So far as the Eleventh and one or two other regiments were concerned,
that summer's campaign, so fraught with incident and tribulation, was
now at an end. It would take weeks and months of care to restore their
horses to serviceable condition. Others were ordered up to replace the
worn-out command, and while an indomitable general pushed fresh columns
into the field to track the savages to their winter lairs, the ragged
troopers--for all the world like so many beggars a horseback, so many
mounted scarecrows--were ordered in to the big garrisons near the supply
depots to refit, recuperate, and restore to discipline. Some, officers
and men both, had been sent ahead, too weak or ill to remain in the
field, and among these, consigned to the tender care of the post surgeon
of Fort Cameron, was Lieutenant Davies, over whose condition the doctors
shook their heads. Brain fever was the malady, but his system was so
reduced by starvation and exposure that even a moderate fever would have
been most serious. Not until he had been gone nearly a month did the
regiment follow, and then, scattered in detachments to various posts,
became busily occupied in the work of rehabilitation. Cameron was a big
new frontier fort with few accommodations, over-crowded, too; yet, being
the nearest to the field of action, thither had Captain Wilbur Cranston
gone just as soon as he was convalescent and able to move. Thither with
him went his devoted wife and her devoted cousin and companion, Miss
Loomis, for whose reception the subalterns of the infantry guard
promptly gave up their frame quarters and moved into tents, and Cranston
was there on light duty in charge of the big corral of remount horses
when Davies was bundled in and established under Cranston's roof. There,
carefully treated by Dr. Glover and regularly visited, often tenderly
nursed, by Mrs. Cranston and her friend, the naturally strong
constitution of the young officer triumphed and he began slowly to
mend. Meantime, as is or was the way, it fell to the lot of the gentle
and sympathetic army wives or maidens at the post to keep the distant
mother informed of her boy's slow progress toward recovery, and
presently to answer the importunate letters of another. Mrs. Cranston, a
shrewd observer, could not fail to note that as soon as her patient was
allowed to read at all it was his mother's letters, not the great packet
in Miss Quimby's unformed hand, that he eagerly opened. Then when at
last he did begin these latter the steady progress of his convalescence
was impaired. He became again feverish, restless, and depressed. Too ill
and weak as yet to write for himself, he read with grateful eyes his
mother's allusions to the kind and sympathetic missives sent her by Mrs.
Cranston, and occasionally, as happened, by Miss Loomis. Gladly, too,
did he avail himself of their services in reply. But when it became
necessary presently to answer those of his _fiancée_, there might have
been embarrassment but for Mrs. Cranston's tact. She had begun to feel a
strong interest in and respect for her patient. So, too, had her
husband, who came daily to sit by his bedside, but who avoided, as much
as possible, all reference to the closing days of the campaign.
As yet the young officer had not been told of McGrath's disappearance,
and had not been encouraged to tell of his own experience. Indeed, there
was very little he could tell, but his story was frankly imparted to his
friend and comrade, Captain Cranston. Much seemed to be a total blank.
He spoke with a shudder of his last look at poor Mullen and Phillips,
and at the pale, drawn faces of Captain Devers and the troop,--of
another backward glance from near the top of the ridge, then of their
losing sight of Devers and his men, and pushing on to the deeper gloom
of the east valley. It was then too dark to see, and for half an hour he
and McGrath, weary and heart-sick, had scouted northeastward in search
of his party. They had seen some flashes as they began the descent and
rode in their direction, believing them to be signals, but soon all was
darkness, all silence, but for the sigh of the night wind. Conscious of
growing faintness, he suggested firing a shot or two as signals, and
McGrath obeyed. Then off to the southeast, far from the point where they
had seen the first flashes, the shots were answered and distant yells
were heard. McGrath considered this ominous, and asked him to wait in a
little ravine while he reconnoitred. In ten minutes two or three shots
rang out in the direction taken by the sergeant, and presently back he
came fast as a staggering horse could bear him, crying, "Indians!
Indians everywhere!" It was all up with Davies's party, and their only
hope was to hasten back to find the command; but the Indians came in
chase, and though they plied spur, their poor horses seemed too weak for
speed. How far they got he never knew, but remembered a sudden plunge,
his horse's going down, rolling all over him, and nothing more.
"When you parted from Devers," asked Cranston one day, "how far was he
from the top of the ridge?--how far to the west?"
And Davies answered, "At least two and a half or three miles."
Over this did Cranston ponder long. It ill accorded with what they wrote
him from the front as Devers's story.
"You write to Mr. Davies's mother, Agatha," Mrs. Cranston had said. "I
haven't time for both, but I'll take care of Miss Quimby." Just what
might be the tone and tenor of that young lady's letters to her
prostrate lover Mrs. Cranston could not positively say, as no one saw
them but himself, but she was ready to hazard a something more than mere
conjecture when Miss Quimby took to writing to her as well. As was her
wont when moved, Mrs. Margaret unbosomed herself to her lord. "I've no
patience with the girl," she said. "She'll worry him to death. If she
writes such silly, romantic trash to me, what mustn't she be saying to
him? What on earth can he ever have seen in her?"
Now, that's just one thing no woman can find out,--what a man can see to
admire in one in whom she sees nothing. It didn't help matters that
Cranston, in his conservative, whimsical way, should counsel silence and
patience. What woman can be silent under strong provocation? What woman
can patiently abide the personal application of a general rule?
"I don't suppose there ever was a match yet of which some woman didn't
say she couldn't see what he saw," said Cranston, deprecatingly; and
then, with one of his whimsical grins, began to add, "Let's see, wasn't
it Kitty Benton who said, when she heard of our engagement, that
she----" But he got no further in face of his wife's impetuous outbreak:
"That's simply hateful in you, Wilbur, and you know it as well as I do.
She knew me only slightly, for we were not in the same set at school at
all----"
"Well,--still, didn't she know you rather better than you do Miss
Quimby, whom you never saw at all?"
"I don't care. I know what she's like," answered Mrs. Meg, with flushing
cheeks. And that was really before poor Almira's first letter came, and
if Mrs. Cranston thought she was right before, she knew it when she read
now.
The closing paragraph of a long, almost incoherent missive must suffice.
Even Cranston's lips twitched under the heavy thatch of his moustache as
he listened. Even we, who like Mrs. Cranston, must admit it wasn't quite
kind in her, no matter how natural, to read it afterward to Agatha
Loomis, who, although declining to read, did not quite decline to hear
at least a line or two.
"If you knew how I suffered--what tortures of anxiety, what
nights of sleeplessness and woe, tossing on fevered pillow,
tortured with visions of my beloved nobly fallen on the field
of battle and pining for the touch of this hand--you would
indeed pity me; but my father is inflexible. He refuses his
daughter the poor boon of flying to the stricken lover's
side,--her husband that is to be. In vain have I pointed out
that I ask no sweeter bliss than to share my Percy's lot, for
weal or woe, to live in the humblest cot, a tent, a hovel even,
with only a crust,--it meets only his scornful refusal. When my
arms are eagerly outstretched to enfold my soldier hero, I have
to be content with nursing day and night his afflicted mother,
whom for his sake I love as I would my own, had she not been
taken from me years ago when I was but an unsophisticated
child. When I think of you privileged to sit by his delirious
bedside, cooling his fevered brow, I envy you as I never
thought to envy any woman on earth since, long years ago, my
Percy blessed me with his love; and now if after all he should
be taken, or if some proud lady should win him from his simple
little village maid, there would be no refuge for me but the
grave."
"Now," said Mrs. Cranston, "something besides the bedside is delirious
in that case. No wonder the poor fellow is picking up so slowly."
"Well, wait a little," responded her conservative lord and master.
"Seems to me a man ought to rejoice in knowing that the arms of lovely
woman are outstretched in eagerness to enfold him. Now, if I were
he----"
"Yes, if you were he I've no doubt you'd be off to Urbana by first
train; but this young man has some sense in his head" (here Cranston
began to finger his own skull tentatively), "and in losing his freedom
hasn't entirely parted with his wits."
"Was that--my predicament?" asked Cranston, looking plaintively up.
"Well, at least I have to do your thinking for you, and what you have to
do is help him here. Have you had any talk with him about--about what
Captain Truman and Mr. Gray wrote?"
"Certainly not, Meg," answered Cranston, becoming grave at once, "and I
do not mean to until he is well enough to hear it."
"Well, the more I know of him the more I know it's utterly untrue.
Hasn't anything been heard yet of Sergeant McGrath?"
"Not a word. Even friendly Indians say they haven't an idea what could
have become of him." And Cranston's face was both anxious and troubled.
The matter was indeed one to give him deep concern. The massacre of the
little detachment from Warren's battalion late in September--all of them
members of Devers's troop--had brought down sharp and deserved
criticism, and there was every prospect that the matter would be
officially investigated just as soon as the department commander could
turn his attention from the rounding up of the hostile band still at
large. Meantime, between Warren and his senior troop commander, Captain
Devers, strained relations existed,--the former holding to the theory
that the responsibility for the disaster lay with Devers and no one
else, the latter volubly, plausibly, incessantly protesting against the
imputation as utterly unjust, indeed, as utterly outrageous, and moving
heaven and earth to unload the entire blame on the shoulders of the
absent and defenceless.
Now, as a rule this is an easy matter, almost as easy in the army as out
of it, and had his accuser been any other captain in the entire field
column, poor Davies might indeed have been prejudged; but with Devers it
was different. His idiosyncrasies were notorious. His whole mental and
moral fabric was one of antagonism to his fellows in general and his
seniors in particular. It was said, and generally said, of him that the
mere fact that everybody liked or respected a man was enough to set
Devers dead against him. The fact that Mr. Davies had thrown up his
graduating leave and sought instant service in the field as a result of
the tragedies of the early days of the campaign had won him instantly
the interest and good will of officers and men throughout the entire
command. He started well, so to speak, and his quiet, reticent,
observant, but unobtrusive ways favorably impressed his regimental
comrades and led to many a commendatory remark from veteran officers.
But there was universal comment, half humorous, half commiserating, upon
his assignment to Devers's troop, and Devers knew it. He treated the
young man with cool civility at first, but became speedily captious and
irritating, rebuking him openly in the presence and hearing of other
officers and of enlisted men for matters for which he was not justly
blamable. Old Winthrop spoke to Devers about it one day, and spoke
seriously. "You'll disgust that young gentleman with the service if
you're not careful, Devers," said he, "and be the means of depriving us
of a good officer."
"That's just where I'm compelled to differ with you, colonel," was the
response, and it was this propensity for differing that had led to his
sobriquet. "I've had constant and daily opportunity of observing him,
and he's mistaken his vocation. That young man should be a missionary or
a Sunday-school superintendent. He's too pious for Indian fighting,
which is the only thing expected of us."
But for weeks after there was no Indian fighting. What had become of the
swarms of red warriors that had swooped upon the front, flank, and rear
earlier in the campaign no one could say. Their trails led all over the
northwest, and the pursuing column pushed on night and day in dust and
sun-glare, in mud and rain, in pelting hail-storm and darkness, and
never once until late in the autumn could they again come within
striking distance. By that time the jaunty riders of the early
spring-tide were worn to skeletons; the mettlesome horses--those that
were left--barely able to stagger through weakness, exhaustion, and
starvation. Then like prairie wolves the warriors closed once more about
the jaded flanks, waiting, watching every chance of picking off the
stragglers. Just one day did Differs's troop get under fire,--a long way
from under, said satirical subalterns of a command that sustained some
losses,--but so scientifically did the captain handle his men that not a
trooper or horse was scratched. Mr. Davies on this occasion commanded a
platoon, dismounted on the skirmish line. It was his first affair, and
he kept his appropriate thirty paces in rear of his dispersed men to
watch and direct their fire, expecting that the enemy would charge or
attack or do something, he didn't know just what. He simply behaved as
he had been taught at skirmish drill at the Point,--was ready to do his
full duty, but having no experience in Indian battle, thought it his
business to wait orders, which was precisely what Differs had told him
to do, until attacked. All the same, when others twitted Devers on the
fact that his troop "didn't seem to get in," that officer did not
hesitate to respond that they'd have to settle that with their
admiration, Mr. Davies, who was commanding the fighting line, but
probably wasn't done saying his prayers. There was a lively, rattling
skirmish next morning between the rear-guard and the Indians, and at one
time things looked as though the thinned battalion of their comrades of
the --th might be cut off, and some of Devers's regiment thought the
rearmost troops ought to be deployed in support of the fellows who were
fighting off the warriors, who came charging after them over wave after
wave of prairie. But Devers couldn't see it in that light. He was
bringing up the rear of his own regiment. Indeed, not until the fatal
day of their _débouchement_ from the Bad Lands and sighting the broad
valley of the Ska had Devers's men felt the sting of Indian lead, and
then he was not with them.
And now while the worn and ragged commands lay basking day after day in
the warm October sunshine at Camp Recovery, and men for the time had
nothing to do but eat and sleep and discuss the events of the late
campaign, the Eleventh was in turmoil over the tragedy of Antelope
Springs.
When Davies was finally found that morning by Warren's scouts, he was
lying in a depression of the prairie at least a mile to the west of the
point where that long--that fatally long--curtaining ridge sank into the
general level of the valley, and therefore full four and a half or five
miles away from the point where his little detachment had died fighting,
and very nearly two miles south, or west of south, of the point where he
and McGrath had last been seen by their comrades,--just at dusk,--just
at what looked to be the comb or crest of the ridge from the point where
Devers had halted his troop and made the dramatic display of his dead.
But what looked to be the crest from the west was in point of fact not
the crest at all. Invisible to the halted command, there lay still
farther over to the eastward, where the spur seemed to broaden
considerably, a wave that overtopped the westward edge by a dozen feet
or more. Supposing from Devers's account that the trail of his command
could be found distinctly marked along the westward slope and close
under the crest, Warren was searching there with his scouts when
attracted by the signals two miles to the south announcing probably
important discoveries. He had found some Indian pony tracks, also those
of one shod horse, but dropped everything else to go at once in answer
to the signals. Then they had borne the unconscious officer
southeastward toward the clump of trees at the Springs, placed him in
the ambulance, and then came a courier from the general himself
directing Major Warren to report to him in person at Birchwood, thirty
miles away, and the major went, the ambulance following. And so, to his
unspeakable relief, Captain Devers was left once more the senior officer
on the ground to continue the search for McGrath, and in the conduct of
this he took excellent care that only himself and one or two of his
chosen should search any portion of the prairie that might involve
running over the trail west of the ravine which he had made the previous
day. The scouts and searching parties were kept in the valley and in the
timber along the river, not on the back track. _That_ search Devers
conducted in person, and made a rough topographical sketch of the
neighborhood as it appeared in his eyes and as he wished it to appear in
those of others. Just before dusk, sounding the rally far up the spur,
he rode to the point where his two hunters had met their fate, and
there assembled his men, gathering some fifty troopers, and thence led
them in column of twos southward close under the spur and well to the
east of the ravine which on the previous day had partially caused his
wide departure from the line of direction indicated to him by the major.
It was therefore very late, and his men were very tired,--much too tired
to sit up and talk,--when they got to camp.
Pursuing its homeward march, the main column under the general
commanding had gone on through the wild hill country, and not until
nearly a month had elapsed was the scene of the tragedy revisited. The
officer who went thither with an escort, and Captain Devers and Corporal
Finucane and Troopers Boyd and Howard, had had pointed out to him the
scene of the massacre itself, then, far up the spur, the spot where
Mullen and Phillips were shot, and from thence the trail of Davies's
little squad as it marched away on its fatal errand toward the Springs,
and the trails of the various parties. Off to the southwest went Truman
in chase of the murderers,--off after Truman went Calvert and the
invalid corps,--off straight to the south--to the river--along the
westward side of the ridge, far to the east of the ravine and close
under the crest, went another; that, he was assured, was the trail made
by Captain Devers. Many of these trails, said the officer's report, were
now dim and nearly effaced, "but there can be no mistaking that of
Captain Devers along the spur,--it is quite sharp and clear. It isn't
more than five hundred yards from the point where Mr. Davies and
Sergeant McGrath had disappeared over the ridge to the nearest point on
the trail, where--while Captain Devers couldn't be sure--his troopers
are positive Mr. Davies had left to return to his men, and where they
are also positive the captain had again enjoined upon him the necessity
of vigilance, and reminded him that as it was growing dark he could no
longer see, and must therefore depend upon his lieutenant to keep him
informed of what was going on over on that side, as under his new orders
he, Captain Devers, must now go on and bury his dead. Mr. Davies and his
sergeant must have seen the attack just as soon as they got back across
the ridge, but what they did and why they had not instantly warned their
captain remains a mystery. At all events it would seem that Captain
Devers," so concluded the report, "had conscientiously carried out his
instructions, though he might perhaps, if unburdened with his dead, have
kept higher up towards the crest, and should perhaps have detached a
couple of flankers to keep communication, and so relied less on
Lieutenant Davies, who was at least inexperienced in frontier warfare."
The officer could not understand how it was that in broad daylight Major
Warren when searching had failed to see Devers's trail. It certainly was
there. And so the old, old story was told again. The absent it was who
had to take care of himself, and Devers was inferentially "whitewashed"
and Davies held to explain, when convalescent, and McGrath to
substantiate his statement if McGrath ever again turned up on earth.
Otherwise there could be no substantiation until the judgment day. Now,
McGrath, lost in the thick of an Indian fight, was as apt to be found
alive, or found at all, as a pin in a mill-pond. Davies, broken by the
campaign and sore smitten with brain fever, had but one chance in a
hundred of recovery. All things considered, therefore, it may be
conceded that Captain Devers was a very gifted man.
But Devers wasn't the first man, or the last, to count on another
fellow's death or disappearance to cloak his own crime. It gave him a
queer turn to hear that Cranston and his wife and niece had undertaken
the building up of the absent patient. He hated Cranston,--his junior as
an officer, but infinitely his superior as a soldier. He feared him when
word came out to the homeward marching command that Cranston said Davies
was on the mend and would soon be on the war-path. But he drew another
long breath of relief when there reached them the news that General
Sheridan himself had telegraphed directing Davies to hasten home, that
his mother was dying. When next that young officer appeared upon the
scene and reported for duty, it was in midwinter at Fort Scott, a big,
brilliant, sunshiny post, the head-quarters of an infantry regiment, the
station of a cavalry battalion, whose major, Warren, had gone on long
leave abroad, whose senior captain, Devers, was its commander _pro
tempore_, whose other captains, Cranston, Truman, and Hay, were present
for duty; so were most of their subalterns, so were most of the infantry
officers, so were the wives and families of nine-tenths of the array,
for it was a much-married garrison, and there was not a little talk and
speculation when it was announced that Lieutenant Davies would come
accompanied by his bride.