He failed in the warning. He had barely gotten off the reservation
before Geronimo and Nachez and their sympathizers broke out and started
to reach again that fastness in the Sierra Madre from which they had
been routed two years before. But he succeeded without the least
difficulty in obtaining the position of chief of scouts.
And he succeeded in seeing Felipa. It was most unexpected. He had
believed her to be in Stanton, a good many hundred miles away. But
Landor having been sent at once into the field, she had come on to Grant
to visit the Campbells, who were again stationed there. He met her face
to face only once, and he measured with one quick look all the changes
there were between the girl of ten years before and the woman of to-day.
The great, sad pity that rose within him, and seemed to grasp at his
throat chokingly, was the best love he had felt for her yet. It wiped
out the wrong of the short madness in the cave's mouth.
She was quite alone, wandering among the trees and bushes in the creek
bottom, and her hands were full of wild flowers. She had pinned several
long sprays of the little ground blossoms, called "baby-blue eyes," at
her throat, and they lay along her white gown prettily. She stopped and
spoke to him, with a note of lifelessness in her high, sweet voice; and
while he answered her question as to what he had been doing since she
had seen him last, she unpinned the "baby-blue eyes" and held them out
to him. "Would you like these?" she asked simply. He took them, and she
said "Good-by" and went on.
She was broken to the acceptance of the inevitable now,--he could see
that, any one could see it. She had learned the lesson of the ages--the
futility of struggle of mere man against the advance of men. That it had
been a hard lesson was plain. It showed in her face, where patience had
given place to unrest, gentleness to the defiance of freedom. She had
gained, too, she had gained greatly. She was not only woman now, she was
womanly. But Cairness did not need to be told that she was not happy.
He went on the next day with his scouts, and eventually joined Landor in
the field. Landor was much the same as ever, only more gray and rather
more deeply lined. Perhaps he was more taciturn, too, for beyond
necessary orders he threw not one word to the chief of scouts. Cairness
could understand that the sight of himself was naturally an
exasperation, and in some manner a reproach, too. He was sorry that he
had been thrown with this command, but, since he was, it was better that
Landor should behave as he was doing. An assumption of friendliness
would have been a mockery, and to some extent an ignoble one.
Landor's troop, with one other, was in the San Andres Mountains of New
Mexico when Cairness joined it. They were on the trail of a large band
of renegades, and it led them through the mountains, across the flats,
and down to the lava beds.
Once in the æons which will never unfold their secrets now, when the
continent of the Western seas was undreamed of by the sages and the
philosophers of the Eastern world, when it was as alone, surrounded by
its wide waters, as the planets are alone in their wastes of space, when
it was living its own life,--which was to leave no trace upon the scroll
of the wisdom of the ages,--the mountains and the bowels of the earth
melted before the wrath of that same Lord whose voice shook the
wilderness of Judæa. At His bidding they ran as water, and poured down
in waves of seething fire, across the valley of death.
It is a valley of death now, parched and desolate, a waste of white
sand--the dry bone dust of the cycles. But then, when the lava came
surging and boiling and flaming across the plain, not a thin stream, but
a wide, irresistible current, there was life; there was a city--one city
at least. It is there now, under the mass of sharp, gray, porous rock;
how much of it no one knows. But it is there, and it has given up its
unavailing hints of a life which may have been older than that of
Herculaneum and Pompeii, and is as much more safely hidden from the
research of the inquiring day as its walls are more hopelessly buried
beneath the ironlike stone than are those of the cisalpine cities
beneath their ashen drift.
And the great river of rock is there, too, frozen upon the land like
some devouring monster changed by a Gorgon head into lifeless stone. It
is a formidable barrier across the hardly less formidable bad lands. It
can be crossed in places where it is narrowest, not quite a mile in
width, that is. But horses slip and clamber, and men cut through the
leather of their heaviest shoes.
If the sea, whipping in huge waves against the fury of a typhoon, were
to become on the instant rocks, it would be as this. There are heights
and crevasses, hills and gulches, crests and hollows, little caves and
crannies, where quail and snakes and cotton-tails and jack-rabbits,
lizards and coyotes, creatures of desolation and the barrens, hide and
scamper in and out. It is an impregnable stronghold, not for armies,
because they could not find shelter, but for savages that can scatter
like the quail themselves, and writhe on their bellies into the coyotes'
own holes.
And so the hostiles took shelter there from the cavalry that had pursued
them hard across the open all night, and gave battle after the manner of
their kind. It was a very desultory sort of a skirmish, for the troops
did not venture into the traps beyond the very edge, and the Indians
were simply on the defensive. It was not only desultory, it promised to
be unavailing, a waste of time and of ammunition.
The Chiricahuas might stay there and fire at intervals as long as they
listed, killing a few men perhaps. And then they might retreat quite
safely, putting the barrier between themselves and the pursuers.
Obviously there were only two courses wherein lay any wisdom,--to
retreat, or to cut off their retreat. Landor said so to the major in
command.
"And how, may I ask, would you suggest cutting off their retreat?" the
major inquired a little sharply. His temper was not improved by the heat
and by twelve hours in the saddle.
It was certainly not apparent, on the face of it, how the thing was to
be done, but the captain explained. "I've been stationed here, you know,
and I know the roads. We are about a half a mile or more from where the
Stanton road to the railway crosses the lava. It is narrow and rough,
and about from three-quarters of a mile to a mile wide, but cavalry can
go over it without any trouble. I can take my troop over, and then the
Indians will be hemmed in between us. We might capture the whole band."
The major offered the objection that it would be foolhardy, that it
would be cutting through the enemy by file. "They'll pick you off, and
you'll be absolutely at their mercy," he remonstrated. "No, I can't hear
of it."
"Suppose you let me call for volunteers," suggested Landor. He was sure
of his own men, down to the last recruit.
The major consented unwillingly. "It's your lookout. If you come out
alive, I shall be surprised, that's all. Take some scouts, too," he
added, as he lit a cigar and went on with his walk up and down among his
men.
The entire command volunteered, as a matter of course, and Landor had
his pick. He took thirty men and a dozen scouts. Cairness rode up and
offered himself. They looked each other full in the face for a moment.
"Very well," said Landor, and turned on his heel. Cairness was properly
appreciative, despite the incivility. He knew that Landor could have
refused as well as not, and that would have annoyed and mortified him.
He was a generous enemy, at any rate. The volunteers mounted and trotted
off in a cloud of dust that hung above them and back along their trail,
to where the road, as Landor had said, entered the malpais.
Just at the edge of the rock stream there was an abandoned cabin built
of small stones. Whatever sort of roof it had had in the beginning was
now gone altogether, and the cabin itself was tumbling down. Through the
doorway where there was no door, there showed a blackened fireplace.
Once when a party from the post had been taking the two days' drive to
the railroad, they had stopped here, and had lunched in the cabin.
Landor remembered it now, and glanced at the place where Felipa had
reclined in the shade of the walls, upon the leather cushion of the
ambulance seat. She very rarely could be moved to sing, though she had a
sweet, plaintive voice of small volume; but this time she had raised her
tin mug of beer and, looking up to the blue sky, had launched into the
"Last Carouse," in a spirit of light mockery that fitted with it well,
changing the words a little to the scene.
"We meet 'neath the blazing heavens,
And the walls around are bare;
They shout back our peals of laughter,
And it seems that the dead are there.
Then stand to your glasses steady,
We drink to our comrades' eyes
One cup to the dead already.
Hurrah! for the next that dies."
"Hurrah! for the next that dies," thought Landor himself, with a
careless cynicism. The barrel of a Winchester gleamed above a point of
rock, a little sharp sparkle of sunlight on steel, and a bullet
deflected from the big leather hood of his stirrup. He rode on calmly,
and his horse's shoes clicked on the lava.
The men followed, sitting erect, toes in. They might have been on
mounted inspection except for the field clothes, stained and dusty. They
were to go down a narrow path for close on a mile, between two rows of
rifle barrels, and that not at a run or a gallop, but at a trot, at the
most, for the lava was slippery as glass in spots. They were willing
enough to do it, even anxious--not that there was any principle
involved, or glory to be gained, but because their blood was up and it
was part of the chances of the game.
They were not destined to get beyond the first fifty yards,
nevertheless. The rifle that had fired at Landor as he came upon the
malpais went glistening up again. There was a puff of blue-hearted smoke
in the still air, and Cairness's bronco, struck on the flanks, stung to
frenzy, stopped short, then gathering itself together with every
quivering sinew in a knot, after the way of its breed, bounded off
straight in among the jagged boulders. It was all done in an instant,
and almost before Landor could see who had dashed ahead of him the horse
had fallen, neck to the ground, throwing its rider with his head against
a point of stone.
Landor did not stop to consider it. It was one of the few impulses of
his life, or perhaps only the quickest thinking he had ever done.
Cairness was there among the rocks, disabled and in momentary danger of
his life. If it had been a soldier, under the same circumstances, Landor
might have gone on and have sent another soldier to help him. It was
only a chief of scouts, but it was a man of his own kind, for all
that--and it was his enemy. Instinct dismounted him before reason had
time to warn him that the affair of an officer is not to succor his
inferiors in the thick of the fighting when there are others who can be
better spared to do it. He threw his reins over his horse's head and
into the hands of the orderly-trumpeter, and jumped down beside
Cairness.
When the sergeant reported it to the major afterward, he said that the
captain, in stooping over to raise the chief of scouts, had been struck
full in the temple by a bullet, and had pitched forward with his arms
stretched out. One private had been wounded. They carried the two men
back to the little cabin of stones, and that was the casualty list. But
the dash had failed.
They laid Landor upon the ground, in the same patch of shade he had
glanced at in coming by not five minutes before. His glazed eyes stared
back at the sky. There was nothing to be done for him. But Cairness was
alive. They washed the blood from his face with water out of the
canteens, and bound his head with a wet handkerchief. And presently he
came back to consciousness and saw Landor stretched there, with the
bluing hole in his brow, and the quiet there is no mistaking on his
sternly weary face. And he turned back his head and lay as ashy and
almost as still as the dead man, with a look on his own face more
terrible than that of any death.
After a time, when a soldier bent over him and held a flask to his
teeth, he drank, and then he pointed feebly, and his lips framed the
question he could not seem to speak.
The soldier understood. "Trying to save you, sir," he said a little
resentfully.
But Cairness had known it without that. It was so entirely in keeping
with the rest of his fate, that every cup which ought to have been sweet
should have been embittered like this.
He rolled his cut and throbbing head over again, and watched the still
form. And he was conscious of no satisfaction that now there was nothing
in all the world to keep him from Felipa, from the gaining of the wish
of many years, but only of a dull sort of pity for Landor and for
himself, and of a real and deep regret.