An Apache Princess, Charles King [ready player one ebook .txt] 📗

hree days later the infantry guard of the garrison were in sole charge. Wren and Sanders, with nearly fifty troopers apiece, had taken the field in compliance with telegraphic orders from Prescott. The general had established field headquarters temporarily at Camp McDowell, down the Verde Valley, and under his somewhat distant supervision four or five little columns of horse, in single file, were boring into the fastnesses of the Mogollon and the Tonto Basin. The runners had been unsuccessful. The renegades would not return. Half a dozen little nomad bands, forever out from the reservation, had eagerly welcomed these malcontents and the news they bore that two of their young braves had been murdered while striving to defend Natzie and Lola. It furnished all that was needed as excuse for instant descent upon the settlers in the deep valleys north of the Rio Salado, and, all unsuspecting, all unprepared, several of these had met their doom. Relentless war was already begun, and the general lost no time in starting his horsemen after the hostiles. Meantime the infantry companies, at the scattered posts and camps, were left to "hold the fort," to protect the women, children, and property, and Neil Blakely, a sore-hearted man because forbidden by the surgeon to attempt to go, was chafing, fuming, and retarding his recovery at his lonely quarters. The men whom he most liked were gone, and the few among the women who might have been his friends seemed now to stand afar off. Something, he knew not what, had turned garrison sentiment against him.

For a day or two, so absorbed was he in his chagrin over Graham's verdict and the general's telegraphic orders in the case, Mr. Blakely never knew or noticed that anything else was amiss. Then, too, there had been no opportunity of meeting garrison folk except the few officers who dropped in to inquire civilly how he was progressing. The bandages were off, but the plaster still disfigured one side of his face and neck. He could not go forth and seek society. There was really only one girl at the post whose society he cared to seek. He had his books and his bugs, and that, said Mrs. Bridger, was "all he demanded and more than he deserved." To think that the very room so recently sacred to the son and heir should be transformed into what that irate little woman called a "beetle shop"! It was one of Mr. Blakely's unpardonable sins in the eyes of the sex that he found so much to interest him in a pursuit that neither interested nor included them. A man with brains and a bank account had no right to live alone, said Mrs. Sanders, she having a daughter of marriageable age, if only moderately prepossessing. All this had the women to complain of in him before the cataclysm that, for the time at least, had played havoc with his good looks. All this he knew and bore with philosophic and whimsical stoicism. But all this and more could not account for the phenomenon of averted eyes and constrained, if not freezing, manner when, in the dusk of the late autumn evening, issuing suddenly from his quarters, he came face to face with a party of four young women under escort of the post adjutant—Mrs. Bridger and Mrs. Truman foremost of the four and first to receive his courteous, yet half embarrassed, greeting. They had to stop for half a second, as they later said, because really he confronted them, all unsuspected. But the other two, Kate Sanders and Mina Westervelt, with bowed heads and without a word, scurried by him and passed on down the line. Doty explained hurriedly that they had been over to the post hospital to inquire for Mullins and were due at the Sanders' now for music, whereupon Blakely begged pardon for even the brief detention, and, raising his cap, went on out to the sentry post of No. 4 to study the dark and distant upheavals in the Red Rock country, where, almost every night of late, the signal fires of the Apaches were reported. Not until he was again alone did he realize that he had been almost frigidly greeted by those who spoke at all. It set him to thinking.

Mrs. Plume was still confined to her room. The major had returned from Prescott and, despite the fact that the regiment was afield and a clash with the hostiles imminent, was packing up preparatory to a move. Books, papers, and pictures were being stored in chests, big and little, that he had had made for such emergencies. It was evident that he was expecting orders for change of station or extended leave, and they who went so far as to question the grave-faced soldier, who seemed to have grown ten years older in the last ten days, had to be content with the brief, guarded reply that Mrs. Plume had never been well since she set foot in Arizona, and even though he returned, she would not. He was taking her, he said, to San Francisco. Of this unhappy woman's nocturnal expedition the others seldom spoke now and only with bated breath. "Sleep-walking, of course!" said everybody, no matter what everybody might think. But, now that Major Plume knew that in her sleep his wife had wandered up the row to the very door—the back door—of Mr. Blakely's quarters, was it not strange that he had taken no pains to prevent a recurrence of so compromising an excursion, for strange stories were afloat. Sentry No. 4 had heard and told of a feminine voice, "somebody cryin' like" in the darkness of midnight about Blakely's, and Norah Shaughnessy—returned to her duties at the Trumans', yet worrying over the critical condition of her trooper lover, and losing thereby much needed sleep—had gained some new and startling information. One night she had heard, another night she had dimly seen, a visitor received at Blakely's back door, and that visitor a woman, with a shawl about her head. Norah told her mistress, who very properly bade her never refer to it again to a soul, and very promptly referred to it herself to several souls, one of them Janet Wren. Janet, still virtuously averse to Blakely, laid the story before her brother the very day he started on the warpath, and Janet was startled to see that she was telling him no news whatever. "Then, indeed," said she, "it is high time the major took his wife away," and Wren sternly bade her hold her peace, she knew not what she was saying! But, said Camp Sandy, who could it have been but Mrs. Plume or, possibly, Elise? Once or twice in its checkered past Camp Sandy had had its romance, its mystery, indeed its scandals, but this was something that put in the shade all previous episodes; this shook Sandy to its very foundation, and this, despite her brother's prohibition, Janet Wren felt it her duty to detail in full to Angela.

To do her justice, it should be said that Miss Wren had striven valiantly against the impulse,—had indeed mastered it for several hours,—but the sight of the vivid blush, the eager joy in the sweet young face when Blakely's new "striker" handed in a note addressed to Miss Angela Wren, proved far too potent a factor in the undoing of that magnanimous resolve. The girl fled with her prize, instanter, to her room, and thither, as she did not reappear, the aunt betook herself within the hour. The note itself was neither long nor effusive—merely a bright, cordial, friendly missive, protesting against the idea that any apology had been due. There was but one line which could be considered even mildly significant. "The little net," wrote Blakely, "has now a value that it never had before." Yet Angela was snuggling that otherwise unimportant