Under Fire.

by Charles King.

PREFACE.

It is ten years since "The Colonel's Daughter" ventured before the public and found so many friends that "Marion's Faith" and later "Captain Blake" set forth in reinforcement, and even then there came the call for more. Pelham's old regiment was not the only one to contain either odd, laughable, or lovable characters, so now the curtain is raised on the Eleventh Horse,--a command as apocryphal as the --th, yet equally distinguished in the eyes of those who trod the war-path twenty years ago.

C. K.

October, 1894.

UNDER FIRE.

CHAPTER I.

It was the last day of Captain Wilbur Cranston's leave of absence. For three blissful months he had been visiting his old home in a bustling Western city, happy in the happiness of his charming wife in this her first long restoration to civilization since their marriage ten years before; happy in the pride and joy of his father and mother in having once more under their roof the soldier son who had won an honored name in his profession, and in their delight in the exuberant health and antics of two st.u.r.dy, plains-bred little Cranstons. The visit proved one continuous round of home pleasures and social gayeties, for Margaret Cranston had been a stanch favorite in the days of her girl- and bellehood, and all her old friends, married and single, rose _en ma.s.se_ to welcome her return. Parties, dances, dinners, concerts, theatre and opera, lectures, pictures, parks, drives and rides,--all the endless resources of the metropolitan world had been laid at the feet of the girl who, leaving them to follow her soldier lover to his exile and wanderings, had returned in the fulness of time, in the flush of womanhood, a proud wife and proud and happy mother. People could not understand her choice at the time of her marriage: "Cranston's all right, but the idea of going to live in a tent or dug-out," was the popular way of putting it, and people were still unable to understand how she could have ever found anything to enjoy in that wild life or to make her wish to see it again. It was, therefore, incomprehensible to society that she and her two bouncing boys were utterly overwhelmed with distress at having to remain in so charming a circle, so happy a home, when it came time for the captain to return. Society even resented it a little. Juvenile society--feminine--took it amiss that the Cranston boys should so scorn the arts of peace, and persist furthermore in saying the buffalo and bear and wolves in the munic.i.p.al "Zoo" were frauds as compared with what they had seen "any day" all around them out on the plains. Tremendous stories did these little Nimrods tell of the big game on which they had tired of dining, but some of their tales were true, and that's what made it so hard for junior society masculine, in which there wasn't a boy who did not honestly and justly hate these young frontiersmen, even while envying with all his civilized heart. Loud was the merriment at school over the Cranstons' blunders in spelling and arithmetic, but what--what was that as offset to their prowess on pony-back, their skill with the bow and sling-shot, their store of Indian trinkets, trophies, ay, even to the surrept.i.tiously shown Indian scalp? What was that to the tales of tremendous adventure in the land of the Sioux and Apache,--the home of the bear and the buffalo? What city-bred boy could "hold a candle" to the glaring halo about the head of two who could claim personal acquaintance with the great war chiefs Red Cloud and Spotted Tail?--who had actually been to ride and hunt with that then just dawning demiG.o.d of American boyhood,--Buffalo Bill? Sneer and scoff and cavil as did their little rivals for a time, calumny was crushed and scoffers blighted that wonderful March morning when, before the whole a.s.sembled school, there suddenly appeared that paragon of plainsmen, that idol of all well-bred young Westerners, he whom only on flaring posters or in the glare of the footlights had they been permitted to see, and smiling, superbly handsome, king of scouts and Indian-fighters, Buffalo Bill himself stepped into their midst and clasped the little Cranstons, madly rejoicing, in his arms, while their father, the cavalry captain, and even the dreaded teacher looked approvingly on. It was after that episode of no avail for even the st.u.r.diest of their schoolmates to seek to belittle the Cranston fame.

Louis, the elder, could not invent a whopper so big as to tax the credulity of the school. Buffalo Bill was "starring it" with his theatrical company through the States that spring, playing some blood-curdling, scalp-taking; hair-raising border drama which all boys eager strove to see, and when his old chum and comrade, the captain, went to call on him at his hotel, the great chief of scouts would not rest until together they had gone to see his friends "the boys." That other parents should have been pestered half to death as a result of this visitation any one who knows boys has not to be told, and many were the queries and complaints addressed to the laughing cavalryman upon that score. Parents, as a rule, had no proper conception of the honest merit and deserved fame of this transplanted hero, Bill,--were amazed to learn from Cranston that he was no fraud at all, but a man whom he and his regimental comrades swore by. A total change had come over the spirit of the school-boys' dreams. Nothing but Indian raids, buffalo-hunts, or terrific combats diversified the hour of recess. The little girls chose romantic prairie names, were either Indian maidens or ever-ready-to-be-rescued damsels in distress. The boys became redoubtable chiefs or rival imitation scouts, but Louis Cranston alone was permitted to play the _role_ of Buffalo Bill; in his presence no other boy dare attempt it.

It was a revolutionized society long before that budding May morning on which the captain had to take train for the far West, leaving wife and little ones to his father's care until the long threatened and now imminent campaign should be over. Then, should G.o.d spare his life through what proved to be the fiercest and most fatal of ten fierce and fatal summers, they should rejoin him at some distant frontier fort, and the boys' triumphant reign at school be ended. Loudly did they clamor to be taken with him. Stoutly did Louis maintain that his pony could keep up with the swiftest racer in the regiment, and indirectly did he give it to be understood at school that just as soon as the war really began he'd be out with "C" troop as he had been in the past. The war had begun and some savage fighting had already taken place, when the orders were launched for the Eleventh Cavalry to concentrate for field service.

Cranston wired that he would give up the last ten days of his leave, and Mrs. Cranston, brave, submissive, but weeping sore at times, set to packing her soldier's trunk. It was their last evening together for many a long month, and their friends knew it, and therefore, even if they called to leave a sympathetic word with the grandparents, they did not expect to see the captain and his wife. Once or twice the gray-haired mother had come to twine her arms about her big boy's neck, or to say that Mr. and Mrs. Somebody had just called, but wouldn't intrude. It was, therefore, a surprise when towards nine o'clock she came to announce a caller below,--a caller who begged not to be denied,--Mrs. Barnard.

"Mrs. _Barnard_!" exclaimed the army wife, in that tone in which incredulity mingled with surprise tells to the observant ear that no welcome awaits the announced one.

"_Who is_ Mrs. Barnard?" asked the trooper, looking up from the depths of his big trunk.

"Oh, her husband owns about half the tenth ward," said Mrs. Cranston the elder, city bred, "and," hesitatingly, "you've often seen her in church."

"At church--yes," answered her daughter-in-law, "but no one ever sees her anywhere else. She has never called on me, has she?"

"No," said the elder lady. "They are old residents, though, and years ago when the city was new your father and hers--indeed, her husband and mine--were well acquainted, but we drifted apart as the city grew. She was Almira Prendergast."

"I'm sure I never heard of her when I was a girl, though, of course, I was away at school a good deal. Every one knows her by sight now because she's the most conspicuous woman in church. She dresses magnificently,"

said Mrs. Cranston the younger. "I couldn't help noticing her diamonds last Sunday."

"They must have been big, Meg," put in the captain, reflectively, as he was getting himself out of his smoking-jacket. "Let's see,--ours is a hundred-dollar pew down near the foot of the side aisle, and hers a thousand-dollar box-stall just in front of the centre. Could they flash all that distance? They'd be useful for signalling----"

"Wilbur! I do wish you wouldn't mingle church and cavalry slang. It's downright irreverent, and at the bottom of your heart you're anything but an irreverent man."

"I won't," said the captain, solemnly; "at least I'll try to separate the ideas--they are a trifle incongruous--if you'll tell me how at that distance you could mingle your devotions with appraisal of Mrs.

Barnard's diamonds."

"I didn't. If you'd gone to church yourself you'd understand these things. I couldn't help it. I simply happened to be next to her afterwards--at communion."

"Oh, I see," said Cranston, giving a jab at his thinning hair with the thickest and stiffest of brushes. "That does bring us to close quarters, doesn't it?" Then with provoking deliberation he rearranged his necktie and began pulling on his coat. "Hum, let's see," he went on, his eyes twinkling and his lips twitching ominously, "anything wrong about Mrs.

B., mother mine, or with the millionaire husband? No? I see: just some of those people one meets at the Lord's table and n.o.body else's."

"Wilbur!" exclaimed Mrs. Cranston, in tones of horror. "Indeed, indeed, mamma, he isn't a bit like that out on the frontier. It's only when he gets into civilized church circles that he says these outrageous things.

If you could hear him read the burial service over some of our poor fellows as I have heard him, you'd know he lacked no reverence at all.

He's queer,--he always has been about these social distinctions. You know and I know they are inevitable."

But leaving wife and mother to deplore his conduct and comfort each other with the a.s.surance that he really knew better and wasn't as bad as he painted himself, which was occasionally in lurid colors, as must be admitted, Captain Cranston went down-stairs with a certain stiffness of gait which his intimates were well aware was attributable entirely to a war reminiscence of Pickett's parapet at Five Forks, but which nine out of ten, uninitiated, ascribed to military _hauteur_. He was still smiling his whimsical, teasing smile, for, though a devoted son, husband, and father, Wilbur Cranston was at times a trial to his feminine connections, and entertained on matters of church and state some views that were incompatible with those of high society. With opportunities second to none other when he joined the pioneer circle in the early days, Mr. Cranston, senior, had but moderately prospered from a worldly point of view. Eminent in his profession, he was dest.i.tute of any instinct of acc.u.mulation. He was a man the whole county honored,--whose word was his bond, whose purse-strings had never known a knot,--who had made large moneys in the law and spent them in charity, until now, occupying a social position at the top of the ladder, he lived but modestly in the house that was once the envy of all his neighbors, many of whom once, and more than once, the beneficiaries of his charity, now looked down upon him from the colossal heights of their wheat elevators or sixteen-story office blocks. "The Cranstons were among our oldest and best people," said Society; "it is too bad they are so poor." For there had been a time when the old lawyer's health failed and practice was forbidden, and when Wilbur, once the recipient of a liberal allowance, felt called upon not only to resign that, but often to help from a captain's pay. Better times had come, and the soldier son had been able to make investments for himself and for his father in far Western mining property that yielded good return; but even when known as one of the few well-to-do men in his regiment, Cranston had persisted in a certain simplicity of living that some people could not understand.

There were officers who had married wealthy women,--women whose gowns were superb, whose parlors and tables were richly furnished, whose household establishments put to shame those of three-fourths of their companions; whereas Cranston, even when he was able to dress his family fashionably and furnish his quarters elaborately, would not do it.

"Every year," said he, "some of our most promising young officers are going to the devil because they or their wives try to dress or to entertain as do their wealthy neighbors. It's all wrong, and I won't set the example. It's getting to be the curse of our army, Meg, and if I had my way I'd introduce a law the reverse of that in force in foreign armies. Over there no officer can marry unless he and his bride-elect can show that they will have over a certain income to live upon. In a republican army like ours no man ought to be commissioned unless he will agree to live on less than a fixed amount for each successive grade."

They called him "Crank Cranston" in the Eleventh for quite a while, but without affecting in the faintest degree his st.u.r.dy stand. Margaret's gowns continued simple and inexpensive, and their mode of living modest as any subaltern's, and many women spoke of them as "close" and "mean,"

but many men wished openly they had Cranston's moral courage. At home, too, better times had come. There was the old homestead, and Mr.

Cranston as counsel of certain big corporations had his easy salary and little work. There was no anxiety, but there should be, said he, no extravagance.

On the other hand, neighbor Barnard, who in by-gone days, tin dinner-pail in hand, tramped cheerily by the lawyer's rose-trellised home long hours before the household was awake, and who in his early struggles to maintain his little lot and roof had often availed himself of his neighbor's known liberality, had been surely and steadily climbing to wealth and honors, was now among the ranking capitalists of the great and growing city, and a few years back had been united in marriage to the admiration of his early school days,--Almira Prendergast, who, disdaining him in the early 50's and wedding the youth of her choice, was overwhelmed with joy to find in the days of want and widowhood, fifteen years later, that Barnard had been faithful to his ideal, had remained single for her sake, and so at last had she consented to accept him and the control of his household. A pew in the "First Presbyterian" had been for years his habitual resort on the Sabbath, but as time wore on and wealth acc.u.mulated and the lady of his love a.s.sumed more and more the leadership in all matters, spiritual and domestic, he saw his establishment blossoming into unaccustomed splendor, he met new people, later comers from the distant East, and dropped the old, the friends of his boy days. He never meant to. He was engrossed in his affairs. He let Mrs. Barnard "run the machine," as he used to phrase it, knowing nothing of that sort of thing himself, and Almira's buxom beauty, attired now in splendor hitherto undreamed of, was rapidly rising into prominence in the new and growing circle wherein the old families revolved but seldom, but the errant orbits of Eastern stars were quick entangled; and some few years after their marriage a new and gorgeous edifice having been erected by the congregation of St.

Jude's, and a daughter having been born to Barnard, the man of money heard without surprise and with little resistance his wife's change of faith in revealed religion. St. Jude's, a parochial offspring of old and established St. Paul's down-town, had become an ecclesiastical necessity in the growing north side. The Cranstons transferred their pew, as did others, to follow a favorite rector and his gospel closer to home. Mrs.

Barnard experienced a long projected change of heart because the acknowledged leaders of the social circle herded thither, and Barnard followed as his wife might lead. The great memorial window in the south transept, through whose hallowed purpling the noon-day sunshine streamed rich and mellow on the gray head in that prominent central pew, was the devout offering of Thomas Barnard and Almira, his wife, in testimony of their abandonment of the faith of their fathers and the adoption of that which in school days they had held to be idolatrous.

Wilbur Cranston well recalled how in his school days Tom Barnard's honest, st.u.r.dy form went trudging by at nightfall from the long day's labor with the railway gang of which he was "boss," but Tom was a division superintendent when the lawyer's boy came home from West Point on furlough just as the war dogs began their growling along the border States. And now Tom Barnard owned all the tenth ward and most of the railroad, did he? And it was Tom Barnard's wife, a fair, fat penitent in sealskin and sables, who drove by in such a magnificent sleigh and style to humble herself at the altar by the side of such as we, whose social shoes she was as yet held unworthy to unlatch? Wilbur remembered how once, some years before, when his father's affairs were straitened and his own were cramped, when Meg and the baby actually and sorely needed change, but she st.u.r.dily refused to leave him and go East because of the expense, he had bethought him of Tom Barnard, the rising railway man, and wrote him a personal note explaining the situation and asking through his influence if such a thing as a pa.s.s for himself and wife could be obtained over certain roads east of the Missouri, and the answer came, written by a secretary, brief and to the point. Mr. Barnard enclosed pa.s.s over the Q. R. & X. for Mr. Cranston and wife, but did not feel in a position to ask favors of any other road. And now Tom Barnard's wife had come almost at the last moment of his stay and begged that he would not refuse to see her. What on earth could she want?

A boy with a telegram had just entered and was at the open door as the captain reached the hall. Under the gas lamp without Cranston saw the carriage standing by the curb--a livery team, not the beautiful roans that had caught his trooper eye the first Sunday of his leave when he went to church with mother and Meg. The message was sharp and clear enough in all conscience:

"We march at once. You can catch us at Fetterman.

GRAY, _Adjutant_."

"So old Winthrop goes in command and Bob Gray as adjutant," he mused.

"Then I've no minute to waste."

His step was quicker, his bearing unconsciously more erect and soldierly, as he entered the parlor and found himself facing the lady.

"I ask your pardon for keeping you waiting, Mrs. Barnard. I was in the midst of packing when you came, as I must go West at once."

She had not risen from the easy-chair,--a comfortable old family relic which stood opposite the old-fashioned piano. She leaned forward, however, so that the sealskin mantle, which the warmth of the room and the length of her wait had prompted her to throw back, settled down from her shoulders in rich and luxurious folds. She gave him, half extended, a hand, which he lifted and lowered once after the fashion of the day and then released. He remembered her now perfectly,--the Almira Prendergast the big boys used to say was by long odds the prettiest girl in the days when half a dozen big brick ward schools were all the town afforded, but he did not say so, nor did she care to have him.

"Perhaps I ought to begin by apologizing for taking up your time," she said, as though not knowing how to begin; and then he saw that heavy lines of grief and anxiety had eaten their way underneath her dark and luminous eyes,--ravages that no tinsel could cover or wealth dislodge.

"Was it the driver you spoke to at the door? I heard you say wait. I had already told him; but it isn't my carriage," she went on deprecatingly.

"Our horses cannot stand night work, the coachman says, and there's always something the matter with them when they are most needed."

She was looking at him appealingly, as though she hoped he might suggest some way of helping her to say what had brought her thither--besides a livery carriage; but Cranston had taken a seat and was waiting, the telegram crushed in his hand. At last she spoke again.

"You--went to West Point, didn't you?"

"I? Yes."

"Well, then, you could tell me, couldn't you, how to get my boy there?"

"You mean by-and-by when he is old enough?"

"No. I mean now,--at once,--this week in fact."