The Price of the Prairie Part 55

"Baronet?"

"Yes," I replied.

"Tobacco?" he asked.

"No, Hard Rope," I answered, "I have every other mark of a great man except this. I don't smoke."

"I want tobacco," he continued.

What made me accommodating just then I do not know, but I suddenly remembered some tobacco that Reed had left in my tent.

"Hard Rope," I said, "here is some tobacco. I forgot I had it, because I don't care for it. Take it all."

The scout seized it with as much grat.i.tude as an Indian shows, but he did not go away at once.

"Something else now?" I questioned not unkindly.

"You Judge Baronet's son?"

I nodded and smiled.

He came very close to me, putting both hands on my shoulders, and looking steadily into my eyes he said solemnly, "You will be safe. No evil come near you."

"Thank you, Hard Rope, but I will keep my powder dry just the same," I answered.

All the time in the Inman camp the scout shadowed me. On the evening before our start for Fort Hays to be mustered out of service he came to me as I sat alone beside the Was.h.i.+ta, breathing deeply the warm air of an April twilight. I had heard no word from home since I left Topeka in October. Marjie must be married, as Jean had said. I had never known the half-breed to tell a lie. It was so long ago that that letter of hers to me had miscarried. She thought of course that I had taken it and even then refused to stay at home. Oh, it was all a hopeless tangle, and now I might be dreaming of another man's wife. I had somehow grown utterly hopeless now. Jean--oh, the thought was torture--I could not feel sure about him. He might be shadowing her night and day. Custer did not tell me what had become of the Indian, and I had seen on the Sweet.w.a.ter what such as he could do for a Kansas girl. As I sat thus thinking, Hard Rope squatted beside me.

"You go at sunrise?" pointing toward the east.

I merely nodded.

"I want to talk," he went on.

"Well, talk away, Hard Rope." I was glad to quit thinking.

What he told me there by the rippling Was.h.i.+ta River I did not repeat for many months, but I wrung his hand when I said good-bye. Of all the scouts with Custer that we left behind when we started northward, none had so large a present of tobacco as Hard Rope.

My father had demanded that I return to Springvale as soon as our regiment was mustered out. Morton was still in the East, and I had no foothold in the Saline Valley as I had hoped in the Fall to have. Nor was there any other place that opened its doors to me. And withal I was homesick--desperately, ravenously homesick. I wanted to see my father and Aunt Candace, to look once more on the peaceful Neosho and the huge oak trees down in its fertile valley. For nearly half a year I had not seen a house, nor known a civilized luxury. No child ever yearned for home and mother as I longed for Springvale. And most of all came an overwhelming eagerness to see Marjie once more. She was probably Mrs.

Judson now, unless Jean--but Hard Rope had eased my mind a little there--and I had no right even to think of her. Only I was young, and I had loved her so long. All that fierce battle with myself which I fought out on the West Prairie on the night she refused to let me speak to her had to be fought over again. And this time, marching northward over the April Plains toward Fort Hays, this time, I was hopelessly vanquished.

I, Philip Baronet, who had fought with fifty against a thousand on the Arickaree; who had gone with Custer to the Sweet.w.a.ter in the dreary wastes of the Texas desert; I who had a little limp now and then in my right foot, left out too long in the cold, too long made to keep step in weary ways on endlessly wearing marches; I who had lost the softness of the boy's physique and who was muscled like a man, with something of the military bearing hammered mercilessly upon me in the days of soldier life--I was still madly in love with a girl who had refused all my pleadings and was even now, maybe, another man's wife. Oh, cold and terror and starvation were all bad enough, but this was unendurable.

"I will go home as my father wishes," I said. "I do not need to stay there, but I will go now for a while and feel once more what civilization means. Then--I will go to the Plains, or somewhere else."

So I argued as we came one April day into Fort Hays. Letters from home were awaiting me, urging me to come at once; and I went, leaving O'mie to follow later when he should have rested at the Fort a little.

All Kansas was in its Maytime glory. From the freshly ploughed earth came up that sweet wholesome odor that like the scent of new-mown hay carries its own traditions of other days to each of us. The young orchards--there were not many orchards in Kansas then--were all a blur of pink on the hill slopes. A thousand different blossoms gemmed the prairies, making a perfect kaleidoscope of brilliant hues, that blended with the s.h.i.+fting shades of green. Along the waterways the cottonwood's silvery branches, tipped with tender young leaves fluttering in the soft wind, stood up proudly above the scrubby bronze and purple growths hardly yet in bud and leaf. From every gentle swell the landscape swept away to the vanis.h.i.+ng line of distances in billowy seas of green and gold, while far overhead arched the deep-blue skies of May. Fleecy clouds, white and soft as foam, drifted about in the limitless fields of ether. The glory of the new year, the fresh sweet air, the spirit of budding life, set the pulses a-tingle with the very joy of being. Like a dream of Paradise lay the Neosho Valley in its wooded beauty, with field and farm, the meadow, and the open unending prairie rolling away from it, wave on wave, in the Maytime grace and grandeur. Through this valley the river itself wound in and out, glistening like molten silver in the open s.p.a.ces, and gliding still and shadowy by overhanging cliff and wooded covert.

"Dever," I said to the stage driver when we had reached the top of the divide and looked southward to where all this magnificence of nature was lavishly spread out, "Dever, do you remember that pa.s.sage in the Bible about the making of the world long ago, 'And G.o.d saw that it was good'?

Well, here's where all that happened."

Dever laughed a crowing laugh of joy. He had hugged me when I took the stage, I didn't know why. When it came to doing the nice thing, Dever had a sense of propriety sometimes that better-bred folk might have envied. And this journey home proved it.

"I've got a errant up west. D'ye's lief come into town that way?" he asked me.

Would I? I was longing to slip into my home before I ran the gantlet of all the streets opening on the Santa Fe Trail. I never did know what Dever's "errant" was, that led him to swing some miles to the west, out of the way to the ford of the Neosho above the old stone cabin where Father Le Claire swam his horse in the May flood six years before. He gave no reason for the act that brought me over a road, every foot sacred to the happiest moments of my life. Past the big cottonwood, down into the West Draw where the pink blossoms called in sweet insistent tones to me to remember a day when I had crowned a little girl with blooms like these, a day when my life was in its Maytime joy. On across the prairie we swung to the very borders of Springvale, which was nestling by the river and stretching up the hillslope toward where the bluff breaks abruptly. I could see "Rockport" gray and sun-flecked beyond its sheltering line of green bushes.

Just as we turned toward Cliff Street Dever said carelessly,

"Lots of changes some ways sence I took you out of here last August.

Judson, he's married two months ago."

The warm sunny glorious world turned drab and cold to me with the words.

"What's the matter, Baronet?--you're whiter'n a dead man!"

"Just a little faint. Got that way in the army," I answered, which was a lie.

"Better now? As I was sayin', Judson and Lettie has been married two months now. Kinder surprised folks by jinin' up sudden; but--oh, well, it's a lot better quick than not at all sometimes."

I caught my breath. My "spell" contracted in the army was pa.s.sing. And here were Cliff Street and the round turret-like corners of Judge Baronet's stone-built domicile. It was high noon, and my father had just gone into the house. I gave Dever his fare and made the hall door at a leap. My father turned at the sound and--I was in his arms. Then came Aunt Candace, older by more than ten months. Oh, the women are the ones who suffer most. I had not thought until that moment what all this winter of absence meant to Candace Baronet. I held her in my strong arms and looked down into her love-hungry eyes. Men are such stupid unfeeling brutes. I am, at least; for I had never read in this dear woman's face until that instant what must have been written there all these years,--the love that might have been given to a husband and children of her own, this lonely, childless woman had given to me.

"Aunty, I'll never leave you again," I declared, as she clung to me, and patted my cheeks and stroked my rough curly hair.

We sat down together to the midday meal, and my father's blessing was like the benediction of Heaven to my ears.

Springvale also had its measure of good breeding. My coming was the choicest news that Dever had had to give out for many a day, and the circulation was amazing in its rapid transit. I had a host of friends here where I had grown to manhood, and the first impulse was to take Cliff Street by storm. It was Cam Gentry who counselled better methods.

"Now, by hen, let's have some sense," he urged, "the boy's jest got here. He's ben through life and death, er tarnation nigh akin to it.

Let's let him be with his own till to-morror. Jest ac like we'd had a grain o' raisin' anyhow, and wait our turn. Ef he shows hisself down on this 'er street we'll jest go out and turn the Neoshy runnin' north for an hour and a half while we carry him around dry shod. But now, to-day, let him come out o' hidin', and we'll give him welcome; but ef he stays up there with Candace, we'll be gentlemen fur oncet ef it does purty nigh kill some of us."

"Cam is right," Cris Mead urged. "If he comes down here he'll take his chances, but we'll hold our fire on the hill till to-morrow."

"Well, by cracky, the Baronets never miss prayer meeting, I guess.

Springvale will turn out to-night some," Grandpa Mead declared.

And so while I revelled in a home-coming, thankful to be alone with my own people, the best folks on earth were waiting and dodging about, but courteously abstaining from rus.h.i.+ng in on our sacred home rights.

In the middle of the afternoon Cam Gentry called to Dollie to come to his aid.

"Jest tie the end of this rope good and fast around this piazzer post,"

he said.

His wife obeyed before she noted that the other end was fastened around Cam's right ankle. To her wondering look he responded:

"Ef I don't lariat myself to something, like a old hen wanting to steal off with her chickens, I'll be up to Baronet's spite of my efforts, I'm that crazy to see Phil once more."

Through the remainder of the May afternoon he sat on the veranda, or hopped the length of his tether to the side-walk and looked longingly up toward the high street, that faced the cliff, but his purpose did not change.

Springvale showed its sense of delicacy in more ways than this. Marjie was the last to hear of my leaving when all suddenly I turned my back on the town nearly ten months before. And now, while almost every family had discussed my return--anything furnishes a little town a sensation--the Whately family had had no notice served of the momentarily interesting topic. And so it was that Marjie, innocent of the suppressed interest, went about her home, never dreaming of anything unusual in the town talk of that day.