Part 9 (1/2)
So far as the Eleventh and one or two other regiments were concerned, that summer's campaign, so fraught with incident and tribulation, was now at an end. It would take weeks and months of care to restore their horses to serviceable condition. Others were ordered up to replace the worn-out command, and while an indomitable general pushed fresh columns into the field to track the savages to their winter lairs, the ragged troopers--for all the world like so many beggars a horseback, so many mounted scarecrows--were ordered in to the big garrisons near the supply depots to refit, recuperate, and restore to discipline. Some, officers and men both, had been sent ahead, too weak or ill to remain in the field, and among these, consigned to the tender care of the post surgeon of Fort Cameron, was Lieutenant Davies, over whose condition the doctors shook their heads. Brain fever was the malady, but his system was so reduced by starvation and exposure that even a moderate fever would have been most serious. Not until he had been gone nearly a month did the regiment follow, and then, scattered in detachments to various posts, became busily occupied in the work of rehabilitation. Cameron was a big new frontier fort with few accommodations, over-crowded, too; yet, being the nearest to the field of action, thither had Captain Wilbur Cranston gone just as soon as he was convalescent and able to move. Thither with him went his devoted wife and her devoted cousin and companion, Miss Loomis, for whose reception the subalterns of the infantry guard promptly gave up their frame quarters and moved into tents, and Cranston was there on light duty in charge of the big corral of remount horses when Davies was bundled in and established under Cranston's roof. There, carefully treated by Dr. Glover and regularly visited, often tenderly nursed, by Mrs. Cranston and her friend, the naturally strong const.i.tution of the young officer triumphed and he began slowly to mend. Meantime, as is or was the way, it fell to the lot of the gentle and sympathetic army wives or maidens at the post to keep the distant mother informed of her boy's slow progress toward recovery, and presently to answer the importunate letters of another. Mrs. Cranston, a shrewd observer, could not fail to note that as soon as her patient was allowed to read at all it was his mother's letters, not the great packet in Miss Quimby's unformed hand, that he eagerly opened. Then when at last he did begin these latter the steady progress of his convalescence was impaired. He became again feverish, restless, and depressed. Too ill and weak as yet to write for himself, he read with grateful eyes his mother's allusions to the kind and sympathetic missives sent her by Mrs.
Cranston, and occasionally, as happened, by Miss Loomis. Gladly, too, did he avail himself of their services in reply. But when it became necessary presently to answer those of his _fiancee_, there might have been embarra.s.sment but for Mrs. Cranston's tact. She had begun to feel a strong interest in and respect for her patient. So, too, had her husband, who came daily to sit by his bedside, but who avoided, as much as possible, all reference to the closing days of the campaign.
As yet the young officer had not been told of McGrath's disappearance, and had not been encouraged to tell of his own experience. Indeed, there was very little he could tell, but his story was frankly imparted to his friend and comrade, Captain Cranston. Much seemed to be a total blank.
He spoke with a shudder of his last look at poor Mullen and Phillips, and at the pale, drawn faces of Captain Devers and the troop,--of another backward glance from near the top of the ridge, then of their losing sight of Devers and his men, and pus.h.i.+ng on to the deeper gloom of the east valley. It was then too dark to see, and for half an hour he and McGrath, weary and heart-sick, had scouted northeastward in search of his party. They had seen some flashes as they began the descent and rode in their direction, believing them to be signals, but soon all was darkness, all silence, but for the sigh of the night wind. Conscious of growing faintness, he suggested firing a shot or two as signals, and McGrath obeyed. Then off to the southeast, far from the point where they had seen the first flashes, the shots were answered and distant yells were heard. McGrath considered this ominous, and asked him to wait in a little ravine while he reconnoitred. In ten minutes two or three shots rang out in the direction taken by the sergeant, and presently back he came fast as a staggering horse could bear him, crying, ”Indians!
Indians everywhere!” It was all up with Davies's party, and their only hope was to hasten back to find the command; but the Indians came in chase, and though they plied spur, their poor horses seemed too weak for speed. How far they got he never knew, but remembered a sudden plunge, his horse's going down, rolling all over him, and nothing more.
”When you parted from Devers,” asked Cranston one day, ”how far was he from the top of the ridge?--how far to the west?”
And Davies answered, ”At least two and a half or three miles.”
Over this did Cranston ponder long. It ill accorded with what they wrote him from the front as Devers's story.
”You write to Mr. Davies's mother, Agatha,” Mrs. Cranston had said. ”I haven't time for both, but I'll take care of Miss Quimby.” Just what might be the tone and tenor of that young lady's letters to her prostrate lover Mrs. Cranston could not positively say, as no one saw them but himself, but she was ready to hazard a something more than mere conjecture when Miss Quimby took to writing to her as well. As was her wont when moved, Mrs. Margaret unbosomed herself to her lord. ”I've no patience with the girl,” she said. ”She'll worry him to death. If she writes such silly, romantic trash to me, what mustn't she be saying to him? What on earth can he ever have seen in her?”
Now, that's just one thing no woman can find out,--what a man can see to admire in one in whom she sees nothing. It didn't help matters that Cranston, in his conservative, whimsical way, should counsel silence and patience. What woman can be silent under strong provocation? What woman can patiently abide the personal application of a general rule?
”I don't suppose there ever was a match yet of which some woman didn't say she couldn't see what he saw,” said Cranston, deprecatingly; and then, with one of his whimsical grins, began to add, ”Let's see, wasn't it Kitty Benton who said, when she heard of our engagement, that she----” But he got no further in face of his wife's impetuous outbreak:
”That's simply hateful in you, Wilbur, and you know it as well as I do.
She knew me only slightly, for we were not in the same set at school at all----”
”Well,--still, didn't she know you rather better than you do Miss Quimby, whom you never saw at all?”
”I don't care. I know what she's like,” answered Mrs. Meg, with flus.h.i.+ng cheeks. And that was really before poor Almira's first letter came, and if Mrs. Cranston thought she was right before, she knew it when she read now.
The closing paragraph of a long, almost incoherent missive must suffice.
Even Cranston's lips twitched under the heavy thatch of his moustache as he listened. Even we, who like Mrs. Cranston, must admit it wasn't quite kind in her, no matter how natural, to read it afterward to Agatha Loomis, who, although declining to read, did not quite decline to hear at least a line or two.
”If you knew how I suffered--what tortures of anxiety, what nights of sleeplessness and woe, tossing on fevered pillow, tortured with visions of my beloved n.o.bly fallen on the field of battle and pining for the touch of this hand--you would indeed pity me; but my father is inflexible. He refuses his daughter the poor boon of flying to the stricken lover's side,--her husband that is to be. In vain have I pointed out that I ask no sweeter bliss than to share my Percy's lot, for weal or woe, to live in the humblest cot, a tent, a hovel even, with only a crust,--it meets only his scornful refusal. When my arms are eagerly outstretched to enfold my soldier hero, I have to be content with nursing day and night his afflicted mother, whom for his sake I love as I would my own, had she not been taken from me years ago when I was but an unsophisticated child. When I think of you privileged to sit by his delirious bedside, cooling his fevered brow, I envy you as I never thought to envy any woman on earth since, long years ago, my Percy blessed me with his love; and now if after all he should be taken, or if some proud lady should win him from his simple little village maid, there would be no refuge for me but the grave.”
”Now,” said Mrs. Cranston, ”something besides the bedside is delirious in that case. No wonder the poor fellow is picking up so slowly.”
”Well, wait a little,” responded her conservative lord and master.
”Seems to me a man ought to rejoice in knowing that the arms of lovely woman are outstretched in eagerness to enfold him. Now, if I were he----”
”Yes, if you were he I've no doubt you'd be off to Urbana by first train; but this young man has some sense in his head” (here Cranston began to finger his own skull tentatively), ”and in losing his freedom hasn't entirely parted with his wits.”
”Was that--my predicament?” asked Cranston, looking plaintively up.
”Well, at least I have to do your thinking for you, and what you have to do is help him here. Have you had any talk with him about--about what Captain Truman and Mr. Gray wrote?”
”Certainly not, Meg,” answered Cranston, becoming grave at once, ”and I do not mean to until he is well enough to hear it.”
”Well, the more I know of him the more I know it's utterly untrue.
Hasn't anything been heard yet of Sergeant McGrath?”
”Not a word. Even friendly Indians say they haven't an idea what could have become of him.” And Cranston's face was both anxious and troubled.
The matter was indeed one to give him deep concern. The ma.s.sacre of the little detachment from Warren's battalion late in September--all of them members of Devers's troop--had brought down sharp and deserved criticism, and there was every prospect that the matter would be officially investigated just as soon as the department commander could turn his attention from the rounding up of the hostile band still at large. Meantime, between Warren and his senior troop commander, Captain Devers, strained relations existed,--the former holding to the theory that the responsibility for the disaster lay with Devers and no one else, the latter volubly, plausibly, incessantly protesting against the imputation as utterly unjust, indeed, as utterly outrageous, and moving heaven and earth to unload the entire blame on the shoulders of the absent and defenceless.
Now, as a rule this is an easy matter, almost as easy in the army as out of it, and had his accuser been any other captain in the entire field column, poor Davies might indeed have been prejudged; but with Devers it was different. His idiosyncrasies were notorious. His whole mental and moral fabric was one of antagonism to his fellows in general and his seniors in particular. It was said, and generally said, of him that the mere fact that everybody liked or respected a man was enough to set Devers dead against him. The fact that Mr. Davies had thrown up his graduating leave and sought instant service in the field as a result of the tragedies of the early days of the campaign had won him instantly the interest and good will of officers and men throughout the entire command. He started well, so to speak, and his quiet, reticent, observant, but un.o.btrusive ways favorably impressed his regimental comrades and led to many a commendatory remark from veteran officers.
But there was universal comment, half humorous, half commiserating, upon his a.s.signment to Devers's troop, and Devers knew it. He treated the young man with cool civility at first, but became speedily captious and irritating, rebuking him openly in the presence and hearing of other officers and of enlisted men for matters for which he was not justly blamable. Old Winthrop spoke to Devers about it one day, and spoke seriously. ”You'll disgust that young gentleman with the service if you're not careful, Devers,” said he, ”and be the means of depriving us of a good officer.”