The Cup of Trembling and Other Stories Part 21

What he had seen at first had been the abject figure of a little squaw facing the wind, her bowed head shrouded in her blanket, carrying something which her short arms could barely meet around,--a shapeless bundle. He did not think it a child, for a squaw will pack her baby always on her back. He had looked at her indifferently, but with condescending pity; for the day was rough, and the road was long, even for a squaw. Then, in all the disfigurement of her dirt and wretchedness and wild attire, it broke upon him that this creature was his wife, the rightful sharer of his life and freedom; and that animal-like thing she held up, that wrung its face and squeaked like a blind kitten, was his son.

Good G.o.d! He clutched the driver's arm, and the man swore and jerked his mules out of the road, for the woman had stopped right in the track where the wheels were going. The driver looked back, but could not see her; he knew that he had not touched her, only with the wind of his pace, so he pulled the mules into the road again, and the ambulance rolled on.

"Stop; let me get off. That woman is my wife." Henniker heard himself saying the words, but they were never spoken to the ear. "Stop; let me get down," the inner voice prompted; but he did not make a sound, and the curtains flapped and the wheels went bounding along. They were a long way past the spot, and the station was in sight, when Henniker was heard to say hoa.r.s.ely, "Pick her up, as you go back, can't you?"

"Pick up which?" asked the driver.

"The--that woman we pa.s.sed just now."

"I'll see how she's making it," the man answered coolly. "I ain't much stuck on squaws. Acted like she was drunk or crazy."

Henniker's face flushed, but he shuddered as if he were cold.

"Pick her up, for the child's sake, by G.o.d!" No man was ever more ashamed of himself than he as he took out a gold piece and handed it to the soldier. "Give her this, Billy,--from yourself, you know. I ain't in it."

Billy looked at Henniker, and then at the gold piece. It was a double eagle; all that the husband had dared to offer as alms to his wife, but more than enough to arouse the suspicions that he feared.

"Ain't in it, eh?" thought the soldier. "You knew the woman, and she knew you. This is conscience money." But aloud he said, "A fool and his money are soon parted. How do you know but I'll blow it in at canteen?"

"I'll trust you," said Henniker.

The men did not speak to each other again.

"She's one of them Bannocks that camped by old Pop Meadows's place, down at Bisuka, I bet," said the soldier to himself.

Henniker went on fighting his fight as if it had not been lost forever in that instant's hesitation. A man cannot bethink himself: "By the way, it strikes me that was my wife and child we pa.s.sed on the road!" What he had done could never be explained without grotesque lying which would deceive n.o.body.

It could not be undone; it must be lived down. Henniker was much better at living things down than he was at explaining or trying to mend them.

After all, it was the girl's own fault, putting up that wretched squaw act on him. To follow him publicly, and shame him before all the garrison, in that beastly Bannock rig! Had she turned Bannock altogether and gone back to the tribe? In that case let the tribe look after her; he could have no more to do with her, of course.

He stepped into the smoking-car, and lost himself as quickly as possible in the interest of new faces around him, and the agreeable impressions of himself which he read in eyes that glanced and returned for another look at so much magnificent health and color and virility. His spot of turpitude did not show through. He was still good to look at; and to look the man that one would be goes a long way toward feeling that one is that man.

II

It was at Laramie, between the mountains, and Henniker was celebrating the present and drowning the past in a large, untrammeled style, when he received a letter from the quartermaster-sergeant at Custer,--a plain statement until the end, where Henniker read:--

"If you should happen at any time to wish for news of your son, Meadows and his wife have taken the child. They came on here to get him, and Meadows insisted on standing the expense of the funeral, which was the best we could give her for the credit of the troop. He put a handsome stone over her, with 'Meta, wife of Trumpeter Henniker, K Troop, --th U.

S. Cavalry,' on it; and there it stands to her memory, poor girl, and to your shame, a false, cruel, and cowardly man in the way you treated her.

And so every one of us calls you, officers and men the same,--of your old troop that walked behind her to her grave. And where were you, Henniker, and what were you doing this day two weeks, when we were burying your poor wife? The twenty dollars you sent her by Billy, Meadows has, and says he will keep it till he sees you again. Which some of us think it will be a good while he will be packing that Judas piece around with him.--And so good-by, Henniker. I might have said less, or I might have said nothing at all, but that the boy is a fine child, my wife says, and must have a grand const.i.tution to stand what he has stood; and I have a fondness for you myself when all is said and done.

"P. S. I would take a thought for that boy once in a while, if I was you. A man doesn't care for the brats when he is young, but age cures us of all wants but the want of a child."

But Henniker was not ready to go back to the Meadows cottage and be clothed in the robe of forgiveness, and receive his babe like a pledge of penitence on his hand.

The shock of the letter sobered him at first, and then the sting of it drove him to drinking harder than ever. He did not run upon that "good thing" at Laramie, nor in any of the cities westward, that one after another beheld the progress of his deterioration. It does not take long in the telling, but it was several years before he finally struck upon the "Barbary Coast" in San Francisco, where so many mothers' sons who never were heard of have gone down. He went ash.o.r.e, but he did not quite go to pieces. His const.i.tution had matured under healthy conditions, and could stand a good deal of ill-usage; but we are "no stronger than our weakest part," and at the end of all he found himself in a hospital bed under treatment for his knee,--the same that had been mulcted for him twice before.

He listened grimly to the doctor's explanations,--how the past sins of his whole impenitent system were being vicariously reckoned for through this one afflicted member. It was rough on his old knee, Henniker remarked; but he had hopes of getting out all right again, and he made the usual sick-bed promises to himself. He did get out, eventually, without a penny in the world, and with a stiff knee to drag about for the rest of his life. And he was just thirty-four years old.

His splendid vitality, that had been wont to express itself in so many attractive ways, now found its chief vent in talk--inexpensive, inordinate, meddlesome discourse--wherever two or three were gathered together in the name of idleness and discontent. The members of these congregations were pessimists to a man. They disbelieved in everybody and everything except themselves, and secretly, at times, they were even a little shaken on that head; but all the louder they exclaimed upon the world that had refused them the chance to be the great and successful characters nature had intended them to be.

It need hardly be said that when Henniker raved about the inequalities of cla.s.s, the helplessness of poverty, the tyranny of wealth, and the curse of labor; and devoted in eloquent phrases the remainder of a blighted existence to the cause of the Poor Man, he was thinking of but one poor man, namely, himself. He cla.s.sed himself with Labor only that he might feel his superiority to the laboring ma.s.ses. There were few situations in which he could taste his superiority, in these days. The "ego" in his Cosmos was very hungry; his memories were bitter, his hopes unsatisfied; his vanity and artistic sense were crucified through poverty, lameness, and bad clothes. Now all that was left him was the conquests of the mind. For the smiles of women, give him the hoa.r.s.e plaudits of men. The dandy of the garrison began to s.h.i.+ne in saloon coteries and primaries of the most primary order. He was the star of sidewalk convocations and vacant-lot meetings of the Unemployed. But he despised the mob that echoed his perorations and paid for his drinks, and was at heart the aristocrat that his old uniform had made him.

In the summer of 1894, a little black-eyed boy with chestnut curls used to swing on the gate of the Meadows cottage that opens upon the common, and chant some verses of domestic doggerel about c.o.xey's army, which was then begging and bullying its way eastward, and demanding transportation at the expense of the railroads and of the people at large.

He sang his song to the well-marked tune of Pharaoh's Army, and thus the verses ran:--

"The c.o.xeyites they gathered, The c.o.xeyites they gathered, And stole a train of freight-cars in the morn, And stole a train of freight-cars in the morning, And stole a train of freight-cars in the morn.

"The engine left them standing, The engine left them standing, On the railroad-track at Caldwell in the morn.

Very sad it was for Caldwell in the morning To feed that hungry army in the morn.

"Where are all the U. S. marshals, The deputy U. S. marshals, To jail that c.o.xey army in the morn, That 'industrious, law-abiding' c.o.xey's army That stole a train of freight-cars in the morn?"

Where indeed were all the U. S. marshals? The question was being asked with anxiety in the town, for a posse of them had gone down to arrest the defiant train-stealers, and it was rumored that the civil arm had been disarmed, and the deputies carried on as prisoners to Pocatello, where the Industrials, two hundred strong, were intrenched in the sympathies of the town, and knocking the federal authorities about at their law-abiding pleasure. Pocatello is a division town on the Union Pacific Railroad; it is full of the company's shops and men, the latter all in the American Railway Union or the Knights of Labor, and solid on cla.s.s issues, right or wrong; and it was said that the master workman was expected at Pocatello to speak on the situation, and, if need arose, to call out the trades all over the land in support of the principle that tramp delegations shall not walk. Disquieting rumors were abroad, and there was relief in the news that the regulars had been called on to sustain the action of the federal court.

The troops at Bisuka barracks were under marching orders. While the town was alert to hear them go they tramped away one evening, just as a shower was clearing that had emptied the streets of citizens; and before the ladies could say "There they go," and call each other to the window, they were gone.

Then for a few days the remote little capital, with c.o.xeyites gathering and threatening its mails and railroad service, waited in apprehensive curiosity as to what was going to happen next. The party press on both sides seized the occasion to point a moral on their own account, and some said, "Behold the logic of McKinleyism," and others retorted, "Behold the shadow of the Wilson Bill stalking abroad over the land. Let us fall on our faces and pray!" But most people laughed instead, and patted the c.o.xeyites on the back, preferring their backs to their faces.

It seemed as if it might be time to stop laughing and gibing and inviting the procession to move on, when a thousand or more men, calling themselves American citizens, were parading their idleness through the land as authority for lawlessness and crime, and when our sober regulars had to be called out to quell a Falstaff's army. The regulars, be sure, did not enjoy it. If there is a sort of service our soldiers would like to be spared, doubtless it is disarming crazy Indians: but they prefer even that to standing up to be stoned and insulted and chunked with railroad iron by a mob which they are ordered not to fire upon, or to entering a peaceful country which has been sown with dynamite by patriotic labor unions, or prepared with cut-bridges by sympathetic strikers.

We are here to be hurt, so the strong ones tell us, and perhaps the best apology the strong can make to the weak for the vast superiority that training gives is to show how long they can hold their fire amidst a mob of brute ignorances, and how much better they can bear their hurts when the senseless missiles fly. We love the forbearance of our "unpitied strong;" it is what we expect of them: but we trust also in their firmness when the time for forbearance is past.

Little Ross Henniker--named for that mythical great Scotchman, his supposed grandfather--was deeply disappointed because he did not see the soldiers go. To have lived next door to them all his life, seven whole years, and watched them practicing and preparing to be fit and ready to go, and then not to see them when they did march away for actual service in the field, was hard indeed.

Ross was not only one of those brightest boys of his age known to parents and grand-parents by the million, but he was really a very bright and handsome child. If Mother Meadows, now "granny," had ever had any doubts at all about the Scottish chief of the Hudson's Bay Company, the style and presence of that incomparable boy were proof enough. It was a marked case of "throwing-back." There was none of the Bannock here. Could he not be trusted like a man to do whatever things he liked to do; as riding to fetch the cows and driving them hillward again, on the weird little spotted pony, hardly bigger than a dog, with a huge head and a furry cheek and a hanging under-lip, which the tributary Bannocks had brought him? It was while he was on cow-duty far away, but not out of sight of the post, that he saw the column move. "Great Scott!" how he did ride! He broke his stick over the pony's back, and kicked him with his bare heels, and slapped him with his hat, till the pony bucked him off into a sagebush whence he picked himself up and flew as fast as his own legs would spin; but he was too late. Then, for the first time in six months at least, he howled. Aunt Callie comforted him with fresh strawberry jam for supper, but the lump of grief remained, until, as she was was.h.i.+ng the dishes, she glanced at him, laughing out of the corner of her eye, and began to make up the song about c.o.xey's army. For some time Ross refused to smile, but when it came to the chorus about the soldiers who were going

"To turn back c.o.xey's army, hallelujah!

To turn back c.o.xey's army, halleloo!"

he began to sing "hallelujah" too. Then gun-fire broke in with a lonesome sound, as if the cavalry up on the hill missed its comrades of the white stripes who were gone to "turn back" that ridiculous army.

Mother Meadows wished "that man c.o.xey had never been born," so weary did she get of the c.o.xey song. c.o.xeyism had taken complete possession of the young lord of the house, now that his friends the soldiers had gone to take a hand in the business.

In a few days the soldiers came back escorting the c.o.xey prisoners. The "presence of the troops" had sufficed. The two hundred c.o.xeyites were to be tried at Bisuka for crimes committed within the State. They were penned meanwhile in a field by the river, below the railroad track, and at night they were shut into a rough barrack which had been hastily put up for the purpose. A skirt of the town little known, except to the Chinese vegetable gardeners and makers of hay on the river meadows and small boys fis.h.i.+ng along the sh.o.r.e, now became the centre of popular regard; and "Have you been down to the c.o.xey camp?" was as common a question as "Are you going to the Natatorium Sat.u.r.day night?" or "Will there be a mail from the west to-day?"

One evening, Mother Meadows, with little Ross Henniker by the hand, stood close to the dead-line of the c.o.xey field, watching the groups on the prisoners' side. The woman looked at them with perplexed pity, but the child swung himself away and cried, "Pooh! only a lot of dirty hobos!" and turned to look at the soldiers.

The tents of the guard of regulars stood in a row in front of a rank of tall poplar-trees, their tops swinging slow in the last sunlight. Behind the trees stretched the green river flats in the shadow. Frogs were croaking; voices of girls could be heard in a tennis-court with a high wall that ran back to the street of the railroad.

Roll-call was proceeding in front of the tents, the men firing their quick, harsh answers like scattering shots along the line. Under the trees at a little distance the beautiful sleek cavalry horses were grouped, unsaddled and calling for their supper. Ross Henniker gazed at them with a look of joy; then he turned a contemptuous eye upon the prisoners.

"Which of them two kinds of animals looks most like what a man ought to be?" he asked, pointing to the horses and then to the c.o.xeyites, who in the cool of the evening were indulging in unbeautiful horse-play, not without a suspicion of showing off before the eyes of visitors. The horses in their free impatience were as unconscious as lords.

"What are you saying, Ross?" asked Mrs. Meadows, rousing herself.