An Apache Princess, Charles King [ready player one ebook .txt] 📗
- Author: Charles King
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But Graham went straightway to the quarters of Captain Wren, a rough pencil copy of that most unusual paper in his hand. "R-robert Wren," said he, as he entered, unknocking and unannounced, "will ye listen to this? Nay, Angela, lass, don't go." When strongly moved, as we have seen, our doctor dropped to the borderland of dialect.
In the dim light from the shaded windows he had not at first seen the girl. She was seated on a footstool, her hands on her father's knee, her fond face gazing up into his, and that strong, bony hand of his resting on her head and toying with the ribbon, the "snood," as he loved to call it, with which she bound her abundant tresses. At sound of the doctor's voice, Janet, ever apprehensive of ill, had come forth from the dining room, silver brush and towel in hand, and stood at the doorway, gazing austerely. She could not yet forgive her brother's friend his condemnation of her methods as concerned her brother's child. Angela, rising to her full height, stood with one hand on the back of her father's chair, the other began softly stroking the grizzled crop from his furrowed forehead.
No one spoke a word as Graham began and slowly, to the uttermost line, read his draft of Blakely's missive. No one spoke for a moment after he had finished. Angela, with parted lips and dilated eyes, had stood at first drinking in each syllable, then, with heaving bosom, she slowly turned, her left hand falling by her side. Wren sat in silence, his deep-set eyes glowering on the grim reader, a dazed look on his rugged face. Then he reached up and drew the slim, tremulous hand from his forehead and snuggled it against his stubbly cheek, and still he could not speak. Janet slowly backed away into the darkness of the dining room. The situation had softening tendencies and Janet's nature revolted at sentiment. It was Graham's voice that again broke the silence.
"For a vain carpet knight, 'whose best boast was to wear a braid of his fair lady's hair,' it strikes me our butterfly chaser has some points of a gentleman," said he, slowly folding his paper. "I might say more," he continued presently, retiring toward the hall. Then, pausing at the doorway, "but I won't," he concluded, and abruptly vanished.
An hour later, when Janet in person went to answer a knock at the door, she glanced in at the parlor as she passed, and that peep revealed Angela again seated on her footstool, with her bonny head pillowed on her father's knee, his hand again toying with the glossy tresses, and both father and child looked up, expectant. Yes, there stood the young adjutant, officially equipped with belt and sword and spotless gloves. "Can I see the captain?" he asked, lifting his natty kepi, and the captain arose and strode to the door.
"Major Plume presents his compliments—and this letter, sir," stammered the youth, blushing, too, at sight of Angela, beaming on him from the parlor door. "And—you're in command, sir. The major has gone on sick report."
That evening a solemn cortège filed away down the winding road to the northward flats and took the route to the little cemetery, almost all the garrison following to the grave all that was mortal of the hapless agent. Byrne, returned from the agency, was there to represent the general commanding the department. Wren stalked solemnly beside him as commander of the post. Even the women followed, tripping daintily through the sand. Graham watched them from the porch of the post hospital. He could not long leave Mullins, tossing in fever and delirium. He had but recently left Lieutenant Blakely, sitting up and placidly busying himself in patching butterfly wings, and Blakely had even come to the front door to look at the distant gathering of decorous mourners. But the bandaged head was withdrawn as two tall, feminine forms came gravely up the row, one so prim and almost antique, the other so lithe and lissome. He retreated to the front room, and with the one available eye at the veiled window, followed her, the latter, until the white flowing skirt was swept from the field of his vision. He had stood but a few hours previous on the spot where he had received that furious blow five nights before, and this time, with cordial grasp, had taken the huge hand that dealt it between his white and slender palms. "Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those," Wren had murmured, as he read the deeply regretful words of his late accuser and commander, for had not he in his turn, and without delay, also to eat humble pie? There was something almost pathetic in the attitude of the big soldier as he came to the darkened room and stood before his junior and subordinate, but the latter had stilled the broken, clumsy, faltering words with which this strong, masterful man was striving to make amend for bitter wrong. "I won't listen to more, Captain Wren," he said. "You had reasons I never dreamed of—then. Our eyes have been opened" (one of his was still closed). "You have said more than enough. Let us start afresh now—with better understanding."
"It—it is generous in you, Blakely. I misjudged everything—everybody, and now,—well, you know there are still Hotspurs in the service. I'm thinking some man may be ass enough to say you got a blow without resenting—"
Blakely smiled, a contorted and disunited smile, perhaps, and one much trammeled by adhesive plaster. Yet there was placid unconcern in the visible lines of his pale face. "I think I shall know how to answer," said he. And so for the day, and without mention of the name uppermost in the thoughts of each, the two had parted—for the first time as friends.
But the night was yet to come.
CHAPTER X. "WOMAN-WALK-IN-THE-NIGHT" AGAINo swift had been the succession of events since the first day of the week, few of the social set at Sandy could quite realize, much less fathom, all that had happened, and as they gathered on the verandas, in the cool of the evening after Daly's funeral, the trend of talk was all one way. A man who might have thrown light on certain matters at issue had been spirited away, and there were women quite ready to vow it was done simply to get him beyond range of their questioning. Sergeant Shannon had been sent to the agency on some mission prescribed by Colonel Byrne. It was almost the last order issued by Major Plume before turning over the command.
Byrne himself still lingered at the post, "watching the situation," as it was understood, and in constant telegraphic correspondence with the general at Prescott and the commander of the little guard over the agency buildings at the reservation—Lieutenant Bridger, of the Infantry. With a sergeant and twenty men that young officer had been dispatched to that point immediately after the alarming and unlooked-for catastrophe of the reveille outbreak. Catastrophe was what Byrne called it, and he meant what he said, not so much because it had cost the life of Daly, the agent, whose mistaken zeal had precipitated the whole misunderstanding, but rather because of the death of two such prominent young warriors as "Shield" and his friend, who had fallen after dealing the fatal blow to him who had laid violent hands, so they regarded it, on two young girls, one a chieftain's daughter and both objects of reverent and savagely sentimental interest. "If war doesn't come at once," said Byrne, "it will be because the Apache has a new sense or a deep-laid scheme. Look out for him."
No news as yet had come from the runners sent forth in search of the scattered fugitives, who would soon be flocking together again in the fastnesses of the Mogollon to the east or the Red Rock country northward—the latter probably, as being nearer their friends at the reservation and farther from the few renegade Tontos lurking in the mountains toward Fort Apache. Byrne's promise to the wanderers, sent by these runners, was to the effect that they would be safe from any prosecution if they would return at once to the agency and report themselves to the interpreter and the lieutenant commanding the guard. He would not, he said, be answerable for what might happen if they persisted in remaining at large. But when it was found that, so far from any coming in, there were many going out, and that Natzie's father and brother had already gone, Byrne's stout heart sank. The message came by wire from the agency not long after the return of the funeral party, and while the evening was yet young. He sent at once for Wren, and, seated on the major's front piazza, with an orderly hovering just out of earshot, and with many an eye anxiously watching them along the row, the two veterans were holding earnest conference. Major Plume was at the bedside of his wife, so said Graham when he came down about eight. Mrs. Plume, he continued, was at least no worse, but very nervous. Then he took himself back to the hospital.
Another topic of talk along the line was Blakely's watch and its strange recovery, and many were the efforts to learn what Blakely himself had to say about it. The officers, nearly all of them, of course, had been at intervals to see Blakely and inquire if there were not something that they could do, this being the conventional and proper thing, and they who talked with him, with hardly an exception, led up to the matter of the watch and wished to know how he accounted for its being there on the post of No. 5. It was observed that, upon this topic and the stabbing of Private Mullins, Mr. Blakely was oddly reticent. He had nothing whatever to suggest as explanation of either matter. The watch was taken from the inner pocket of his thin white coat as he lay asleep at the pool, of this he felt confident, but by whom he would not pretend to say. Everybody knew by this time that Angela Wren had seen him sleeping, and had, in a spirit of playful mischief, fetched away his butterfly net, but who would accuse Angela of taking his watch and money? Of course such things had been, said one or two wise heads, but—not with girls like Angela.
But who could say what, all this while, Angela herself was thinking? Once upon a time it had been the way of our young folk well over the North and West to claim forfeit in the game of "Catching the weasel asleep." There had been communities, indeed, and before co-education became a fad at certain of our great universities, wherein the maid caught napping could hold it no sin against watchful swain, or even against her, that he then and there imprinted on
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