage might be a very ugly thing,
but he drew back a step at the revelation of its possibilities. Twice
she tried hard to speak. She put her hand to her throat, where her voice
burned away as it rose. Then it came from the depths of that being of
hers, which he had never fathomed.
"Are you trying to drive me off?" she said measuredly. "Do you wish me
to go away from you? If you do, I will go. I will go, and I will never
come back. But I will not go to him--not on my own account. It doesn't
matter what happens to me; but on your account and on his, I will never
go to him--not while you are alive." She stopped, and every nerve in her
body was tense to quivering, her drawn lips worked.
"And if I were out of the way?" he suggested.
She had never been cruel intentionally before, and afterward she
regretted it. But she raised her eyebrows and turned her back on him
without answering.