The Desert and the Sown Part 10

"This is not from Paul!" Mrs. Bogardus fixed her eyes upon a letter which she held at arm's length, feeling for her gla.s.ses. "It's not for me--'_Miss_ Bogardus.'"

"Ah, well. I saw it was postmarked Lemhi--Fort Lemhi, you know. Sit down, madam. Suppose I give you Mr. Winslow's report first--Lieutenant Winslow. You heard of his going to Lemhi?"

"She doesn't know," whispered Moya.

"True. Well, two weeks ago I gave Mr. Winslow a hunter's leave, as we call it in the army, to beat up the trail of those boys. I thought it was time we heard from them, but it wasn't worth while to raise a hue and cry. He started out with a few picked men from Lemhi, the Indian Reservation, you know. I couldn't have sent a better man; the thing hasn't got into the local papers even. My object, of course, has been to save unnecessary alarm. Mr. Winslow has just got back to Challis. He rounded up the Bowen youths and the cook and the helper, in bad shape, all of them, but able to tell a story. The details we shall get later, but I have Mr. Winslow's report to me. It is short and probably correct."

"Was Paul not with them?" his mother questioned in a hard, dry voice.

"Where is he then?"

"He is in camp, madam, in charge of the wounded."

"Dear father! if you would speak plain!" Moya whispered nervously.

"Certainly. There is nothing whatever to hide. We know now that on their last day's hunt they met with an accident which resulted in a division of the party. A fall of snow had covered the ice on the trails, and the guide's horse fell and rolled on him--nature of his injuries not described. This happened a day's journey from their camp at Ten-Mile cabin, and the retreat with the wounded man was slow and of course difficult over such a trail. They put together a sort of horse-litter made of pine poles and carried him on that, slung between two mules tandem. A beastly business, winding and twisting over fallen timber, hugging the canon wall, near a thousand feet down--'Impa.s.sable' the trail is marked, on the government military maps. This first day's march was so discouraging that at Ten Mile they called a council, and the packer spoke up like a man. He disposed of his own case in this way. If he were to live, they could send back help to fetch him out. If not, no help would be needed. The snows were upon them; there was danger in every hour's delay. It was insane to sacrifice four sound men for one, badly hurt, with not many hours perhaps to suffer."

A murmur from the mother announced her appreciation of the packer's argument.

"It was no more than a man should do; but as to taking him at his word, why, that's another question." The colonel paused and gustily cleared his throat. "They were up against it right then and there, and the party split upon it. Three of them went on,--for help, as they put it,--and Paul stayed behind with the wounded man."

"Paul stayed--alone?" Mrs. Bogardus uttered with hoa.r.s.e emphasis. "Was not that a very strange way to divide? Among them all, I should think they might have brought the man out with them."

"Their story is that his injuries were such that he could not have borne the pain of the journey. Rather an unusual case," the colonel added dryly. "In my experience, a wounded man will stand anything sooner than be left on the field."

"I cannot understand it," Mrs. Bogardus repeated, in a voice of indignant pain. "Such a strange division! One man left alone--to nurse, and hunt, and cook, and keep up fires! Suppose the guide should die!"

"Paul was not _left_, you know," the colonel said emphatically. "He _stayed_. And I should be thankful in your place, madam, that my son was the man who made that choice. But setting conduct aside, for we are not prepared to judge, it is merely a matter of time our getting in there, now that we know where he is."

"How much time?" Mrs. Bogardus opened her ashen lips to say.

The colonel's face fell. "Mr. Winslow reports heavy snows for the past week,--soft, clogging snow,--too deep to wade through and too soft to bear. A little later, when the cold has formed a crust, our men can get in on snowshoes. There is nothing for it but patience, Mrs. Bogardus, and faith in the boy's endurance. The pluck that made him stay behind will help him to hold out."

Moya gave a hurt sob; the colonel stepped to the desk and stood there a moment turning over his papers. Behind his back the mother sent a glance to Moya expressive of despair.

"Do you know what happened to his father? Did he ever tell you?" she whispered.

Moya a.s.sented; she could not speak.

"Twice, twice in a lifetime!" said the older woman.

With a gesture, Moya protested against this wild prophecy; but as Paul's mother left the room she rushed upon her father, crying: "Tell _me_ the truth! What do you think of it? Did you ever hear of such a dastardly thing?"

"It was a rout," said the colonel coolly. "They were in full flight before the enemy."

"What enemy? They deserted a wounded comrade, and a servant at that!"

"The enemy was panic,--panic, my dear. In these woods I've seen strong men go half beside themselves with fear of something--the Lord knows what! Then, add the winter and what they had seen and heard of that.

Anyway, you can afford to be easy on the other boys. The honors of the day are with Paul--and the old packer, though it's all in the day's work to him."

"And you are satisfied with Paul, father?"

"He didn't desert his command to save his own skin." The colonel smiled grimly.

"When the men of the Fourth discovered those other fellows they had literally sat down in the snow to die. Not a man of them knew how to pack a mule. Their meat pack slipped, going along one of those high trails, and scared the mule, and in trying to kick himself free the beast fell off the trail--mule and meat both gone. They got tired of carrying their stuff and made a raft to float it down the river, and lost that! Paul has been much better off in camp than he would have been with them. So cheer up, my girl, and think how you'd like to have your bridegroom out on an Indian campaign!"

"Ah, but that would be orders! It's the uselessness that hurts. There was nothing to do or to gain. He didn't want to go. Oh, daddy dear, I made fun of his shooting,--I did! I laughed at his way with firearms.

Wretched fool and sn.o.b that I was! As if I cared! I thought of what other people would say. You remember,--he went shooting up the gulch with Mr. Lane, and when he hit but didn't kill he wouldn't--couldn't put the birds out of pain. Jephson had to do it for him, and he told it in barracks and the men laughed."

"How did you know that! And what does it all amount to! Blame yourself all you like, dear, if it does you any good, but don't make him out a fool! There's not much that comes to us straight in this world--not even orders, you'll find. But we have to take it straight and leave the muddles and the blunders as they are. That's the brave man's courage and the brave woman's. Orders are mixed, but duty is clear. And the boy out there in the woods has found his duty and done it like a man. That should be enough for any soldier's daughter."

An hour pa.s.sed in suspense. Moya was disappointed in her expectation of sharing in whatever the letter from Fort Lemhi might contain. Christine was in bed with a headache, her mother dully gave out, with no apparent expectation that any one would accept this excuse for the girl's complete withdrawal. The letter, she told Moya, was from Banks Bowen.

"There was nothing in it of consequence--to us," she added, and Moya took the words to mean "you and me" to the unhappy exclusion of Christine.

Mrs. Bogardus's face had settled into lines of anxiety printed years before, as the creases in an old garment, smoothed and laid away, will reappear with fresh wear. Her plan was to go back to New York with Christine, who was plainly unfit to bear a long siege of suspense. There she could leave the girl with friends and learn what particulars could be gathered from the Bowens, who would have arrived. She would then return alone and wait for news at the garrison. That night, with Moya's help, she completed her packing, and on the following day the wedding party broke up.

XI

A SEARCHING OF HEARTS

Fine, dry snowflakes were drifting past the upper square of a window set in a wall of logs. The lower half was obscured by a white bulk that shouldered up against the sash in the likeness of a m.u.f.fled figure stooping to peer in.

Lying in his bunk against the wall, the packer watched this sentinel snowdrift grow and become human and bold and familiar. His deep-lined visage was reduced to its bony structure. The hand was a claw with which he plucked at the ancient fever-crust shredding from his lips: an occupation at once so absorbing and so exhausting that often the hand would drop and the blankets rise upon the arch of the chest in a sigh of r.e.t.a.r.ded respiration. The sigh would be followed by a cough, controlled, as in dread of the shock to a sore and shattered frame. The snow came faster and faster until the dim, wintry pane was a blur. Millions of atoms crossed the watcher's weary vision, whirling, wavering, driven with an aimless persistence, unable to pause or to stop. And the blind white snowdrift climbed, fed, like human circ.u.mstance, from disconnected atoms impelled by a common law.

There were sounds in the cabin: wet wood sweating on hot coals; a step that went to and fro. Outside, a snow-weighted bough let go its load and sprang up, sc.r.a.ping against the logs. Some heavy soft thing slid off the roof and dropped with a _chug_. Then the door, that hung awry like a drooping eyelid, gave a disreputable wink, and the whole front gable of the cabin loomed a giant countenance with a silly forehead and an evil leer. Now it seemed that a hand was hurling snow against the door, as a sower scatters grain,--snow that lay like beach sand on the floor, or melted into a crawling pool--red in the firelight, red as blood!

These and other phantasms had now for an unmeasured time been tenants of the packer's brain, sharing and often overpowering the reality of the human step that went to and fro. To-day the shapes and relations of things were more natural, and the step aroused a querulous curiosity.

"Who's there?" the sick man imagined himself to have said. A croaking sound in his throat, which was all he could do by way of speech, brought the step to his bedside. A young face, lightly bearded, and gaunt almost as his own, bent over him. Large, black eyes rested on his; a hand with womanish nails placed its fingers on his wrist.

"You are better to-day. Your pulse is down. I wouldn't try to talk."

"Who's that--outside?"

"There is no one outside," Paul answered, following the direction of his patient's eyes. "That? That is only a snowdrift. It grows faster than I can shovel it away."

The packer had forgotten his own question. He dozed off, and presently roused again as suddenly as he had slept. His utterance was clearer, but not his meaning.

"What--you want to fetch me back for?"

"Back?" Paul repeated.

"I was most gone, wa'n't I?"

"Back to life, you mean? You came back of yourself. I hadn't much to do with it."