Part 20 (1/2)

”Good-by, friend.”

”_Adios_,” said the Mexican. ”_Vaya usted con Dios!_” And the English of that is, ”May you ride with G.o.d!”

From the other end of the room Captain Taylor and I were watching that little scene. Without hearing a word we could understand so well. ”Young woman,” said the captain, ”when I was a younger fool than I am now, I was a naval attache at St. Petersburg. I'd seen how the Russian Bear behaved at Sebastopol and I liked to watch how he behaved in the Winter Palace. One day a Cossack officer and his son came to make an appeal.

Mrs. officer had been a puss and bolted with one of the court officials, so her husband and son wanted leave to go after the man with their guns.

They were so miserable that they sat at a table and took no notice of anybody or anything. After they'd been sitting a long time, a man came and laid down a case of dueling pistols on the table beside them. I couldn't hear what he said, but he sat down with them. Presently I saw him shake hands with the general.

”Now your husband put something on the table, and sat down with those wretched prisoners, and presently shook hands with one of them.

”Your husband and that Russian chap did the very same things in the very same way. Yes, you've married a gentleman by mistake.”

I was puzzled. ”Who was the Russian?” I asked.

”Oh, didn't I tell you? He was the emperor.”

After a minute, while I watched my royal man, the captain laid his hand on mine. ”Don't let these loafers see you crying,” he whispered.

”I'm not crying.” I looked round to prove that I was not crying, and as I did so, my glance fell upon the old man's miniature medals. One of them was the Victoria Cross.

CHAPTER XI

BILLY O'FLYNN

_Kate's Narrative_

Both Jesse and I have a habit of committing our thoughts to paper and not to speech. Things written can be destroyed, whereas things said stay terribly alive. I think if other husbands and wives I know of wrote more and talked less, their homes would not feel so dreadful, so full of horrible shadows. There are houses where I feel ill as soon as I cross the door-step, because the very air of the rooms is foul with the spite, the nagging, the strife of bitter souls. As to the houses where horrors have taken place--despair, madness, murder, suicide--these are always haunted, and sensitive people are terrified by ghosts.

My pen has rambled. I sat down to write a thing which must not be said.

Jesse is cruel to young O'Flynn. Perhaps he is justly, rightly cruel, in gibing at this young cow-boy, taunting him until the lad is on the very edge of murder. ”Got to be done,” says Jesse, ”I promised his father that I'd break the colt until he's fed up with robbers. So just you watch me lift the dust from his hide, and don't you git gesticulating on my trail with your fool sympathies.” Billy does not suspect that the tormentor loves his victim.

My heart aches with his humiliation. His mother is my cook, not a princess, as the boy's pride would have her. His father was one of the most dangerous leaders of the Rocky Mountain outlaws, so there the lad saw glory, and I don't blame him. But all the glamour was stripped away when Jesse tricked O'Flynn and his gang into surrender, handed them over to justice, and showed poor Billy his sordid heroes for what they really were. His father has been hanged.

Remember that this ranch, ablaze with romance for me, is squalid every-day routine for Billy, whose dreams are beyond the sky-line. He imagines railways as we imagine dragons, and the Bloomsbury boarding-house from which my sister wrote on her return from India is, from his point of view, a place in the Arabian Nights. I read to him Taddy's letter, about the new boarder from Selangor, who is down with fever, the German waiter caught reading Colonel Boyce's ma.n.u.script on protective color for howitzers, the tweeny's sailor father drowned at sea, and the excitement in that humdrum house when Lady Blacktail called. ”Wish I'd had a shot,” said Billy wistfully, his mind on the black-tail, our local kind of deer. Perhaps he saw forest behind the boarding-house. ”In the old country,” said he, ”do the does call? Only the buck calls here. Your folks is easy excited, anyways.”

”Lady Blacktail,” said I, ”is a woman.”

”What was she shouting about?”

”She just called--came to take tea, you know.”

”Got no job of work?”

”Oh, but her husband, Sir Tom, was a very rich man. He left her millions.”

”Mother's first husband,” said Billy, his mind running on widows, ”had lots of wealth. He kep' a seegar stand down-town near the Battery, and had a bra.s.s band when they buried him. Mother came out West.”