The Rustler of Wind River

by Ogden, George W

  If ever there was an unpopular man in the service, then that man was Colonel John Hancock Landcraft, direct descendant—he could figure it out as straight as a bayonet—of the heavy-handed signer himself. His years and his empty desires bore heavily on the colonel. The trespass of time he resented; the barrenness of his hope he grieved.

  There he was in those Septembral days, galloping along toward the age limit and retirement. Within a few weeks he would be subject to call before the retiring board any day, and there was nothing in his short-remaining time of service to shore up longer the hope of advancement in rank as compensatory honor in his retirement. He was a testy little old man, charged for instant explosion, and it was generally understood by everybody but the colonel himself that the department had sent him off to Fort Shakie to get him out of the way.

  On the afternoon of the day following Nola Chadron’s ball, when Major King returned to Frances the glove that Alan Macdonald had carried away from the garden, Colonel Landcraft was a passenger on the mail stage from Meander to the post. The colonel had been on official business to the army post at Cheyenne. Instead of telegraphing to his own post the intelligence of his return, and calling for a proper equipage to meet him at the railroad end, he had chosen to come back in this secret and unexpected way.

  That was true to the colonel’s manner. Perhaps he hoped to catch somebody overstepping the line of decorum, regulations, forms, either in the conduct of the post’s business or his own household. For the colonel was as much a tyrant in one place as the other. So he eliminated himself, wrapped to the bushy eyebrows in his greatcoat, for there was a chilliness in the afternoon, and clouds were driving over the sun.

  His austerity silenced the talkative driver, and when the stage reached the hotel the colonel parted from him without a word and clicked away briskly on his military heels—built up to give him stature—to see what he might surprise out of joint at the post.

  Perhaps it was a shock to his valuation of his own indispensability to find everything in proper form at the post. The sentry paced before the flagstaff, decorum prevailed. There was not one small particular loose to give him ground for flying at the culpable person and raking him with his blistering fire.

  Colonel Landcraft turned into his own house with a countenance somewhat fallen as a consequence of this discovery. It seemed to bear home to him the fact that the United States Army would get along very neatly and placidly without him.

  The colonel occupied one wing of his sprawling, commodious, and somewhat impressive house as official headquarters. This room was full of stiff bookcases, letter files, severe chairs. The colonel’s desk stood near the fireplace in a strong light, with nothing ever unfinished left upon it. It was one of the colonel’s greatest satisfactions in life that he always was ready to snap down the cover of that desk at a moment’s notice and march away upon a campaign to the world’s end—and his own—leaving everything clear behind him.

  A private walk led up to a private door in the colonel’s quarters, where a private in uniform, with a rifle on his shoulder, made a formal parade when the colonel was within, and accessible to the military world for the transaction of business. This sentinel was not on duty now, the return of the colonel being unlooked-for, and nobody was the wiser in that household when the master of it let himself into the room with his key.

  The day was merging into dusk, or the colonel probably would have been aware that a man was hastening after him along the leaf-strewn walk as he passed up the avenue to his home. He was not many rods behind the colonel, and was gaining on him rapidly, when the crabbed old gentleman closed his office door softly behind him.

  The unmilitary visitor—this fact was betrayed by both his gait and his dress—turned sharply in upon the private walk and followed the colonel to his door. He was turning through the letters and telegrams which had arrived during his absence when the visitor laid hand to the bell.

  No sound of ringing followed this application to the thumbscrew arrangement on the door, for the colonel had taken the bell away long ago. But there resulted a clucking, which brought the colonel to the portal frowning and alert, warming in the expectation of having somebody whom he might dress down at last.

  “Colonel Landcraft, I beg the favor of a word in private,” said the stranger at the door.

  The colonel opened the door wider, and peered sharply at the visitor, a frown gathering on his unfriendly face.

  “I haven’t the honor”—he began stiffly, seeing that it was an inferior civilian, for all civilians, except the president, were inferior to the colonel.

  “Macdonald is my name. I am a rancher in this country; you will have heard of me,” the visitor replied.

  “Nothing to your credit, young man,” said the colonel, tartly. “What do you want?”

  “A man’s chance,” said Macdonald, earnestly. “Will you let me explain?”

  Colonel Landcraft stood out of the doorway; Macdonald entered.

  “I’ll make a light,” said the colonel, lowering the window-shades before he struck the match. When he had the flame of the student’s lamp on top of his desk regulated to conform to his exactions, the colonel faced about suddenly.

  “I am listening, sir.”

  “At the beginning, sir, I want you to know who I am,” said Macdonald, producing papers. “My father, Senator Hampden Macdonald of Maine, now lives in Washington. You have heard of him. I am Alan Macdonald, late of the United States consular service. It is unlikely that you ever heard of me in that connection.”

  “I never heard of you before I came here,” said the colonel, unfavorably, unfolding the credentials which the visitor had placed on his desk, and skimming them with cursory eye. Now he looked up from his reading with a sudden little jerk of the head, and stood at severe attention. “And the purpose of this visit, sir?”

  “First, to prove to you that the notorious character given me by the cattlemen of this country is slanderous and unwarranted; secondly, to ask you to give me a man’s chance, as I have said, in a matter to which I shall come without loss of words. I am a gentleman, and the son of a gentleman; I do not acknowledge any moral or social superiors in this land.”

  The colonel, drew himself up a notch, and seemed to grow a little at that. He looked hard at the tall, fair-haired, sober-faced man in front of him, as if searching out his points to justify the bold claim upon respectability that he had made. Macdonald was dressed in almost military precision; the colonel could find no fault with that. His riding-breeches told that they had been cut for no other legs, his coat set to his shoulders with gentlemanly ease. Only his rather greasy sombrero, with its weighty leather band, and the bulging revolvers under his coat seemed out of place in the general trimness of his attire.

  “Go on, sir,” the colonel said.

  “I had the honor of meeting Miss Landcraft last night at the masquerade given by Miss Chadron—”

  “How was that, sir? Did you have the effrontery to force yourself into a company which despises you, at the risk of your life and the decorum of the assemblage?”

  “I was drawn there,” Macdonald spoke slowly, meeting the colonel’s cold eye with steady gaze, “by a hope that was miraculously realized. I did risk my life, and I almost lost it. But that is nothing unusual—I risk it every day.”

  “You saw Miss Landcraft at the ball, danced with her, I suppose, talked with her,” nodded the colonel, understandingly. “Macdonald, you are a bold, a foolishly bold, man.”

  “I saw Miss Landcraft, I danced with her, I talked with her, and I have come to you, sir, after a desperate ride through the night to save my life as the penalty of those few minutes of pleasure, to request the privilege of calling upon Miss Landcraft and paying my court to her. I ask you to give me a man’s chance to win her hand.”

  The audacity of the request almost tied the colonel’s sharp old tongue. For a moment he stood with his mouth open, his face red in the gathering storm of his sudden passion.

  “Sir!”
said he, in amazed, unbelieving voice.

  “There are my credentials—they will bear investigation,” Macdonald said.

  “Damn your credentials, sir! I’ll have nothing to do with them, you blackguard, you scoundrel!”

  “I ask you to consider—”

  “I can consider nothing but the present fact that you are accused of deeds of outlawry and violence, and are an outcast of society, even the crude society of this wild country, sir. No matter who you are or whence you sprung, the evidence in this country is against you. You are a brigand and a thief, sir—this act of barbaric impetuosity in itself condemns you—no civilized man would have the effrontery to force himself into my presence in such a manner and make this insane demand.”

  “I am exercising a gentleman’s prerogative, Colonel Landcraft.”

  “You are a vulture aspiring to soar among eagles, sir!”

  “You have heard only the cattlemen’s side of the story, Colonel Landcraft,” said Macdonald, with patience and restraint. “You know that every man who attempts to build a fence around his cabin in this country, and strikes a furrow in the ground, is a rustler according to their creed.”

  “I am aware that there is narrowness, injustice even, on the drovers’ side,” the colonel admitted, softening a little, it seemed. “But for all that, even if you were an equal, and an honest man, the road to Miss Landcraft’s heart is closed to assault, no matter how wild and sudden. She is plighted to another man.”

  “Sir—”

  “It is true; she will be married in the Christmas holidays. Go your way now, Macdonald, and dismiss this romantic dream. You build too high on the slight favor of a thoughtless girl. A dance or two is nothing, sir; a whispered word is less. If you were the broad man of the world that you would have me believe, you have known this. Instead, you come dashing in here like a savage and claim the right to woo her. Preposterous! She is beyond your world, sir. Go back to your wild riding, Macdonald, and try to live an honest man.”

  Macdonald stood with his head bent, brows gathered in stubborn expression of resistance. Colonel Landcraft could read in his face that there was no surrender, no acknowledgment of defeat, in that wild rider’s heart. The old warrior felt a warming of admiration for him, as one brave man feels for another, no matter what differences lie between them. Now Macdonald lifted his face, and there was that deep movement of laughter in his eyes that Frances had found so marvelous on the day of their first meeting.

  “Perhaps her heart is untouched, sir, in spite of the barricade that has been raised between it and the world,” he said.

  The colonel studied him shrewdly a little while before replying.

  “Macdonald, you’re a strange man, a stubborn man, and a strong one. There is work for a man like you in this life; why are you wasting it here?”

  “If I live six months longer the world beyond these mountains will know,” was all that Macdonald said, taking up the papers which he had submitted to the colonel, and placing them again in his pocket.

  Colonel Landcraft shook his head doubtfully.

  “Running off other men’s cattle never will do it, Macdonald.”

  The door of the colonel’s room which gave into the hall of the main entrance opened without the formality of announcement. Frances drew back in quick confusion, speaking her apology from behind the door.

  “I ask your pardon, father. I heard voices here and wondered who it could be—I didn’t know you had come home.”

  “Your appearance is opportune, Miss Landcraft,” her father told her, with no trace of ill-humor. “Come in. Here is this wild Alan Macdonald come bursting in upon us from his hills.”

  The colonel indicated him with a wave of the hand, and Macdonald bowed, his heart shrinking when he saw how coldly she returned his greeting from her place at the door.

  “He has come riding,” the colonel continued, “with a demand on me to be allowed to woo you, and carry you off to his cave among the rocks. Show him the door, and add your testimony to my assurance—which seems inadequate to satisfy the impetuous gentleman—that his case is hopeless.”

  The colonel waved them away with that, and turned again, with his jerky suddenness, to his telegrams and letters. The colonel had not meant for Macdonald to pass out of the door through which he had entered. That was the military portal; the other one, opening into the hall from which Frances came, was the world’s door for entering that house. And it was in that direction Colonel Landcraft had waved them when he ordered Frances to take the visitor away.

  “This way, Mr. Macdonald, please,” said she, politely cold, unfeelingly formal. For all the warmth that he could discover in her voice and eyes, or in her white face, so unaccountably severe and hard, there might never have been a garden with white gravel path, or a hot hasty kiss given in it—and received.

  In the hall the gloom of evening was deepened into darkness that made her face indistinct, like the glimmering whiteness of the hydrangea blooms in that past romantic night. She marched straight to the street door and opened it, and he had no strength in his words to lift even a small one up to stay her. He believed that he had taken the man’s course and the way of honor in the matter. That it had not been indorsed by her was evident, he believed.

  “There was nothing for me to conceal,” said he, as the door opened upon the gray twilight and glooming trees along the street; “I came in a man’s way, as I thought—”

  “You came in a man’s way, Mr. Macdonald, to ask the privilege of attempting to win a woman’s hand, when you lack the man’s strength or the man’s courage to defend even the glove that covers it,” she said. Her voice was low; it was accusingly scornful.

  Macdonald started. “Then it has come back to you?”

  “It has come back to me, through a channel that I would have given the hand that wore it”—she stretched it out as she spoke; it glimmered like a nebulous star in misty skies there in the gloom before his eyes—“to have kept the knowledge from!”

  “I lost it,” said he, drawing himself up as if to withstand a blow, “and in this hour I can plead no mitigation. A man should have put his life down for it.”

  “It might have been expected—of a man,” said she.

  “But I ask you not to borrow trouble over the circumstance of its return to you, Miss Landcraft,” he said, cold now in his word, and lofty. “You dropped it on the ballroom floor or in the garden path, and I, the cattle thief, found it and carried it away, to show it as evidence of a shadowy conquest, maybe, among my wild and lawless kind. Beyond that you know nothing—you lost it, that was all.”

  In the door he turned.

  “Good-bye, Mr. Macdonald,” she said.

  “If time and events prove so unkind to me that I never come to a vindication in this country,” he said, “just go on thinking of me as a thief and a wild rider, and a man of the night. Good-bye, Miss Landcraft.”

  She closed the door, and stood cooling from her sudden resentment at seeing him there alive when her heart had told her that he must be lying dead in the dust of the river trail. She should not have been so suddenly resentful, she now believed. Perhaps there were mitigating circumstances which he would not stoop to explain unasked. Her heart bounded with the thought; warm blood came spreading in her cheeks.

  But Alan Macdonald was gone; misjudged and unjustly condemned, she now believed, remorse assailing her. Now the fault could not be repaired, for he was not the man to come back. But there was much in knowing that she had not been mistaken in the beginning; comfort and pride in the full knowledge that he was a man! Only a man would have come, bravely and sincerely, in that manner to her father; only a man would have put his hurt behind him like that and marched away from her, too proud to stoop to the mean expedient of begging her to allow him to explain.

  She sighed as she turned back into the room where the colonel sat at his desk, but her cheek was hot, her bosom agitated by an uplifting of pride. The colonel turned, with inquiring impatience, a letter in his hand.<
br />
  “He is gone,” she said.

  “Very well,” he nodded, shortly.

  “I have just come back to tell you, father, that I have broken my engagement with Major King, to—”

  “Impossible! nonsense!”

  “To save you embarrassment in your future relations with him,” she concluded, unshaken.

  The colonel was standing now; his face reflecting the anger that boiled in his breast.

  “I tell you, miss, you can’t break your engagement to Major King! That is out of your power, beyond you, entirely. It rests with me, and with me solely, to terminate any such obligation. I have pledged a soldier’s word and a soldier’s honor in this matter, miss. It is incumbent on you to see that both are redeemed.”

  “I’m in a mind to do my own thinking now, father; I’m old enough.”

  “A woman is never old enough to know her own mind! What’s the occasion of this change in the wind? Surely not—”

  Colonel Landcraft’s brows drew together over his thin nose, making small glaring points of his blue eyes among the gathered wrinkles and bristling hair. He held his words suspended while he searched her face for justification of his pent arraignment.

  “Nonsense!” said he at last, letting his breath go with the word, as if relief had come. “Put the notion out of your head, for you are going to marry Major King.”

  “I tell you, father, you must adjust yourself to my decision in this matter. I am not going to marry Major King. I have told him so, and it is final.”

  His own stubbornness, his own fire, was reflected in her as she spoke. But Colonel Landcraft was not to be moved from what he considered his right to dispose of her in a way that he believed would be an honor to the army and a glory to the nation.

  “You’ll marry Major King, or die a maid!” he declared.

  “Very well, father,” she returned, in ambiguous concession.