Of course there was the exception of Nola Chadron, but she was not of Meander and the railroad’s end, and she came only in flashes of summer brightness, like a swift, gay bird. But when Nola was at the ranchhouse on the river the gloom lifted over the post, and the sour leaven in the hearts of unmarried officers became as sweet as manna in the cheer of the unusual social outlet thus provided.
Nola kept the big house in a blaze of joy while she nested there through the summer days. The sixteen miles which stretched between it and the post ran out like a silver band before those who rode into the smile of her welcome, and when she flitted away to Cheyenne, champagne, and silk hats in the autumn, a grayness hovered again over the military post in the corner of the reservation.
Later than usual Nola had lingered on this fall, and the social outlet had remained open, like a navigable river over which the threat of ice hung but had not yet fallen. There were not lacking those who held that the lodestone which kept her there at the ranchhouse, when the gaieties of the season beckoned elsewhere, was in the breast of Major Cuvier King. Fatal infatuation, said the married ladies at the post, knowing, as everybody knew in the service, that Major King was betrothed to Frances Landcraft, the colonel’s daughter.
No matter for any complications which might come of it, Nola had remained on, and the major had smiled on her, and ridden with her, and cut high capers in the dance, all pending the return of Frances and her mother from their summering at Bar Harbor in compliance with the family traditions. Now Frances was back again, and fortune had thrown a sunburst of beauty into the post by centering her and Nola here at once. Nola was the guest of the colonel’s daughter, and there were flutterings in uniformed breasts.
Beef day was an event at the agency which never grew old to the people at the post. Without beef day they must have dwindled off to acidulous shadows, as the Indians who depended upon it for more solid sustenance would have done in the event of its discontinuation by a paternal government.
There were phases of Indian life and character which one never saw save on beef day, which fell on Wednesday of each week. Guests at the post watched the bright picture with the keen interest of a pageant on the stage; tourists came over by stage from Meander in the summer months by the score to be present; the resident officers, and their wives and families—such as had them—found in it an ever-recurring source of interest and relief from the tedium of days all alike.
This beef day, the morning following the meeting between Saul Chadron and his mysterious guest, a chattering group stood on the veranda of Colonel Landcraft’s house in the bright friendly sun. They were waiting for horses to make the short journey to the agency—for one’s honesty was questioned, his sanity doubted, if he went afoot in that country even a quarter of a mile—and gayest among them was Nola Chadron, the sun in her fair, springing hair.
Nola’s crown reached little higher than a proper soldier’s heart, but what she lacked in stature she supplied in plastic perfection of body and vivacity of face. There was a bounding joyousness of life in her; her eager eyes reflecting only the anticipated pleasures of today. There was no shadow of yesterday’s regret in them, no cloud of tomorrow’s doubt.
On the other balance there was Frances Landcraft, taller by half a head, soldierly, too, as became her lineage, in the manner of lifting her chin in what seemed a patrician scorn of small things such as a lady should walk the world unconscious of. The brown in her hair was richer than the clear agate of her eyes; it rippled across her ear like the scroll of water upon the sand.
There was a womanly dignity about her, although the threshold of girlhood must not have been far behind her that bright autumnal morning. Her nod was equal to a stave of Nola’s chatter, her smile worth a league of the light laughter from that bounding little lady’s lips. Not that she was always so silent as on that morning, there among the young wives of the post, at her own guest’s side. She had her hours of overflowing spirits like any girl, but in some company she was always grave.
When Major King was in attendance, especially, the seeing ones made note. And there were others, too, who said that she was by nature a colonel among women, haughty, cold and aloof. These wondered how the major ever had made headway with her up to the point of gaining her hand. Knowing ones smiled at that, and said it had been arranged.
There were ambitions on both sides of that match, it was known—ambition on the colonel’s part to secure his only child a station of dignity, and what he held to be of consequence above all achievements in the world. Major King was a rising man, with two friends in the cabinet. It was said that he would be a brigadier-general before he reached forty.
On the major’s side, was the ambition to strengthen his political affiliations by alliance with a family of patrician strain, together with the money that his bride would bring, for Colonel Landcraft was a weighty man in this world’s valued accumulations. So the match had been arranged.
The veranda of the colonel’s house gave a view of the parade grounds and the long avenue that came down between the officers’ houses, cottonwoods lacing their limbs above the road. There was green in the lawns, the flash of flowers between the leaves and shrubs, white-gleaming walls, trim walks, shorn hedges. It seemed a pleasant place of quiet beauty that bright September morning, and a pity to give it up by and by to dust and desolation; a place where men and women might be happy, but for the gnawing fire of ambition in their hearts.
Mrs. Colonel Landcraft was not going. Indians made her sick, she said, especially Indians sitting around in the tall grass waiting for the carcasses to be cut up and apportioned out to them in bloody chunks. But there seemed to be another source of her sickness that morning, measuring by the grave glances with which she searched her daughter’s face. She wondered whether the major and Frances had quarreled; and if so, whether Nola Chadron had been the cause.
They were off, with the colonel and a lately-assigned captain in the lead. There was a keener pleasure in this beef day than usual for the colonel, for he had new ground to sow with its wonders, which were beginning to pale in his old eyes which had seen so much of the world.
“Very likely we’ll see the minister’s wife there,” said he, as they rode forward, “and if so, it will be worth your while to take special note of her. St. John Mathews, the Episcopalian minister over there at the mission—those white buildings there among the trees—is a full-blooded Crow. One of the pioneer missionaries took him up and sent him back East to school, where in time he entered the ministry and married this white girl. She was a college girl, I’ve been told, glamoured by the romance of Mathews’ life. Well, it was soon over.”
The colonel sighed, and fell silent. The captain, feeling that it was intended that he should, made polite inquiry.
“The trouble is that Mathews is an Indian out of his place,” the colonel resumed. “He returned here twenty years or so ago, and took up his work among his people. But as he advanced toward civilization, his wife began to slip back. Little by little she adopted the Indian ways and dress, until now you couldn’t tell her from a squaw if you were to meet her for the first time. She presents a curious psychological study—or perhaps biological example of atavism, for I believe there’s more body than soul in the poor creature now. It’s nature maintaining the balance, you see. He goes up; she slips back.
“If she’s there, she’ll be squatting among the squaws, waiting to carry home her husband’s allotment of warm, bloody beef. She doesn’t have to do it, and it shames and humiliates Mathews, too, even though they say she cuts it up and divides it among the poorer Indians. She’s a savage; her eyes sparkle at the sight of red meat.”
They rounded the agency buildings and came upon an open meadow in which the slaughterhouses stood at a distance from the road. Here, in the grassy expanse, the Indians were gathered, waiting the distribution of the meat. The scene was barbarically animated. Groups of women in their bright dresses sat here and there on the grass, and apart from them in gravity waited old men
in moccasins and blankets and with feathers in their hair. Spry young men smoked cigarettes and talked volubly, garbed in the worst of civilization and the most useless of savagery.
One and all they turned their backs upon the visitors, the nearest groups and individuals moving away from them with the impassive dignity of their race. There is more scorn in an Indian squaw’s back, turned to an impertinent stranger, than in the faces of six matrons of society’s finest-sifted under similar conditions.
Colonel Landcraft led his party across the meadow, entirely unconscious of the cold disdain of the people whom he looked down upon from his superior heights. He could not have understood if any there had felt the trespass from the Indians’ side—and there was one, very near and dear to the colonel who felt it so—and attempted to explain. The colonel very likely would have puffed up with military consequence almost to the bursting-point.
Feeling, delicacy, in those smeared, smelling creatures! Surliness in excess they might have, but dignity, not at all. Were they not there as beggars to receive bounty from the government’s hand?
“Oh, there’s Mrs. Mathews!” said Nola, with the eagerness of a child who has found a quail’s nest in the grass. She was off at an angle, like a hunter on the scent. Colonel Landcraft and his guest followed with equal rude eagerness, and the others swept after them, Frances alone hanging back. Major King was at Nola’s side. If he noted the lagging of his fiancée he did not heed.
The minister’s wife, a shawl over her head, her braided hair in front of her shoulders like an Indian woman, rose from her place in startled confusion. She looked as if she would have fled if an avenue had been open, or a refuge presented. The embarrassed creature was obliged to stand in their curious eyes, and stammer in a tongue which seemed to be growing strange to her from its uncommon use.
She was a short woman, growing heavy and shapeless now, and there was gray in her black hair. Her skin was browned by sun, wind, and smoke to the hue of her poor neighbors and friends. When she spoke in reply to the questions which poured upon her, she bent her head like a timid girl.
Frances checked her horse and remained behind, out of range of hearing. She was cut to the heart with shame for her companions, and her cheek burned with the indignation that she suffered with the harried woman in their midst. A little Indian girl came flying past, ducking and dashing under the neck of Frances’ horse, in pursuit of a piece of paper which the wind whirled ahead of her. At Frances’ stirrup she caught it, and held it up with a smile.
“Did you lose this, lady?” she asked, in the very best of mission English.
“No,” said Frances, bending over to see what it might be. The little girl placed it in her hand and scurried away again to a beckoning woman, who stood on her knees and scowled over her offspring’s dash into the ways of civilized little girls.
It was a narrow strip of paper that she had rescued from the wind, with the names of several men written on it in pencil, and at the head of the list the name of Alan Macdonald. Opposite that name some crude hand had entered, with pen that had flowed heavily under his pressure, the figures “$500.”
Frances turned it round her finger and sat waiting for the others to leave off their persecution of the minister’s wife and come back to her, wondering in abstracted wandering of mind who Alan Macdonald might be, and for what purpose he had subscribed the sum of five hundred dollars.
“I think she’s the most romantic little thing in the world!” Nola was declaring, in her extravagant surface way as they returned to where Frances sat her horse, her wandering eyes on the blue foothills, the strip of paper prominent about her finger. “Oh, honey! what’s the matter? Did you cut your finger?”
“No,” said Frances, her serious young face lighting with a smile, “it’s a little subscription list, or something, that somebody lost. Alan Macdonald heads it for five hundred dollars. Do you know Alan Macdonald, and what his charitable purpose may be?”
Nola tossed her head with a contemptuous sniff.
“They call him the ‘king of the rustlers’ up the river,” said she.
“Oh, he is a man of consequence, then?” said Frances, a quickening of humor in her brown eyes, seeing that Nola was up on her high horse about it.
“We’d better be going down to the slaughter-house if we want to see the fun,” bustled the colonel, wheeling his horse. “I see a movement setting in that way.”
“He’s just a common thief!” declared Nola, with flushed cheek and resentful eye, as Frances fell in beside her for the march against the abattoir.
Frances still carried the paper twisted about her finger, reserving her judgment upon Alan Macdonald, for she knew something of the feuds of that hard-speaking land.
“Anyway, I suppose he’d like to have his paper back,” she suggested. “Will you hand it to him the next time you meet him?”
Frances was entirely grave about it, although it was only a piece of banter which she felt that Nola would appreciate. But Nola was not in an appreciative mood, for she was a full-blooded daughter of the baronial rule. She jerked her head like a vicious bronco and reined hurriedly away from Frances as she extended the paper.
“I’ll not touch the thing!” said Nola, fire in her eyes.
Major King was enjoying the passage between the girls, riding at Nola’s side with his cavalry hands held precisely.
“If I’m not mistaken, the gentleman in question is there talking to Miller, the agent,” said he, nodding toward two horsemen a little distance ahead. “But I wouldn’t excite him, Miss Landcraft, if I were you. He’s said to be the quickest and deadliest man with a weapon on this range.”
Major King smiled over his own pleasantry. Frances looked at Nola with brows lifted inquiringly, as if waiting her verification. Then the grave young lady settled back in her saddle and laughed merrily, reaching across and touching her friend’s arm in conciliating caress.
“Oh, you delightful little savage!” she said. “I believe you’d like to take a shot at poor Mr. Macdonald yourself.”
“We never start anything on the reservation,” Nola rejoined, quite seriously.
Miller, the Indian agent, rode away and left Macdonald sitting there on his horse as the military party approached. He spurred up to meet the colonel, and to present his respects to the ladies—a hard matter for a little round man with a tight paunch, sitting in a Mexican saddle. The party halted, and Frances looked across at Macdonald, who seemed to be waiting for Miller to rejoin him.
Macdonald was a supple, sinewy man, as he appeared across the few rods intervening. His coat was tied with his slicker at the cantle of his saddle, his blue flannel shirt was powdered with the white dust of the plain. Instead of the flaring neckerchief which the cowboys commonly favored, Macdonald wore a cravat, the ends of it tucked into the bosom of his shirt, and in place of the leather chaps of men who ride breakneck through brush and bramble, his legs were clad in tough brown corduroys, and fended by boots to his knees. There were revolvers in the holsters at his belt.
Not an unusual figure for that time and place, but something uncommon in the air of unbending severity that sat on him, which Frances felt even at that distance. He looked like a man who had a purpose in his life, and who was living it in his own brave way. If he was a cattle thief, as charged, thought she, then she would put her faith against the world that he was indeed a master of his trade.
They were talking around Miller, who was going to give them places of vantage for the coming show. Only Frances and Major King were left behind, where she had stopped her horse to look curiously across at Alan Macdonald, king of the rustlers, as he was called.
“It may not be anything at all to him, and it may be something important,” said Frances, reaching out the slip to Major King. “Would you mind handing it to him, and explaining how it came into my hands?”
“I’ll not have anything to do with the fellow!” said the major, flushing hotly. “How can you ask such a thing of me? Throw it away, it’s no concern
of yours—the memorandum of a cattle thief!”
Frances drew herself straight. Her imperious chin was as high as Major King ever had carried his own in the most self-conscious moment of his military career.
“Will you take it to him?” she demanded.
“Certainly not!” returned the major, haughtily emphatic. Then, softening a little, “Don’t be silly, Frances; what a row you make over a scrap of blowing paper!”
“Then I’ll take it myself!”
“Miss Landcraft!”
“Major King!”
It was the steel of conventionality against the flint of womanly defiance. Major King started in his saddle, as if to reach out and restrain her. It was one of those defiantly foolish little things which women and men—especially women—do in moments of pique, and Frances knew it at the time. But she rode away from the major with a hot flush of insubordination in her cheeks, and Alan Macdonald quickened from his pensive pose when he saw her coming.
His hand went to his hat when her intention became unmistakable to him. She held the little paper out toward him while still a rod away.
“A little Indian girl gave me this; she found it blowing along—they tell me you are Mr. Macdonald,” she said, her face as serious as his own. “I thought it might be a subscription list for a church, or something, and that you might want it.”
“Thank you, Miss Landcraft,” said he, his voice low-modulated, his manner easy.
Her face colored at the unexpected way of this man without a coat, who spoke her name with the accent of refinement, just as if he had known her, and had met her casually upon the way.
“I have seen you a hundred times at the post and the agency,” he explained, to smooth away her confusion. “I have seen you from afar.”
“Oh,” said she, as lame as the word was short.
He was scanning the written paper. Now he looked at her, a smile waking in his eyes. It moved in slow illumination over his face, but did not break his lips, pressed in their stern, strong line. She saw that his long hair was light, and that his eyes were gray, with sandy brows over them which stood on end at the points nearest his nose, from a habit of bending them in concentration, she supposed, as he had been doing but a moment before he smiled.
The Rustler of Wind River Page 2
