The Captain of the Gray-Horse Troop. Garland Hamlin
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time! But we'll both be so old we won't enjoy it. Sometimes I feel that we are missing everything that's worth while."
He did not mention Elsie's letter, and as the weeks passed without any reply he was very glad he had kept silence. Jennie had her secret, also, which was that Elsie was as good as engaged to Lawson. No one knew this for a certainty, but Mrs. Wilcox was quite free to say she considered it a settled thing.
Jennie was relieved to know how indifferent her brother was to Miss Colson, the missionary, who seemed to be undergoing a subtle transformation. With Jennie she was always moaning and sighing, but in the presence of her lord, the agent, she relaxed and became quite cheerful and dangerously pretty. The other teachers – good, commonplace souls! – went their mechanical way, with very little communication with the agent's household, but Miss Colson seized every opportunity to escape her messmates. "They are so material," she said, sighfully; "they make spiritual growth impossible to me."
Jennie was not deceived. "You're a cat, that's what you are – a nice, little, scared cat; but you're getting over your scare," she added, as she watched the devotee in spirited conversation with her brother.
Elsie's reply to Curtis's long letter was studiedly cool but polite. "I feel the force of what you say, but the course of civilization lies across the lands of the 'small peoples.' It is sorrowful, of course, but they must go, like the wolves and the rattlesnakes." In this phrase he recognized the voice of Andrew J. Brisbane, and it gave him a twinge to see it written by Elsie's small hand. The letter ended by leaving matters very adroitly at an equipoise. It was friendlier than she had ever been in conversation, yet not so womanly as he had hoped it might be. As he studied it, however, some subtler sense than sight detected in its carefully compounded phrases something to feed upon, and though he did not write in answer to it, he had a feeling that she expected him to do so.
Meanwhile the tone of the opposition grew confident. The settlers were convinced that Congress would accede to their wishes and remove the Tetongs, and they began to treat the redmen with a certain good-natured tolerance, as if to say, "Well, you'll soon be settled for, anyway."
Calvin Streeter came often to the agency, and not infrequently stayed to dinner with Curtis, paying timid court to Jennie, who retained enough of her girlhood's coquetry to enjoy the handsome cowboy's open-eyed admiration, even though she laughed at him afterwards in response to her brother's jesting. Calvin vastly improved under the stress of his desire to be worthy of her. He caught up many of the Captain's nice mannerisms, and handled his fork and napkin with very good grace indeed. He usually came galloping across the flat, his horse outstretched at full speed, his hat-rim uprolled by the wind, his gay neckerchief fluttering, his hands holding the reins high – a magnificent picture of powerful young manhood. As he reached the gate it was his habit to put his horse on his haunches with one sudden, pitiless wrench on the Mexican bit and drop to the ground, and in dramatic contrast with his approach call out in smooth, quiet voice:
"Howdy, folks, howdy! Nice day."
These affectations pleased Jennie very much, though she finally complained of his cruelty in reining in his horse so sharply.
"All right, miss, I won't do it no more," he said, instantly.
He quite regularly invited them to the dances given round about, and Jennie was ready to go, but Curtis, being too deeply occupied, could not spare the time, and that debarred Jennie, though Calvin could see no good reason why it should. "I'll take care of you," said he, but the girl could not trust herself to his protection.
His was not a secretive nature, and he kept Curtis very well informed as to the feeling of the settlers, reporting, as he did, their conversations as well as their speeches, with great freedom and remarkable accuracy.
In this way the agent learned that the cattlemen had agreed to use caution in dealing with him. "He's a bad man to monkey with," was the sentiment Calvin reported to be current among the settlers on the West Fork. Young Crane's Voice also circulated this phrase, properly translated into Dakota, to his uncles Lame Paw and Two Horns, and so the tribe came to understand that they had a redoubtable defender in Swift Eagle, as they called the agent in their own tongue.
From every source they heard good things of him, and they came to love him and to obey him as they had never loved and obeyed even their best-regarded chief. The squaws made excuse to come in and shake hands with him and hear his laughter, and the children no longer hid or turned away when he came near – on the contrary, they ran to him, crying "Hello, Hagent!" and clung to his legs as he walked. The old men often laid their arms across his shoulders as they jokingly threatened to pull out the hairs of his face, in order to make him a redman. His lightest wish was respected. The wildest young dare-devil would dismount and take a hand at pushing a wagon or lifting a piece of machinery when Curtis asked it of him.
"If I only had the water that flows in these three little streams," he often said to Jennie, "I'd make these people self-supporting."
"We'll have things our own way yet," replied Jennie, always the optimist.
IX
CALLED TO WASHINGTON
One day Curtis announced, with joyful face:
"Sis, we are called to Washington. Get on your bonnet!"
She did not light up as he had expected her to do. "I can't go, George," she replied, decisively and without marked disappointment.
He seemed surprised. "Why not?"
"Because I have my plans all laid for giving my little 'ingines' such a Christmas as they never had, and you must manage to get back in time to be 'Sandy Claws.'"
"I don't see how I can do it. I am to appear before the Committee on Indian Affairs relative to this removal plan, and there may be other business requiring me to remain over the holidays."
"I don't like to have you away. I suppose you'll see Mr. Lawson and Miss Brisbane," she remarked, quietly, after a pause.
"Oh yes," he replied, with an assumption of carelessness. "I imagine Lawson will appear before the committee, and I hope to call on Miss Brisbane – I want to see her paintings." He did not meet his sister's eyes as squarely as was his wont, and her keen glance detected a bit more color in his face than was usual to him. "You must certainly call," she finally said. "I want to know all about how they live."
Many things combined to make this trip to Washington most pleasurable to the soldier. He was weary with six weeks of most intense application to a confused and vexatious situation, and besides he had not been East for several years, and his pocket was filled with urgent invitations to dinner from fellow-officers and co-workers in science, courtesies which he now had opportunity to accept; but back of all and above all was the hope of meeting Elsie Brisbane again. He immediately wrote her a note, telling her of his order to report at the department, and asking permission to call upon her at her convenience.
It was a long ride, but he enjoyed every moment of it. He gave himself up to rest. He went regularly to his meals in the dining-car; he smoked and dreamed and looked out with impersonal, shadowy interest upon the flying fields and the whizzing cities. He slept long hours and rose at will. Such freedom he had known only on the trail; here luxury was combined with leisure. In Chicago a friend met him and they lunched at a luxurious club, and afterwards went for a drive. That night he left the Western metropolis behind and Washington seemed very near.
As the train drew down out of the snows of the hill country into the sunshine and shelter of the Potomac Valley his heart leaped. This was home! Here were the little, whitewashed cabins, the red soil, the angular stone houses – verandaed and shuttered – of his native town. It was pleasant to meet the darkies swarming, chirping like crickets, around the train. They shadowed forth a warmer clime, a less insistent civilization than that of the West, and he was glad of them. They brought up in his mind a thousand memories of his boy-life in an old Maryland village not far from the great city, which still retained its supremacy in his mind. He loved Washington; to him it was the centre of national life.
The great generals, the great political leaders were there, and the greatest ethnologic bureau in all the world was there, and when the gleaming monument came into view over the wooded hills