Part 12 (1/2)

”Oh, I haven't got one yet,” Scarlett hastened to a.s.sure her. ”But I shall, please G.o.d, if I live long enough.”

”Sergeant, you are talking nonsense,” said Evelyn. ”Pain has made you flighty.”

”'Way up in the seventh heaven,” a.s.sented Scarlett. ”Don't be so cruel as to call me down.”

”There!” Having stuck a final pin in the handkerchief she had bound about the wrist, Evelyn folded the soldier's arm across his breast.

”Sarah, go fetch me another sash, will you? I'm going to use this one for a sling.”

”Which color shall I get you, miss?” asked the maid, preparing to obey.

Evelyn shrugged her shoulders with indifference. ”I don't care--though I should think your own taste would lead you to see that blue goes best with this frock. There, Sergeant”--having made a creditable cradle of the ribbon for the soldier's arm and knotted it behind his neck, she came in front of him and surveyed her work admiringly--”that will do, I think. Now, remember, it must not be unbound for four and twenty hours.

Promise! I wish you would stop laughing in that silly way and tell me if it feels all right, really.”

”Joyous, beyond words,” Scarlett affirmed. ”I only wish I were that chap in the mythology with a hundred hands--and every blessed one of them in need of fomentation.”

”I suppose you say these inane things to me because you think me incapable of appreciating sense,” commented Miss Durant. ”Just because all my poor little efforts to do good up here have seemed superfluous.

Oh, yes”--she checked the protest that rose to his lips--”you all have been kindness personified, but I do not think you quite understand me,”

she complained, with the injured quaver of one who at heart knows herself to be understood only too well. ”I'm really not such an overbearing, ill-natured girl; only, I acknowledge, a wee bit spoiled.

You see, after my mother died, when I was still a very small child, in Colorado, my father sent me to a fas.h.i.+onable school in San Francisco, and there I began to feel that in Colorado we had been quite savage.

Then, in my early 'teens I was put at another still more fas.h.i.+onable school in Chicago, where I was made to feel that in San Francisco I had been hopelessly Western. Next, I moved on to an ultra-fas.h.i.+onable school in New York, where it was tacitly impressed on me that in Chicago we had been positively vulgar. After this came a course of Dresden, Vienna, London, Paris, by which I realized that in New York I had been provincial, crude. On my return I felt myself cosmopolitan, a finished product. Yet, in this short s.p.a.ce up here you all have made me wonder if, after all, all the time, I have not been a bit of a sn.o.b. Yes, you can't contradict me. I know. A thoroughbred would have taken things as she found them--would be at home anywhere, while I----” Having amazed herself far more even than her hearer by this unexpected burst of confidence, Miss Durant amazed herself still more by an unexpected burst of tears.

”Poor child!” Scarlett compa.s.sionated her, while liking her thoroughly for her candor. ”Dear, dear little Evelyn, it's libelling yourself you are, although it's true, and that's the sweetest part of it. Here, take mine!” As she was hunting, between inconsolable sniffs, for the handkerchief with which she herself had bandaged him, he tendered her his own.

”Oh, the sprain--your wrist!” cried Evelyn, in alarm.

”That's all right,” Scarlett rea.s.sured her, while drying her eyes with the hand he had removed for the purpose from the sling. ”It was the other one that got the twist.”

Evelyn drew back. ”You mean you dared let me bind up the wrong one?”

”Ye made your own selection,” Scarlett reminded her, in tones he vainly tried to render penitent.

”That you did, miss,” corroborated Sarah, coming from the hotel with the blue sash and tying it about Evelyn's slender waist.

”Give me back my ribbon, my handkerchief!” demanded Evelyn of Scarlett, furiously.

”Not for four and twenty hours,” he answered. ”Not even for you would I break a promise to a lady.”

”Never, never, never will I speak to you again!” cried Miss Durant.

Just then the chapel bell began to ring merrily, and at the same moment Maclane hurried toward them from the mission, an open hymnal in hand.

”Come, my children, we march in, singing,” he explained, pointing toward the Indians, who were forming in a procession by the chapel door. ”As I am short of hymnals, you and the Sergeant will have to share one, Miss Durant. Hymn 674. 'Peace, Perfect Peace.'”

Evelyn stood still. ”I absolutely decline to be a.s.sociated in any way whatever with Sergeant Scarlett.”

”Oh, my children!” remonstrated the minister. ”How can we talk of missionizing the heathen when the Gentiles so wrangle among themselves!