Told In The Hills Part 47

And his fingers closing nervously on the hunting-knife emphasized his meaning, and showed how stubborn and sleepless were the man's prejudices.

The hand dropped, and Genesee reached out the doc.u.ment to one of the crestfallen scouts.

"Just read that out loud for the benefit of anyone that can't understand my way of talking," he suggested with ironical bitterness; "and while you are about it, the fellows that stripped this boy will be good enough to ante up with everything they've got of his--and no time to waste about it either."

And Captain Holt, with a new idea of the seriousness of the demand, seconded it, receiving with his own hands the arms and decorations that had been seized by the victorious Denny, and afterward divided among his comrades. Genesee noted that rendering up of trifling spoils with sullen eyes, in which the fury had not abated a particle.

"A healthy crew you are!" he remarked contemptuously; "a nice, clean-handed lot, without grit enough to steal a horse, but plenty of it for robbing a dead boy. I reckon no one of you ever had a boy that age of your own."

Several of them--looking in the dark, dead face--felt uneasy, and forgot for the moment that they were lectured by a horse-thief; forgot even how light a thing the life of an Indian was anyway.

"Don't blame the whole squad," said the man who took the articles from the Captain and handed them up to Genesee. "Denny captured them when he made the shot, just as anyone would do, and it's no use cussin' about Denny; he's buried up in that gulch--the Kootenais finished him."

"And saved me the trouble," added the scout significantly.

He was wrapping as well as he could the gay blanket over the rigid form.

The necklace was clasped about the throat, but the belt was more awkward to manage, and was thrust into the bosom of Genesee's buckskin shirt, the knife in his belt, the rifle swung at his back.

There was something impressively ghastly in those two figures--the live one with the stubborness of fate, and the stolidity, sitting there, with across his thighs the blanketed, shapeless thing that had held a life; and even the husk seemed a little more horrible with its face hidden than when revealed more frankly; there was something so weirdly suggestive in the motionless outlines.

"No, I don't want that," he said, as the man who read the message was about to hand it back to him; "it belongs to the command, and I may get a dose of cold lead before I could deliver it."

Then he glanced about, signaling Stuart by a motion of his head.

"There's a lady across in the valley there that I treated pretty badly last night," he said, in a tone so natural that all near could hear him, and more than one head was raised in angry question. "She was just good enough to ride over from the ranch to bring a letter to me--hearing I was locked up for a horse-thief, and couldn't go after it. Well, as I tell you, I was just mean enough to treat her pretty bad--flung her on the floor when she tried to stop me, and then nabbed the beast she rode to camp on--happened to be my own; but may be she won't feel so bad if you just tell her what the nag was used for; and may be that will show her I didn't take the trail for fun."

"That" was one of the gloves he had worn from his hands with his night's work, and there were stains on it darker than those made with earth.

"I'll tell her;" and then an impulsive honesty of feeling made him add: "You need never fear her judgment of you, Jack."

The two looked a moment in each other's eyes, and the older man spoke.

"I've been hard on you," he said deliberately, "d.a.m.ned hard; all at once I've seen it, and all the time you've been thinking a heap better of me than I deserved. I know it now, but it's about over. I won't stand in your way much longer; wait till I come back--"

"You are coming back? and where are you going?" The questions, a tone louder than they had used, were heard by the others around. Genesee noted the listening look on the faces, and his words were answers to them as much as to the questioner.

"I'm going to take the trail for the Kootenai village; if any white man is let reach it, or patch up the infernal blunder that's been made, I can do it with him," and his hand lay on the breast of the shrouded thing before him.

"If I get out of it alive, I'll be back to meet the Major; if I don't"--and this time his significant glance was turned unmistakably to the blue coats and their leader--"and if I don't, you'd better pack your carca.s.ses out of this Kootenai valley, and h.e.l.l go with you."

So, with a curse for them on his lips, and the dogged determination to save them in his heart, he nodded to Hardy, clasped the hand of Stuart, and turning Mowitza's head, started with that horrible burden back over the trail that would take a day and a night to cover.

The men were grateful for the bravery that had saved their lives, but burned under the brutal taunts that had spared nothing of their feelings. His execrable temper had belittled his own generosity.

He was a squaw man, but they had listened in silence and ashamed, when he had presumed to censure them. He was a horse-thief, yet the men who believed it watched, with few words, the figure disappear slowly along the trail, with no thought of checking him.

CHAPTER V.

HIS WIFE'S LETTER.

In the bosom of Rachel's family strange thoughts had been aroused by that story of Genesee's escape.

They were wonderfully sparing of their comments in her presence; for, when the story came to her of what he had done when he left her, she laughed.

"Yet he is a horse-thief," she said, in that tone of depreciation that expresses praise, "and he sent me his glove? Well, I am glad he had the grace to be sorry for scattering me over the floor like that. And we owe it to him that we see you here alive again? We can appreciate his bravery, even say prayers for him, if the man would only keep out of sight, but we couldn't ask him to a dinner party, supposing we gave dinner parties, could we, Tillie?"

And Tillie, who had impulsively said "G.o.d bless him!" from the shelter of her husband's arms, collapsed, conscience-stricken and tearful.

"You have a horrid way, Rachel, of making people feel badly," she said, in the midst of her thankfulness and remorse; "but wait until I see him again--I will let him know how much we can appreciate such courage as that. Just wait until he comes back!"

"Yes," said the girl, with all the irony gone from her voice, only the dreariness remaining, "I'm waiting."

The words started Tillie to crying afresh; for, in the recesses of her own bosom, another secret of Genesee's generosity was hidden for prudential motives--the fact that it was he who had sent the guide for Rachel that terrible night of the snow. And Tillie was not a good keeper of secrets--even this thoroughly wise one was hard to retain, in her gladness at having her husband back!

"The man seems a sort of shepherd of everything that gets astray in these hills," said Lieutenant Murray, who was kindly disposed toward all creation because of an emotional, unsoldier-like welcome that had been given him by the little non-commissioned officer in petticoats. "He first led us out of that corral in the hills and brought us back where we belonged, and then dug up that dead Indian and started to take him where he belonged. I tell you there was a sort of--of sublimity in the man as he sat there with that horrible load he was to carry, that is, there would have been if he hadn't 'cussed' so much."

"Does he swear?" queried Fred.

"Does he? My child, you would have a finely-trained imagination if you could conceive the variety of expressions by which he can consign a citizen to the winter resort from which all good citizens keep free. His profanity, they say, is only equaled by his immorality. But, ah--what a soldier he would make! He is the sort of a man that men would walk right up to cannon with--even if they detested him personally."

"And a man needs no fine attributes or high morality to wield that sort of influence, does he?" asked Rachel, and walked deliberately away before any reply could be made.

But she was no more confident than they of his unimpeachable worth.

There was the horse-thieving still unexplained; he had not even denied it to her. And she came to the conclusion that she herself was sadly lacking in the material for orthodox womanhood, since the more proof she had of his faults, the more solidly she took her position for his defense. It had in it something of the same blind stubbornness that governed his likes and dislikes, and that very similarity might have accounted for the sort of understanding that had so long existed between them. And she had more than the horse-stealing to puzzle over. She had that letter he had thrust in her hand and told her to read; such a pleading letter, filled with the heart-sickness of a lonely woman. She took it out and re-read it that time when she walked away from their comments; and reading over the lines, and trying to read between them, she was sorely puzzled:

"DEAR JACK: I wrote you of my illness weeks ago, but the letter must have been lost, or else your answer, for I have not heard a word from you, and I have wanted it more than I can tell you.

I am better, and our little Jack has taken such good care of me. He is so helpful, so gentle; and do you know, dear, he grows to look more like you every day. Does that seem strange?

He does not resemble me in the least. You will think me very exacting, I suppose, when I tell you that such a child, and such a home as you have given me, does not suffice for my content. I know you will think me ungrateful, but I must speak of it to you. I wrote you before, but no answer has come. If I get none to this, I will go to find you--if I am strong enough.

If I am not, I shall send Jack. He is so manly and strong, I know he could go. I will know then, at least, if you are living. I feel as if I am confessing a fault to you when I tell you I have heard from him at last--and more, that I was so glad to hear!

"Jack--dear Jack--he has never forgotten. He is free now; would marry me yet if it were possible. Write to me--tell me if it can ever be. I know how weak you will think me. Perhaps my late ill-health has made me more so; but I am hungry for the sound of the dear voice, and I am so alone since your father died.

You will never come back; and you know, Jack, how loneliness always was so dreadful to me--even our boy is not enough. He does not understand. Come back, or write to me. Let my boy know his father, or else show me how to be patient; this silence is so terrible to YOUR WIFE.

"Jack, what a mockery that word looks--yet I am grateful."

This was the letter he had told her to read and give to Stuart, if he never returned; but she gave it to no one. She mentioned it to no one, only waited to see if he ever came back, and with each reading of that other woman's longings, there grew stronger in her the determination that his life belonged to the writer of that letter and her child--her boy, who looked like him. Surely there was a home and an affection that should cure him of this wild, semi-civilized life he was leading. She was slipping away that almighty need he had shown of herself. She grimly determined that all remembrance of it must be put aside; it was such an unheard-of, reasonless sort of an attraction anyway, and if she really had any influence over him, it should be used to make him answer that letter as it should be answered, and straighten out the strange puzzles in it. All this she determined she would tell him--when he got back.

CHAPTER VI.

ON THE HEIGHTS.