The Way of a Man, Emerson Hough [ebook reader macos .TXT] 📗
- Author: Emerson Hough
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Some one came pushing through the crowd, evidently having sprung down from one of the carriages. I turned to see a young girl, clad in white lawn, a thin silver-gray veil drawn tight under her chin, who now pushed forward through the men, and ran up to the black boy who stood with the bird in his hand, hanging by one wing. She caught it from him, and held it against her breast, where its blood drabbled her gown and hands. I remember I saw one drop of blood at its beak, and remember how glad I was that the bird was in effect dead, so that a trying scene would soon be ended.
"Stop this at once!" cried the girl, raising an imperative hand. "Aren't you ashamed, all of you? Look, look at this!" She held out the dying bird in her hand. "Judge Reeves," she cried, "what are you doing there?"
Our decisive referee grew suddenly abashed. "Ah—ah, my dear young lady—my very dear young lady," he began.
"Captain Stevenson," exclaimed the girl, whirling suddenly on my second, "stop this at once! I'm ashamed of you."
"Now, now, my dear Miss Ellen," began Stevenson, "can't you be a good fellow and run back home? We're off the reservation, and really—this, you see, is a judge of the Supreme Court! We're doing nothing unlawful." He motioned toward Judge Reeves, who looked suddenly uncomfortable.
Major Williams added his counsel. "It is a little sport between Captain Orme and Mr. Cowles, Miss Ellen."
"Sport, great sport, isn't it?" cried the girl, holding out her drabbled hands. "Look there"—she pointed toward the pile of dead birds—"hundreds of these killed, for money, for sport. It isn't sport. You had all these birds once, you owned them."
And there she hit a large truth, with a woman's guess, although none of us had paused to consider it so before.
"The law, Miss Ellen," began Judge Reeves, clearing his throat, "allows the reducing to possession of animals feroe naturoe, that is to say, of wild nature, and ancient custom sanctions it."
"They were already reduced" she flashed. "The sport was in getting them the first time, not in butchering them afterward."
Stevenson and Williams rubbed their chins and looked at each other. As for me, I was looking at the girl; for it seemed to me that never in my life had I seen one so beautiful.
Her hair, reddish brown in the sunlight, was massed up by the binding veil, which she pushed back now from her face. Her eyes, wide and dark, were as sad as they were angry. Tears streamed from them down her cheek, which she did not dry. Fearless, eager, she had, without thought, intruded where the average woman would not have ventured, and she stood now courageously intent only upon having the way of what she felt was right and justice. There came to me as I looked at her a curious sense that I and all my friends were very insignificant creatures; and it was so, I think, in sooth, she held us.
"Captain Orme," said I to my opponent, "you observe the actual Supreme Court of America!" He bowed to me, with a questioning raising of his eyebrows, as though he did not like to go on under the circumstances.
"I am unfortunate to lead by a bird," said I, tentatively. For some reason the sport had lost its zest to me.
"And I being the loser as it stands," replied Orme, "do not see how I can beg off." Yet I thought him as little eager to go on as I myself.
"Miss Ellen," said Judge Reeves, removing the hat from his white hair, "these gentlemen desire to be sportsmen as among themselves, but of course always gentlemen as regards the wish of ladies. Certain financial considerations are involved, so that both feel a delicacy in regard to making any motion looking to the altering of the original conditions of this contract. Under these circumstances, then, appeal is taken from this lower Court"—and he bowed very low—"to what my young friend very justly calls the Supreme Court of the United States. Miss Ellen, it is for you to say whether we shall resume or discontinue."
The girl bowed to Judge Reeves, and then swept a sudden hand toward Stevenson and Williams. "Go home, all of you!" she said.
And so, in sooth, much shamefaced, we did go home, Judge of the Supreme Court, officers of the Army, and all, vaguely feeling we had been caught doing some ignoble thing. For my part, although I hope mawkishness no more marks me than another, and although I made neither then nor at any time a resolution to discontinue sports of the field, I have never since then shot in a pigeon match, nor cared to see others do so, for it has never again seemed to me as actual sport. I think the intuitive dictum of the Army girl was right.
"Now wasn't that like Ellen!" exclaimed Kitty, when finally we found ourselves at her carriage—"just like that girl. Just wasn't it like that girl! To fly in the face of the Supreme Court of the State, and all the laws of sport as well! Jack, I was keeping count," she held out her ivory tablets. "You'd have beaten him sure, and I wanted to see you do it. You were one ahead, and would have made it better in the next twenty-five. Oh, won't I talk to that girl when I see her!"
"So that was Ellen!" I said to Kitty.
"The very same. Now you've seen her. What you think I don't know, but what she thinks of you is pretty evident."
"You were right, Mrs. Kitty," said I. "She's desperately good looking. But that isn't the girl I danced with last night. In the name of Providence, let me get away from this country, for I know not what may happen to me! No man is safe in this neighborhood of beauties."
"Let's all go home and get a bite to eat," said Stevenson, with much common sense. "You've got glory enough just the way it stands."
So that was Ellen! And it moreover was none less than Ellen Meriwether, daughter of my father's friend and business associate, whom I had traveled thus far to see, and whom, as I now determined, I must meet at the very first possible opportunity. Perhaps, then, it might very naturally come about that—but I dismissed this very rational supposition as swiftly as I was able.
Events had somewhat hurried me in the two days since my arrival at Jefferson Barracks, but on the morning following the awkward ending of my match with Orme I had both opportunity and occasion to take stock of myself and of my plans. The mails brought me two letters, posted at Wallingford soon after my departure; one from Grace Sheraton and one from my mother. The first one was—what shall I say? Better perhaps that I should say nothing, save that it was like Grace Sheraton herself, formal, correct and cold. It was the first written word I had ever received from my fiancée, and I had expected—I do not know what. At least I had thought to be warmed, comforted, consoled in these times of my adversity. It seemed to my judgment, perhaps warped by sudden misfortune, that possibly my fiancée regretted her hasty promise, rued an engagement to one whose affairs had suddenly taken an attitude of so little promise. I was a poor man now, and worse than poor, because lately I had been rich, as things went in my surroundings. In this letter, I say, I had expected—I do not know what. But certainly I had not expected to see sitting on the page written in my fiancée's hand, the face of another woman. I hated myself for it.
The second letter was from my mother, and it left me still more disconcerted and sad. "Jack," it said, "I grieve unspeakably. I am sad beyond all imaginings of sadness. I need thee. Come back the first day thee can to thy mother."
There was indeed need for me at home. Yet here was I with my errand not yet well begun; for Captain Stevenson told me this morning that the Post Adjutant had received word from Colonel Meriwether saying that he would be gone for some days or weeks on the upper frontier. Rumor passed about that a new man, Sherman, was possibly to come on to assume charge of Jefferson, a man reported to be a martinet fit to stamp out any demonstration in a locality where secession sentiment was waxing strong. Meriwether, a Virginian, and hence suspected of Southern sympathy, was like many other Army officers at the time, shifted to points where his influence would be less felt, President Buchanan to the contrary notwithstanding. The sum of all which was that if I wished to meet Colonel Meriwether and lay before him my own personal request, I would be obliged to seek for him far to the West, in all likelihood at Fort Leavenworth, if not at the lower settlements around the old town of Independence. Therefore I wrote at once both to my fiancée and to my mother that it would be impossible for me to return at the time, nor at any positive future time then determinable. I bade a hasty good-by to my host and hostess, and before noon was off for the city. That night I took passage on the River Belle, a boat bound up the Missouri.
Thus, somewhat against my will, I found myself a part of that motley throng of keen-faced, fearless American life then pushing out over the frontiers. About me were men bound for Oregon, for California, for the Plains, and not a few whose purpose I took to be partisanship in the border fighting between slavery and free soil. It was in the West, and on the new soils, that the question of slavery was really to be debated and settled finally.
The intenseness, the eagerness, the compelling confidence of all this west-bound population did not fail to make the utmost impression upon my own heart, hitherto limited by the horizon of our Virginia hills. I say that I had entered upon this journey against my will. Our churning wheels had hardly reached the turbid flood of the Missouri before the spell of the frontier had caught me. In spite of sadness, trouble, doubt, I would now only with reluctance have resigned my advance into that country which offered to all men, young and old, a zest of deeds bold enough to banish sadness, doubt and grief.
I made friends with many of these strange travelers, and was attracted especially by one, a reticent man of perhaps sixty odd years, in Western garb, full of beard and with long hair reaching to his shoulders. He had the face of an old Teuton war chief I had once seen depicted in a canvas showing a raid in some European forest in years long before a Christian civilization was known—a face fierce and eager, aquiline in nose, blue of eye; a figure stalwart, muscular, whose every movement spoke courage and self-confidence. Auberry was his name, and as I talked with him he told me of days passed with my heroes—Fremont, Carson, Ashley, Bill Williams, Jim Bridger, even the negro ruffian Beckwourth—all men of the border of whose deeds I had read. Auberry had trapped from the St. Mary's to the sources of the Red, and his tales, told in simple and matter-of-fact terms, set my very blood atingle. He was bound, as he informed me, for Laramie; always provided that the Sioux, now grown exceedingly restless over the many wagon-trains pushing up the Platte to
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