The Captain of the Gray-Horse Troop. Garland Hamlin
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turned to Curtis. "You'll miss this, Curtis, when you're exiled down there at old Fort Smith among the Tetongs. Here we are a little oasis of civilization in the midst of a desert of barbarians; down there you'll be swallowed up."
"We'll take civilization with us," said Jennie. "But, of course, we shall miss our friends."
"Well, you'll have a clear field for experiment at Smith. You can try all your pet theories on the Tetongs. God be with them! – their case is desperate." He chuckled gracelessly.
"When do you go?" asked Mrs. Quinlan.
"At once. As soon as I can make arrangements," replied Curtis, and then added: "And, by-the-way, I hope you will all refrain from mentioning my appointment till after I reach Fort Smith."
The visitors did not stay late, for their host was plainly preoccupied, and as they shook hands with him in parting they openly commiserated him. "I'm sorry for you," again remarked the Colonel, "but it's a just punishment."
After they were gone Curtis turned to his sister. "I must leave here to-morrow morning, sis."
"Why, George! Can't you take time to breathe and pack up?"
"No, I must drop down on that agent like a hawk on a June-bug, before he has a chance to bury his misdeeds. The Colonel has given out the news of my detail, and the quicker I move the better. I must reach there before the mail does."
"But I want to go with you," she quickly and resentfully replied.
"Well, you can, if you are willing to leave our packing in Pierce's hands."
"I don't intend to be left behind," she replied. "I'm going along to see that you don't do anything reckless. I never trust a man in a place requiring tact."
Curtis laughed. "That's your long suit, sis, but I reckon we'll need all the virtues that lie in each of us. We are going into battle with strange forces."
II
THE STREETER GUN-RACK
There is a good wagon-road leading to old Fort Smith from Pinon City, but it runs for the most part through an uninteresting country, and does not touch the reservation till within a few miles of the agency buildings. From the other side, however, a rough trail crosses a low divide, and for more than sixty miles lies within the Tetong boundaries, a rolling, cattle country rising to grassy hills on the west.
For these reasons Curtis determined to go in on horseback and in civilian's dress, leaving his sister to follow by rail and buckboard; but here again Jennie promptly made protest.
"I'll not go that way, George. I am going to keep with you, and you needn't plan for anything else – so there!"
"It's a hard ride, sis – sixty miles and more. You'll be tired out."
"What of that? I'll have plenty of time to rest afterwards."
"Very well. It is always a pleasure to have you with me, you stubborn thing," he replied, affectionately.
It had been hard to leave everything at the Fort, hard to look back from the threshold upon well-ordered books and furniture, and harder still to know that rude and careless hands would jostle them into heaps on the morrow, but Jennie was accustomed to all the hardships involved in being sister to a soldier, and, after she had turned the key in the lock, set her face to the south cheerfully. There was something of the missionary in her, and she had long burned with a desire to help the red people.
They got off at a squalid little cow-town called "Riddell" about noon of the second day, and Curtis, after a swift glance around him, said: "Sis, our chances for dinner are poor."
The hotel, a squat, battlemented wooden building, was trimmed with loafing cowboys on the outside and speckled with flies on the inside, but the landlord was unexpectedly attractive, a smiling, courteous host, to whom flies and cowboys were matters of course. It was plain he had slipped down to his present low level by insensible declinations.
"The food is not so bad if it were only served decently," said Jennie, as they sat at the table eying the heavy china chipped and maimed in the savage process of washing.
"I hope you won't be sorry we've left the army, sis."
"I would, if we had to live with these people," she replied, decisively, looking about the room, which was filled with uncouth types of men, keen-eyed, slouchy, and loud-voiced. The presence of a pretty woman had subdued most of them into something like decorum, but they were not pleasant to look at. They were the unattached males of the town, a mob of barkeepers, hostlers, clerks, and railway hands, intermixed with a half-dozen cowboys who had ridden in to "loaf away a day or two in town."
"The ragged edge of the cloth of gold," said Curtis, as he glanced round at them. "Civilization has its seamy side."
"This makes the dear old Fort seem beautiful, doesn't it?" the girl sighed. "We'll see no more green grass and well-groomed men."
An hour later, with a half-breed Indian boy for a guide, they rode away over the hills towards the east, glad to shake the dust of Riddell off their feet.
The day was one of flooding sunlight, warm and golden. Winter seemed far away, and only the dry grass made it possible to say, "This is autumn." The air was without dust or moisture – crystalline, crisp, and deliciously invigorating.
The girl turned to her brother with radiant face. "This is living! Isn't it good to escape that horrid little town?"
"You'd suppose in an air like this all life would be clean and sweet," he replied. "But it isn't. The trouble is, these people have no inner resource. They lop down when their accustomed props are removed. They come from defective stock."
The half-breed guide had the quality of his Indian mother – he knew when to keep silence and when to speak. He led the way steadily, galloping along on his little gray pony, with elbows flapping like a rooster about to take flight.
There was a wonderful charm in this treeless land, it was so lonely and so sinister. It appealed with great power to Curtis, while it appalled his sister. The solitary buttes, smooth of slope and grotesque of line; the splendid, grassy hollows, where the cattle fed; the burned-up mesas, where nothing lived but the horned toad; the alkaline flats, leprous and ashen; the occasional green line of cottonwood-trees, deep sunk in a dry water-course – all these were typical of the whole vast eastern water-shed of the continental divide, and familiar to the young officer, for in such a land he had entered upon active service.
It was beautiful, but it was an ill place for a woman, as Jennie soon discovered. The air, so dry, so fierce, parched her skin and pinched her red lips. The alkali settled in a gray dust upon her pretty hair and entered her throat, increasing her thirst to a keen pain.
"Oh, George! here is a little stream," she cried out.
"Courage, sis. We will soon get above the alkali. That water is rank poison."
"It looks good," she replied, wistfully.
"We'll find some glorious water up there in that clump of willows," and a few minutes' hard riding brought them to a gurgling little brook of clear, cold water, and the girl not merely drank – she laved away all traces of the bitter soil of the lower levels.
At about four o'clock the guide struck into a transverse valley, and followed a small stream to its source in a range of pine-clad hills which separate the white man's country from the Tetong reservation. As they topped this divide, riding directly over a smooth swell, Curtis drew rein, crying out, "Wait a moment, Louie."
They stood on the edge of a vast dip in the plain, a bowl of amethyst and turquoise. Under the vivid October sun the tawny grass seemed to be transmuted into something that shimmered, was translucent, and yet was firm, while the opposite wall, already faintly in shadow, rose by two degrees to snow-flecked mountains, faintly showing in the west and north. On the floor of this resplendent amphitheatre a flock of cattle fed irregularly, luminous as red and white and deep-purple beads. The landscape was silent – as silent as the cloudless sky above. No bird or beast, save the cattle, and the horses the three travellers rode, was abroad in this dream-world.
"Oh, isn't it beautiful!" exclaimed Jennie.
Curtis