For two days she had been hoping that mother would suggest that she, too, might come when they went for the afternoon visits to their wounded. But, though mother had twice taken her to sit a few minutes by the side of poor, frenzied Mrs. Bennett, there came no intimation that she might follow to the bedside of Lieutenant Willett, whose voice the child was longing to hear again, whose face she craved to see. No woman of heroic mould, perhaps, was Mrs. Archer. Hers was one of those fond, clinging natures, capable of any sacrifice for the husband or child she loved. She had turned her back on the home and the people so dear to her when unhesitatingly she followed the soldier husband she rapturously loved, and now, though she yearned to take her daughter to her heart and kiss away the wistful, pathetic, pleading look in the fond eyes that never before had appealed to her in vain, something told her it were best to let her fight it out, even to suffer, alone, than admit, even to her, the possibility of a growing love for this brilliant and dangerous young gallant, as to whom she had unwittingly heard such damning accusation. It had not taken Mrs. Archer long to learn that Case, nerved by drink, had appeared at Harris's bedside that Sunday afternoon, asking to speak with him alone, only to be speedily followed by Willett, and by the altercation she had overheard. Under the circumstances, as known to her, Mrs. Archer was thankful that, since he could not leave the post, Lieutenant Willett could not even leave his room. Not with her knowledge and consent should her gentle Lilian be again brought within the sphere of his influence.
But Love that laughs at locksmiths was yet to find his way, and that right soon.
CHAPTER XV.
Harris was up and fuming for action. With his wound unhealed and his arm utterly useless, he was insistent that he should be permitted to mount and ride. "What could you do?" asked Bentley. "The post is surrounded. Every trail and both roads are watched day and night. Your horse is all that's left you. 'Tonio is gone. 'Tonio has turned traitor!"
"That," said Harris, "I will not believe for an instant."
They brought General Archer to see him, and the grave-faced old soldier bent kindly over the impatient and incredulous junior. "It is even as Bentley tells you, lad," said he. "Only one messenger has been able to come or go through their lines since the demoralized pair that got in from Verde, and they can't be hired to try again. We are hemmed in and helpless until our cavalry return. Willett will tell you he saw 'Tonio fire the shot that killed his horse and was meant to kill him. 'Tonio has intercepted messengers between Turner and me, and killed, I believe, at least one messenger. You must be patient or you will throw yourself into a fever and set you back a month. We've simply got to act on the defensive, guard the post and the women until relief comes. By this time, of course, General Crook himself is somewhere in the field, and any moment may bring him; then our Apache friends, hereabouts, will have to hunt their holes."
"General Archer," said Harris, commanding himself with evident effort and striving to speak with his accustomed deliberation, "I have not seen Willett, but, if I had, I should refuse to believe that 'Tonio fired at him. The Apache-Mohaves may be with the hostiles at last, but not 'Tonio. There is some reason for his absence that we cannot fathom. They may have killed him for his loyalty to us, but loyal he is at heart, no matter how much appearances are against him."
"We'll hope so," said Archer, "but for the present, do as Bentley bids you and stay quiet," and the commander rose to go.
But Harris, too, was on his feet, steadying himself with one hand on the back of his chair. "You will pardon me, will you not, sir, if I ask a question? You say you have been unable to communicate with Stannard or Turner. Stannard is, probably, too far away, but if Turner's wounded are over on Tonto Creek, he can be reached. Have you tried signalling?"
"Signalling? We've got some flags and torches somewhere, but I believe that——"
"I don't mean that, sir. No one with Turner would understand if we had. I mean smoke signals—Indian."
"No," said Archer slowly. "No one but Indians could say what they meant, even if any one here knew their confounded code. Do you?"
"I know enough at least to call 'Tonio; and unless he is dead or spirited away, he'll answer. Then we can get word to Turner."
Archer turned back. He was almost at the door. "Do you mean he would answer—that he would come in here?"
"If I may give my word that no one shall touch or harm him, he'll come—if alive and able."
For a moment the general was silent. It was a grave question. In his eyes and those of his officers, 'Tonio stood attainted practically with treason. He had deserted in face of the enemy, joined forces with the enemy, shot as an enemy, conspired and acted as an enemy. He deserved to be hunted and shot down without trial, without mercy. Yet here was this young soldier, who had known him best and longest, full of boundless faith in him, demanding safe conduct for him on the honor of an officer and gentleman. If Archer gave his word it would be flying in the face of his entire command—what there was left of it, at least—and Archer's word was a thing not to be lightly given. "I must think of this awhile," said he. "It is a big proposition. You think you can reach him?"
"By night or day, sir, either; but it would have to be from the top of Squadron Peak."
It was then late on Friday afternoon, the fifth day of what might he called the siege. Not a signal had come from without, not a sign from either command, not a symptom of surrounding Indian; yet a little party sent to search the rookery down stream, where Case declared he'd been entertaining the ghost of 'Patchie Sanchez, came back reporting that fresh moccasin and mule tracks were plainly visible about the premises and at the neighboring ford, also that the mule tracks led away back of the Picacho, as everybody persisted in calling the peak—in spite of the fact that from the north it presented no sharp point to the skies, but rather a bold and rounded poll. Squadron Peak was more "sonorous and appropriate," said the trooper who so named it, but now that troopers were scarce at Almy, there were none to do it that reverence.
Old Sanchez—José—the former proprietor, had disappeared entirely, he and his brace of henchmen, after somewhere digging a treasure pit in the sand and therein "caching" their store of mescal, aguardiente, and certain other illicit valuables. It was conjectured that he had fled to the Verde Valley and taken refuge at McDowell until the storm blew over. But Craney was more than curious as to Case's guest, the ghost, and by Friday Case was sober and solemn and sick enough to be cross-questioned without show of resentment. Craney went so far as to ask Case wouldn't he like a little whiskey to steady his nerves—a cocktail to aid his appetite and stir his stomach? "Like it," said Case, "you bet I would—which is why I won't take it. Three days' liquor, two days' taper, one day suffer, then the water wagon for a spell. Thank you all the same, Mr. Craney. What can I do for you without the drink?"
But when Craney mentioned Sanchez, the ghost and the drinking bout by night at the rookery, Case said he must have been nigher to jimjams than he'd got in a year. "I never saw any ghost," said he, and Craney had to give it up, and report his failure to the commanding officer.
"Ever try threatening him with discharge?" asked Bucketts, by way of being helpful.
"Ever try? I don't have to try! The one time I started in on that lay he never let me finish; said all right, he'd go just as soon as he'd balanced the books. Then, by gad, it was all I could do to get him to stay. He is the most independent damn man I ever met. Says he knows he's a drunkard and nuisance one week out of four, and don't wonder I want to discharge him. Discharge him? I couldn't get along without him! Any time he wants a better job and plenty of society all he's got to do is go to Prescott. Discharge him! All I'm afraid of is he'll discharge himself!"
So Bucketts dropped the subject and he and Strong went to report non-success to Archer just as the sun was going down and the peak, in lone grandeur, loomed up dazzling above the black drapery about its base, and Bonner, pacing up and down with his much-honored chief, saw the gloom deepen in his deep-set eyes. Only Lilian see
med able to win a smile from him, as she came and took him by the arm and led him away to dinner.
Darkness settled down apace. The moon rose late and the stars were holding high carnival in consequence, for the skies were gorgeous in their deck of gold. Mrs. Stannard was dining with the Archers en famille, as she did now almost every evening, for the Archers would so have it, and Archer had been talking of Harris's proposition, and his determined stand for 'Tonio. Mrs. Archer shook her pretty head in negation. She could not see how any one who distrusted her general could himself be loyal. She had said the same of Secretary Stanton during the war, for one of that iron master's most masterly convictions was that every soldier, Southern born—even such as Thomas—must of necessity be a Southern sympathizer. 'Tonio must needs be a traitor since he avoided sight of, or speech with, her soldier who could do no wrong. And if Mrs. Archer believed in 'Tonio, on her husband's account, what must have been Lilian's conviction? she who had both father and lover—father and the husband soon to be, for of that Mrs. Archer had now no earthly doubt—the two men beyond all others combined who were dearest to Lilian on earth, both of them inimical to 'Tonio, one of them wellnigh his victim. It was Mrs. Stannard who listened in silence. She had longer known the Apache-Mohave, and as between 'Tonio and Willett it might well be a story with two sides.
They had finished their coffee and were just coming forth upon the veranda into the exquisite evening air, and, as bidden by her father, Lilian had just begun to tune her guitar, when across the parade among the men seated along the low front of the barracks there was sudden start, sudden rush, and, from up the line of officers' quarters not many doors away, came agonized cry for help. Archer sprang to his feet and started, but Mrs. Archer, in a paroxysm of fear, thinking only of Indians and treachery, seized him by the arm, clung to and held him. Mrs. Stannard sprang within the hall and back with Archer's revolver which, without a word, she thrust into his hand. Then all three together started, for while fifty men came tearing headlong across the sandy level, making straight for the adjutant's quarters, Lilian, their little Lilian—the silent, sad-eyed, anxious child of the days and days gone by—heading everybody, was flying like a white-winged bird, straight along the line, and when the father reached her she had thrown herself upon a heap of burning, smouldering bedding, thrashing it with a wet blanket snatched from the olla, and then, with her own fair, white hands, was beating out the few sparks that remained about the sleeve and shoulder of a soaked and dishevelled gown, and brushing others from the hair and face of an unheroic, swathed and dripping figure—Harold Willett in the midst of the wreck of his cot, while Blitz, the striker, aided by Wettstein and the doctor's man, were stamping and swearing and tearing things to bits in the effort to down other incipient blazes. Between them they had dragged Willett from the midst of the flames and drenched him with a cataract from the olla. The rush of the men from the barracks made short work of the fire, but when Mrs. Archer and Mrs. Stannard, with throbbing hearts, bent over the scorched and smoking ruin on the south porch, a tousled brown head, with ghastly face, was clasped in Lilian's arms, pillowed on Lilian's fair, white bosom. Willett had fainted from fright, pain and reaction, and the unheroic, untried, unfearing girl had blistered her own fair hands, her own soft, rounded, clasping arms, yet saw and felt nothing but dread for his suffering and joy for his safety. Even the mother for a moment could not take her rescued darling from that fond, fearless, impassioned embrace. All in that desperate instant the veil of virgin shame had burned away. In the fierce heat and shock and peril the latent love force had burst its bonds, the budding lily had blossomed into womanhood.
And upon that picture, pallid, weak and suffering, another neighbor, another pain-stricken young soldier gazed in silence, then turned unobtrusively away. There was no one to help him back to the reclining chair from which he had been startled at the almost frenzied shriek of alarm. There was no further talk—no thought of signals that night; Archer had had enough of fire. They bore the reviving officer, presently, to a vacant room in Stannard's quarters, and Lilian was led to her own. There were bandages about both hands and arms when next morning she appeared upon the gallery. They hid the red ravages on the fair, white skin, but what was there to veil the radiant light that shone in her eyes, the burning blushes that mantled her soft and rounded cheeks? Archer took her to his heart and kissed her and turned to his duty with a sigh. Mrs. Archer clung to and hovered about her, silent, for what was there to say? Mrs. Stannard came over, all smiles and sunshine, to announce that "He" had passed a comfortable night, and "His" first waking thoughts and words were for her, as indeed they should have been, and, so far as audible words were concerned, they possibly were. What else could Mrs. Stannard have said when she saw that winsome, yet appealing little face?
And in such wise was our Lilian wooed; in such wise was she won. Contrary to Bentley's wishes, Willett had essayed to smoke, and so set his bed afire. Contrary to all convention, the love of the maiden had been the first to manifest itself to public eye, but Willett manfully rose to the occasion. In the midst of anxiety, uncertainty and danger there beamed one ray, at least, of radiant, unshadowed, buoyant hope and bliss and shy delight. Lilian Archer envied no girl on the face of the globe, no white-robed seraph in heaven; and for her sake others, too, strove hard to hope, to help, to shower good wishes and congratulation.
"But to think of my little girl in love," said Archer, with brimming eyes. "Why, you—you won't be nineteen!"
"And mother was but seventeen when she married you," softly laughed Lilian, snuggling to his side.
"And Mr. Willett so far from his captaincy," sighed her mother.
"Much nearer than father was to even a first lieutenancy when you married him," was the joyous answer. "He was only a second lieutenant by brevet."
"Well," said Mrs. Archer, "it seems different—somehow."
And so it seemed to us. "All too brief a wooing," said poor Archer. "God send her longer wedded bliss!"
CHAPTER XVI.
Moreover, as some one said in speaking of the sudden engagement, "It came about on a Friday evening, didn't it?" And then, too, when people were talking it over a few weeks later, as Mrs. Archer said, "it seemed different." Soldier folk sometimes have superstitions as surely as the sailor man is never without his, and a start on a voyage of love life, clearing port of a Friday evening, had its inauspicious side. But for the mishap that suddenly enveloped the happy man in flames at a moment when he was sprawled on his back with his whole right side, as it were, in a sling, Mr. Harold Willett might indeed have returned to duty and department headquarters with no other encumbrance than a mortgaged pay account, and it was not fair to Lilian to speak of her engagement as "announced" that Friday evening; but in her wondrous happiness she could find no fault with anything about it. It was all just perfect, just heavenly (where they neither give nor are given in marriage, which possibly accounts, as said our cynic, for so much that is heavenly about it). As an engagement, in fact, it did not exist until four days later, after other and equally important things had occurred, and we have merely taken Lilian's point of view, and left them out of that chapter and all consideration, as she did, so far as we are concerned, in order to have it all over and done with. But of course there had to be time for Willett to recover from the effects of the shock, to be clothed in his right mind and something less fragmentary than the relics of a robe de nuit, and a day in which to realize what had taken place. (I shrewdly suspect that our good friend Mrs. Stannard saw to it that Mr. Willett was informed of what Lilian had done and suffered on his account, if she did not dilate on what Lilian had betrayed.) And then came his very properly worded plea to be allowed to see her and thank her; and when there was equally proper demur on Mrs. Archer's part, Willett made his avowal in what even the mother held to be manly and convincing fashion, for, now that she knew that her darling's heart was gone—that it was too late to avert the inevitable—mother-like, she strove to see with her darling's eyes all that was
good in him, and there was so very much that was good-looking. She never even hinted to her husband, much less to Lilian, that she had heard the paragon most vehemently accused of most unmanly and unbecoming conduct (for what was Mr. Case, after all, but an irresponsible inebriate?), and she saw that her daughter's happiness was wrapped up in this brilliant and most presentable young soldier. Willett certainly gave many a promise of eminence in his career and profession, so she set herself at once to work to talk the general into complaisance, and he, who loved her with all his heart, and believed her the best, the bravest, fondest, truest wife in all the army (as indeed she might have been without being the wisest), and who could deny Lilian nothing from the time she turned his best silken sash into a swing for herself and Wauwataycha Two Bears, her tiny Sioux playmate, till now that she had set her heart on one Harold Willett for a husband, broke down and surrendered as ordered. But there was that in the old soldier's face as he took Willett's hand that made the junior wince more than did the grip, which was mild enough. "She will be just such another wife as is her blessed mother," said Archer. "Be good and true to her, Willett."
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