The girl looked up with astounded eyes, which in the capriciousness of her pa.s.sionate nature the next moment filled with tears. Then dropping on her knees she caught the master's bitten hand and covered it with tears and kisses. But he quietly disengaged it and lifted her to her seat. There was a sniffling sound among the benches, which, however, quickly subsided as he glanced around the room, and the incident ended.

Regularly thereafter she took her prayer book back at recess and disappeared with the children, finding, as he afterwards learned, a seat under a secluded buckeye tree, where she was not disturbed by them until her orisons were concluded. The children must have remained loyal to some command of hers, for the incident and this custom were never told out of school, and the master did not consider it his duty to inform Mr.

or Mrs. Hoover. If the child could recognize some check--even if it were deemed by some a superst.i.tious one--over her capricious and precocious nature, why should he interfere?

One day at recess he presently became conscious of the ceasing of those small voices in the woods around the schoolhouse, which were always as familiar and pleasant to him in his seclusion as the song of their playfellows--the birds themselves. The continued silence at last awakened his concern and curiosity. He had seldom intruded upon or partic.i.p.ated in their games or amus.e.m.e.nts, remembering when a boy himself the heavy incompatibility of the best intentioned adult intruder to even the most hypocritically polite child at such a moment. A sense of duty, however, impelled him to step beyond the schoolhouse, where to his astonishment he found the adjacent woods empty and soundless. He was relieved, however, after penetrating its recesses, to hear the distant sound of small applause and the unmistakable choking gasps of Johnny Stidger's pocket accordion. Following the sound he came at last upon a little hollow among the sycamores, where the children were disposed in a ring, in the centre of which, with a handkerchief in each hand, Concha the melancholy!--Concha the devout!--was dancing that most extravagant feat of the fandango--the audacious sembicuaca!

Yet, in spite of her rude and uncertain accompaniment, she was dancing it with a grace, precision, and lightness that was wonderful; in spite of its doubtful poses and seductive languors she was dancing it with the artless gayety and innocence--perhaps from the suggestion of her tiny figure--of a mere child among an audience of children. Dancing it alone she a.s.sumed the parts of the man and woman; advancing, retreating, coquetting, rejecting, coyly bewitching, and at last yielding as lightly and as immaterially as the flickering shadows that fell upon them from the waving trees overhead. The master was fascinated yet troubled.

What if there had been older spectators? Would the parents take the performance as innocently as the performer and her little audience? He thought it necessary later to suggest this delicately to the child. Her temper rose, her eyes flashed.

"Ah, the slipper, she is forbidden. The prayer book--she must not. The dance, it is not good. Truly, there is nothing."

For several days she sulked. One morning she did not come to school, nor the next. At the close of the third day the master called at the Hoovers' ranch.

Mrs. Hoover met him embarra.s.sedly in the hall. "I was sayin' to Hiram he ought to tell ye, but he didn't like to till it was certain. Concha's gone."

"Gone?" echoed the master.

"Yes. Run off with Pedro. Married to him yesterday by the Popish priest at the mission."

"Married! That child?"

"She wasn't no child, Mr. Brooks. We were deceived. My brother was a fool, and men don't understand these things. She was a grown woman--accordin' to these folks' ways and ages--when she kem here. And that's what bothered me."

There was a week's excitement at Chestnut Ridge, but it pleased the master to know that while the children grieved for the loss of Concha they never seemed to understand why she had gone.

d.i.c.k BOYLE'S BUSINESS CARD

The Sage Wood and Dead Flat stage coach was waiting before the station.

The Pine Barrens mail wagon that connected with it was long overdue, with its transfer pa.s.sengers, and the station had relapsed into listless expectation. Even the humors of d.i.c.k Boyle, the Chicago "drummer,"--and, so far, the solitary pa.s.senger--which had diverted the waiting loungers, began to fail in effect, though the cheerfulness of the humorist was unabated. The ostlers had slunk back into the stables, the station keeper and stage driver had reduced their conversation to impatient monosyllables, as if each thought the other responsible for the delay.

A solitary Indian, wrapped in a commissary blanket and covered by a cast-off tall hat, crouched against the wall of the station looking stolidly at nothing. The station itself, a long, rambling building containing its entire accommodation for man and beast under one monotonous, shed-like roof, offered nothing to attract the eye. Still less the prospect, on the one side two miles of arid waste to the stunted, far-s.p.a.ced pines in the distance, known as the "Barrens;" on the other an apparently limitless level with darker patches of sage brush, like the scars of burnt-out fires.

d.i.c.k Boyle approached the motionless Indian as a possible relief. "YOU don't seem to care much if school keeps or not, do you, Lo?"

The Indian, who had been half crouching on his upturned soles, here straightened himself with a lithe, animal-like movement, and stood up.

Boyle took hold of a corner of his blanket and examined it critically.

"Gov'ment ain't pampering you with A1 goods, Lo! I reckon the agent charged 'em four dollars for that. Our firm could have delivered them to you for 2 dols. 37 cents, and thrown in a box of beads in the bargain.

Suthin like this!" He took from his pocket a small box containing a gaudy bead necklace and held it up before the Indian.

The savage, who had regarded him--or rather looked beyond him--with the tolerating indifference of one interrupted by a frisking inferior animal, here suddenly changed his expression. A look of childish eagerness came into his gloomy face; he reached out his hand for the trinket.

"Hol' on!" said Boyle, hesitating for a moment; then he suddenly e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed, "Well! take it, and one o' these," and drew a business card from his pocket, which he stuck in the band of the battered tall hat of the aborigine. "There! show that to your friends, and when you're wantin' anything in our line"--

The interrupting roar of laughter, coming from the box seat of the coach, was probably what Boyle was expecting, for he turned away demurely and walked towards the coach. "All right, boys! I've squared the n.o.ble red man, and the star of empire is taking its westward way.

And I reckon our firm will do the 'Great Father' business for him at about half the price that it is done in Washington."

But at this point the ostlers came hurrying out of the stables. "She's comin'," said one. "That's her dust just behind the Lone Pine--and by the way she's racin' I reckon she's comin' in mighty light."

"That's so," said the mail agent, standing up on the box seat for a better view, "but darned ef I kin see any outside pa.s.sengers. I reckon we haven't waited for much."

Indeed, as the galloping horses of the incoming vehicle pulled out of the hanging dust in the distance, the solitary driver could be seen urging on his team. In a few moments more they had halted at the lower end of the station.

"Wonder what's up!" said the mail agent.

"Nothin'! Only a big Injin scare at Pine Barrens," said one of the ostlers. "Injins doin' ghost dancin'--or suthin like that--and the pa.s.sengers just skunked out and went on by the other line. Thar's only one ez dar come--and she's a lady."

"A lady?" echoed Boyle.

"Yes," answered the driver, taking a deliberate survey of a tall, graceful girl who, waiving the gallant a.s.sistance of the station keeper, had leaped unaided from the vehicle. "A lady--and the fort commandant's darter at that! She's clar grit, you bet--a chip o' the old block. And all this means, sonny, that you're to give up that box seat to HER. Miss Julia Cantire don't take anythin' less when I'm around."

The young lady was already walking, directly and composedly, towards the waiting coach--erect, self-contained, well gloved and booted, and clothed, even in her dust cloak and cape of plain ashen merino, with the unmistakable panoply of taste and superiority. A good-sized aquiline nose, which made her handsome mouth look smaller; gray eyes, with an occasional humid yellow sparkle in their depths; brown penciled eyebrows, and brown tendrils of hair, all seemed to Boyle to be charmingly framed in by the silver gray veil twisted around her neck and under her oval chin. In her sober tints she appeared to him to have evoked a harmony even out of the dreadful dust around them. What HE appeared to her was not so plain; she looked him over--he was rather short; through him--he was easily penetrable; and then her eyes rested with a frank recognition on the driver.

"Good-morning, Mr. Foster," she said, with a smile.

"Mornin', miss. I hear they're havin' an Injin scare over at the Barrens. I reckon them men must feel mighty mean at bein' stumped by a lady!"

"I don't think they believed I would go, and some of them had their wives with them," returned the young lady indifferently; "besides, they are Eastern people, who don't know Indians as well as WE do, Mr.

Foster."

The driver blushed with pleasure at the a.s.sociation. "Yes, ma'am," he laughed, "I reckon the sight of even old 'Fleas in the Blanket' over there," pointing to the Indian, who was walking stolidly away from the station, "would frighten 'em out o' their boots. And yet he's got inside his hat the business card o' this gentleman--Mr. d.i.c.k Boyle, traveling for the big firm o' Fletcher & Co. of Chicago"--he interpolated, rising suddenly to the formal heights of polite introduction; "so it sorter looks ez ef any SKELPIN' was to be done it might be the other way round, ha! ha!"

Miss Cantire accepted the introduction and the joke with polite but cool abstraction, and climbed lightly into the box seat as the mail bags and a quant.i.ty of luggage--evidently belonging to the evading pa.s.sengers--were quickly transferred to the coach. But for his fair companion, the driver would probably have given profane voice to his conviction that his vehicle was used as a "d----d baggage truck," but he only smiled grimly, gathered up his reins, and flicked his whip. The coach plunged forward into the dust, which instantly rose around it, and made it thereafter a mere cloud in the distance. Some of that dust for a moment overtook and hid the Indian, walking stolidly in its track, but he emerged from it at an angle, with a quickened pace and a peculiar halting trot. Yet that trot was so well sustained that in an hour he had reached a fringe of rocks and low bushes. .h.i.therto invisible through the irregularities of the apparently level plain, into which he plunged and disappeared. The dust cloud which indicated the coach--probably owing to these same irregularities--had long since been lost on the visible horizon.

The fringe which received him was really the rim of a depression quite concealed from the surface of the plain,--which it followed for some miles through a tangled trough-like bottom of low trees and underbrush,--and was a natural cover for wolves, coyotes, and occasionally bears, whose half-human footprint might have deceived a stranger. This did not, however, divert the Indian, who, trotting still doggedly on, paused only to examine another footprint--much more frequent--the smooth, inward-toed track of moccasins. The thicket grew more dense and difficult as he went on, yet he seemed to glide through its density and darkness--an obscurity that now seemed to be stirred by other moving objects, dimly seen, and as uncertain and intangible as sunlit leaves thrilled by the wind, yet bearing a strange resemblance to human figures! Pressing a few yards further, he himself presently became a part of this shadowy procession, which on closer scrutiny revealed itself as a single file of Indians, following each other in the same tireless trot. The woods and underbrush were full of them; all moving on, as he had moved, in a line parallel with the vanishing coach.

Sometimes through the openings a bared painted limb, a crest of feathers, or a strip of gaudy blanket was visible, but nothing more.

And yet only a few hundred yards away stretched the dusky, silent plain--vacant of sound or motion!

Meanwhile the Sage Wood and Pine Barren stage coach, profoundly oblivious--after the manner of all human invention--of everything but its regular function, toiled dustily out of the higher plain and began the grateful descent of a wooded canyon, which was, in fact, the culminating point of the depression, just described, along which the shadowy procession was slowly advancing, hardly a mile in the rear and flank of the vehicle. Miss Julia Cantire, who had faced the dust volleys of the plain unflinchingly, as became a soldier's daughter, here stood upright and shook herself--her pretty head and figure emerging like a G.o.ddess from the enveloping silver cloud. At least Mr. Boyle, relegated to the back seat, thought so--although her conversation and attentions had been chiefly directed to the driver and mail agent. Once, when he had light-heartedly addressed a remark to her, it had been received with a distinct but unpromising politeness that had made him desist from further attempts, yet without abatement of his cheerfulness, or resentment of the evident amus.e.m.e.nt his two male companions got out of his "snub." Indeed, it is to be feared that Miss Julia had certain prejudices of position, and may have thought that a "drummer"--or commercial traveler--was no more fitting company for the daughter of a major than an ordinary peddler. But it was more probable that Mr.

Boyle's reputation as a humorist--a teller of funny stories and a boon companion of men--was inconsistent with the feminine ideal of high and exalted manhood. The man who "sets the table in a roar" is apt to be secretly detested by the s.e.x, to say nothing of the other obvious reasons why Juliets do not like Mercutios!

For some such cause as this d.i.c.k Boyle was obliged to amuse himself silently, alone on the back seat, with those liberal powers of observation which nature had given him. On entering the canyon he had noticed the devious route the coach had taken to reach it, and had already invented an improved route which should enter the depression at the point where the Indians had already (unknown to him) plunged into it, and had conceived a road through the tangled brush that would shorten the distance by some miles. He had figured it out, and believed that it "would pay." But by this time they were beginning the somewhat steep and difficult ascent of the canyon on the other side. The vehicle had not crawled many yards before it stopped. d.i.c.k Boyle glanced around.

Miss Cantire was getting down. She had expressed a wish to walk the rest of the ascent, and the coach was to wait for her at the top. Foster had effusively begged her to take her own time--"there was no hurry!" Boyle glanced a little longingly after her graceful figure, released from her cramped position on the box, as it flitted youthfully in and out of the wayside trees; he would like to have joined her in the woodland ramble, but even his good nature was not proof against her indifference. At a turn in the road they lost sight of her, and, as the driver and mail agent were deep in a discussion about the indistinct track, Boyle lapsed into his silent study of the country. Suddenly he uttered a slight exclamation, and quietly slipped from the back of the toiling coach to the ground. The action was, however, quickly noted by the driver, who promptly put his foot on the brake and pulled up. "Wot's up now?" he growled.

Boyle did not reply, but ran back a few steps and began searching eagerly on the ground.

"Lost suthin?" asked Foster.

"Found something," said Boyle, picking up a small object. "Look at that!

D----d if it isn't the card I gave that Indian four hours ago at the station!" He held up the card.

"Look yer, sonny," retorted Foster gravely, "ef yer wantin' to get out and hang round Miss Cantire, why don't yer say so at oncet? That story won't wash!"