Over the Pass Part 58

Those of the party who remained behind for the last duty to the dead counted its most solemn moment, perhaps, the one that gave Wrath of G.o.d the honorable due of a soldier who had fallen face to the enemy. Bob Worther wrote the epitaph with a pencil on a bit of wood: "Here lies the gloomiest pony that ever was. The gloomier he was the better he went and the better Jack Wingfield liked him;" which was Bob's way of interpreting Jack's instructions.

Then Worther and his detail rode as fast as they might to overtake the slow-marching group in trail of the litters with the question that all Little Rivers had been asking ever since, "How is he?" A ghastly, painfully tedious journey this homeward one, made mostly in the night, with the men going thirsty in the final stretches in order that wet bandages might be kept on Jack's feverish head; while Dr. Patterson was frequently thrusting his little thermometer between Jack's hot, cracking lips.

"If he were free of this jouncing! It is a terrible strain on him, but the only thing is to go on!" the doctor kept repeating.

But when Jack lay white and still in his bedroom and Firio was rapidly convalescing, the fever refused to abate. It seemed bound to burn out the life that remained after the hemorrhage from his wounds had ceased. Men found it hard to work in the fields while they waited on the crisis. John Wingfield, Sr. sat for hours under Dr. Patterson's umbrella-tree in moody absorption. He talked to all who would talk to him. Always he was asking about the duel in the _arroyo_ which was fought in Jack's way. He could not hear enough of it; and later he almost attached himself to the one eye-witness of the final duel, which had been fought in Leddy's way.

When Firio was well enough to walk out he was to be found in a long chair on Jack's porch, ever raising a warning finger for silence to anyone who approached and looking out across the yard to Jag Ear, who was winning back the fat he had lost in a const.i.tutional crisis, and P.D., who, after bearing himself first and last in a manner characteristic of a pony who was P.D. but never Q., seemed already none the worse for the hards.h.i.+ps he had endured. The master of twenty millions would sit on the steps, while Firio occupied the chair and regarded him much as if he were a blank wall. But at times Firio would humor the persistent inquirer with a few abbreviated sentences. It was out of such fragments as this that John Wingfield, Sr. had to piece the story of the fight for the water-hole.

"Senor Jack and Mister Prather, they no look alike," said Firio one day, evidently bound to make an end of the father's company. "Anybody say that got bad eyes. Mister Prather"--and Firio smiled peculiarly--"I call him the mole! He burrow in the sand, so! His hand tremble, so! He act like a man believe himself the only G.o.d in the world when he in no danger, but when he get in danger he act like he afraid he got to meet some other G.o.d!"

"But Jack? Now, after Prather had gone?" persisted the father greedily.

"We glad the mole go. It sort of hurt inside to think a man like him. He make you wonder what for he born."

John Wingfield, Sr. half rose in a sudden movement, as if he were about to go, but remained in response to another emotion that was stronger than the impulse.

"And Jack? He kept his head! He figured out his chances coolly! Now, that trick he played by going up on the ridge under cover of darkness?"

"No trick!" said Firio resentfully, in instinctive defence. "That the place to fight! Senor Jack he see it."

"And all through the night you kept firing?"

"_Si,_ after moon very bright and over our shoulders in their faces!

_Si_, at the little lumps that lie so still. When they move quick like they stung, we know we hit!"

"Ah, that was it! You hit! You hit! And the other fellows couldn't. You had the light with you--everything! Jack had seen to that! He used his head! He--he was strong, strong!"

Quite unconsciously, John Wingfield, Sr. rubbed his palms together.

"When you pleased you always rub your hands same as Mister Prather,"

observed Firio.

"Oh! Do I? I--" John Wingfield, Sr. clasped his fingers together tightly. "Yes, and the finish of the fight--how was that?"

"Sometimes, when there no firing, Senor Jack and Leddy call out to each other. Leddy he swear hard, like he fight. Senor Jack he sing back his answers cheerful, like he fight. Toward morning we both wounded and only Leddy and one other man alive on his side. When a cloud slip over the moon and the big darkness before morning come, we creep down from the ridge and with first light we bang-bang quick--and I no remember any more."

"Forced the fighting--forced it right at the end!" cried John Wingfield, Sr. in the flush of a great pride.

"The aggressive, that is it--that is the way to win, always!"

"But Senor Jack no fight just to win!" said Firio. "He no want to fight.

In the big darkness, before we crawl down to the water-hole, he call out to Leddy to make quits. He almost beg Leddy. But Leddy, he say: 'I never quit and I get you!' 'Sorry,' says Senor Jack, with the devil out again, 'sorry--and we'll see!' No, Senor Jack no like to fight till you make him fight and the devil is out. He fight for water; he fight for peace. He no want just to win and kill, but--but--" bringing his story to an end, Firio looked hard at the father, his velvety eyes shot with a comprehending gleam as he shrugged his shoulders--"but you no understand, you and the mole!"

John Wingfield, Sr. s.h.i.+fted his gaze hurriedly from the little Indian.

His face went ashen and it was working convulsively as he a.s.sisted himself to rise by gripping the veranda post.

"Why do you think that?" he asked.

"I know!" said Firio.

His lips closed firmly. That was all he had to say. John Wingfield, Sr.

turned away with the unsteady step of a man who is afraid of slipping or stumbling, though the path was hard and even.

Out in the street he met the cold nods of the people of a town where his son had a dominion founded on something that was lacking in his own. And one of those who nodded to him ever so politely was a new citizen, who had once been a unit of his own city within a city.

Peter Mortimer had arrived in Little Rivers only two days after his late employer. Peter had been like some old tree that everybody thinks has seen its last winter. But now he waited only on the good word from the sick-room for the sap of renewed youth to rise in his veins and his shriveled branches to break into leaf at the call of spring.

And the good word did come thrilling through the community. The physical crisis had pa.s.sed. The fever was burning itself out. But a mental crisis developed, and with it a new cause for apprehension. Even after Jack's temperature was normal and he should have been well on the road to convalescence, there was a veil over his eyes which would not allow him to recognize anybody. When he spoke it was in delirium, living over some incident of the past or of sheer imagination.

Now he was the ancestor, fitting out his s.h.i.+p:

"No, you can't come! A man who is a malingerer on the London docks would be a malingerer on the Spanish Main. I don't want bullies and boasters.

Let them stay at home to pick quarrels in the alleys and cheer the Lord Mayor's procession!"

Now his frigate was under full sail, sighting the enemy:

"Suppose they have two guns to our one! That makes it about even! We'll get the windward side, as we have before! Who cares about their guns once we start to board!"

Another time he was on the trail:

"I'll grow so strong, so strong that he can never call me a weakling again! He will be proud of me. That is my only way to make good."

Then he was apprenticed to the millions:

"All this detail makes me feel as if my brains were a tangled spool of thread. But I will master it--I will!"

Again, he was happily telling stories to the children; or tragically pleading with Leddy that there had been slaughter enough around the water-hole; or serenely planning the future which he foresaw for himself when the phantoms were laid:

"I may not know how to run the store, but I do seem to fit in here. We can find the capital! We will build the dam ourselves!"

His body grew stronger, with little appreciable change otherwise. For an instant he would seem to know the person who was speaking to him; then he was away on the winds of delirium.

"His mind is too strong for him not to come out of this all right. It is only a question of time, isn't it?" insisted the father.

"There was a far greater capacity in him for suffering in that h.e.l.lish fight than there was in Pete Leddy," said Dr. Patterson. "He had sensitiveness to impressions which was born in him, at the same time that a will of steel was born in him--the sensitiveness of the mother, perhaps, and the will of the ancestor. His life hung by a thread when we found him and his nerves had been twisted and tortured by the ordeal of that night. And that isn't all. There was more than fighting. Something that preceded the fight was even harder on him. I knew from his look when he set out for Agua Fria that he was under a terrible strain; a strain worse than that of a few hours' battle--the kind that had been weighing day after day on the will that grimly sustained its weight. And that wound in the head was very close, very, and it came at the moment when he collapsed in reaction after that last telling shot. Something snapped then. There was a fracture of the kind that only nature can set. Will he come out of this delirium, you ask? I don't know. Much depends upon whether that strain is over for good or if it is still pressing on his mind. When he rises from his bed he may be himself or he may ride away madly into the face of the sun. I don't know. n.o.body on earth can know."

"Yes, yes!" said John Wingfield, Sr. slowly.

In Jack's wildest moments it was Mary's voice that had the most telling effect. However low she spoke he seemed always to recognize the tone and would greet it with a smile and frequently break into verses and sc.r.a.ps of remembered conversations of his boyhood exile in villa gardens. One morning, when she and Dr. Patterson had entered the room together, Jack called out miserably:

"Just killing, killing, killing! What will Mary say to me, now?"

He raised his hands, fingers spread, and stared at them with a ghastly look. She sprang to the bedside and seized them fast in hers, and bending very close to him, as if she would impart conviction with every quivering particle of her being, she said:

"She thinks you splendid! She is glad, glad! It is just what she wanted you to do. She wished every bullet that you fired luck--luck for your sake, to speed it straight to the mark!"

He seemed to understand what she was saying, as one understands that shade is cool after the broiling torment of the sun.