The Rustler of Wind River Part 8

Tell me that--tell me!"

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

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

"A messenger arrived with it an hour ago."

"For you, Major King?"

"For me, certainly."

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

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

"There is much more," he insisted. "Tell me that he s.n.a.t.c.hed the glove from you, tell me that you lost it--tell me anything, and I'll believe you--but tell me something!"

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

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

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

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

"But you are not my confessor, for all that."

"G.o.d's name!" groaned King, his teeth set, his eyes staring as if he had gone mad. "Will you shame us both? Do you forget you are _my affianced wife?_"

"That is ended--you are free!"

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

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

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

"I refuse to humor your caprice--you are irresponsible, you don't know what you are doing," he declared. "You are forcing the issue to this point, Frances, I haven't demanded this."

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

"It's only the infatuation of a moment. You can't care for a man like that, Frances," he argued, shaken out of his pa.s.sion by her determined stand.

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

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

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

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

"If he was a gentleman, as you said of him once, then he is dead,"

said he.

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

CHAPTER VI

A BOLD CIVILIAN

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

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

Smallness of stature, disappointment in his ambition for preferment, and a natural narrowness of soul, had turned Colonel Landcraft into a military martinet of the most p.r.o.nounced character. He was the grandfather of colonels in the service, rank won in the old Indian days. That he was not a brigadier-general was a circ.u.mstance puzzling only to himself. He was a man of small bickerings, exactions, forms.

He fussed with civilians as a regular thing when in command of posts within the precincts of civilization, and to serve under him, as officer or man, was a chafing and galling experience.

If ever there was an unpopular man in the service, then that man was Colonel John Hanc.o.c.k 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 trespa.s.s 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 sh.o.r.e 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 pa.s.senger 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 n.o.body 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 pa.s.sed 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.