The Cup of Trembling and Other Stories Part 22

"I say, suppose I'd just come down from the moon, or some place where they don't know a man from a horse, and you said to me: 'Look at these things, and then look at them things over there, and say which is boss of t'other.' Why, I'd say _them_ things, every time." Ross pointed without any prejudice to the horses.

"My goodness!" cried Mrs. Meadows, "if these c.o.xeys had been taken care of and coddled all their lives like them troop horses, they might not be so handsome, but they'd look a good deal better than what they do. And they'd have more sense," she added in a lower voice. "Very few poor men's sons get the training those horses have had. They've learned to mind, for one thing, and to be faithful to the hand that feeds them."

"Not all of them don't," said Ross, shaking his head wisely. "There's kickers and biters and s.h.i.+rks amongst them; but if they won't learn and can't learn, they get 'condemned.'"

"And what becomes of them then?"

"Why, _you_ know," answered the boy, who began to suspect that there was a moral looming in the distance of this bold generalization.

"Yes," said Mother Meadows, "I know what becomes of some of them, because I've seen; and I don't think a condemned horse looks much better in the latter end of him than a condemned man."

"But you can't leave them in the troop, for they'd spoil all the rest,"

objected the boy.

"It's too much for me, dear," replied the old woman humbly. "These c.o.xeys are a kind of folks I don't understand."

"I should think you might understand, when the troops have to go out and run 'em in! I'm on the side of the soldiers, every time."

"Well, that's simple enough," said Mrs. Meadows. She was a very mild protagonist, for she could never confine herself to one side of a question. "I'm on the side of the soldiers, too. A soldier has to do what he's told, and pays with his life for it, right or wrong."

"And I think it's a shame to send the beautiful clean soldiers to shove a lot of dirty hobos back where they belong."

"My goodness! Hus.h.!.+ you'd better talk less till you get more sense to talk with," said Mrs. Meadows sternly. A man standing near, with his back to them, had turned around quickly, and she saw by his angry eye that he had overheard. She looked at him again, and knew the man. It was the boy's father. Ross had bounded away to talk to his friend Corporal Niles.

"Henniker!" exclaimed Mrs. Meadows in a low voice of shocked amazement.

"It don't seem as if this could be you!"

"Let that be!" said Henniker roughly. "I didn't enlist by that name in this army. Who's that young son of a gun that's got so much lip on him?"

"G.o.d help you! don't you know your own son?"

"What? No! Has he got to be that size already?" The man's weather-beaten face turned a darker red under the week-old beard that disfigured it. He sat down on the ground, for suddenly he felt weak, and also to hide his lameness from the woman who should have hated him, but who simply pitied him instead. Her face showed a sort of motherly shame for the change that she saw in him. It was very hard to bear. He had not fully realized the change in himself till its effect upon her confronted him. He tried to bluff it off carelessly.

"Bring the boy here. I have a word to say to him."

"You should have said it long ago, then." Mrs. Meadows was hurt and indignant at his manner. "What has been said is said, for good and all.

It's too late to unsay it now."

"What do you mean by that, Mrs. Meadows? Am I the boy's father or am I not?"

"You are not the father he knows. Do you think I have been teaching him to be ashamed of the name he bears?"

"Old lady," cried Henniker the c.o.xeyite, "have you been stuffing that boy about his dad as you did the mother about hers?"

"I have told him the truth, partly. The rest, if it wasn't the truth, it ought to have been," answered Mrs. Meadows stoutly. "I have put the story right, as an honest man would have lived it. Whatever you've been doing with yourself these years, it's your own affair, not the boy's nor mine. Keep it to yourself now. You were too good for them once,--the mother and the child; they can do without you now."

"That's all right," said Henniker, wincing; "but as a matter of curiosity let me hear how you have put it up."

"How I have what?"

"How you have dressed up the story to the boy. I'd like to see myself with a woman's eyes once more."

Mrs. Meadows looked him over and hesitated; then her face kindled. "I've told him that his father was a beautiful clean man," she said, using unconsciously the boy's own words, "and rode a beautiful horse, and saluted his captain so!" She pointed to the corporal of the guard who was at that moment reporting. "I told him that when the troops went you had to leave your young wife behind you, and she could not be kept from following you with her child; and by a cruel mischance you pa.s.sed each other on the road, and you never knew till you had got to her old home and heard she was dead and buried; and you were so broke up that you couldn't bear your life in the place where you used to be with her; and you were a sorrowful wandering man that he must pray for, and ask G.o.d to bring you home. You never came near us, Henniker, nor thought of coming; but could I tell your own child that? Indeed, I would be afraid to tell him what did happen on that road from Custer station, for fear when he's a man he'd go hunting you with a shotgun. Now where is the falsehood here? Is it in me, or in you, who have made it as much as your own life is worth to tell the truth about you to your son? _Was_ it the truth, Henniker? Sure, man, you did love her! What did you want with her else?

Was it the truth that they told us at Custer? There are times when I can't believe it myself. If there is a word you could say for yourself,--say it, for the child's sake! You wouldn't mind speaking to an old woman like me? There was a time when I would have been proud to call you my son."

"You are a good woman, Mrs. Meadows, but I cannot lie to you, even for the child's sake. And it's not that I don't know how to lie, for G.o.d knows I'm nothing but a lie this blessed minute! What do I care for such cattle as these?" He had risen, and waved his hand contemptuously toward his fellow-martyrs. "Well, I must be going. I see they're pa.s.sin' around the flesh-pots. We're livin' like fighting-c.o.c.ks here, on a restaurant contract. There'll be a big deal in it for the marshal, I suspect."

Henniker winked, and his face fell into the lowest of its demoralized expressions.

"There's no such a thing!" said Mrs. Meadows indignantly. "Some folks are willing to work for very little these hard times, and give good value for their money. You had better eat and be thankful, and leave other folks alone!"

Little Ross coming up heard but the last words, and saw his granny's agitation and the familiar att.i.tude of the strange c.o.xeyite. His quick temper flashed out: "Get out with you! Go off where you belong, you dirty man!"

Mrs. Meadows caught the boy, and whirled him around and shook him.

"Never, never let me hear you speak like that to any man again!"

"Why?" he demanded.

"I'll tell you why, some day, if I have to. Pray G.o.d I may never need to tell you!"

"Why?" repeated the boy, wondering at her excitement.

"Come away,--come away home!" she said, and Ross saw that her eyes were red with unshed tears. He hung behind her and looked back.

"He's lame," said he, half to himself. "I wouldn't have spoken that way if I'd known he had a game leg."

"Who's lame?" asked Mrs. Meadows.

"The c.o.xeyite. See. He limps bad."

"Didn't I tell you! We never know, when we call names, what sore spots we may be hitting. You may have sore spots of your own some day."

"I hope I sha'n't be lame," mused the boy. "And I hope I sha'n't be a c.o.xey."

The c.o.xeyites had been in camp a fortnight when their trial began. Twice a day the prisoners were marched up the streets of Bisuka to the courthouse, and back again to camp, till the citizens became accustomed to the strange, unrepublican procession. The prisoners were herded along the middle of the street; on either side of them walked the marshals, and outside of the line of civil officers the guard of infantry or cavalry, the officers riding and the men on foot.

This was the last march of the c.o.xeyites. Many citizens looking on were of the opinion that if these men desired to make themselves an "object-lesson" to the nation, this was their best chance of being useful in that capacity.

For two weeks, day by day, in the prisoner's field, Henniker had been confronted with the contrast of his old service with his present demoralization. He had been a conspicuous figure among the Industrials until they came in contact with the troops; then suddenly he subsided, and was heard and seen as little as possible. Not for all that a populist congress could vote, out of the pockets of the people into the pockets of the tramp pet.i.tioners, would he have posed as one of them before the eyes of an officer, or a man, of his old regiment, who might remember him as Trumpeter Henniker of K troop. But the daily march to the courthouse was the death-sickness of his pride. Once he had walked these same streets with his head as high as any man's; and it had been, "How are you, Henniker?" and "Step in, Henniker;" or Callie had been laughing and falling out of step on his arm, or Meta--poor little Meta--waiting for him when the darkness fell!

Now the women ran to the windows and crowded the porches, and stared at him and his ill-conditioned comrades as if they had been animals belonging to a different species.

But Henniker was mistaken here. The eyes of the pretty girls were for the "pretty soldiers." It was all in the day's work for the soldiers, who tramped indifferently along; but the officers looked bored, as if they were neither proud of the duty nor of the display of it which the times demanded.

On the last day's march from the courthouse to the camp, there was a clamor of voices that drowned the shuffling and tramping of the feet.

The prisoners were all talking at once, discussing the sentences which the court had just announced: the leaders and those taken in acts of violence to be imprisoned at hard labor for specified terms; the rank and file to be put back on their stolen progress as far westward, whence they came, as the borders of the State would allow; there to be staked out, as it were, on the banks of the Snake River, and guarded for sixty days by the marshals, supported by the inevitable "presence of the troops."

But the sentence that Henniker heard was that private one which his own child had spoken: "Get out with you! Go back where you belong, you dirty man!" He had wished at the time that he could make the proud youngster feel the sting of his own lash: but that thought had pa.s.sed entirely, and been merged in the simple hurt of a father's longing for his son.

"If he were mine," he bitterly confessed, "if that little c.o.c.k-a-hoop rascal would own me and love me for his dad, I swear to G.o.d I could begin my life again! But now, what next?"