Major King surrendered his arms to the sergeant with a petulant, lofty shrug of his shoulders.
“I’m not through with you yet, you old cuss!” said Chadron. “I never started out to git a man but what I got him, and I’ll git you. I’ll—”
Chadron’s voice caught in his throat. He stood there looking toward the outside door, drawing his breath like a man suffocating. Stealthily his hand moved toward his revolver, while his wife and daughter, even Frances, struck by a thrill of some undefined terror, leaned and looked as Chadron was looking, toward the open door.
A tall, gaunt, dark shaggy man was standing there, an old flapping hat drooping over his scowling eyes. He was a man with a great branching mustache, and the under lid of one eye was drawn down upon his cheek in a little point, as if caught by a surgical hook and held ready for the knife; a man who bent forward from the middle, as if from long habit of skulking under cover of low-growing shrubs; an evil man, whose foul soul cried of bloody deeds through every feature of his leering face.
“Oh, that man! that man!” cried Nola, in fearful, wild scream.
Mrs. Chadron clasped her in her arms and turned her defiant face toward the man in the door. He was standing just as he had stood when they first saw him, silent, still; as grim as the shadow of Saul Chadron’s sins.
The soldiers who stood around Major King looked on with puzzled eyes; Colonel Landcraft frowned. Macdonald from his cot could not see the door, but he felt the sharp striking of those charged seconds. Chadron moved to one side a little, his fixed eyes on the man in the door, his hand nearer his revolver now; so near that his fingers touched it, and now it was in his hand with a sudden bright flash into the light.
Two shots in that quiet room, one following the other so closely that they seemed but a divided one; two shots, delivered so quickly after Nola’s awful scream that no man could whip up his shocked nerves to obedience fast enough to interpose. Saul Chadron pitched forward, his hands clutching, his arms outspread, and fell dead, his face groveling upon the floor. Outside, the soldiers lifted Mark Thorn, a bullet through his heart.
* * *
CHAPTER XXIII
TEARS IN THE NIGHT
They buried Saul Chadron next day in a corner of the garden by the river. And there was the benediction of tender autumn sunshine over the place where they laid him down, away from the turmoil of his life, and the tangle of injustices that he left behind.
But there was none to come forward and speak for the body of Mark Thorn. The cowboys hid him in the sage at the foot of a butte, as men go silently and shadow-like to bury away a shame.
There seemed to be a heart-soreness over the ranchhouse by the river as night fell upon it again. Saul Chadron had been a great and noble man to some who wept in its silent rooms as the gloaming deepened into darkness over the garden, where the last leaves of autumn were tugging at their anchorage to sail away. Even Frances Landcraft in her vigil beside Macdonald’s cot felt pity for Chadron’s fall. She regretted, at least, that he had not gone out of life more worthily.
Colonel Landcraft had gone up the river to carry a new message to the homesteaders whose houses lay in ashes. He had ridden to tell them that they could build in security and live in peace. The surgeon had returned to the post, but was coming again tomorrow. Behind him he had left the happy assurance that Macdonald would live.
Macdonald himself had added his own brave word to bear out the doctor’s prediction, as far as Frances would permit him to speak. That was not above ten words, whispered into her ear, inclined low to hear. When he attempted to go beyond that, soft warm fingers made a latch upon his lips.
Mrs. Chadron came down a little after dark, and whispered at the door. Macdonald was sleeping, and Frances went softly to tell her.
“Nola’s askin’ for you,” Mrs. Chadron told her, “she’s all heartbroke and moanin’ in her bed. If you’ll go to her, and comfort her a little, honey, I’ll take as good care of him as if he was my own.”
Frances was touched by the appeal for sympathy. She could picture Nola, little fashioned by nature or her life’s experiences to bear grief, shuddering and sobbing alone in the dark, and her heart went out to her in all its generosity and large forgivingness.
Nola’s room was dark for all except the night sky at her window. Frances stood a moment in her door, listening, believing from the silence that she must have gone to sleep.
“Nola,” she whispered, softly.
A little shivering sob was the answer. Frances went in, and closed the door. Nola was lying face downward on her pillow, like a child, and Frances found on putting out her comforting hand that the fickle little lady’s bolster was wet with tears. She sat on the bedside and tried gently to turn Nola’s face toward her. That brought on a storm of tears and moanings, and agonized burrowing of her face into the pillow.
“Oh, I feel so mean and wicked!” she cried. “If I hadn’t been so deceitful and treacherous and—and—and everything, maybe all this sorrow wouldn’t have come to us!”
Frances said nothing. She had found one hot hand, tear-wet from lying under Nola’s cheek, and this she held tenderly, feeling it best to let the tears of penitence purge the sufferer’s soul in their world-old way. After a time Nola became quieter. She shifted in the bed, and moved over to give Frances more room, and put up her arms to draw her friend down for the kiss of forgiveness which she knew would not be denied.
Afterwards she sat up in bed, and brushed her hair back from her throbbing forehead with her palms.
“Oh, it aches and aches—so!” she said.
“I’ll bind a cold towel around it, dear; that always used to ease it, you remember?”
“Not my head, Frances—my heart, my heart!”
It was better so, Frances understood. Penitence that brings only a headache is like plating over brass; it cannot long conceal the baseness of the thing that lies beneath.
“Time is the only remedy for that, Nola,” she said, her own words slow and sad.
“Do you think I’ve sinned past forgiveness because I—because—I love him?” Nola’s voice trembled with earnestness.
“He is free, to love and be loved as it may fall, Nola. I told you he was mine, but I thought then that I was claiming him from death. He will live. He never has asked me to marry him; maybe he never will. When he recovers, he may turn to you—who can tell?”
“No, it’s only you that he thinks of, Frances. When I was watching by him he opened his eyes, and you should have seen the look in them when he saw me instead of you. He struggled to sit up and look for you, and he called your name, sharp and frightened, as if he thought somebody had taken you away from him forever.”
Frances did not need that assurance to quiet any fear of his loyalty. She had spoken the truth, only because it was the truth, but not to give Nola hope. For hope she knew there was not any, nor any love, to come to Nola out of that man’s heart.
“We’ll not talk of it,” Frances said.
“I must, I can’t let anything stand between us, Frances. If I’d been fair, all the way through—but I wasn’t. I wasn’t fair about Major King, and I wasn’t fair this time. I was fool enough to think that if you were out of the way for a little while I could make him love me! He’d never love me, never in a million years!”
Frances said nothing. But she was beginning to doubt the sincerity of Nola’s repentance. There, under the shadow of her bereavement, she could think of nothing but the hopelessness of love.
“But I didn’t want you to come up just to pet me and be good to me, Frances—I wanted to give you something.”
Nola felt under her pillow, and groped for Frances’ hand, in which she placed a soft something with a stub of a feather in it.
“I have no right to keep it,” said Nola. “Do you know what it is?”
“Yes, I know.”
Much of the softness which Frances had for the highland bonnet was in her voice as she replied, and the little bonnet itself was being nestled
against her cheek, as a mother cuddles a baby’s hand.
“The best that’s in me goes out to that man,” said Nola solemnly—and truthfully, Frances knew—“but I wouldn’t take him from you now, Frances, even if I could. I don’t want to care for him, I don’t want to think of him. I just want to think of poor father lying out there under the ground.”
“It’s best for you to think of him.”
“Only a day ago he was alive and warm, like you and me, and now he’s dead! Mother never will want to leave this place again now, and I don’t feel like I want to either. I just want to lie down and die—oh, I just want to die!”
Pity for herself brought Nola’s tears gushing again, and her choking sobs into her throat. Her voice was hoarse from her lamentations; there seemed to be only sorrow for her in every theme. Frances held her shivering slim body in her supporting arm, and Nola’s face bent down upon her shoulder. It seemed that her renunciation was complete, her regeneration undeniable. But Frances knew that a great flood of tears was required to put out the fire of passion in a woman’s heart. One spark, one little spark, might live through the deluge to spring into the heat of the past under the breath of memory.
Again the heaving breast grew calm, and the tear-wet face was lifted to shake back the fallen hair.
“This has emptied everything out for me,” Nola sighed. “I’m going to be serious in everything, with everybody, after this. Do you suppose Mrs. Mathews would let me help her over at the mission—if I went to her meek and humble and asked her?”
“If she saw that it would help you, she would, Nola.”
“Just think how lonesome it will be here when the post’s abandoned and everybody but the Indians gone! You’ll be away—maybe long before that—and I’ll not see anybody but Indians and cowboys from year’s beginning to year’s end. Oh, it will be so dreary and lonesome here!”
“There’s work up the river in the homesteaders’ settlement, Nola; there’s suffering to be relieved, and bereaved hearts to be comforted. There’s your work, it seems to me, for you and those nearest to you are to blame for the desolation of those poor homes, excuse it as charitably as we may.”
Frances felt a shudder run through the girl’s body as her arm clasped the pliant waist.
“Why, Frances! You can’t mean that! They’re terrible—just think what they’ve done—oh, the underhanded thieves! By the law of the range it’s my fight now, instead of my work to help them!”
“The law of the range isn’t the law any longer here, Nola, and it never will be again. Alan Macdonald has done the work that he put his lone hand to. You have no quarrel with anybody, child, no feud to carry on to a bloody end. Put it out of your mind. If you are sincere in your heart, and truly penitent, you can prove it best by beginning to do good in the place where your house has done a terrible, sad wrong.”
“They started it!” said Nola, vindictively, the lifelong hatred for those who encroached upon the range so deep in her breast, it seemed, that the soil of her life must come away on its roots.
“There’s no use talking to you about it, then,” said Frances, coldly.
Nola seemed hurt by her tone. She began to cry again, and plead her cause in moaning, broken words. “It’s our country, we were here first—father always said that!”
“I know.”
“But I don’t blame Mr. Macdonald, they deceived him, the rustlers deceived him and told him lies. He didn’t belong to this country, he couldn’t know at first, or understand. Frances”—she put her hand on her friend’s shoulder, and lifted her head as if trying to pierce the dark and look into her eyes—“don’t you know how it was with him? He was too much of a man to turn his back on them, even when he found he was on the wrong side. A man like him must have understood it our way.”
“What he has done in this country calls for no excuse,” returned Frances, loftily.
“In your eyes and mine he wouldn’t need any excuse for anything he might do,” said Nola, with a sagacity unexpected. “We love him, and we’d love him, right or wrong. Well”—a sigh—“you’ve got a right to love him, and I haven’t. I wouldn’t try to make him care for me now if I could, for I’m different; I’m all emptied out.”
“It takes more than you’ve gone through to empty a human life, Nola. But you have no right to love him; honor and honesty are in the way, friendship not considered at all. You’ll spring up in the sun again after a little while, like fresh grass that’s trodden on, just as happy and light-hearted as before. Let me have this one without any more interference—there are plenty in the world that you would stand heart-high to with your bright little head, just as well as Alan Macdonald.”
“I can’t give him up, the thought of him, and the longing for him, without regret, Frances; I can’t!”
“I wouldn’t have you do it. I want you to have regret, and pain—not too deep nor too lasting, but some corrective pain. Now, go to sleep.”
Frances pressed her back to the pillow, and touched her head with light caress.
“Frances,” she whispered, a new gladness dawning in her voice, “I’ll go and see those poor people, and try to help them—if they’ll let me. Maybe we were wrong—partly, anyhow.”
“That’s better,” Frances encouraged.
“And I’ll try not to care for him, or think about him, even one little bit.”
Frances bent and kissed her. Nola’s arms clung to her neck a little, holding her while she whispered in her ear.
“For I’m going to be different, I’m going to be good—abso-lutely good!”
* * *
CHAPTER XXIV
BANJO FACES INTO THE WEST
“You don’t tell me? So the old colonel’s got what his heart’s been pinin’ for many a year. Well, well!”
Mrs. Chadron was beside her window in her favored rocker again, less assertive of bulk in her black dress, not so florid of face, and with lines of sadness about her mouth and eyes. A fire was snapping in the chimney, for the gray sky was driving a bitter wind, and the first snowflakes of winter were straying down.
Banjo Gibson was before the fire, his ears red, his cheeks redder, just in from a brisk ride over from the post. His instruments lay beside him on the floor, and he was limbering his fingers close to the blaze.
“Yes, he’s a brigamadier now,” said he.
“Brigadier-General Landcraft,” said she, musingly, looking away into the grayness of the day; “well, maybe he deserves it. Fur as I’m concerned, he’s welcome to it, and I’m glad for Frances’ sake.”
“He’s vinegar and red pepper, that old man is! Takin’ him up both sides and down the middle, as the feller said, I reckon the colonel—or brigamadier, I guess they’ll call him now—he’s about as good as they make ’em. I always did have a kind of a likin’ for that old feller—he’s something like me.”
“It was nice of you to come over and tell me the news, anyhow, Banjo; you’re always as obligin’ and thoughtful as you can be.”
“It’s always been a happiness and a pleasure, mom, and I’ve come a good many times with news, sad and joyful, to your door. But I reckon it’ll be many a long day before I come ridin’ to Alamito with news ag’in; many a long, long day.”
“What do you mean, Banjo? You ain’t goin’—”
“To Californy; startin’ from here as soon as my horse blows a spell and eats his last feed at your feed box, mom. I’ve got to make it to Meander to ketch the mornin’ train.”
“Oh, Banjo! you don’t tell me!” Tears gushed to Mrs. Chadron’s eyes, used to so much weeping now, and her lips trembled as she pressed them hard to keep back a sob. “You’re the last friend of the old times, the last face outside of this house belongin’ to the old days. When you’re gone my last friend, the very last one I care about outside of my own, ’ll be gone!”
Banjo cleared his throat unsteadily, and looked very hard at the fire for quite a spell before he spoke.
“The best of friends must part,” he said.
“Yes, they must part,” she admitted, her handkerchief pressed to her eyes, her voice muffled behind it.
“But they ain’t no use of me stayin’ around in this country and pinin’ for what’s gone, and starvin’ on the edge,” said Banjo, briskly. “Since you’ve sold out the cattle and the boys is all gone, scattered ever-which-ways and to Texas, and the homesteaders is comin’ into this valley as thick as blackbirds, it ain’t no place for me. I don’t mix with them kind of people, I never did. You’ve give it all up to ’em, they tell me, but this homestead, mom?”
“All but the homestead,” she sighed, her tears checked now, her eyes on the farthest hill, where she had watched the crest many and many a time for Saul to rise over it, riding home from Meander.
“You hadn’t ort to let it go,” said he, shaking his sad head.
“I couldn’t’a’held it, the lawyers and Mr. Macdonald told me that. It’s public land, Banjo, it belongs to them folks, I reckon. But we was here first!” A futile sigh, a regretful sigh, a sigh bitter with old recollections.
“I reckon that’s so, down to the bottom of it, but you folks made this country what it was, and by rights it’s yourn. Well, I stopped in to say good-bye to the old brigamadier-colonel over at the post as I come through. He tells me Alan and that little girl of hisn that stuck to him and stood up for him through thick and thin ’re goin’ to be married at Christmas time.”
“Then they’ll be leavin’, too,” she said.
“No, they’re goin’ to build on his ranch up the river and stay here, and that old brigamadier-colonel he’s goin’ to take up land next to ’em, or has took it up, one of the two, and retire from the army when they’re married. He says this country’s the breath of his body and he couldn’t live outside of it, he’s been here so long.”
The Rustler of Wind River Page 23
