The Rustler of Wind River

by Ogden, George W

  He spoke rapidly, bending so near that his breath moved the hair on her temple. She stood with arms half lifted, her hands clenched, her breath laboring in her bosom. She did not know that love—she had not known that love—could spring up that way, and rage like a flame before a wind.

  “If you’re pledged to another man, then I’ll defy him, man to man—I do defy him, I challenge him!”

  As he spoke he stooped, suddenly, like a wind-bent flame, clasped her, kissed her, held her enfolded in his arms one moment against his breast. He released her then, and stepped back, standing tall and silent, as if he waited for her blast of scorn. It did not come. She was standing with hands pressed to her face, as if to cover some shame or sorrow, or ease the throbbing of a soul-deep pain.

  The sound of men and horses came from the corral. He stood, waiting for judgment.

  “Go now,” she said, in a sad, small voice.

  “Give me a token to carry away, to tell me I have not broken my golden hope,” he said.

  “No, I’ll give you nothing!” she declared, with the sharpness of one wronged, and helpless of redress. “You have taken too much—you have taken—”

  “What?” he asked, as if he exulted in what he heard, his blood singing in his ears.

  “Oh, go—go!” she moaned, stripping off one long white glove and throwing it to him.

  He caught it, and pressed it to his lips; then snatching off his bonnet, hid it there, and bent among the shrubbery and was gone, as swiftly and silently as a wolf. Frances flew to the house and up the stairs to her room. There she threw up the window and sat panting in it, straining, listening, for sounds from the river road.

  From below the voices of the revelers came, and the laughter over the secrets half-guessed before masks were snatched away around the banquet table. There was a dash of galloping hoofs from the corral, the clatter of the closing gate. The sound grew dimmer, was lost, in the sand of the hoof-cut trail.

  After a little, a shot! two! a silence; three! and one as if in reply. Frances slipped to her knees beside the open window, a sob as bitter as the pang of death rising from her breast. She prayed that Alan Macdonald might ride fast, and that the vindictive hands of his enemies might be unsteady that night by the gray riverside.

  * * *

  CHAPTER V

  IF HE WAS A GENTLEMAN

  “Don’t you think we’d better drop it now, Frances, and be good?”

  Major King reined his horse near hers as he spoke, and laid his hand on the pommel of her saddle as if he expected to meet other fingers there.

  “You puzzle me, Major King,” she returned, not willing to understand.

  They were bringing up the rear of the tired procession which was returning to the post from the ball. Already the east was quickening. The stars near the horizon were growing pale; the morning wind was moving, with a warmth in it from the low places, like a tide toward the mountains.

  “Oh, I mean this play acting of estrangement,” said he, impatiently. “Let’s forget it—it doesn’t carry naturally with either you or me.”

  “Why, Major King!” Her voice was lively with mild surprise; she was looking at him as if for verification of his words. Then, slowly: “I hadn’t thought of any estrangement, I hadn’t intended to bring you to task for one flirtatious night. Be sure, sir, if it has given you pleasure, it has brought me no pain.”

  “You began it,” said he, petulantly. It is almost unbelievable how boyishly silly a full-grown man can be.

  “I began it, Major King? It’s too early in the morning for a joke!”

  “You were wilful and contrary; you would speak to the fellow that day.”

  “Oh!” deprecatingly.

  “Never mind it, though. Wilfulness doesn’t become either of us, Frances. I’ve tried my turn at it tonight, and it has left me cold.”

  “Poor man!” said she, in low voice, like a sigh. Perhaps it was not all for Major King; perhaps not all assumed.

  “Let’s not quarrel, Frances.”

  “Not now, I’m too tired for a real good one. Leave it for tomorrow.”

  He rode on in silence, not sure, maybe, how much of it she meant. Covertly she looked at him now and then, thinking better of him for his ingenuous confession of failure to warm himself at little Nola Chadron’s heart-flame. She extended her hand.

  “Forgive me, Major King,” she said, very softly, not far removed, indeed, from tenderness.

  For a little while Major King left his horse to keep the road its own way, his cavalry hands quite regardless of manuals, regulations, and military airs. Both of them were enfolding her one. He might have held it until they reached the post, but that she drew it away.

  There were some qualms of uneasiness in her breast that hour, some upbraidings of conscience for treason to Major King, of whom she had been girlishly fond, girlishly proud, womanly selfish. That quick, wild scene in the garden was not to be put away for all those arraignments of her honest heart, although it seemed impossible, recalled there in the thin hours of that long and eventful night, like something remembered of another, not of herself.

  Her cheeks grew hot, her heart leaped again, at the recollection of that strong man’s wild, bold words, his defiant kiss upon her lips. She had yielded them in the recklessness of that moment, in the force of his all-carrying demand, when she might have denied them, or sped away from him, as innocence is believed to know from instinct when to fly from a destructive lure.

  Closing her eyes against the gray-creeping morning, she saw him again, standing that moment with her glove to his lips; saw him bend and speed away, the cunning of his hunted ancestors in his swift feet and self-eliminating form. A wild fear struck her, a cold dread fell like ashes into her heart, as she wondered how well he had ridden that night, and how far.

  Perhaps he was lying in his blood that hour, never to come back to her again. Yet, why should it matter so much to her? Only that it was a gallant life gone out, whatever its faults had been; only the interest that she might have in any man who had danced with her, and told her his story, and spoken of his designs. So she said, confessing with the same breath that it was a poor, self-deluding lie.

  Back again in her home at the post, the day awake around her, reveille sounding in the barracks, she turned the key in her door as if to shut the secret in with her, and bent beneath the strain of her long suspense. She no longer tried to conceal, or to deny to her own heart, the love she bore that man, which had come so suddenly, and so fiercely sweet.

  No longer past than the evening before her heart had ached with jealous pain over the little triumph that Nola Chadron had thought she was making of Major King. Now Nola might have Major King, and all the world beside that her little head might covet. There was no reservation in the surrender that she made of him in her conscience, no regret.

  She reproached herself for it in one breath, and glowed with a strange new gladness the next, clasping the great secret fearfully in her breast, in the world-old delusion that she had come into possession of a treasure uniquely and singularly her own. One thing she understood plainly now; she never had loved Major King. What a revolution it was to overturn a life’s plans thus in a single night! thought she.

  How easily we are astounded by the eruptions in our own affairs, and how disciplined in the end to find that the foundations of the world have withstood the shock!

  Chadron himself had not gone out after Macdonald. He had been merry among his guests long after the shots had sounded up the river. Frances believed that the old man had put the matter into the hands of his cowboys and ranch foreman, having no sons, no near male relatives of his own in that place. She did not know how many had gone in pursuit of Macdonald, but several horses were in the party which rode out of the gate. None had returned, she was certain, at the time the party dispersed. The chase must have led them far.

  There was no way of knowing what the result of that race had been. If he had escaped, Frances believed that he would let her know in some
way; if he had fallen, she knew that the news of his death, important as it would be to Chadron, would fly as if it had wings. There was nothing to do but wait, and in any event hide away that warm sweet thing that had unfolded in beautiful florescence in her soul.

  She told herself that he must have escaped, or the pursuers would have returned long before the party from the post left the Chadron house. He had led them a long ride in his daring way, and doubtless was laughing at them now in his own house, among his friends. She wondered what his surroundings were, and what his life was like on that ranch for which he risked it. In the midst of this speculation she fell asleep, and lay wearily in dreamless repose for many hours.

  Sleep is a marvelous clarifier of the mind. It is like the saleratus which the pioneers used to cast into their barrels of Missouri River water, to precipitate the silt and make it clear. Frances rose out of her sleep with readjusted reasoning; in fear, and in doubt.

  She was shocked by the surrender that she had made to that unknown man. Perhaps he was nothing more than a thief, as charged, and this story fixing his identification had been only a fabrication. An honest man would have had no necessity for such haste, such wild insistence of his right to love her. It seemed, in the light of due reflection, the rude way of an outlawed hand.

  Then there came the soft pleading of something deeper to answer for Alan Macdonald, and to justify his rash deed. He had risked life to see her and set himself right in her eyes, and he had doubled the risk in standing there in the garden, defiantly proud, unbent, and unrepentant, refusing to leave her without some favor to carry away.

  There was only a sigh to answer it, after all; only a hope that time would bring her neither shame nor regret for that romantic passage in the dusky garden path. That she had neither shame nor regret in that hour was her sweetest consolation. More, she was comfortable in the security that the secret of that swift interlude was her own. Honest man or thief, Alan Macdonald was not the man to speak of that.

  Frances was surprised to find that she had slept into the middle of the afternoon. Major King had called an hour ago, with inquiries, the maid reported. There! that must be the major’s ring again—she hoped she might know it by this time, indeed. In case it was the major, would miss—

  Yes; miss would see him. Ask him to wait. The maid’s ear was true; it was the major’s ring. She came bounding upstairs to report on it, her breath short, her eyes big.

  “Oh, miss! I think something must ’a’ happened to him, he looks all shook!” she said.

  “Nonsense!” said Frances, a little flutter of apprehension, indefinable, cold, passing through her nerves in spite of her bearing and calm face.

  Major King had remained standing, waiting her. He was handsome and trim in his uniform, dark-eyed, healthy-skinned, full of the vigor of his young manhood. The major’s face was pale, his carriage stiff and severe. He appeared as if something might have happened to him, indeed, or to somebody in whom he was deeply concerned.

  Frances knew that her face was a picture of the worriment and straining of her past night, for it was a treacherous mirror of her soul. She smiled as she made a little pause in the reception-room door. Major King bowed, with formal, almost official, dignity. His hand was in the bosom of his coat, and he drew it forth with something white in it as she approached.

  “I’m dreadfully indolent to belong to a soldiering family, Major King,” she said, offering her hand in greeting.

  “Permit me,” said he, placing the folded white thing in her outstretched fingers.

  “What is it? Not—it isn’t—” she stammered, something deeper than surprise, than foreboding, in her eyes and colorless cheeks.

  “Unmistakably yours,” he said; “your name is stamped in it.”

  “It must be,” she owned, her spirits sinking low, her breath weak between her lips. “Thank you, Major King.”

  The glove was soiled with earth-marks; it was wrinkled and drawn, as if it had come back to her through conflict and tragedy. She rolled it deliberately, in a compact little wad, her fingers as cold as her hope for the life of the man who had borne it away. She knew that Major King was waiting for a word; she was conscious of his stern eyes upon her face. But she did not speak. As far as Major King’s part in it went, the matter was at an end.

  “Miss Landcraft, I am waiting.”

  Major King spoke with imperious suggestion. She started, and looked toward him quickly, a question in her eyes.

  “I sha’n’t keep you then,” she returned, her words little more than a whisper.

  “Don’t try to read a misunderstanding into my words,” said he, his voice shaking. Then he seemed to break his stiff, controlled pose as if it had been a coating of ice, and expand into a trembling, white-hot man in a moment. “God’s name, girl! Say something, say something! You know where that glove was found?”

  “No; and I shall not ask you, Major King.”

  “But I demand of you to know how it came in that man’s possession! Tell me that—tell me!”

  He stood before her, very near to her. His hands were shaking, his eyes gleaming with fury.

  “I might ask you with as much reason how it came in yours,” she told him, resentful of his angry demand.

  “A messenger arrived with it an hour ago.”

  “For you, Major King?”

  “For me, certainly.”

  She had no need to ask him whence the messenger came. She could see the horsemen returning to the ranchhouse by the river in the gray morning light, in the triumph of their successful hunt. Alan Macdonald had fallen. It had been Nola’s hand that had dispatched this evidence of what she could but guess to be the disloyalty of Frances to her betrothed. If Nola had hoped to make a case with the major, Frances felt she had succeeded better than she knew.

  “Then there is nothing more to be said, Major King,” said she, after a little wait.

  “There is much more,” he insisted. “Tell me that he snatched the glove from you, tell me that you lost it—tell me anything, and I’ll believe you—but tell me something!”

  “There is nothing to tell you,” said she, resentful of the meddling of Nola Chadron, which his own light conduct with her had in a manner justified.

  “Then I can only imagine the truth,” he told her, bitterly. “But surely you didn’t give him the glove, surely you cannot love that wolf of the range, that cattle thief, that murderer!”

  “You have no right to ask me that,” she said, flashing with resentment.

  “I have a right to ask you that, to ask you more; not only to ask, but to demand. And you must answer. You forget that you are my affianced wife.”

  “But you are not my confessor, for all that.”

  “God’s name!” groaned King, his teeth set, his eyes staring as if he had gone mad. “Will you shame us both? Do you forget you are my affianced wife?”

  “That is ended—you are free!”

  “Frances!” he cried, sharply, as in despair of one sinking, whom he was powerless to save.

  “It is at an end between us, Major King. My ‘necessity’ of explaining everything, or anything, to you is wiped away, your responsibility for my acts relieved. Lift your head, sir. You need not blush before the world for me!”

  Sweat was springing on the major’s forehead; he drew his breath through open lips.

  “I refuse to humor your caprice—you are irresponsible, you don’t know what you are doing,” he declared. “You are forcing the issue to this point, Frances, I haven’t demanded this.”

  “You have demanded too much. You may go now, Major King.”

  “It’s only the infatuation of a moment. You can’t care for a man like that, Frances,” he argued, shaken out of his passion by her determined stand.

  “This is not a matter for discussion between you and me, sir.”

  Major King bowed his head as if the rebuke had crushed him. She stood aside to let him pass. When he reached the door she turned to him. He paused, expectantly, hopefully, as i
f he felt that a reconciliation was dawning.

  “If it hadn’t been for you they wouldn’t have discovered him last night,” she charged. “You betrayed him to his enemies. Can you tell me, then—will you tell me—is Alan Macdonald—dead?”

  Major King stood, his stern eyes on the glove, unrolled again, now dangling in her hand.

  “If he was a gentleman, as you said of him once, then he is dead,” said he.

  He turned and left her. She did not look after him, but stood with the soiled glove spread in her hands, gazing upon it in sad tenderness.

  * * *

  CHAPTER VI

  A BOLD CIVILIAN

  Colonel Landcraft was a slight man, and short of stature for a soldierly figure when out of the saddle. His gray hair was thinning in front, and his sharp querulous face was seamed in frowning pattern about the eyes. His forehead was fashioned on an intention of massiveness out of keeping with his tapering face, which ran out in a disappointing chin, and under the shadow of that projecting brow his cold blue eyes seemed as unfriendly as a winter sky.

  Early in his soldiering days the colonel had felt the want of inches and pounds, a shortage which he tried to overcome by carrying himself pulled up stiffly, giving him a strutting effect that had fastened upon him and become inseparable from his mien. This air of superior brusqueness was sharpened by the small fierceness of his visage, in which his large iron-gray mustache branched like horns.

  Smallness of stature, disappointment in his ambition for preferment, and a natural narrowness of soul, had turned Colonel Landcraft into a military martinet of the most pronounced character. He was the grandfather of colonels in the service, rank won in the old Indian days. That he was not a brigadier-general was a circumstance puzzling only to himself. He was a man of small bickerings, exactions, forms. He fussed with civilians as a regular thing when in command of posts within the precincts of civilization, and to serve under him, as officer or man, was a chafing and galling experience.