When Sanders, with solemn face, turned to meet the general and report
his discovery, the difference between the young and the old campaigner
was told in their own words.
"I'm afraid we're too late to save 'em, sir. Everything's wiped out but
the stockade."
"If the stockade's left, they've saved themselves," was the answer, and
the Gray Fox was right. Long before the column reached the lowlands of
the valley horsemen could be seen spurring eagerly forward to meet it,
and the first-comer was Trooper O'Brien, who saluted the general with
all soldierly grace and the rest of the array with a sociable grin.
"We're all right, general,--leastwise most of us is. Two of the boys is
killed, and Loot'n't Boynton's wounded,--and four others,--but the
women's all safe, and the agent--bad scran to him! Is there a doctor
along?" A doctor was along,--Burroughs,--riding with the senior captain
commanding the battalion, and Burroughs was hurried forward with Sanders
and a squad of men, while O'Brien, proud of his prominence, rode by the
general's side and told the story of the sharp and sudden fight.
"They came down on us like a crowd of grasshoppers so soon as it was
light enough to see anything, but they couldn't get near us without our
bowling over bucks and ponies. The prairie's dotted with the corpses of
the poor beggars, sir,--the ponies, that is; they never left an Indian.
We stood 'em off first rate. Loot'nant Boynton and Loot'nant Davies was
everywhere at once, and after trying two dashes the Indians gave it up
and kept at long range. They was a thousand strong at least, and Elk
came in with a white flag for a parley, and Mr. Boynton ordered him
back, but McPhail let him in. He said we must give up Red Dog or they'd
burn the agency over our heads and massacre every man, and McPhail was
for letting him go then, but Mr. Boynton and he had words over it, and
they kept him. That night was cloudy and the moon was hid, and sure
enough at ten o'clock they crawled in on the storehouse side and heaped
up timber under them flimsy pine boards, and no one could see them on
that side until everything was in a broad blaze. It was when trying to
bucket out the fire the lieut'nant was shot, and it was a roaring
conflagration in five minutes, and from that it spread to the agency and
the other shebangs, and it was all we could do to get the women and
children out of the cellars and into the corral, and them bucks firing
from every sage brush for a mile around. The whole thing was down by
midnight, but it didn't do them no good: we was really better off with
less to take care of and more men to do it with, and we had wather in
the well and rations for all hands, and the agent and his non-combatants
under cover in one corner of the stockade, and Red Dog tied up in
another. All Sunday they kept up a long-range fire, and five or six
times made as though they was going to charge, but Loot'nant Davies was
on all four sides of that square from dawn till dark, sir, and they
never got within four hundred yards that we didn't drop them. Sure it
was just pie, general. The only trouble was, could they set fire to the
stockade at night? The loot'nant had buckets of water all around inside,
and every little while a patrol ran round on the outside, and half the
fellows kept watch at the loop-holes while the others slept, and Mr.
Davies had the office side of the stockade battened up with old wagons
and boxes and things to fill the gap. Faith, sir, he never seemed to
close an eye night or day until this blessed morning, when the valley
was clear of Indians and we knew it meant that the general was coming."
And as O'Brien told his tale to attentive ears, others of the little
garrison, lately beleaguered, joined the battalion, still steadily in
march, and found eager auditors everywhere along the jogging column.
Every one sorrowed at hearing of Boynton's serious wound, for he was a
soldierly, faithful fellow, albeit a trifle blunt and unsociable, but as
man after man spoke in lavish praise of Davies, of his plucky grapple
with the most redoubtable chief in the rebellious tribes, of his calm,
cool vigilance and skill in the conduct of the defence after the command
devolved upon him, Cranston's eyes sparkled, and Hay and Truman joined
in the chorus of congratulation.
When at last the battalion unsaddled at the stream and the officers
pressed into the stockade to shake hands with the defenders, they found
Boynton and the wounded feebly rejoicing in Burroughs's hands and
Davies tucked away in a corner under an old wagon, rolled in agency
blankets, sleeping the dreamless sleep of a tired child.
"Don't disturb him for anything," said the general, with moistened eyes.
"They tell me he hasn't had an hour's rest since Friday. He's behaved
like a trump."
That night our old friend Tintop came trotting in at the head of eight
strong troops of horse, some of his own, others of the --th Cavalry.
Behind them, with the wagons, came the infantry, supplementing the
little detachment of the Fortieth already on the ground,--the sturdy
trampers from Fort Scott. Next day the agent and his household, with the
other women and children, were bustled off to Braska until new quarters
should be built for them, and his red wards be rounded up, run down, and
returned to the arms of Uncle Sam by their natural oppressors, the
cavalry. Sending Red Dog in irons and Boynton and the wounded back to
Scott by easy stages, leaving four companies of the Fortieth to build
cantonments for themselves and their comrades, the Gray Fox took the
field with the residue of his force and set forth upon a winter campaign
in search of the now scattered and despondent Indians. The oratory of
Red Dog had borne its fruit. Four truculent bands had joined in the
outbreak at the agency and lost their leader, half a score of
mad-brained young warriors, scores of their best war ponies, but, what
was of most consequence, had burned up the whole store of agency
provisions and, with their squaws and children, were now lurking among
the trackless Bad Lands to the north, outcasts upon the face of the
frozen earth.
The only Indians whose condition was not made materially worse as a
result of this ebullition were the Brulé band of Two Lance, who had
taken advantage of the general confusion to slip away to their old head
chief Sintogaliska. He might not be able to feed or clothe them, and the
agent at Sheridan might say he had no authority to help, but they would
at least be getting as much comfort as was accorded them at Ogallalla,
and less abuse.
And then, while the soldiers were stalking the renegades, the
commissioner of Indian affairs sent out to stalk the soldiers.
Investigation as to the cause of this inexplicable outbreak was
demanded. Those very chiefs had left the capital in unbounded good humor
not two months before, and who was responsible for this sudden and
baleful change of heart? It was a matter soon and easily settled. In the
absence of military testimony to the contrary and the presence of so
unanimous a party as the agent and his assistants, the fault was laid on
the broad shoulders of the troopers. Devers rode over from Scott to
Braska to hear the evidence, Boynton being still in surgical bandage and
bondage, and without committing himself to anything absolutely
derogatory to Messrs. Boynton and Davies, was certainly understood to
raise no dissenting voice to the often expressed theory that but for the
impetuosity and interference of those two officers the whole trouble
could have been amicably settled by the authorities of the Indian
bureau. And with this most satisfactory conclusion the commissioner
returned to Washington. Red Dog was ordered released and restored to the
bosom of his family, and when the general had finally succeeded in
bringing in the scattered starvelings and the cavalry reappeared at the
site of the agency, the first thing whispered to Davies was, "Be on your
guard every moment. Look out for Red Dog!"
The general never swore. He was in this respect the mate of Grant, his
old-time friend and regimental comrade, but he could "look swear words
by the gallon," said the adjutant of the Eleventh, whose own chief was
in no wise tongue-tied. It fell to the lot of Mr. Gray, sent forward
from the Bad Lands to announce the coming of the field column with all
its humbled captives, to be the first on returning to announce to the
Gray Fox that Red Dog had been released from durance at Fort Scott,
equipped anew by McPhail at Braska, and had ridden to the cantonment to
harangue such Indians as were already reassembling there, and to thunder
furious threats at the officers of the Fortieth. Three bitter weeks had
the Gray Fox and his faithful men been scoring the wild, wintry
fastnesses along the Wakpa-Schicha, and, just as the Indians obtained
through the bureau the vast supplies of ammunition with which to battle
the soldiers through the summer past, so now, while the War Department
was running down the renegades in the field, the Interior Department was
running down the soldiery at home. The troops came in with the
conviction that they had been seeing some hard and trying service, many
of them with frosted fingers, toes, or ears, and thinking they deserved
rather well of their country for having finally rounded up a thousand
warriors with all their families, ponies, and unsavory impedimenta, and
the general so informed them, and leaving a command of eight companies,
equally divided among the horse and foot, to occupy the cantonments on
the Chasing Water and thereafter keep the Indians in check, he hastened
away to attend to important business in another lively section of his
big department. The agency buildings were being rapidly restored, which
was much more than could be said of its influence for good among the red
men, and presently McPhail and his family reappeared on the scene, shook
hands all around with the warriors who burned him out several weeks
before, slapped Elk at Bay on the back and called him a bully boy, and
promptly requested of the commanding officer of the new cantonment,
which was a mile away up stream, a guard of a lieutenant and twenty-five
men to be stationed at the agency itself. The major demurred, and the
agent wired to Washington with the usual result. Whatsoever slur upon
his actions McPhail had seen fit to cast at the expense of Mr. Davies
during the investigation recently referred to, he had heard enough to
convince him that the Indians spoke of that officer with awe and
reverence and as "heap brave," so the man he urgently asked for to
command his guard was the very one whom he had maligned. The
adjutant-general of the department could only transmit the order that
came from superior head-quarters within the week, and Lieutenant Davies,
just as he was expecting brief leave of absence to visit his wife at
Fort Scott, was detailed to the command of the permanent agency guard.
The Ides of March had come.
And how had it fared with Mira and her sympathetic friends at Scott
during all these weeks of toil and march and scout? Two at a time the
officers had been allowed to run in thither for a few days as soon as
their men and horses were made fairly comfortable at the cantonments.
Cranston and Hay went first, then Truman and Jervis, then came the turn
to which Sanders and the patient Parson had been looking forward, and
Sanders went alone. Already some of those fearless frontierswomen, the
amazons of the Fortieth, had come ahead with bag, baggage and babies and
moved into the log huts of their lords as contentedly as they would have
taken quarters at the Grand Central in Omaha, but Mesdames Flight and
Darling were not of the number. Indeed, there was no reason why they
should be, as it was settled that their companies were those designated
presently to return to Scott; so was Hay's troop, so presumably would be
the detached members of Devers's Troop, "A," as soon as he wrote and
called attention to the fact that nearly one-half his men were detained
eighty miles away where there was now an abundance of other soldiery,
and the truly remarkable thing was that he, always hitherto so quick to
find fault with or criticise the actions of his superiors, was keeping
utter silence, and so long as he made no protest no one else could.
Colonel Stone, still weak and dazed, was just beginning to hobble about
the post, and for six wonderful weeks had Devers succeeded in retaining
the command.
"Your husband will be home any day," said Mrs. Darling to Mira, when
they got the news of the triumphant return of the command to the
cantonments. "He belongs here with his troop, so he's sure to come, and
then," she added, archly, "what will poor Willett do?"
That was a question occurring to many another mind and falling from many
another tongue. The rapture of Cranston's home-coming one sharp evening
in late February was dashed only by the sight of a blooming face at
Willett's side behind that stylish Eastern team. In the windings of the
road among the willow islands in the Platte he had come suddenly upon
them, he riding at rapid gallop, they dawdling with loosened reins.
Willett was bending eagerly toward her, talking earnestly. She sat with
downcast eyes that never saw the swift rider until he had almost passed
them by. Mrs. Darling, chatting with Mr. Burtis on the rear seat, was
the first to announce his coming, and with rare presence of mind to turn
and send sweetest smiles and beaming glances and the welcome of a waving
hand after the grim, bearded face that had no smile for their civilian
escorts and only grave courtesy for the ladies themselves. He would not
mar the joy of his home-coming by the faintest reference to what he had
seen, but Margaret read his honest eyes as she read her boys', and knew
that he must have met them on the way. For weeks she had seen the rapid
growth of the new intimacy and deplored it, and had no one to confer
with about it except Agatha, but Agatha flatly refused to open her lips
upon the subject. It was a mercy that Wilbur at last came home and
unloosed her tongue. As she pathetically said, "I simply could not
contain myself any longer."
But if Mrs. Cranston had held her tongue, there was no lack of others
who had not, and foremost of these was Mrs. Flight, who spoke by the
card. For a fortnight or so the devotion of these two ladies, Mrs.
Flight and Mira, to one another had been of that seething and tireless
character that rendered them incapable of spending an hour apart, and
then came the little tiffs and coolnesses that betokened that this, too,
was inevitably going the way of all such feminine intimacies. Up to the
day of Mira's coming Mrs. Flight and Mrs. Darling had been inseparable
for as much as a week at a time. Both were young, pretty, and
empty-headed; neither was burdened with children nor ideas. Both were
healthy, one was wealthy, neither was wise. Mrs. Darling had the
advantage over Mrs. Flight in that she was able to entertain lavishly,
whereas Mrs. Flight could only entertain by personal charm and sprightly
chat. They were the reigning belles at Scott, and not only the young
officers at the post, but the young civilians in town, found great
pleasure in their society. There was capital sleighing for several
weeks, and Willett and Burtis came as often as every other day to take
the ladies an airing. At first it had been Mesdames Flight and Darling,
then the bride had to be invited because she was the bride, then because
she was a beauty, and finally because Willett would have no one else.
Then as it was generally at Darlings' they lunched, dined, danced,
supped, were wined and warmed and welcomed, it transpired that
Mrs. Flight found herself very frequently dropped from the
sleigh-rides,--only invited semi-occasionally, perhaps once in ten days,
when Burtis pointed out to Willett that they really must, you know, to
which the now infatuated Willett merely responded, "All right. You ask
her, then, and let her sit with you." No one but Mrs. Davies shared the
sleigh man's seat.
During the fortnight that followed the departure of Lieutenant Davies,
Mrs. Flight had been devotion itself to her dear, bereaved friend, and,
having wept with her, slept with her, sleighed with her, bared her
innermost soul to her, and made herself, as she supposed, indispensable,
it was to be expected that Mrs. Flight could not look with equanimity
upon the discovery that she was not so indispensable after all. She had
started Mira on the road to conquest, never dreaming that she herself
would be the first overtaken and supplanted. She had thought hitherto no
possible harm could come of their taking an occasional drive with their
friends, especially as Mr. Flight expressed himself so grateful for the
attention shown his wife, and as she and Mrs. Darling seemed chosen
rather to the exclusion of the other women, but when Mira and not
herself became the invariable occupant of the seat by the swell
civilian's side, the indiscretion, not to say the impropriety of the
affair, became glaringly apparent. It is rarely from the contemplation
of our own, but rather from the errors of our neighbors, that our moral
lessons are drawn, and now that in all its nakedness the scandalous
nature of Mira's conduct was forced upon her attention, Mrs. Flight
reasoned, most logically, that she could be no true friend if she failed
to remonstrate and, if need be, admonish and reprove. She did so, and
Almira pouted and was grievously vexed. She didn't think so at all,
neither had Mrs. Flight until--until she began to be counted out. This
led to war, and from pointing the moral Mrs. Flight now turned to
adorning the tale with what "everybody was saying." Mira challenged her
authorities. "I know who you mean,--Mrs. Cranston and Miss Loomis. They
hate me and would say anything mean of me." Now, it was not Mrs.
Cranston and Miss Loomis at all. They had no more intimacy with Mrs.
Flight than they had with Mira, nor as much. They looked upon Mrs.
Flight as responsible in great measure for Almira's wrong start. They
under no circumstances would confide to Mrs. Flight what they thought of
Mrs. Davies, and Mrs. Flight knew it, still she was not unwilling to let
Mira suppose that she was now enjoying their confidences even while she
referred to other authorities by the dozen as condemning or deploring
Mira's conduct, and a stormy scene followed, ending in tears and
reproaches,--much heat, followed by chilling cold.
For the following fortnight Almira's intimacy was transferred to Mrs.
Darling, and from going to spend the night with Mira, Mrs. Flight took
to revolving in mind her singular observations while she was there.
There had been a thrilling, a delicious, a mysterious and romantic
occurrence. Somebody twice came and whistled a strange, soft melody
under the window and tapped as with a cane, gently, stealthily, a signal
that sounded like Rattat _tat_, rattat _tat_, just once repeated, and
Mrs. Davies trembled all over and grew icily cold, and begged Mrs.
Flight to go to the window and say, "Go away, or I'll call the guard,"
and when pressed for explanation Mira moaned hysterically and said, but
Mrs. Flight must never, never tell, that there was once a young man whom
she had known long before who had got desperate on her account, for she
couldn't return his love, and he had run away from home and enlisted,
and she feared that he was there now, though she had never seen him and
never wanted to see him, and it became Mrs. Flight's belief that it was
no one less than that handsome young fellow, Brannan, who Captain Devers
said was drinking himself to death. And now that Mira had withdrawn from
her the confidences of the month gone by and was recklessly driving the
road to ruin, flouting her admonitions, what more natural than that Mrs.
Flight should forget her own vows of secrecy and conclude it time to
seek other advice? Mrs. Darling would have been her first confidante in
this revelation, but they, too, had once been devotedly intimate and had
now drifted apart. They were no longer on anything more than merely
frigidly friendly terms, smiling and kissing in public and hiding
womanfully their wounds, yet confiding to friends how much they had been
disappointed in the other's character, if not actually deceived. Mrs.
Flight found a confidante in the chaplain's wife, a woman simply swamped
under an overload of best intentions. It was Bulwer who declared that
"It is difficult to say who do the most harm, enemies with the worst
intentions or friends with the best," but Bulwer, who had reason to know
what he was talking about, never lived at Scott in the Centennial times
or at old Camp Sandy in the Arizona "days of the empire," for then he
would have known no such difficulty in deciding. Just as the stanch old
chaplain was just such another God-fearing, God-serving, devil-downing
man as Davies's father, so was the chaplain's wife a counterpart of
Davies's mother, filled with the milk of human kindness still unturned,
and overflowing with best intentions uncontrollably effervescent. Had
she told her husband all might have been stopped right there, but, as
the demon of ill luck would have it, he had gone to a distant
convention. So she sallied forth, brimming with eagerness to snatch this
lovely brand from the burning, to turn this fair, motherless, guideless,
possibly guileless girl to the contemplation of her dangers, to the
knowledge of her peril, to banish Willett from the dove-cote,--wily hawk
that he was,--and settle forthwith the fate of that young scamp Brannan.
She did not find Almira until after dark, but meantime told her
thrilling tale to Mrs. Stone (now full panoplied for further social
triumphs, the colonel being on the mend, and herself so young as not to
have looked unmoved on those famous sleigh-rides, nor without envy on
Almira's blooming cheek), and from her side sped the chaplain's wife to
hunt up Captain Devers. In him she found a listener indeed in whom there
was no end of guile.
This was just before Cranston's return. The ball to be given by the
townsfolk had been indefinitely postponed in deference to Colonel
Stone's condition and the absence of so many dancing men in the field,
but the weekly hops, although with thinned attendance, went regularly
on. Now there were several households who did not attend at all, among
them Cranston's, Leonard's, and Hay's. More civilians came out from
town, whom Devers welcomed affably and Hastings and the resident
"doughboys" entertained as best they could. No need to trouble
themselves: the visitors came to "dance with the grass widows at the
fort," and had no embarrassment other than richness. There were always
wall-flowers, but never in the person of pretty Mrs. Davies, to whom
"Phaeton" Willett's devotion was now the talk of all.
It was just at this time, too, that there came to Braska a middle-aged
lawyer with all the ear-marks of the soldier about him, including a
white seam along his cheek that told of a close call his intimates knew
to have occurred at Spottsylvania. His name was Langston, and his first
visit to the post was the result of a letter of introduction to Captain
Cranston from a classmate in the East. Cranston had driven over to
Braska to seek him out on receipt of the letter enclosing Langston's
card, bade him hearty welcome to the West, and was surprised to hear
that his practice brought him frequently to the neighborhood. He asked
him out to dinner two weeks later, Captain and Mrs. Hay, Mrs. Davies,
and Mr. Hastings being invited to meet him, for almost his first
question had been for that soldierly young officer, the hero of the riot
on the train. Mrs. Davies pleaded previous engagement, but Captain and
Mrs. Cranston took the trouble to call and explain that this Mr.
Langston especially admired and asked for her husband, Mr. Davies, and
so Almira simply had to go. Hastings called for and escorted her. He was
a blunt fellow, who held that when the husband was away and the lady of
the house alone, no other man ought to set foot within the threshold,
and he waited on the porch. But the lady was not alone. Willett's sleigh
was in the trader's stable, and Willett himself biting his nails and
swearing in Almira's parlor while Mrs. Darling was putting the finishing
touches to Almira's toilet. Willett had driven out _solus_ this time,
thinking to persuade Mrs. Davies to take a drive, with some other dames
playing propriety on the back seat, and, finding she was engaged for
dinner and could not go, lost a chance of scoring a point by asking the
other women anyhow, for by this time his infatuation had utterly
overcome his senses. Katty again appeared and begged the lieutenant to
step in wid Mr. Willett, and Hastings turned fiery red, scowled
malevolently, said "No," and took himself outside the gate, pacing up
and down like the orderly in front of Devers's quarters, a short
pistol-shot away, until Almira came fluttering out, Willett in close
attendance, Mrs. Darling mercifully following. Hastings bade the others
a gruff good-evening, silently tendered Mrs. Davies his arm, and led her
away with the sole remark "Aren't we late?" which gave her a chance to
talk the rest of the way.
And though Langston sat on Mrs. Cranston's right, with the pretty bride
on his other side, so that he might descant about the absent Percy to
his heart's content, his eyes ever wandered across the simple table and
dwelt on Agatha Loomis's noble face. She had recognized him at once as
the one of the two civilians on the sleeper the previous June who had
not been suggestively and impertinently intrusive, yet she welcomed him
only formally even now because of that association. Langston had heard
the first mention of a Mrs. Davies with an inexplicable little pang, and
the further description of her with quick reaction, for his instant
thought was of Miss Loomis. The dinner dragged, despite every effort,
for Almira was distinctly and determinedly unresponsive. Margaret was
glad when it was over, glad when Almira early went home, for matters
brightened somewhat with her disappearance. Langston paid his dinner
call with surprising promptitude, and then overjoyed "the ladies" with a
box of rarest roses expressed from Margaret's own beloved home. "I know
how many of these are meant for me," she said, with almost fierce
rejoicing. "Oh, Wilbur!" she cried that evening, as she nestled in his
arms in front of their cheery fire, "if only he is all they say of him,
and she should----"
"Should what, Meg?" he densely queried.
"Should--why, you know just as well as I do, and he has such a fine
practice, and comes from such an admirable family and all that."
"Undoubtedly,--but where does Agatha come in?"
"Wilbur, you are just as provokingly sluggish as our own Chicago
River,--what wouldn't I give for a sight of its dirty face sometimes
when--when you're away! Now, be honest. Don't you know he never could
have sent all that way for all those roses--just for me?"
"_I_ would."
"Oh, you,--you are----" but the entrance of Miss Loomis herself with
sorrow in her face blocked the conference.
"Captain Cranston," she said, "Brannan has been sent to the guard-house
again. I know he has not been drinking. What can it possibly mean?"
It meant, said Captain Devers, when respectfully approached upon the
subject in the morning, that on very strong circumstantial evidence he
had discovered the identity of the night prowler. Brannan certainly
answered the description given by the chaplain, despite the chaplain's
assurance that he didn't believe it was Brannan, and Brannan, said
Devers, when not in the guard-house or hospital, had frequently been out
of his quarters at midnight.