The men all say she is too good for him, whose name has been in everybody's mouth. They say it, even though they do not know the cruel way in which he won her love. But the women say that Phebe, though undeniably a saint (and "the sweetest thing that ever lived"), is yet a woman, incapable of inflicting judgment upon the man she loves.
The case is in her hands now. She may punish, she may avenge, if she will; for Ludovic is the slave of his own remorseless conquest. But Phebe has never discovered that she was wronged. There is something in faith, after all; and there is a good deal in blood, Friend Underhill thinks. "Doubtless the grandson of Martin Ludovic must have had great provocation."
When the trumpets at Bisuka barracks sound retreat, the girls in the Meadows cottage, on the edge of the Reservation, begin to hurry with the supper things, and Mrs. Meadows, who has been young herself, says to her eldest daughter, "You go now, Callie; the girls and I can finish." Which means that Callie's colors go up as the colors on the hill come down; for soon the tidy infantrymen and the troopers with their yellow stripes will be seen, in the first blush of the afterglow, tramping along the paths that thread the sagebrush common between the barracks and the town; and Callie's young man will be among them, and he will turn off at the bridge that crosses the acéquia, and make for the cottage gate by a path which he ought to know pretty well by this time.
Callie's young man is Henniker, one of the trumpeters of K troop, —th cavalry;thetrumpeter, Callie would say, for though there are two of the infantry and two of the cavalry who stand forth at sunset, in front of the adjutant's office, and blow as one man the brazen call that throbs against the hill, it is only Henniker whom Callie hears. That trumpet blare, most masculine of all musical utterances, goes straight from his big blue-clad chest to the heart of his girl, across the clear-lit evening; but not to hers alone. There is only one Henniker, but there is more than one girl in the cottage on the common.
At this hour, nightly, a small dark head, not so high above the sage as Callie's auburn one, pursues its dreaming way, in the wake of two cows and a half-grown heifer, towards the hills where the town herd pastures. Punctually at the first call it starts out behind the cows from the home corral; by the second it has passed, very slowly, the foot-bridge, and is nearly to the corner post of the Reservation; but when "sound off" is heard, the slow-moving head stops still. The cheek turns. A listening eye is raised; it is black, heavily lashed; the tip of a silken eyebrow shows against the narrow temple. The cheek is round and young, of a smooth clear brown, richly under-tinted with rose,—a native wild flower of the Northwest. As the trumpets cease, and the gun fires, and the brief echo dies in the hill, the liquid eyes grow sad.
"Sweet, sweet! too sweet to be so short and so strong!" The dumb childish heart swells in the constriction of a new and keener sense of joy, an unspeakable new longing.
What that note of the deep-colored summer twilight means to her she hardly understands. It awakens no thought of expectation for herself, no definite desire. She knows that the trumpeter's sunset call is his good-by to duty on the eve of joy; it is the pæan of his love for Callie. Wonderful to be like Callie; who after all is just like any other girl,—like herself, just as she was a year ago, before she had ever spoken to Henniker.
Henniker was not only a trumpeter, one of four who made music for the small two-company garrison; he was an artist with a personality. The others blew according to tactics, and sometimes made mistakes; Henniker never made mistakes, except that he sometimes blew too well. Nobody with an ear, listening nightly for taps, could mistake when it was Henniker's turn, as orderly trumpeter, to sound the calls. He had the temperament of the joyous art: and with it the vanity, the passion, the forgetfulness, the unconscious cruelty, the love of beauty, and the love of being loved that made him the flirt constitutional as well as the flirt military,—which not all soldiers are, but which all soldiers are accused of being. He flirted not only with his fine gait and figure, and bold roving glances from under his cap-peak with the gold sabres crossed above it; he flirted in a particular and personal as well as promiscuous manner, and was ever new to the dangers he incurred, not to mention those to which his willing victims exposed themselves. For up to this time in all his life Henniker had never yet pursued a girl. There had been no need, and as yet no inducement, for him to take the offensive. The girls all felt his irresponsible gift of pleasing, and forgot to be afraid. Not one of the class of girls he met but envied Callie Meadows, and showed it by pretending to wonder what he could see in her.
It was himself Henniker saw, so no wonder he was satisfied, until he should see himself in a more flattering mirror still. The very first night he met her, Callie had informed him, with the courage of her bright eyes, that she thought him magnificent fun; and he had laughed in his heart, and said, "Go ahead, my dear!" And ahead they went headlong, and were engaged within a week.
Mother Meadows did not like it much, but it was the youthful way, in pastoral frontier circles like their own; and Callie would do as she pleased,—that was Callie's way. Father Meadows said it was the women's business; if Callie and her mother were satisfied, so was he.
But he made inquiries at the post, and learned that Henniker's record was good in a military sense. He stood well with his officers, had no loose, unsoldierly habits, and never was drunk on duty. He did not save his pay; but how much "pay" had Meadows ever saved when he was a single man? And within two years, if he wanted it, the trumpeter was entitled to his discharge. So he prospered in this as in former love affairs that had stopped short of the conclusive step of marriage.
Meta, the little cow-girl, the youngest and fairest, though many shades the darkest, of the Meadows household, was not of the Meadows blood. On her father's side, her ancestry, doubtless, was uncertain; some said carelessly, "Canada French." Her mother was pure squaw of the Bannock breed. But Mother Meadows, whose warm Scotch-Irish heart nourished a vein of romance together with a feudal love of family, upheld that Meta was no chance slip of the murky half-bloods, neither clean wild nor clean tame. Her father, she claimed to know, had been a man of education and of honor, on the white side of his life, a well-born Scottish gentleman, exiled to the wilderness of the Northwest in the service of the Hudson's Bay Company. And Meta's mother had broken no law of her rudimentary conscience. She had not swerved in her own wild allegiance, nor suffered desertion by her white chief. He had been killed in some obscure frontier fight, and his goods, including the woman and child, were the stake for which he had perished. But Father Josette, who knew all things and all people of those parts, and had baptized the infant by the sainted name of Margaret, had traced his lost plant of grace and conveyed it out of the forest shades into the sunshine of a Christian white woman's home. Father Josette—so Mrs. Meadows maintained—had known that the babe would prove worthy of transplantation.
She made room for the little black-headed stranger, with soft eyes like a mouse (by the blessing of God she had never lost a child, and the nest was full,) in the midst of her own fat, fair-haired brood, and cherished her in her place, and gave her a daughter's privilege.
In a wild, woodlandish way Meta was a bit of an heiress in her own right. She had inherited through her mother a share in the yearly increase of a band of Bannock ponies down on the Salmon meadows; and every season, after grand round-up, the settlement was made,—always with distinct fairness, though it took some time, and a good deal of eating, drinking, and diplomacy, before the business could be accomplished.
"What is a matter of a field worth forty shekels betwixt thee and me?" was the etiquette of the transaction, but the outcome was practically the same as in the days of patriarchal transfers of real estate.
Father Meadows would say that it cost him twice over what the maiden's claim was worth to have her cousins the Bannocks, with their wives and children and horses, camped on his borders every summer; for Meta's dark-skinned brethren never sent her the worth of her share in money, but came themselves with her ponies in the flesh, and spare ponies of their own, for sale in the town; and on Father Meadows was the burden of keeping them all good-natured, of satisfying their primitive ideas of hospitality, and of pasturing Meta's ponies until they could finally be sold for her benefit. No account was kept, in this simple, generous household, of what was done for Meta, but strict account was kept of what was Meta's own.
The Bannock brethren were very proud of their fair kinswoman who dwelt in the tents of Jacob. They called her, amongst themselves, by the name they give to the mariposa lily, the closed bud of which is pure white as the whitest garden lily; but as each Psyche-wing petal opens it is mooned at the base with a dark, purplish stain which marks the flower with startling beauty, yet to some eyes seems to mar it as well. With every new bud the immaculate promise is renewed; but the leopard cannot change his spots nor the wild hill lily her natal stain.
This year the sale of pony flesh amounted to nearly a hundred dollars, which Father Meadows put away for Meta's future benefit,—all but one gold piece, which the mother showed her, telling her that it represented a new dress.
"You need a new white one for your best, and I shall have it made long. You're filling out so, I don't believe you'll grow much taller."
Meta smiled sedately. In spite of the yearly object lesson her dark kinsfolk presented, she never classed herself among the hybrids. She accepted homage and tribute from the tribe, but in her consciousness, at this time, she was all white. This was due partly to Mother Meadows's large-hearted and romantic theories of training, and partly to an accident of heredity. The woman who looks the squaw is the squaw, when it comes to the flowering time of her life. To Meta had succeeded the temperament of her mother expressed in the features of her father; whether Canadian trapper or Scotch grandee, he had owned an admirable profile.
A great social and musical event took place that summer in the town, and Meta's first long dress was finished in time to play its part, as such trifles will, in the simple fates of girlhood. It was by far the prettiest dress she had ever put over her head: the work of a professional, to begin with. Then its length persuaded one that she was taller than nature had made her. Its short waist suited her youthful bust and flat back and narrow shoulders. The sleeves were puffed and stood out like wings, and were gathered on a ribbon which tied in a bow just above the bend of her elbow. Her arms were round and soft as satin, and pinkish-pale inside, like the palms of her small hands. All her skin, though dark, was as clear as wine in a colored glass. The neck was cut down in a circle below her throat, which she shyly clasped with her hands, not being accustomed to feel it bare. And as naturally as a bird would open its beak for a worm, she exclaimed to Mother Meadows, "Oh, how I wish I had some beads!" And before night she had strung herself a necklace of the gold-colored pom-pons with silver-gray stems that spangle the dry hills in June,—"butter-balls" the Western children call them,—and, in spite of the laughter and gibes of the other girls, she wore her sylvan ornament on the gala night, and its amazing becomingness was its best defense.
So Meta's first long dress went, in company with three other unenvious white dresses and Father Meadows's best coat, to hear the "Coonville Minstrels," a company of amateur performers representing the best musical talent in the town, who would appear "for one night only," for the benefit of the free circulating library fund.
Henniker was not in attendance on his girl as usual.
"What a pity," the sisters said, "that he should have to be on guard to-night!" But Meta remembered, though she did not say so, that Henniker had been on guard only two nights before, so it could not be his turn again, and that could not explain his absence.
But Callie was as gay as ever, and did not seem put out, even at her father's bantering insinuations about some other possible girl who might be scoring in her place.
The sisters were enraptured over every number on the programme. The performers had endeavored to conceal their identity under burnt cork and names that were fictitious and humorous, but everybody was comparing guesses as to which was which, and who was who. The house was packed, and "society" was there. The feminine half of it did not wear its best frock to the show and its head uncovered, but what of that! A girl knows when she is looking her prettiest, and the young Meadowses were in no way concerned for the propriety of their own appearance. Father Meadows, looking along the row of smiling faces belonging to him, was as well satisfied as any man in the house. His eyes rested longer than usual on little Meta to-night. He saw for the first time that the child was a beauty; not going to be,—she was one then and there. Her hair, which she was accustomed to wear in two tightly braided pigtails down her back, had been released and brushed out all its stately maiden length, "crisped like a war steed's encolure." It fell below her waist, and made her face and throat look pale against its blackness. A spot of white electric light touched her chest where it rose and fell beneath the chain of golden blossom balls,—orange gold, the cavalry color. She looked like no other girl in the house, though nearly every girl in town was there.
Part I. of the programme was finished; a brief wait,—the curtain rose, and behold the colored gentlemen from Coonville had vanished. Only the interlocutor remained, scratching his white wool wig over a letter which he begged to read in apology for his predicament. His minstrelsy had decamped, and spoilt his show. They wrote to inform him of the obvious fact, and advised him facetiously to throw himself upon the indulgence of the house, but "by no means to refund the money."
Poor little Meta believed that she was listening to the deplorable truth, and wondered how Father Meadows and the girls could laugh.
"Oh, won't there be any second part, after all?" she despaired; at which Father Meadows laughed still more, and pinched her cheek, and some persons in the row of chairs in front half turned and smiled.
"Goosey," whispered Callie, "don't you see he's only gassing? This is part of the fun."
"Oh, is it?" sighed Meta, and she waited for the secret of the fun to develop.
"Look at your programme," Callie instructed her. "See, this is the Impressario's Predicament. The Wandering Minstrel comes next. He will be splendid, I can tell you."
"Mr. Piper Hide-and-Seek," murmured Meta, studying her programme. "What a funny name!"
"Oh, you child!" Callie laughed aloud, but as suddenly hushed, for the sensation of the evening, to the Meadows party, had begun.
A very handsome man, in the gala dress of a stage peasant, of the Bavarian Highlands possibly, came forward with a short, military step, and bowed impressively. There was a burst of applause from the bluecoats in the gallery, and much whistling and stamping from the boys.
"Who is it?" the lady in front whispered to her neighbor.
"One of the soldiers from the post," was the answer.
"Really!"
But the lady's accent of surprise conveyed nothing, beside the speechless admiration of the Meadows family. Callie, who had been in the exciting secret all along, whispered violently with the other girls, but Meta had become quite cold and shivery. She could not have uttered a word.
Henniker made a little speech in an assumed accent which astonished his friends almost more than his theatrical dress and bearing. He said he was a stranger, piping his way through a foreign land, but he could "spik ze Engleesh a leetle." Would the ladies and gentlemen permit him, in the embarrassing absence of better performers, to present them with a specimen of his poor skill upon a very simple instrument? Behold!
He flung back his short cloak, and filled his chest, standing lightly on his feet, with his elbows raised.
No rattling trumpet blast from the artist's lips to-night, but, still and small, sustained and clear, the pure reed note trilled forth. Willow whistles piping in spring-time in the stillness of deep meadow lands before the grass is long, or in flickering wood paths before the full leaves darken the boughs—such was the pastoral simplicity of the instrument with which Henniker beguiled his audience. Such was the quality of sound, but the ingenuity, caprice, delicacy, and precision of its management were quite his own. They procured him a wild encore.
Henniker had been nervous at the first time of playing; it would have embarrassed him less to come before a strange house; for there were the captain and the captain's lady, and the lieutenants with their best girls; and forty men he knew were nudging and winking at one another; and there were the bonny Meadowses, with their eyes upon him and their faces all aglow. But who was she, the little big-eyed dark one in their midst? He took her in more coolly as he came before the house the second time; and this time he knew her, but not as he ever had known her before.
Is it one of nature's revenges that in the beauty of their women lurks the venom of the dark races which the white man has put beneath his feet? The bruised serpent has its sting; and we know how, from Moab and Midian down, the daughters of the heathen have been the unhappy instruments of proud Israel's fall; but the shaft of his punishment reaches him through the body of the woman who cleaves to his breast.
That one look of Henniker's at Meta, in her strange yet familiar beauty, sitting captive to his spell, went through his flattered senses like the intoxication of strong drink. He did not take his eyes off her again. His face was pale with the complex excitement of a full house that was all one girl and all hushed through joy of him. She sat so close to Callie, his reckless glances might have been meant for either of them; Callie thought at first they were for her, but she did not think so long.
Something followed on the programme at which everybody laughed, but it meant nothing at all to Meta. She thought the supreme moment had come and gone, when a big Zouave in his barbaric reds and blues marched out and took his stand, back from the footlights, between the wings, and began that amazing performance with a rifle which is known as the "Zouave drill."
The dress was less of a disguise than the minstrel's had been, and it was a sterner, manlier transformation. It brought out the fighting look in Henniker. The footlights were lowered, a smoke arose behind the wings, strange lurid colors were cast upon the figure of the soldier magician.
"The stage is burning!" gasped Meta, clutching Collie's arm.
"It's nothing but red fire. You mustn't give yourself away so, Meta; folks will take us for a lot of sagebrushers."
Meta settled back in her place with a fluttering sigh, and poured her soul into this new wonder.
But Henniker was not doing himself justice to-night, his comrades thought. No one present was so critical of him or so proud of him as they. A hundred times he had put himself through this drill before a barrack audience, and it had seemed as if he could not make a break. But to-night his nerve was not good. Once he actually dropped his piece, and a groan escaped the row of uniforms in the gallery. This made him angry; he pulled himself up and did some good work for a moment, and then—"Great Scott! he's lost it again! No, he hasn't. Brace up, man!" The rifle swerves, but Henniker's knee flies up to catch it; the sound of the blow on the bone makes the women shiver; but he has his piece, and sends it savagely whirling, and that miss was his last. His head was like the centre of a spinning top or the hub of a flying wheel. He felt ugly from the pain of his knee, but he made a dogged finish, and only those who had seen him at his best would have said that his drill was a failure.
Henniker knew, if no one else did, what had lost him his grip in the rifle act. His eyes, which should have been glued to his work, had been straying for another and yet one more look at Meta. Where she sat so still was the storm centre of emotion in the house, and when his eyes approached her they caught the nerve shock that shook his whole system and spoiled his fine work. He cared nothing for the success of his piping when he thought of the failure of his drill. The failure had come last, and, with other things, it left its sting.
On the way home to barracks, the boys were all talking, in their free way, about Meta Meadows,—the little broncho, they called her, in allusion to her great mane of hair,—which made Henniker very hot.
He would not own that his knee pained him; he would not have it referred to, and was ready, next day, to join the riders in squad drill, a new feature of which was the hurdles and ditch-jumping and the mounted exercises, in which as usual, Henniker had distinguished himself.
The Reservation is bounded on the south-east side, next the town, by an irrigation ditch, which is crossed by as many little bridges as there are streets that open out upon the common. (All this part of the town is laid out in "additions," and is sparsely built up.) Close to this division line, at right angles with it, are the dry ditches and hurdle embankments over which the stern young corporals put their squads, under the eye of the captain.
Out in the centre of the plain other squads are engaged in the athletics of horsemanship,—a series of problems in action which embraces every sort of emergency a mounted man may encounter in the rush and throng of battle, and the means of instantly meeting it, and of saving his own life or that of a comrade. So much more is made in these days of the individual powers of the man and horse that it is wonderful to see what an exact yet intelligently obedient combination they have become; no less effective in a charge, as so many pounds of live momentum to be hurled on the bayonet points, but much more self-reliant on scout service, or when scattered singly, in defeat, over a wide, strange field of danger.
On the regular afternoons for squad and troop drill, the ditch bank on the town side would be lined with spectators: ladies in light cotton dresses and beflowered hats, small bare-legged boys and muddy dogs, the small boys' sisters dragging bonnetless babies by the hand, and sometimes a tired mother who has come in a hurry to see where her little truants have strayed to, or a cow-boy lounging sideways on his peaked saddle, condescending to look on at the riding of Uncle Sam's boys. The crowd assorts itself as the people do who line the barriers at a bull-fight: those who have parasols, to the shadow; those who have barely a hat, to the sun.
Here, on the field of the gray-green plain, under the glaring tent roof of the desert sky, the national free circus goes on,—to the screaming delight of the small boys, the fear and exultation of the ladies, and the alternate pride and disgust of the officers who have it in charge.
A squad of the boldest riders are jumping, six in line. One can see by the way they come that every man will go over: first the small ditch, hardly a check in the pace; then a rush at the hurdle embankment, the horses' heads very grand and Greek as they rear in a broken line to take it. Their faces are as strong and wild as the faces of the men. Their flanks are slippery with sweat. They clear the hurdles, and stretch out for the wide ditch.
"Keep in line! Don't crowd!" the corporal shouts. They are doing well, he thinks. Over they all go; and the ladies breathe again, and say to each other how much finer this sport is because it is work, and has a purpose in it.
Now the guidon comes, riding alone, and the whole troop is proud of him. The signal flag flashes erect from the trooper's stirrup; the horse is new to it, and fears it as if it were something pursuing him; but in the face of horse and man is the same fixed expression, the sober recklessness that goes straight to the finish. If these do not go over, it will not be for want of the spur in the blood.
Next comes a pale young cavalryman just out of the hospital. He has had a fall at the hurdle week before and strained his back. His captain sees that he is nervous and not yet fit for the work, yet cannot spare him openly. He invents an order, and sends him off to another part of the field where the other squads are manœuvring.
If it is not in the man to go over, it will not be in his horse, though a poor horse may put a good rider to shame; but the measure of every man and every horse is taken by those who have watched them day by day.
The ladies are much concerned for the man who fails,—"so sorry" they are for him, as his horse blunders over the hurdle, and slackens when he ought to go free; and of course he jibs at the wide ditch, and the rider saws on his mouth.
"Give him his head! Where are your spurs, man?" the corporal shouts, and adds something under his breath which cannot be said in the presence of his captain. In they go, floundering, on their knees and noses, horse and man, and the ladies cannot see, for the dust, which of them is on top; but they come to the surface panting, and the man, whose uniform is of the color of the ditch, climbs on again, and the corporal's disgust is heard in his voice as he calls, "Ne-aaxt!"
It need not be said that no corporal ever asked Henniker where werehisspurs. To-day the fret in his temper fretted his horse, a young, nervous animal who did not need to know where his rider's heels were quite so often as Henniker's informed him.
"Is that a non-commissioned officer who is off, and his horse scouring away over the plain? What a dire mortification," the ladies say, "and what a consolation to the bunglers!"
No, it is the trumpeter. He was taking the hurdle in a rush of the whole squad; his check-strap broke, and his horse went wild, and slammed himself into another man's horse, and ground his rider's knee against his comrade's carbine. It is Henniker who is down in the dust, cursing the carbine, and cursing his knee, and cursing the mischief generally.
The ladies strolled home through the heat, and said how glorious it was and how awfully real, and how one man got badly hurt; and they described in detail the sight of Henniker limping bareheaded in the sun, holding on to a comrade's shoulder; how his face was a "ghastly brown white," and his eyes were bloodshot, and his black head dun with dust.
"It was the trumpeter who blew so beautifully the other night,—who hurt his knee in the rifle drill," they said. "It was his knee that was hurt to-day. I wonder if it was the same knee?"
It was the same knee, and this time Henniker went to hospital and stayed there; and being no malingerer, his confinement was bitterly irksome and a hurt to his physical pride.
The post surgeon's house is the last one on the line. Then comes the hospital, but lower down the hill. The officer's walk reaches it by a pair of steps that end in a slope of grass. There are moisture and shade where the hospital stands, and a clump of box-elder trees is a boon to the convalescents there. The road between barracks and canteen passes the angle of the whitewashed fence; a wild syringa bush grows on the hospital side, and thrusts its blossoms over the wall. There is a broken board in the fence which the syringa partly hides.
After three o'clock in the afternoon this is the coolest corner of the hospital grounds; and here, on the grass, Henniker was lying, one day of the second week of his confinement.
He had been half asleep when a soft, light thump on the grass aroused him. A stray kitten had crawled through the hole in the fence, and, feeling her way down with her forepaws, had leaped to the ground beside him.
"Hey, pussy!" Henniker welcomed her pleasantly, and then was silent. A hand had followed the kitten through the hole in the fence,—a smooth brown hand no bigger than a child's, but perfect in shape as a woman's. The small fingers moved and curled enticingly.
"Pussy, pussy? Come, pussy!" a soft voice cooed. "Puss, puss, puss? Come, pussy!" The fingers groped about in empty air. "Where are you, pussy?"
Henniker had quietly possessed himself of the kitten, which, moved by these siren tones, began to squirm a little and meekly to "miew." He reached forth his hand and took the small questing one prisoner; then he let the kitten go. There was a brief speechless struggle, quite a useless one.
"Let me go! Who is it? Ohdear!"
Another pull. Plainly, from the tone, this last was feminine profanity.
Silence again, the hand struggling persistently, but in vain. The soft bare arm, working against the fence, became an angry red.
"Softly now. It's only me. Didn't you know I was in hospital, Meta?"
"Is it you, Henniker?"
"Indeed it is. You wouldn't begrudge me a small shake of your hand, after all these days?"
"But you are not in hospital now?"
"That's what I am. I'm not in bed, but I'm going on three legs when I'm going at all. I'm a house-bound man." A heavy sigh from Henniker.
"Haven't you shaken hands enough now, Henniker?" beseechingly from the other side. "I only wanted kitty; please put her through the fence."
"What's your hurry?"
"Have you got her there? Callie left her with me. I mustn't lose her. Please?"
"Has Callie gone away?"
"Why, yes, didn't you know? She has gone to stay with Tim's wife." (Tim Meadows was the eldest, the married son of the family.) "She has a little baby, and they can't get any help, and father wouldn't let mother go down because it's bad for her to be over a cook stove, you know."
"Yes, I know the old lady feels the heat."
"We are quite busy at the house. I came of an errand to the quartermaster-sergeant's, and kitty followed me, and the children chased her. I must go home now," urged Meta. "Really, I did not think you would be so foolish, Henniker. I can't see what fun there is in this!"
"Yes, but Meta, I've made a discovery,—here in your hand."
"In my hand? What is it? Let me see." A violent determined pull, and a sound like a smothered explosion of laughter from Henniker.
"Softly, softly now. You'll hurt yourself, my dear."
"Is my hand dirty? It was the kitten, then; her paws were all over sand."
"Oh, no. Great sign! It's worse than that. It'll not come off."
"Iwillsee what it is!"
"But you can't see unless I was to tell you. I'm a hand reader, did you know it? I can tell your fortune by the lines on your palm. I'm reading them off here just like a book."
"Good gracious! what do you see?"
"Why, it's a most extraordinary thing! Your head line is that mixed up with your heart line, 'pon me word I can't tell which is which. Which is it, Meta? Do you choose your friends with your head entirely, or is it the other way with you, dear?"
"Oh, is that all? I thought you could tell fortunes really. I don't care what Iam; I want to know what I'm going todo. Don't you see anything that's going to happen to me?"
"Lots of things. I see something that's going to happen to you right now. I wonder did it ever happen to you before?"
"What is it? When is it coming?"
"It has come. I will put it right here in your hand. But I shall want it back again, remember; and don't be giving it away, now, to anybody else."
A mysterious pause. Meta felt a breath upon her wrist, and a kiss from a mustached lip was pressed into the hollow of her hand.
"Keep that till I ask you for it," said Henniker quite sternly, and closed her hand tight with his own. The hand became an expressive little fist.
"I think you are just as mean and silly as you can be! I'll never believe a word you say again."
"Pussy," remarked Henniker, in a mournful aside, "go ask your mistress will she please forgive me. Tell her I'm not exactly sorry, but I couldn't help it. Faith, I couldn't."
"I'm not her mistress," said Meta.
It was a keen reminder, but Henniker did not seem to feel it much.
"Go tell Meta," he corrected. "Ask her please to forgive me, and I'll take it back,—the kiss, I mean."
"I'm going now," said Meta. "Keep the kitten, if you want her. She isn't mine, anyway."
But now the kitten was softly crowded through the fence by Henniker, and Meta, relenting, gathered her into her arms and carried her home.
It was certainly not his absence from Callie's side that put Henniker in such a bad humor with his confinement. He grew morbid, and fell into treacherous dreaming, and wondered jealously about the other boys, and what they were doing with themselves these summer evenings, while he was loafing on crutches under the hospital trees. He was frankly pining for his freedom before Callie should return. He wanted a few evenings which he need not account for to anybody but himself; and he got his freedom, unhappily, in time to do the mischief of his dream,—to put vain, selfish longings into the simple heart of Meta, and to spoil his own conscience toward his promised wife.
Henniker knew the ways of the Meadows cottage as well as if he had been one of the family. He knew that Meta, having less skill about the house than the older girls, took the part of chore-boy, and fetched and drove away the cows.
It were simple enough to cross her evening track through the pale sagebrush, which betrayed every bit of contrasting color, the colors of Meta's hair-ribbon and her evening frock; it were simple enough, had she been willing to meet him. But Meta had lost confidence in the hero of the household. She had seen Henniker in a new light; and whatever her heart line said, her head line told her that she had best keep a good breadth of sagebrush between herself and that particular pair of broad blue shoulders that moved so fast above it. So as Henniker advanced the girl retreated, obscurely, with shy doublings and turnings, carefully managed not to reveal that she was running away; for that might vex Henniker, and she was still too loyal to the family bond to wish to show her sister's lover an open discourtesy. She did not dream of the possibility of his becoming her own lover, but she thought him capable of going great lengths in his very peculiar method of teasing.
As soon as he understood her tactics Henniker changed his own. Without another glance in her direction he made off for the hills, but not too far from the trail the cows were taking; and choosing a secluded spot, behind a thick-set clump of sage, he took out his rustic pipe and waited, and when he saw her he began to play.
Meta's heart jumped at the first note. She stole along, drinking in the sounds, no one molesting or making her afraid. Ahead of her, as she climbed, the first range of hills cast a glowing reflection in her face; but the hills beyond were darker, cooler, and the blue-black pines stood out against the sky-like trees of a far cloud-country cut off by some aerial gulf from the most venturesome of living feet.
Henniker saw the girl coming, her face alight in the primrose glow, and he threw away all moments but the present. His breath stopped; then he took a deep inspiration, laid his lips to the pipe, and played, softly, subtly, as one who thinks himself alone.
She had discovered him, but she could not drag herself very far away from those sounds. At last she sat down upon the ground, and gave herself up to listening. A springy sagebush supported her as she let herself sink back; one arm was behind her head, to protect it from the prickly shoots.
"Meta," said Henniker, "are you listening? I'm talking to you now."
It was all the same: his voice was like another phrase of music. He went on playing, and Meta did not stir.
Another pause. "Are you there still, Meta? I was lonesome to-night, but you ran away from me. Was that friendly? You like my music; then why don't you like me? Well, here's for you again, ungrateful!" He went on playing.
The cows were wandering wide of the trail, towards the upper valley. Meta began to feel herself constrained, and not in the direction of her duty. She rose, cast her long braids over her shoulder, and moved resolutely away.
Henniker was absorbed in what he was saying to her with his pipe. When he had made a most seductive finish he paused, and spoke. He rose and looked about him. Meta was a long way off, down the valley, walking fast. He bounded after her, and caught her rudely around the waist.
"See here, little girl, I won't be made game of like this! I was playing to you, and you ran off and left me tooting like a fool. Was that right?"
"I had to go; it is getting late. The music was too sweet. It made me feel like I could cry." She lifted her long-lashed eyes swimming in liquid brightness. Henniker caught her hand in his.
"I was playing to you, Meta, as I play to no one else. Does a person steal away and leave another person discoursin' to the empty air? I didn't think you would want to make a fool of me."
Meta drew away her hand and pressed it in silence on her heart. No woman of Anglo-Saxon blood, without a vast amount of training, could have said so much and said it so naturally with a gesture so hackneyed.
Henniker looked at her from under his eyebrows, biting his mustache. He took a few steps away from her, and then came back.
"Meta," he said, in a different voice, "what was that thing you wore around your neck, the other night, at the minstrels,—that filigree gold thing, eh?"
The girl looked up, astonished; then her eyes fell, and she colored angrily. No Indian or dog could hate to be laughed at more than Meta; and she had been so teased about her innocent make-believe necklace! Had the girls been spreading the joke? She had suddenly outgrown the childish good faith that had made it possible for her to deck herself in it, and she wished never to hear the thing mentioned again. She hung her head and would not speak.
Henniker's suspicions were characteristic. Of course a girl like that must have a lover. Her face confessed that he had touched upon a tender spot.
"It was a pretty thing," he said coldly. "I wonder if I could get one like it for Callie?"
"I don't think Callie would wear one even if you gave it to her," Meta answered with spirit.
"I say, won't you tell me which of the boys it is, Meta?—Won't I wear the life out of him, just!" he added to himself.
"Is what?"
"Your best fellah; the one who gave you that."
"There isn't any. It was nothing. I won't tell you what it was! I made it myself, there! It was only 'butter-balls.'"
"Oh, good Lord!" laughed Henniker.
Meta thought he was laughing at her. It was too much! The sweetness of his music was all jangled in her nerves. Tears would come, and then more tears because of the first.
Had Meta been the child of her father, she might have been sitting that night in one of the vine-shaded porches of the houses on the line, with a brace of young lieutenants at her feet, and in her wildest follies with them she would have been protected by all the traditions and safeguards of her class. As she was the child of her mother, instead, she was out on the hills with Henniker. And how should the squaw's daughter know the difference between protection and pursuit?
When Henniker put his arm around her and kissed the tears from her eyes, she would not have changed places with the proudest lady of the line,—captain's wife, lieutenant's sweetheart, or colonel's daughter of them all. Her chief, who blew the trumpet, was as great a man in Meta's eyes as the officer who buckled on his sabre in obedience to the call.
As for Henniker, no girl's head against his breast had ever looked so womanly dear as Meta's; no shut eyelids that he had ever kissed had covered such wild, sweet eyes. He did not think of her at all in words, any more than of the twilight afterglow in which they parted, with its peculiar intensity, its pang of color. He simply felt her; and it was nearest to the poetic passion of any emotion that he had ever known.
That night Meta deceived her foster-mother, and lying awake beside Callie's empty cot, in the room which the two girls shared together, she treacherously prayed that it might be long before her sister's return. The wild white lily had opened, and behold the stain!
It had been a hard summer for Tim Meadows's family,—the second summer on a sagebrush ranch, their small capital all in the ground, the first hay crop ungathered, and the men to board as well as to pay. The boarding was Mrs. Tim's part; yet many a young wife would have thought that she had enough to do with her own family to cook and wash for, and her first baby to take care of.
"You'll get along all right," the older mothers encouraged her. "A summer baby is no trouble at all."
No trouble when the trouble is twenty years behind us, among the joys of the past. But Tim's wife was wondering if she could hold out till cool weather came, when the rush of the farm work would be over, and her "summer baby" would be in short clothes and able to sit alone. The heat in their four-roomed cabin, in the midst of the treeless land, was an ordeal alone. To sleep in the house was impossible; the rooms and the windows were too small to admit enough air. They moved their beds outside, and slept like tramps under the stars; and the broad light awoke them at earliest dawn, and the baby would never sleep till after ten at night, when the dry Plains wind began to fan the face of the weary land. Even Callie, whose part in the work was subsidiary, lost flesh, and the roses in her cheeks turned sallow, in the month she stayed on the ranch; but she would have been ashamed to complain, though she was heartsick for a word from Henniker. He had written to her only once.
It was Mrs. Meadows who thought it high time that Callie should come home. She had found a good woman to take her daughter's place, and arranged the matter of pay herself. Tim had said they could get no help, but his mother knew what that meant; such help as they could afford to pay for was worse than none.
It seemed a poor return to Callie, for her sisterly service in the valley, to come home and find her lover a changed man. Mrs. Meadows said he was like all the soldiers she had ever known,—light come, light go. But this did not comfort Callie much, nor more to be reminded what a good thing it was she had found him out in time.
Henniker was not scoundrel enough to make love to two girls at once, two semi-sisters, who slept in the same room and watched each other's movements in the same looking-glass. It was no use pretending that he and Callie could "heat their broth over again;" so the coolness came speedily to a breach, and Henniker no longer openly, in fair daylight, took the path to the cottage gate. But there were other paths.
He had found a way to talk to Meta with his trumpet. He sent her messages at guard-mounting, as the guard was forming, when, as senior trumpeter, he was allowed a choice in the airs he played; and when he was orderly trumpeter, and could not come himself to say it, he sent her his good-night in the plaintive notes of taps.
This was the climax of Henniker's flirtations: all that went before had been as nothing, all that came after was not much worse than nothing. It was the one sincere as it was the one poetic passion of his life; and had it not cost him his self-respect through his baseness to Callie, and the treachery and dissimulation he was teaching to an innocent child, it might have made him a faithful man. As it was, his soldier's honor slept; it was the undisciplined part of him that spoke to the elemental nature of the girl; and it was fit that a trumpet's reckless summons, or its brief inarticulate call, like the note of a wild bird to its mate, should be the language of his love.
Retreat had sounded, one evening in October, but it made no stir any more in the cottage where the girls had been so gay. Callie, putting the tea on the table, remembered, as she heard the gun fire, how in the the spring Henniker had said that when "sound off" was at six he would drop in to supper some night, and show her how to makechili con carne, a dish that every soldier knows who has served on the Mexican border. Her face grew hard, for these foolish, unsleeping reminders were as constant as the bugle calls.
The women waited for the head of the house; but as he did not come, they sat down and ate quickly, saving the best dish hot for him.
They had finished, and the room was growing dusk, when he came in breezily, and called at once, as a man will, for a light. Meta rose to fetch it. The door stood open between the fore-room and the kitchen, where she was groping for a lamp. Mr. Meadows spoke in a voice too big for the room. He had just been conversing across the common with the quartermaster-sergeant, as the two men's footsteps diverged by separate paths to their homes.
"I hear there's going to be a change at the post;" he shouted. "The —th is going to leave this department, and C troop of the Second is coming from Custer. Sergeant says they are looking for orders any day now."
Mrs. Meadows, before she thought, glanced at Callie. The girl winced, for she hated to be looked at like that. She held up her head and began to sing audaciously, drumming with her fingers on the table:—