ON THE BORDERS OF DISGRACE.
He was no sooner out of sight than Wilkins sprang to his feet, his
form trembling, his eyes blazing, his brain on fire with rage and
hatred.
“You low-down ruffian!” he said, shaking his fist at the retreating
man. “Do you think you can treat me that way and me not strike back
at you? Well, you can’t! Because you’re a big bruiser you treat me
that way. Well, I’ll make things warm for you in this fort, if I hang
for it.”
He was fairly crying, yet did not know it, and sobs of violent rage
shook him. After all, compared with Barlow, he was a mere boy, his
face still beardless.
“I’ll get even with you for that blow, you villain, if it takes me a
year!” said Wilkins.
He stooped by the side of the small canal that brought water to the
roots of the cottonwoods, and with this water he bathed his face;
yet, as he discovered later, in removing the blood from his lip he
got a good deal of it on his handkerchief.
He did not leave the shelter of the cottonwoods for half an hour, and
not until he had again secured control of his nerves.
There was in his heart a shaking rage against Joel Barlow and an
aching desire to “get even.”
As he walked along, going toward his barracks room, he passed close
by the stockade gate.
It was swung open, after a challenge and some questions, and by the
lamp which brightly lighted the gate he saw Buffalo Bill ride through
to the inside.
That the great scout had been out on the vast plains somewhere, and
was bringing in some report to the colonel in command, was Wilkins’
conclusion when he saw him. He stood back in the darkness and looked
at the handsome horseman who passed on from the gate in the direction
of the colonel’s quarters; then, after a minute of hesitation, he
turned in that direction and followed.
Buffalo Bill was no more than in the room which had been assigned him
before there was a soft rap on his door. When he opened it, he saw
before him Wilkins, pale-faced, bright-eyed, with a lip that was fast
swelling, and bruises on his cheeks.
“Come in.”
Wilkins slid into the room, and the scout, closing the door, eyed the
young man keenly.
Wilkins was slender, not overmuscular, being of the light and wiry
build. Just now his dark face was chalky in its pallor, and his dark
eyes burning bright.
The scout, keen reader of the human mind that he was, saw that
Wilkins had come in that stealthy way because of something he wished
to say in private, and he guessed that the young man was in trouble.
Wilkins dropped nervously into a chair, and pulled nervously at the
sleeve of his coat.
“Something I can do for you?” Buffalo Bill asked, in a tone so kind
that it touched Wilkins’ heart.
“I have come to make a confession!” he blurted out.
“I can guess that you have been fighting,” said the scout.
“No, I have not; but I was struck down, brutally knocked down, by a
man who thinks he has me for his life slave simply because he knows
certain things against me.”
His face was flaming again, and his manner was excited.
“Yes, I see!” said the scout, trying to help him along.
“That man is Joel Barlow, now in command here in the absence of the
commandant.”
“Not Lieutenant Barlow?”
“Yes, Lieutenant Barlow. And I’m going to tell you about it. I know I
shall be disgraced and court-martialed, and perhaps sent to prison;
but that doesn’t matter now. I’m going to tell it, if I’m hung for
it.”
“I shall be pleased to hear what you have to say.”
Wilkins sprang to his feet, he was so excited, and began to walk
about the room.
“Cody, you’ve always been an honorable man, but you know about these
things! I’m a gambler; I seem to be a slave to cards. Barlow is
another, but he’s shrewder than I am, and I think he is tricky. We
played, and I got in debt to him. I owe him five thousand dollars. I
can never pay it, of course, and he knows I can’t; for I haven’t five
thousand cents, and he knows that, too.
“Well, just because I owed him so much he began to get me to do
little favors for him. At first they were all square. Later they
have begun to be crooked, and I was too weak to refuse to do them,
because of that debt.
“The last has to do with you--with you, Buffalo Bill!”
“With me?”
“Yes. You know that nugget you gave to Colonel Montrose--the nugget
with the strange marks on it?”
“Ah, yes, I recall that nugget. I gave it to him not long since. And
a strange nugget it is. I’ll tell you about it some time.”
“Well, that nugget comes into my story--holds first place there. For
it was stolen from Colonel Montrose by Lieutenant Barlow, and----”
The scout came to his feet.
“Be sure you know just what you are talking about!” he warned. “What
you charge Barlow with is a crime that will----”
“I know it. It will ruin him, and I want it to ruin him. That’s why
I’m telling you about it; that it may ruin him. I hope it will tear
the stripes from his uniform and send him to jail. And it will!”
He walked nervously about the room.
“Better sit down and tell me this quietly,” said the scout. “I’d
advise you not to shout it out of the windows. And walls have ears,
you know.”
“It doesn’t matter who hears me now,” said Wilkins excitedly. “I wish
these walls had a thousand ears, and a thousand tongues to tell the
story!”
He strode up and down the room in a very fury of excited anger.
“It ruins me, of course, but it will ruin him, and that’s what I
want. He is so high now, in the opinion of the colonel, but this will
drag him down.”
“Quiet yourself and tell me the story,” said Buffalo Bill.
“As I said, he stole that nugget from the colonel, and by listening
under the colonel’s window he heard its story, and knows that there
are many more like it.”
“Ah! He knows that?”
“And he knows where they are; in the Moonlight Mountains, far to the
southwest, on the borders of New Mexico.”
“I see that he did hear,” said the scout; “and apparently you heard,
also.”
“Those gold pieces are the treasure of an old Indian medicine man,
and with them he pretends to work his charms; they are sacred to
that medicine man, and to all his tribe. That tribe is a branch of
the Cheyennes now held on the reservation near here; and if trouble
comes these Cheyennes here can be counted on to help those in the
mountains.”
“Very true,” Buffalo Bill admitted softly.
“I’m telling you this,” said Wilkins, “to show you that I know what I
am talking about.”
“The proof seems good,” the scout admitted, “so far as it goes.”
Young Wilkins continued to walk about the room nervously, in spite of
the scout’s invitation to him to sit down.
“Barlow,” he went on, “intended to get permission to lead a small
force over into the Moonlight Mountains. There was a disturbance to
be made there, to give him an excuse, and he felt sure he could get
the colonel to send him. Well, when he got there he meant to scheme
in some way to get those Cheyennes involved and slaughtered, and
he expected to get hold of that store of gold belonging to the old
medicine man.”
The scout’s interest had quickened.
“Perhaps you know Smallpox Dave?” said Wilkins.
“I have heard of him,” was the answer.
“Well, he’s a borderman, a sort of renegade, I take it. Barlow was
going to have Smallpox Dave slip over into the Moonlight Mountains
and there start the initial trouble which was to give him an excuse
for being sent there. So he had some talk with Dave; and then,
later, wrote him a letter. At the time he wrote that letter he wrote
another.”
“To Smallpox Dave?”
“No, to a girl named May Arlington, who lives out on the prairie here
with her father. Barlow is in love with the girl, but he didn’t get
on well with her; and this letter had something to do with that. She
turned him down a week or so ago.”
“From what you have told me of him I judge she did the right thing.”
“Yes, she did. But about these letters. I was to be the messenger who
was to carry them.”
“Then you were in the thing, too?” said the scout, looking hard at
him.
Wilkins turned toward him, trembling and white-faced.
“Yes,” he admitted, “I was. I had got down that low, by degrees. I
tried to tell you about it, and how it started in my gambling mania
and the debt I owed him. I was helping him in this thing; or, rather,
was running some errands for him in connection with it.”
“And if those gold nuggets of the medicine man were secured I suppose
you were to have had some of them?”
“No; not so far as I know. Barlow made no promises to me. He said
he wanted me to help him; and--well, I had so far weakened, under
the threats of disgrace he held over me, that lately I had taken to
doing anything he told me to, without stopping to ask questions about
it. And so I was to carry those letters. They were left on a table
by Barlow, who had been called from his room in a hurry. I got them
mixed; and the letter with the nugget, intended for Smallpox Dave, I
threw out to the girl as I passed the house where she lives. And the
other letter I carried on to Smallpox Dave--the letter which rightly
belonged to the girl.”
“Yes, I see.”
“It’s a long story, and the rest of it I’ll make short.
“The theft of the nugget from the colonel’s room was discovered.
In some way it was believed that a man from outside did the work.
In the search that was made, the soldiers--pack of fools that they
were!--struck my trail, and followed it.”
“They weren’t so very far wrong,” remarked the scout. “You
acknowledge that the nugget was in the letter you carried.”
Wilkins frowned; he did not like the interruption.
“They followed me. Another horseman had come to the house where the
girl lived, and they arrested him, thinking they had their man.”
“I should say they were poor trailers, if they couldn’t tell the
hoofmarks of your horse from his. No two are ever alike, any more
than two faces are alike.”
“But they had the proof right on him, you see! He had the nugget. It
was in the letter I threw to the girl as I flew by; she had shown it
to him, and he was looking at it when they came on him.
“And so they arrested both him and the girl, and brought them in to
the fort. He was the girl’s lover--the one she cared for--and his
name is Ben Stevens. He’s a cowboy on one of these ranches.”
“And they’re here now--the young cowboy and the girl?” the scout
asked.
“Yes; he’s in the prison pen, and she is with Mrs. McGee.”
“And Barlow is in command here now?”
“Yes.”
“And, being the real thief himself, he has flung this young cowboy
into jail, and has held the girl?”
“Yes.”
Buffalo Bill bored Wilkins with a keen glance.
“And you--why did you come to me with this?”
Wilkins’ violent wrath blazed out again as he answered, “Because I
want to depose him. I’ve told you already--it’s because I want to
ruin him.”
“But why?”
Wilkins flung himself round and faced the scout, and put a finger on
his swollen lip, and showed his battered face.
“That’s why!” he almost screamed. “He struck me--he knocked me down;
he treated me as no man would treat a dog.”
“What was his reason for striking you? He must have thought he at
least had a good reason? You had threatened to betray him?”
“His reason was that he caught me listening under the window at Mrs.
McGee’s to some talk he was having with the girl; but he was mistaken
in believing that I deliberately eavesdropped. I listened, but it was
only by chance I knew he was talking there. And for that he struck me
and abused me.”
“I suppose you know the result of this exposure of him?”
“As far as I am concerned? Yes, I know it will disgrace me. But I
don’t care now. I’ve ruined myself with gambling. I expect to go
down; and when I go down I’m going to pull him down with me.”
He turned toward the door.
“Think what you please of me, Cody,” he said. “It doesn’t matter now.
You’re an upright man, and can’t understand these things probably;
and I’m a wild and wrecked young fool on the borders of disgrace.
But I swore I’d do him, and I’ve done it. The rest is for you. When
you want me send for me; I’ll tell all I know, and I’ll then take my
medicine. But he goes down with me, and that suits me.”
He flung himself out of the room in wild desperation, and went
clattering down the stairs.