Kitabı oku: «The Cup of Trembling, and Other Stories», sayfa 9

Long before, she had turned over fruitlessly in her mind every means of getting money for this journey besides the obvious way of asking Father Meadows for her own. She had guessed that her friends were suspicious of Henniker's good faith, and believed that if they should come to know of her intention of running away to follow him they would prevent her for her own good, – which was quite the case.

That was the point Father Meadows made with his wife, when she argued that Meta, being a married woman now, ought to learn the purchasing power of money and its limitations by experimenting with a little of her own.

"We shall do wrong if we keep her a child now," she said.

"But if she has money, she'll lay it by till she gets enough to slip off to her soldier with. There's that much Injun about her; she'll follow to heel like a dog."

Father Meadows could not have spoken in this way of Meta a year ago. She had lost caste with him, also.

"Don't, father," the mother said, with a hurt look. "She'll not follow far with ten dollars in her pocket; but that much I want to try her with. She's like a child about shopping. She'll take anything at all, if it looks right and the man persuades her. And those Jew clerks will charge whatever they think they can get."

Mrs. Meadows had her way, and the trial sum was given to Meta one day, and the next day she and the child were missing.

At dusk, that evening, a group of Bannock squaws, more or less encumbered with packs, and children, climbed upon one of the flat cars of a freight train bound for Pocatello. The engine steamed out of the station, and down the valley, and away upon the autumn plains. The next morning the Bannocks broke camp, and vanished before the hoar frost had melted from the sage. Their leave-taking had been sullen, and their answers to questions about Meta, with which Father Meadows had routed them out in the night, had been so unsatisfactory that he took the first train to the Fort Hall Agency. There he waited for the party of squaws from Bisuka; but when they came, Meta was not with them. They knew nothing of her, they said; even the agent was deceived by their counterfeit ignorance. They could tell nothing, and were allowed to join their men at Eagle Rock, to go hunting into the wild country around Jackson's Hole.

Father Meadows went back and relieved his wife's worst fear, – that the girl had fulfilled the wrong half of her destiny, and gone back to hide her grief in the bosom of her tribe.

"Then you'll find her at Custer," said she. "You must write to the quartermaster-sergeant. And be sure you tell him she's married to him. He may be carrying on with some one else by this time."

Traveling as a ward of the nation travels; suffering as a white girl would suffer, from exposure and squalor, weariness and dirt, but bearing her misery like a squaw, Meta came at last to Custer station. In five days, always on the outside of comforts that other travelers pay for, she had passed from the lingering mildness of autumn in southern Idaho into the early winter of the hard Montana north.

She was fit only for a sick-bed when she came into the empty station at Custer, and learned that she was still thirty miles away from the fort. In her make-believe broken English, she asked a humble question about transportation. The station-keeper was called away that moment by a summons from the wire. It was while she stood listening to the tapping of the message, and waiting to repeat her question, that she felt a frightening pain, sharp, like a knife sticking in her breast. She could take only short breaths, yet longed for deep ones to brace her lungs and strengthen her sick heart. She stepped outside and spoke to a man who was wheeling freight down the platform. She dared not throw off her fated disguise and say, "I am the wife of Trumpeter Henniker. How shall I get to the fort?" for she had stolen a ride of a thousand miles, and she knew not what the penalty of discovery might be. She had borrowed a squaw's wretched immunity, and she must pay the price for that which she had rashly coveted. She pulled her blanket about her face and muttered, "Which way – Fort Custer?"

The freight man answered by pointing to the road. Dark wind clouds rolled along the snow-white tops of the mountains. The plain was a howling sea of dust.

"No stage?" she gasped.

The man laughed and shook his head. "There's the road. Injuns walk." He went on with his baggage-truck, and did not look at her again. He had not spoken unkindly: the fact and his blunt way of putting it were equally a matter of course, Squaws who "beat" their way in on freight trains do not go out by stage.

Meta crept away in the lee of a pile of freight, and sat down to nurse her child. The infant, like herself, had taken harm from exposure to the cold; his head passages were stopped, and when he tried to nurse he had to fight with suffocation and hunger both, and threw himself back in the visible act of screaming, but his hoarse little pipe was muted to a squeak. This, which sounds grotesque in the telling, was acute anguish for the mother to see. She covered her face with her blanket and sobbed and coughed, and the pain tore her like a knife. But she rose, and began her journey. She had little conception of what she was under-taking, but it would have made no difference; she must get there on her feet, since there was no other way.

She no longer carried her baby squaw fashion. She was out of sight of the station, and she hugged it where the burden lay heaviest, on her heart. Her hands were not free, but she had cast away her bundle of food; she could eat no more; and the warmth of the child's nestling body gave her all the strength she had, – that and her certainty of Henniker's welcome. That he would be faithful to her presence she never doubted. He would see her coming, perhaps, and he would run to catch her and the child together in his arms. She could feel the thrill of his eyes upon her, and the half groan of joy with which he would strain her to his breast. Then she would take one deep, deep breath of happiness, – ah, that pain! – and let the anguish of it kill her if it must.

The snows on the mountains had come down and encompassed the whole plain; the winter's siege had begun. The winds were iced to the teeth, and they smote like armed men. They encountered Meta carrying some hidden, precious thing to the garrison at Custer; they seized her and searched her rudely, and left her, trembling and disheveled, sobbing along with her silly treasure in her arms. The dust rose in columns, and traveled with mocking becks and bows before her, or burst like a bomb in her face, or circled about her like a band of wild horses lashed by the hooting winds.

Meantime, Henniker, in span-new civilian dress, was rattling across the plain on the box seat of the ambulance, beside the soldier driver. The ambulance was late to catch the east-bound train, and the pay-master was inside; so the four stout mules laid back their ears and traveled, and the heavy wheels bounded from stone to stone of the dust-buried road. Henniker smoked hard in silence, and drew great breaths of cold air into his splendid lungs. He was warm and clean and sound and fit, from top to toe. He had been drinking bounteous farewells to a dozen good comrades, and though sufficiently himself for all ordinary purposes, he was not that self he would have wished to be had he known that one of the test moments of his life was before him. It was a mood with him of headlong, treacherous quiet, and the devil of all foolish desires was showing him the pleasures of the world. He was in dangerously good health; he had got his discharge, and was off duty and off guard, all at once. He was a free man, though married. He was going to his wife, of course. Poor little Meta! God bless the girl, how she loved him! Ah, those black-eyed girls, with narrow temples and sallow, deep-fringed eyelids, they knew how to love a man! He was going to her by way of Laramie, or perhaps the coast. He might run upon a good thing over there, and start a bit of a home before he sent for her or went to fetch her; it was all one. She rested lightly on his mind, and he thought of her with a tender, reminiscent sadness, – rather a curious feeling considering that he was to see her now so soon. Why was she always "poor little Meta" in his thoughts?

Poor little Meta was toiling on, for "Injuns walk." The dreadful pain of coughing was incessant. The dust blinded and choked her, and there was a roaring in her ears which she confused with the night and day burden of the trains. She was in a burning fever that was fever and chill in one, and her mind was not clear, except on the point of keeping on; for once down, she felt that she could never get up again. At times she fancied she was clinging to the rocking, roaring platforms she had ridden on so long. The dust swirled around her – when had she breathed anything but dust! The ground swam like water under her feet. She swayed, and seemed to be falling, – perhaps she did fall. But she was up and on her feet, the blanket cast from her head, when the ambulance drove straight towards her, and she saw him —

She had seen it coming, the ambulance, down the long, dizzy rise. The hills above were white as death; a crooked gash of color rent the sky; the toothed pines stood black against that gleam, and through the ringing in her ears, loud and sweet, she heard the trumpets call. The cloud of delirium lifted, and she saw the uniform she loved; and beside the soldier driver sat her white chief, looking down at her who came so late with joy, bringing her babe, – her sheaves, the harvest of that year's wild sowing. But he did not seem to see her. She had not the power to speak or cry. She took one step forward and held up the child.

Then she fell down on her face in the road, for the beloved one had seen her, and had not known her, and had passed her by. And God would not let her make one sound.

How in Heaven's name could it have happened! Could any man believe it of himself? Henniker put it to his reason, not to speak of conscience or affection, and never could explain, even to himself, that most unhappy moment of his life. If he had not a heart for any helpless thing in trouble, who had? He was the joke of the garrison for his softness about dogs and women and children. Yet he had met his wife and baby on the open road, and passed them by, and owned them not, and still he called himself a man.

What he had seen at first had been the abject figure of a little squaw facing the wind, her bowed head shrouded in her blanket, carrying something which her short arms could barely meet around, – a shapeless bundle. He did not think it a child, for a squaw will pack her baby always on her back. He had looked at her indifferently, but with condescending pity; for the day was rough, and the road was long, even for a squaw. Then, in all the disfigurement of her dirt and wretchedness and wild attire, it broke upon him that this creature was his wife, the rightful sharer of his life and freedom; and that animal-like thing she held up, that wrung its face and squeaked like a blind kitten, was his son.

Good God! He clutched the driver's arm, and the man swore and jerked his mules out of the road, for the woman had stopped right in the track where the wheels were going. The driver looked back, but could not see her; he knew that he had not touched her, only with the wind of his pace, so he pulled the mules into the road again, and the ambulance rolled on.

"Stop; let me get off. That woman is my wife." Henniker heard himself saying the words, but they were never spoken to the ear. "Stop; let me get down," the inner voice prompted; but he did not make a sound, and the curtains flapped and the wheels went bounding along. They were a long way past the spot, and the station was in sight, when Henniker was heard to say hoarsely, "Pick her up, as you go back, can't you?"

"Pick up which?" asked the driver.

"The – that woman we passed just now."

"I'll see how she's making it," the man answered coolly. "I ain't much stuck on squaws. Acted like she was drunk or crazy."

Henniker's face flushed, but he shuddered as if he were cold.

"Pick her up, for the child's sake, by God!" No man was ever more ashamed of himself than he as he took out a gold piece and handed it to the soldier. "Give her this, Billy, – from yourself, you know. I ain't in it."

Billy looked at Henniker, and then at the gold piece. It was a double eagle; all that the husband had dared to offer as alms to his wife, but more than enough to arouse the suspicions that he feared.

"Ain't in it, eh?" thought the soldier. "You knew the woman, and she knew you. This is conscience money." But aloud he said, "A fool and his money are soon parted. How do you know but I'll blow it in at canteen?"

"I'll trust you," said Henniker.

The men did not speak to each other again.

"She's one of them Bannocks that camped by old Pop Meadows's place, down at Bisuka, I bet," said the soldier to himself.

Henniker went on fighting his fight as if it had not been lost forever in that instant's hesitation. A man cannot bethink himself: "By the way, it strikes me that was my wife and child we passed on the road!" What he had done could never be explained without grotesque lying which would deceive nobody.

It could not be undone; it must be lived down. Henniker was much better at living things down than he was at explaining or trying to mend them.

After all, it was the girl's own fault, putting up that wretched squaw act on him. To follow him publicly, and shame him before all the garrison, in that beastly Bannock rig! Had she turned Bannock altogether and gone back to the tribe? In that case let the tribe look after her; he could have no more to do with her, of course.

He stepped into the smoking-car, and lost himself as quickly as possible in the interest of new faces around him, and the agreeable impressions of himself which he read in eyes that glanced and returned for another look at so much magnificent health and color and virility. His spot of turpitude did not show through. He was still good to look at; and to look the man that one would be goes a long way toward feeling that one is that man.

II

It was at Laramie, between the mountains, and Henniker was celebrating the present and drowning the past in a large, untrammeled style, when he received a letter from the quartermaster-sergeant at Custer, – a plain statement until the end, where Henniker read: —

"If you should happen at any time to wish for news of your son, Meadows and his wife have taken the child. They came on here to get him, and Meadows insisted on standing the expense of the funeral, which was the best we could give her for the credit of the troop. He put a handsome stone over her, with 'Meta, wife of Trumpeter Henniker, K Troop, – th U. S. Cavalry,' on it; and there it stands to her memory, poor girl, and to your shame, a false, cruel, and cowardly man in the way you treated her. And so every one of us calls you, officers and men the same, – of your old troop that walked behind her to her grave. And where were you, Henniker, and what were you doing this day two weeks, when we were burying your poor wife? The twenty dollars you sent her by Billy, Meadows has, and says he will keep it till he sees you again. Which some of us think it will be a good while he will be packing that Judas piece around with him. – And so good-by, Henniker. I might have said less, or I might have said nothing at all, but that the boy is a fine child, my wife says, and must have a grand constitution to stand what he has stood; and I have a fondness for you myself when all is said and done.

"P. S. I would take a thought for that boy once in a while, if I was you. A man doesn't care for the brats when he is young, but age cures us of all wants but the want of a child."

But Henniker was not ready to go back to the Meadows cottage and be clothed in the robe of forgiveness, and receive his babe like a pledge of penitence on his hand.

The shock of the letter sobered him at first, and then the sting of it drove him to drinking harder than ever. He did not run upon that "good thing" at Laramie, nor in any of the cities westward, that one after another beheld the progress of his deterioration. It does not take long in the telling, but it was several years before he finally struck upon the "Barbary Coast" in San Francisco, where so many mothers' sons who never were heard of have gone down. He went ashore, but he did not quite go to pieces. His constitution had matured under healthy conditions, and could stand a good deal of ill-usage; but we are "no stronger than our weakest part," and at the end of all he found himself in a hospital bed under treatment for his knee, – the same that had been mulcted for him twice before.

He listened grimly to the doctor's explanations, – how the past sins of his whole impenitent system were being vicariously reckoned for through this one afflicted member. It was rough on his old knee, Henniker remarked; but he had hopes of getting out all right again, and he made the usual sick-bed promises to himself. He did get out, eventually, without a penny in the world, and with a stiff knee to drag about for the rest of his life. And he was just thirty-four years old.

His splendid vitality, that had been wont to express itself in so many attractive ways, now found its chief vent in talk – inexpensive, inordinate, meddlesome discourse – wherever two or three were gathered together in the name of idleness and discontent. The members of these congregations were pessimists to a man. They disbelieved in everybody and everything except themselves, and secretly, at times, they were even a little shaken on that head; but all the louder they exclaimed upon the world that had refused them the chance to be the great and successful characters nature had intended them to be.

It need hardly be said that when Henniker raved about the inequalities of class, the helplessness of poverty, the tyranny of wealth, and the curse of labor; and devoted in eloquent phrases the remainder of a blighted existence to the cause of the Poor Man, he was thinking of but one poor man, namely, himself. He classed himself with Labor only that he might feel his superiority to the laboring masses. There were few situations in which he could taste his superiority, in these days. The "ego" in his Cosmos was very hungry; his memories were bitter, his hopes unsatisfied; his vanity and artistic sense were crucified through poverty, lameness, and bad clothes. Now all that was left him was the conquests of the mind. For the smiles of women, give him the hoarse plaudits of men. The dandy of the garrison began to shine in saloon coteries and primaries of the most primary order. He was the star of sidewalk convocations and vacant-lot meetings of the Unemployed. But he despised the mob that echoed his perorations and paid for his drinks, and was at heart the aristocrat that his old uniform had made him.

In the summer of 1894, a little black-eyed boy with chestnut curls used to swing on the gate of the Meadows cottage that opens upon the common, and chant some verses of domestic doggerel about Coxey's army, which was then begging and bullying its way eastward, and demanding transportation at the expense of the railroads and of the people at large.

He sang his song to the well-marked tune of Pharaoh's Army, and thus the verses ran: —

 
"The Coxeyites they gathered,
The Coxeyites they gathered,
And stole a train of freight-cars in the morn,
And stole a train of freight-cars in the morning,
And stole a train of freight-cars in the morn.
 
 
"The engine left them standing,
The engine left them standing,
On the railroad-track at Caldwell in the morn.
Very sad it was for Caldwell in the morning
To feed that hungry army in the morn.
 
 
"Where are all the U. S. marshals,
The deputy U. S. marshals,
To jail that Coxey army in the morn,
That 'industrious, law-abiding' Coxey's army
That stole a train of freight-cars in the morn?"
 

Where indeed were all the U. S. marshals? The question was being asked with anxiety in the town, for a posse of them had gone down to arrest the defiant train-stealers, and it was rumored that the civil arm had been disarmed, and the deputies carried on as prisoners to Pocatello, where the Industrials, two hundred strong, were intrenched in the sympathies of the town, and knocking the federal authorities about at their law-abiding pleasure. Pocatello is a division town on the Union Pacific Railroad; it is full of the company's shops and men, the latter all in the American Railway Union or the Knights of Labor, and solid on class issues, right or wrong; and it was said that the master workman was expected at Pocatello to speak on the situation, and, if need arose, to call out the trades all over the land in support of the principle that tramp delegations shall not walk. Disquieting rumors were abroad, and there was relief in the news that the regulars had been called on to sustain the action of the federal court.

The troops at Bisuka barracks were under marching orders. While the town was alert to hear them go they tramped away one evening, just as a shower was clearing that had emptied the streets of citizens; and before the ladies could say "There they go," and call each other to the window, they were gone.

Then for a few days the remote little capital, with Coxeyites gathering and threatening its mails and railroad service, waited in apprehensive curiosity as to what was going to happen next. The party press on both sides seized the occasion to point a moral on their own account, and some said, "Behold the logic of McKinleyism," and others retorted, "Behold the shadow of the Wilson Bill stalking abroad over the land. Let us fall on our faces and pray!" But most people laughed instead, and patted the Coxeyites on the back, preferring their backs to their faces.

It seemed as if it might be time to stop laughing and gibing and inviting the procession to move on, when a thousand or more men, calling themselves American citizens, were parading their idleness through the land as authority for lawlessness and crime, and when our sober regulars had to be called out to quell a Falstaff's army. The regulars, be sure, did not enjoy it. If there is a sort of service our soldiers would like to be spared, doubtless it is disarming crazy Indians: but they prefer even that to standing up to be stoned and insulted and chunked with railroad iron by a mob which they are ordered not to fire upon, or to entering a peaceful country which has been sown with dynamite by patriotic labor unions, or prepared with cut-bridges by sympathetic strikers.

We are here to be hurt, so the strong ones tell us, and perhaps the best apology the strong can make to the weak for the vast superiority that training gives is to show how long they can hold their fire amidst a mob of brute ignorances, and how much better they can bear their hurts when the senseless missiles fly. We love the forbearance of our "unpitied strong;" it is what we expect of them: but we trust also in their firmness when the time for forbearance is past.

Little Ross Henniker – named for that mythical great Scotchman, his supposed grandfather – was deeply disappointed because he did not see the soldiers go. To have lived next door to them all his life, seven whole years, and watched them practicing and preparing to be fit and ready to go, and then not to see them when they did march away for actual service in the field, was hard indeed.

Ross was not only one of those brightest boys of his age known to parents and grand-parents by the million, but he was really a very bright and handsome child. If Mother Meadows, now "granny," had ever had any doubts at all about the Scottish chief of the Hudson's Bay Company, the style and presence of that incomparable boy were proof enough. It was a marked case of "throwing-back." There was none of the Bannock here. Could he not be trusted like a man to do whatever things he liked to do; as riding to fetch the cows and driving them hillward again, on the weird little spotted pony, hardly bigger than a dog, with a huge head and a furry cheek and a hanging under-lip, which the tributary Bannocks had brought him? It was while he was on cow-duty far away, but not out of sight of the post, that he saw the column move. "Great Scott!" how he did ride! He broke his stick over the pony's back, and kicked him with his bare heels, and slapped him with his hat, till the pony bucked him off into a sagebush whence he picked himself up and flew as fast as his own legs would spin; but he was too late. Then, for the first time in six months at least, he howled. Aunt Callie comforted him with fresh strawberry jam for supper, but the lump of grief remained, until, as she was washing the dishes, she glanced at him, laughing out of the corner of her eye, and began to make up the song about Coxey's army. For some time Ross refused to smile, but when it came to the chorus about the soldiers who were going he began to sing "hallelujah" too. Then gun-fire broke in with a lonesome sound, as if the cavalry up on the hill missed its comrades of the white stripes who were gone to "turn back" that ridiculous army.

 
"To turn back Coxey's army, hallelujah!
To turn back Coxey's army, halleloo!"
 

Mother Meadows wished "that man Coxey had never been born," so weary did she get of the Coxey song. Coxeyism had taken complete possession of the young lord of the house, now that his friends the soldiers had gone to take a hand in the business.

In a few days the soldiers came back escorting the Coxey prisoners. The "presence of the troops" had sufficed. The two hundred Coxeyites were to be tried at Bisuka for crimes committed within the State. They were penned meanwhile in a field by the river, below the railroad track, and at night they were shut into a rough barrack which had been hastily put up for the purpose. A skirt of the town little known, except to the Chinese vegetable gardeners and makers of hay on the river meadows and small boys fishing along the shore, now became the centre of popular regard; and "Have you been down to the Coxey camp?" was as common a question as "Are you going to the Natatorium Saturday night?" or "Will there be a mail from the west to-day?"

One evening, Mother Meadows, with little Ross Henniker by the hand, stood close to the dead-line of the Coxey field, watching the groups on the prisoners' side. The woman looked at them with perplexed pity, but the child swung himself away and cried, "Pooh! only a lot of dirty hobos!" and turned to look at the soldiers.

The tents of the guard of regulars stood in a row in front of a rank of tall poplar-trees, their tops swinging slow in the last sunlight. Behind the trees stretched the green river flats in the shadow. Frogs were croaking; voices of girls could be heard in a tennis-court with a high wall that ran back to the street of the railroad.

Roll-call was proceeding in front of the tents, the men firing their quick, harsh answers like scattering shots along the line. Under the trees at a little distance the beautiful sleek cavalry horses were grouped, unsaddled and calling for their supper. Ross Henniker gazed at them with a look of joy; then he turned a contemptuous eye upon the prisoners.

"Which of them two kinds of animals looks most like what a man ought to be?" he asked, pointing to the horses and then to the Coxeyites, who in the cool of the evening were indulging in unbeautiful horse-play, not without a suspicion of showing off before the eyes of visitors. The horses in their free impatience were as unconscious as lords.

"What are you saying, Ross?" asked Mrs. Meadows, rousing herself.

"I say, suppose I'd just come down from the moon, or some place where they don't know a man from a horse, and you said to me: 'Look at these things, and then look at them things over there, and say which is boss of t'other.' Why, I'd say them things, every time." Ross pointed without any prejudice to the horses.

"My goodness!" cried Mrs. Meadows, "if these Coxeys had been taken care of and coddled all their lives like them troop horses, they might not be so handsome, but they'd look a good deal better than what they do. And they'd have more sense," she added in a lower voice. "Very few poor men's sons get the training those horses have had. They've learned to mind, for one thing, and to be faithful to the hand that feeds them."

"Not all of them don't," said Ross, shaking his head wisely. "There's kickers and biters and shirks amongst them; but if they won't learn and can't learn, they get 'condemned.'"

"And what becomes of them then?"

"Why, you know," answered the boy, who began to suspect that there was a moral looming in the distance of this bold generalization.

"Yes," said Mother Meadows, "I know what becomes of some of them, because I've seen; and I don't think a condemned horse looks much better in the latter end of him than a condemned man."

"But you can't leave them in the troop, for they'd spoil all the rest," objected the boy.

"It's too much for me, dear," replied the old woman humbly. "These Coxeys are a kind of folks I don't understand."

"I should think you might understand, when the troops have to go out and run 'em in! I'm on the side of the soldiers, every time."

"Well, that's simple enough," said Mrs. Meadows. She was a very mild protagonist, for she could never confine herself to one side of a question. "I'm on the side of the soldiers, too. A soldier has to do what he's told, and pays with his life for it, right or wrong."

"And I think it's a shame to send the beautiful clean soldiers to shove a lot of dirty hobos back where they belong."

"My goodness! Hush! you'd better talk less till you get more sense to talk with," said Mrs. Meadows sternly. A man standing near, with his back to them, had turned around quickly, and she saw by his angry eye that he had overheard. She looked at him again, and knew the man. It was the boy's father. Ross had bounded away to talk to his friend Corporal Niles.