THE QUALITY OF MERCY
A vast dizziness and a throbbing of the head remained after they were
quite done with me, but something of this left me when finally I sat
leaning back against the wagon body and looked about me. There were
straight, motionless figures lying under the blankets in the shade, and
under other blankets were men who writhed and moaned. Belknap passed
about the place, graver and apparently years older than at the beginning
of this, his first experience in the field. He put out burial parties at
once. A few of the Sioux, including the one on whom Andrew Jackson
McGovern had vented his new-found spleen, were covered scantily where
they lay. Our own dead were removed to the edge of the bluff; and so
more headstones, simple and rude, went to line the great pathway into
the West.
Again Ellen Meriwether came and sat by me. She had now removed the gray
traveling gown, for reasons which I could guess, and her costume might
have been taken from a collector's chest rather than a woman's wardrobe.
All at once we seemed, all of us, to be blending with these
surroundings, becoming savage as these other savages. It might almost
have been a savage woman who came to me.
Her skirt was short; made of white tanned antelope leather. Above it
fell the ragged edges of a native tunic or shirt of yellow buck,
ornamented with elk teeth, embroidered in stained quills. Her feet still
wore a white woman's shoes, although the short skirt was enforced by
native leggins, beaded and becylindered in metals so that she tinkled as
the walked. Her hair, now becoming yellower and more sunburned at the
ends, was piled under her felt hat, and the modishness of long
cylindrical curls was quite forgot. The brown of her cheeks, already
strongly sunburned, showed in strange contrast to the snowy white of her
neck, now exposed by the low neck aperture of the Indian tunic. Her
gloves, still fairly fresh, she wore tucked through her belt, army
fashion. I could see the red heart still, embroidered on the cuff!
She came and sat down beside me on the ground, I say, and spoke to me. I
could not help reflecting how she was reverting, becoming savage. I
thought this--but in my heart I knew she was not savage as myself.
"How are you coming on?" she said. "You sit up nicely--"
"Yes, and can stand, or walk, or ride," I added.
Her brown eyes were turned full on me. In the sunlight I could see the
dark specks in their depths. I could see every shade of tan on her face.
"You are not to be foolish," she said.
"You stand all this nobly," I commented presently.
"Ah, you men--I love you, you men!" She said it suddenly and with
perfect sincerity. "I love you all--you are so strong, so full of the
desire to live, to win. It is wonderful, wonderful! Just look at those
poor boys there--some of them are dying, almost, but they won't whimper.
It is wonderful."
"It is the Plains," I said. "They have simply learned how little a thing
is life."
"Yet it is sweet," she said.
"But for you, I see that you have changed again."
She spread her leather skirt down with her hands, as though to make it
longer, and looked contemplatively at the fringed leggins below.
"You were four different women," I mused, "and now you are another,
quite another."
At this she frowned a bit, and rose. "You are not to talk," she said,
"nor to think that you are well; because you are not. I must go and see
the others."
I lay back against the wagon bed, wondering in which garb she had been
most beautiful--the filmy ball dress and the mocking mask, the gray gown
and veil of the day after, the thin drapery of her hasty flight in the
night, her half conventional costume of the day before--or this, the
garb of some primeval woman. I knew I could never forget her again. The
thought gave me pain, and perhaps this showed on my face, for my eyes
followed her so that presently she turned and came back to me.
"Does the wound hurt you?" she asked. "Are you in pain?"
"Yes, Ellen Meriwether," I said, "I am in pain. I am in very great
pain."
"Oh," she cried, "I am sorry! What can we do? What do you wish? But
perhaps it will not be so bad after a while--it will be over soon."
"No, Ellen Meriwether," I said, "it will not be over soon. It will not
go away at all."