Under Fire. Charles King
her friend and most obedient servant.
"Now, I like that young fellow," said Mrs. Cranston, folding up the letter, "only I didn't——"
"Well, didn't what?" asked her companion, seeing that she had faltered for a word.
"Well—he didn't act at all like an engaged man—like he ought to have acted," said Mrs. Cranston, with honest disdain of masculine flirts or malevolent rules of speech, due perhaps to long association with belles of the Blue Grass country.
"Why, I didn't think he was engaged," said Miss Loomis.
"No—and he didn't mean you to. But when one mail brings a man seven letters from one girl, I've no use for him."
"Well, I should much rather he had them of one than from seven different girls," said Miss Loomis, smiling resolutely.
"Oh, you're bound to uphold him, I see. All the same, I thought better of him."
"Ah?" And now in a very pretty, playful way did Miss Loomis take her companion's flushed face between two long, white, slender hands—very cool and dainty members were they—and archly queried, "Are you beginning to tire of your bargain, Lady Cranston? Are you planning already to unload me, as the captain says, on somebody else?"
The answer came with sudden vehemence and a hug. "You are much too good for any man I know—except Will, and you can't have him. And I'll never let you go till the right one comes."
After which outburst, and for over a week, did this young matron say little more to Miss Loomis on the subject, but she must have enlivened some hours of the captain's convalescence with her views on recent graduates in general, and this one in particular, for when at last letters came from the front announcing the arrival of the reinforcements and the final cutting loose of the reorganized column from its base, the prostrate warrior glanced up at his busy wife with an odd mixture of merriment and concern in his haggard face.
"To whose troop do you suppose your friend Davies has been assigned?"
"Not to yours, surely. You have no vacancy."
"No. I fear I wish I had—every time I see my bulky senior sub in saddle. But, of all men you know——"
"Will Cranston! You don't mean Captain Devers?"
"Yes—Captain Differs, for a fact."
"Well, then your protégé and Mr. Davies have gone into the same troop. What a strange coincidence! Isn't it time Mrs. Barnard answered Agatha's letter?"
"Time she answered it? Yes," replied Cranston, "yet not time for her answer to get here. Poor lady! She was so distressed at the thought of his going into the army. I hope that letter will comfort her. It ought to. I doubt if he ever did an honest day's work before."
CHAPTER VI.
The battalion had halted at the foot of the slope, each troop closing up on its predecessor and huddling in shivering silence. No trumpet sounded; no word of command was heard. Every troop leader threw up his hand when he thought he had gone far enough and rolled stiffly out of saddle, his horse only too willingly standing stock-still the instant he found himself no longer urged. "Dismount" either by signal or command would have been an affront to a cavalry force two-thirds of whose array seemed to be dismounted already, some towing along by taut bridle-rein the famished relic of a once spirited charger, others comforting themselves with the reflection that at least they had now only their own carcass to care for, others still wishing they had not even that responsibility, wondering how much longer their aggrieved stomachs might have to struggle with the only pabulum upon which they had been allowed to expend their gastric juices for over forty-eight hours, and suffering the pangs of remorse, both physical and mental, in the poignant consciousness that the cause of this distress was the undigested portion of some late faithful four-footed friend and companion, for the command for rations had been reduced to horse meat on the hoof. Three hundred miles from the nearest post when their supplies gave out, in the heart of the Bad Lands and the height of the worst season of the year, except midwinter, it had turned its back to the forts and its face to the foe, true to its orders, still following the trail of the hostile tribe—the only hot thing it had struck for a week. "Live on the country, there isn't anything else," were their orders, as they cut loose from the main command, and their major—a reserved and conservative fellow at other times—came away from the grim presence of his commander with blasphemy on his bearded lips. The only human habitation within scores of miles of his line of march were Indian lodges, and both grass for the horses and game for the men had been fired off the face of the earth by those active foemen before the drenching wintry rain set in and chilled to the marrow the shelterless forms of starving trooper and staggering steed.
"Live on the country, indeed! Two antelope and ten prairie dogs was the sum total of the game secured by the hunters in three days' pursuit. And what are they," said Captain Truman, "among so many? Barley loaves and Galilee perch might be made to go round in a bigger crowd in the days of miracles, but this isn't Jordan's strand," he added, as he glanced around at the dripping, desolate slopes, and then, fortified in his opinion by the gloomy survey, concluded, with cavalry elegance, "not by a damn sight."
"What's the matter ahead, anyhow?" hailed a brother captain, up to his shins in sticky mud, who had been making mental calculation as to how many more hours of such wearing work and wretched weather it would take to unhorse his entire company.
"Don't know," was the short answer. Men fight, but they seldom talk on empty stomachs.
"Why, I thought I saw you talking with Hastings when he rode back." Hastings being the battalion adjutant. "Didn't he say what they were pow-wowing about?"
"No, and I didn't ask. There was nothing to eat in sight, and that's the only matter that interests my people just now. Just look at those poor brutes!" And Truman heaved a sigh as he gazed about among his gaunt, dejected horses, many of them so weak as barely to be able to stand.
"My men are as bad off as the horses, pretty near," said Captain Devers, the other. "There isn't one of them that hasn't turned his saddle-bags inside out to-day for the last crumb of hard-tack. They're worn to skin and bone. Three of them broke down entirely back there at the creek crossing, and if there weren't Indians all round us, nothing would have fetched them along. There goes Davies, coddling 'em again, damn it! That man would spoil any troop——Mr. Davies!" he called, and a gaunt, wiry fellow, with a stiff beard sprouting on his thin, haggard face, turned away from a bedraggled trooper who had thrown himself in utter abandonment among the dripping sage brush at the side of the trail, and came to his troop commander.
"I wish you wouldn't make such a fuss over those men," said Devers, petulantly. "Just leave 'em alone. They'll come out all right. This coddling and petting isn't going to do any good. Soldiers are not like sick children."
"A good many of ours seem to feel that way just now, sir," said the young officer. "I only thought to cheer him up a bit."
"Well, when my men need nursing, Mr. Davies, I'll have you detailed in that capacity, but be so good as to refrain from it otherwise. I don't like it. That's all."
Without a word Davies turned on his heel and went back to his horse. Truman, looking after him with a not unkindly interest in his tired eyes, saw that he swayed a little as he ploughed his way through the thick and sticky mud. "That boy's as weak as a sick child himself, Devers," said he. "You'll have to have a nurse for him before we get in."
"Well, it's his own fault, then. He had just as much in his haversack as I had when we cut loose from the main column. I 'spose he's given it away."
"I know he has," was the curt rejoinder. "Neither of those two men could stomach tough mule meat. I suppose that was the only way to get 'em along."
Devers turned gloomily about. Down in the bottom of his heart he felt that in his annoyance at what he considered disregard of his instructions