Tales of Trail and Town Part 5

"One moment, colonel," said Peter, with mortified concern. "It's another folly of my sister's! pray let me take it upon myself to bring them back."

"Very well, but see you don't linger, and," turning to Ca.s.sidy, as Peter galloped away, he added, "you follow him."

Peter kept the figures of the two women in view, but presently saw them disappear in the wood. He had no fear for their safety, but he was indignant at this last untimely caprice of his sister. He knew the idea had originated with her, and that the officers knew it, and yet she had made Lady Elfrida bear an equal share of the blame. He reached the edge of the copse, entered the first opening, but he had scarcely plunged into its shadow and shut out the plain behind him before he felt his arms and knees quickly seized from behind. So sudden and unexpected was the attack that he first thought his horse had stumbled against a coil of wild grapevine and was entangled, but the next moment he smelled the rank characteristic odor and saw the brown limbs of the Indian who had leaped on his crupper, while another rose at his horse's head. Then a warning voice in his ear said in the native tongue:--

"If the great white medicine man calls to his fighting men, the pale-faced girl and the squaw he calls his sister die! They are here, he understands."

But Peter had neither struggled nor uttered a cry. At that touch, and with the accents of that tongue in his ears, all his own Indian blood seemed to leap and tingle through his veins. His eyes flashed; pinioned as he was he drew himself erect and answered haughtily in his captor's own speech:--

"Good! The great white medicine man obeys, for he and his sister have no fear. But if the pale-face girl is not sent back to her people before the sun sets, then the yellow jackets will swarm the woods, and they will follow her trail to the death. My brother is wise; let the girl go.

I have spoken."

"My brother is very cunning too. He would call to his fighting men through the lips of the pale-face girl."

"He will not. The great white medicine man does not lie to his red brother. He will tell the pale-face girl to say to the chief of the yellow jackets that he and his sister are with his brothers, and all is peace. But the pale-face girl must not see the great white medicine man in these bonds, nor as a captive! I have spoken."

The two Indians fell back. There was so much of force and dignity in the man, so much of their own stoic calmness, that they at once mechanically loosened the thongs of plaited deer hide with which they had bound him, and side by side led him into the recesses of the wood.

There was some astonishment, although little alarm at the fort, when Lady Elfrida returned accompanied by the orderly who had followed Peter to the wood, but without Peter and his sister. The reason given was perfectly natural and conceivable. Mrs. Lascelles had preceded Lady Elfrida in entering the wood and taken another opening, so that Lady Elfrida had found herself suddenly lost, and surrounded by two or three warriors in dreadful paint. They motioned her to dismount, and said something she did not understand, but she declined, knowing that she had heard Mr. Atherly and the orderly following her, and feeling no fear.

And sure enough Mr. Atherly presently came up with a couple of braves, apologized to her for their mistake, but begged her to return to the fort at once and a.s.sure the colonel that everything was right, and that he and his sister were safe. He was perfectly cool and collected and like himself; she blushed slightly, as she said she thought that he wished to impress upon her, for some reason she could not understand, that he did not want the colonel to send any a.s.sistance. She was positive of that. She told her story unexcitedly; it was evident that she had not been frightened, but Lady Runnybroke noticed that there was a shade of anxious abstraction in her face.

When the officers were alone the colonel took hurried counsel of them.

"I think," said Captain Fleetwood, "that Lady Elfrida's story quite explains itself. I believe this affair is purely a local one, and has nothing whatever to do with the suspicious appearances we noticed this afternoon, or the presence of so large a body of Indians near b.u.t.ternut.

Had this been a hostile movement they would have scarcely allowed so valuable a capture as Lady Elfrida to escape them."

"Unless they kept Atherly and his sister as a hostage," said Captain Joyce.

"But Atherly is one of their friends; indeed he is their mediator and apostle, a non-combatant, and has their confidence," returned the colonel. "It is much more reasonable to suppose that Atherly has noticed some disaffection among these 'friendlies,' and he fears that our sending a party to his a.s.sistance might precipitate a collision. Or he may have reason to believe that this stopping of the two women under the very walls of the fort is only a feint to draw our attention from something more serious. Did he know anything of our suspicions of the conduct of those Indians this morning?"

"Not unless he gathered it from what Lord Reginald foolishly told him. We said nothing, of course," returned Captain Fleetwood, with a soldier's habitual distrust of the wisdom of the civil arm.

"That will do, gentlemen," said the colonel, as the officers dispersed; "send Ca.s.sidy here."

The colonel was alone on the veranda as Ca.s.sidy came up.

"You followed Mr. Atherly to-day?"

"Yes sorr."

"And you saw him when he gave the message to the young lady?"

"Yes sorr."

"Did you form any opinion from anything else you saw, of his object in sending that message?"

"Only from what I saw of HIM."

"Well, what was that?"

"I saw him look afther the young leddy as she rode away, and then wheel about and go straight back into the wood."

"And what did you think of that?" said the colonel, with a half smile.

"I thought it was shacrifice, sorr."

"What do you mean?" said the colonel sharply.

"I mane, sorr," said Ca.s.sidy stoutly, "that he was givin' up hisself and his sister for that young leddy."

The colonel looked at the sergeant. "Ask Mr. Forsyth to come to me privately, and return here with him."

As darkness fell, some half a dozen dismounted troopers, headed by Forsyth and Ca.s.sidy, pa.s.sed quietly out of the lower gate and entered the wood. An hour later the colonel was summoned from the dinner table, and the guests heard the quick rattle of a wagon turning out of the road gate--but the colonel did not return. An indefinable uneasiness crept over the little party, which reached its climax in the summoning of the other officers, and the sudden flashing out of news. The reconnoitring party had found the dead bodies of Peter Atherly and his sister on the plains at the edge of the empty wood.

The women were gathered in the commandant's quarters, and for the moment seemed to have been forgotten. The officers' wives talked with professional sympathy and disciplined quiet; the English ladies were equally sympathetic, but collected. Lady Elfrida, rather white, but patient, asked a few questions in a voice whose contralto was rather deepened. One and all wished to "do something"--anything "to help"--and one and all rebelled that the colonel had begged them to remain within doors. There was an occasional quick step on the veranda, or the clatter of a hoof on the parade, a continued but subdued murmur from the whitewashed barracks, but everywhere a sense of keen restraint.

When they emerged on the veranda again, the whole aspect of the garrison seemed to have changed in that brief time. In the faint moonlight they could see motionless files of troopers filling the parade, the officers in belted tunics and slouched hats,--but apparently not the same men; the half lounging ease and lazy dandyism gone, a grim tension in all their faces, a set abstraction in all their acts. Then there was the rolling of heavy wheels in the road, and the two horses of the ambulance appeared. The sentries presented arms; the colonel took off his hat; the officers uncovered; the wagon wheeled into the parade; the surgeon stepped out. He exchanged a single word with the colonel, and lifted the curtain of the ambulance.

As the colonel glanced within, a deep but embarra.s.sed voice fell upon his ear. He turned quickly. It was Lord Reginald, flushed and sympathetic.

"He was a friend,--a relation of ours, you know," he stammered. "My sister would like--to look at him again."

"Not now," said the colonel in a low voice. The surgeon added something in a voice still lower, which scarcely reached the veranda.

Lord Reginald turned away with a white face.

"Fall back there!" Captain Fleetwood rode up.

"All ready, sir."

"One moment, captain," said the colonel quietly. "File your first half company before that ambulance, and bid the men look in."

The singular order was obeyed. The men filed slowly forward, each in turn halting before the motionless wagon and its immobile freight. They were men inured to frontier bloodshed and savage warfare; some halted and hurried on; others lingered, others turned to look again. One man burst into a short laugh, but when the others turned indignantly upon him, they saw that in his face that held them in awe. What they saw in the ambulance did not transpire; what they felt was not known. Strangely enough, however, what they repressed themselves was mysteriously communicated to their horses, who snorted and quivered with eagerness and impatience as they rode back again. The horse of the trooper who had laughed almost leaped into the air. Only Sergeant Ca.s.sidy was communicative; he took a larger circuit in returning to his place, and managed to lean over and whisper hoa.r.s.ely in the ear of a camp follower spectator, "Tell the young leddy that the torturin' divvils couldn't take the smile off him!"

The little column filed out of the gateway into the road. As Captain Fleetwood pa.s.sed Colonel Carter the two men's eyes met. The colonel said quietly, "Good night, captain. Let us have a good report from you."

The captain replied only with his gauntleted hand against the brim of his slouched hat, but the next moment his voice was heard strong and clear enough in the road. The little column trotted away as evenly as on parade. But those who climbed the roof of the barracks a quarter of an hour later saw, in the moonlight, a white cloud drifting rapidly across the plain towards the west. It was a small cloud in that bare, menacing, cruel, and illimitable waste; but in its breast was crammed a thunderbolt.

It fell thirty miles away, blasting and scattering a thousand warriors and their camp, giving and taking no quarter, vengeful, exterminating, and complete. Later there were different opinions about it and the horrible crime that had provoked it: the opposers of Peter's policy jubilant over the irony of the a.s.sa.s.sination of the Apostle of Peace, Peter's disciples as actively deploring the merciless and indiscriminating vengeance of the military; and so the problem that Peter had vainly attempted to solve was left an open question. There were those, too, who believed that Peter had never sacrificed himself and his sister for the sake of another, but had provoked and incensed the savages by the blind arrogance of a reformer. There were wild stories by scouts and interpreters how he had challenged his fate by an Indian bravado; how himself and his sister had met torture with an Indian stoicism, and how the Indian braves themselves at last in a turmoil of revulsion had dipped their arrows and lances in the heroic heart's blood of their victims, and worshiped their still palpitating flesh.

But there was one honest loyal little heart that carried back--three thousand miles--to England the man as it had known and loved him. Lady Elfrida Runnybroke never married; neither did she go into retirement, but lived her life and fulfilled her duties in her usual clear-eyed fashion. She was particularly kind to all Americans,--barring, I fear, a few pretty-faced, finely-frocked t.i.tle-hunters,--told stories of the Far West, and had theories of a people of which they knew little, cared less, and believed to be vulgar. But I think she found a new pleasure in the old church at Ashley Grange, and loved to linger over the effigy of the old Crusader,--her kinsman, the swashbuckler De Bracy,--with a vague but pretty belief that devotion and love do not die with brave men, but live and flourish even in lands beyond the seas.

TWO AMERICANS