"Why, the ring isn't on my finger yet," laughed the girl, "the fatal promise of obedience--" But she stopped, perceiving her joke was not a good one. "Of course, Jim, if you feel that way," she finished. "Only I'm grown up, and I like reasons."

"Well--that's all right too."

"Ho, ho! All right! Thank you, sir. Dear me!"

"Why, it ain't to please me, Louise; indeed it ain't. I can't swear everything won't be nice and all right and what a woman could be mixed up in, but--well, how should you know what men are, anyway, when they've been a good long time getting mad, and are mad all through? That's what this town is to-day, Louise."

"I don't know," said Miss Sissons, "and I'm sure I'd rather not know."

And so she gave her promise. "But I shouldn't suppose," she added, "that the men of Siskiyou, mad or not, would forget that women are women."

Jim laughed. "Oh no," he said, "they ain't going to forget that."

The appointed day came; and the train came, several hours late, bearing the box of confectionery, addressed to the Ladies' Reform and Literary Lyceum. Bill, the ticket-agent, held his lantern over it on the platform.

"That's the cake," said he.

"What cake?" Abe inquired.

Bill told him the rumor.

"Cake?" repeated Abe. "Fer them?" and he tilted his head towards the jail. "Will you say that again, friend? I ain't clear about it. _Cake_, did ye say?"

"Pound-cake," said Bill. "Ordered special from San Francisco."

Now pound-cake for adults is considered harmless. But it is curious how unwholesome a harmless thing can be if administered at the wrong time.

The gaunt, savage-looking Californian went up to the box slowly. Then he kicked it lightly with his big boot, seeming to listen to its reverberation. Then he read the address. Then he sat down on the box to take a think. After a time he began speaking aloud. "They hold up a stage," he said, slowly. "They lay up a pa.s.senger fer a month. And they lame Bob Griffiths fer life. And then they do up Buck. Shoot a hole through his spine. And I helped bury him; fer I liked Buck." The speaker paused, and looked at the box. Then he got up. "I hain't attended their prayer-meetin's," said he, "and I hain't smelt their flowers. Such perfume's liable to make me throw up. But I guess I'll hev a look at their cake."

He went to the baggage-room and brought an axe. The axe descended, and a splintered slat flew across the platform. "There's a lot of cake," said Abe. The top of the packing-case crashed on the railroad track, and three new men gathered to look on. "It's fresh cake too," remarked the destroyer. The box now fell to pieces, and the tattered paper wrapping was ripped away. "Step up, boys," said Abe, for a little crowd was there now. "Soft, ain't it?" They slung the cake about and tramped it in the grime and oil, and the boards of the box were torn apart and whirled away. There was a singular and growing impulse about all this. No one said anything; they were very quiet; yet the crowd grew quickly, as if called together by something in the air. One voice said, "Don't forgit we're all relyin' on yer serenade, Mark," and this raised a strange united laugh that broke brief and loud, and stopped, leaving the silence deeper than before. Mark and three more left, and walked towards the Lyceum. They were members of the Siskiyou band, and as they went one said that the town would see an interesting trial in the morning. Soon after they had gone the crowd moved from the station, compact and swift.

Meanwhile the Lyceum had been having disappointments. When the train was known to be late, Amanda had abandoned bestowing the cake until morning.

But now a horrid thing had happened: the Siskiyou band refused its services! The rocking-chairs were plying strenuously; but Amanda strode up and down in front of Mount Shasta and Lucretia Mott.

Herr Schwartz entered. "It's all right, madam," said he. "My trombone haf come back, und--"

"You'll play?" demanded the president.

"We blay for de ladies."

The rocking-chairs were abandoned; the Lyceum put on its bonnet and shawl, and marshalled down-stairs with the band.

"Ready," said Amanda.

"Ready," said Herr Schwartz to his musicians. "Go a leedle easy mit der Allegro, or we bust 'Fatinitza.'"

The spirited strains were lifted in Siskiyou, and the procession was soon at the jail in excellent order. They came round the corner with the trombone going as well as possible. Two jerking bodies dangled at the end of ropes, above the flare of torches. Amanda and her flock were shrieking.

"So!" exclaimed Herr Schwartz. "Dot was dose Healy boys we haf come to gif serenade." He signed to stop the music.

"No you don't," said two of the masked crowd, closing in with pistols.

"You'll play fer them fellers till you're told to quit."

"Cerdainly," said the philosophical Teuton. "Only dey gif brobably very leedle attention to our Allegro."

So "Fatinitza" trumpeted on while the two on the ropes twisted, and grew still by-and-by. Then the masked men let the band go home. The Lyceum had scattered and fled long since, and many days pa.s.sed before it revived again to civic usefulness, nor did its members find comfort from their men. Herr Schwartz gave a parting look at the bodies of the lynched murderers. "My!" said he, "das Ewigweibliche haf draw them apove sure enough."

Miss Sissons next day was walking and talking off her shock and excitement with her lover. "And oh, Jim," she concluded, after they had said a good many things, "you hadn't anything to do with it, had you?"

The young man did not reply, and catching a certain expression on his face, she hastily exclaimed: "Never mind! I don't want to know--ever!"

So James Hornbrook kissed his sweetheart for saying that, and they continued their walk among the pleasant hills.

THE GENERAL'S BLUFF

The troops this day had gone into winter-quarters, and sat down to kill the idle time with pleasure until spring. After two hundred and forty days it is a good thing to sit down. The season had been spent in trailing, and sometimes catching, small bands of Indians. These had taken the habit of relieving settlers of their cattle and the tops of their heads. The weather-beaten troops had scouted over some two thousand aimless, veering miles, for the savages were fleet and mostly invisible, and knew the desert well. So, while the year turned, and the heat came, held sway, and went, the ragged troopers on the frontier were led an endless chase by the hostiles, who took them back and forth over flats of lime and ridges of slate, occasionally picking off a packer or a couple of privates, until now the sun was setting at 4.28 and it froze at any time of day. Therefore the rest of the packers and privates were glad to march into Boise Barracks this morning by eleven, and see a stove.

They rolled for a moment on their bunks to get the feel of a bunk again after two hundred and forty days; they ate their dinner at a table; those who owned any further baggage than that which partially covered their nakedness unpacked it, perhaps nailed up a photograph or two, and found it grateful to sit and do nothing under a roof and listen to the grated snow whip the windows of the gray sandstone quarters. Such comfort, and the prospect of more ahead, of weeks of nothing but post duty and staying in the same place, obliterated Dry Camp, Cow Creek Lake, the blizzard on Meacham's Hill, the horse-killing in the John Day Valley, Saw-Tooth stampede, and all the recent evils of the past; the quarters hummed with cheerfulness. The nearest railroad was some four hundred miles to the southeast, slowly constructing to meet the next nearest, which was some nine hundred to the southeast; but Boise City was only three-quarters of a mile away, the largest town in the Territory, the capital, not a temperance town, a winter resort; and several hundred people lived in it, men and women, few of whom ever died in their beds. The coming days and nights were a luxury to think of.

"Blamed if there ain't a real tree!" exclaimed Private Jones.

"Thet eer ain't no tree, ye plum; thet's the flag-pole 'n' th' Merrickin flag," observed a civilian. His name was Jack Long, and he was pack-master.

Sergeant Keyser, listening, smiled. During the winter of '64-65 he had been in command of the first battalion of his regiment, but, on a theory of education, had enlisted after the war. This being known, held the men more shy of him than was his desire.

Jones continued to pick his banjo, while a boyish trooper with tough black hair sat near him and kept time with his heels. "It's a cottonwood-tree I was speakin' of," observed Jones. There was one--a little, shivering white stalk. It stood above the flat where the barracks were, on a bench twenty or thirty feet higher, on which were built the officers' quarters. The air was getting dim with the fine, hard snow that slanted through it. The thermometer was ten above out there. At the mere sight and thought Mr. Long produced a flat bottle, warm from proximity to his flesh. Jones swallowed some drink, and looked at the little tree. "Snakes! but it feels good," said he, "to get something inside y'u and be inside yerself. What's the tax at Mike's dance-house now?"

"Dance 'n' drinks fer two fer one dollar," responded Mr. Long, accurately. He was sixty, but that made no difference.

"You and me'll take that in, Jock," said Jones to his friend, the black-haired boy. "'Sigh no more, ladies,'" he continued, singing. "The blamed banjo won't accompany that," he remarked, and looked out again at the tree. "There's a chap riding into the post now. Shabby-lookin'.

Mebbe he's got stuff to sell."

Jack Long looked up on the bench at a rusty figure moving slowly through the storm. "Th' ole man!" he said.

"He ain't specially old," Jones answered. "They're apt to be older, them peddlers."

"Peddlers! Oh, ye-es." A seizure of very remarkable coughing took Jack Long by the throat; but he really had a cough, and, on the fit's leaving him, swallowed a drink, and offered his bottle in a manner so cold and usual that Jones forgot to note anything but the excellence of the whiskey. Mr. Long winked at Sergeant Keyser; he thought it a good plan not to inform his young friends, not just yet at any rate, that their peddler was General Crook. It would be pleasant to hear what else they might have to say.

The General had reached Boise City that morning by the stage, quietly and unknown, as was his way. He had come to hunt Indians in the district of the Owyhee. Jack Long had discovered this, but only a few had been told the news, for the General wished to ask questions and receive answers, and to find out about all things; and he had noticed that this is not easy when too many people know who you are. He had called upon a friend or two in Boise, walked about unnoticed, learned a number of facts, and now, true to his habit, entered the post wearing no uniform, none being necessary under the circ.u.mstances, and unattended by a single orderly. Jones and the black-haired c.u.mnor hoped he was a peddler, and innocently sat looking out of the window at him riding along the bench in front of the quarters, and occasionally slouching his wide, dark hat-brim against the stinging of the hard flakes. Jack Long, old and much experienced with the army, had scouted with Crook before, and knew him and his ways well. He also looked out of the window, standing behind Jones and c.u.mnor, with a huge hairy hand on a shoulder of each, and a huge wink again at Keyser.

"Blamed if he 'ain't stopped in front of the commanding officer's," said Jones.

"Lor'!" said Mr. Long, "there's jest nothin' them peddlers won't do."

"They ain't likely to buy anything off him in there," said c.u.mnor.

"Mwell, ef he's purvided with any _kind_ o' Injun cur'os'tees, the missis she'll fly right on to 'em. Sh' 'ain't been merried out yere only haff'n year, 'n' when she spies feathers 'n' bead truck 'n' buckskin fer sale sh' hollers like a son of a gun. Enthoosiastic, ye know."