* * * * *
When I opened my eyes again I was lying on a cot. Bare adobe walls were around me, and a high plastered roof resting on cedar poles sheltered that awful glare from my eyes. Through the open door I could see the rain falling on the bare ground of the court, filling the shallow places with puddles.
I tried to lift myself to see more as shrieks of childish laughter caught my ear, but there was a sickish heat in my dry skin, an evil taste in my throat, and a sharp pain in my left shoulder; and I fell back again.
Another shriek, and Eloise St. Vrain came before my doorway, pattering with bare white feet out into the center of the patio puddles and laughing at the dashing summer shower. Her damp hair, twisted into a knot on top of her head, was curling tightly about her temples and neck, her eyes were shining; her wet clothes slapping at her bare white knees—a picture of the delicious happiness of childhood. A little child of three or four years was toddling after her. He was brown as a berry, and at first I thought he was a little Indian. I could hear Mat and Beverly splashing about safe and joyous somewhere, and I forgot my fever and pain and the dread of that awful glare coming again to sear my burning eyeballs as I watched and listened. A louder shriek as the little child ran behind Eloise and gave her a vigorous shove for one so small.
“Oh, Charlie Bent, see what you’ve done,” Mat cried; and then Beverly was picking up “Little Lees,” sprawling, all mud-smeared and happy, in the very middle of the court.
The child stood looking at her with shining black eyes full of a wicked mischief, but he said not a word.
Just then a dull grunt caught my ear, and I half-turned to see a cot beyond mine. An Indian boy lay on it, looking straight at me. I stared back at him and neither of us spoke. His head was bandaged and his cheek was swollen, but with my memory for faces, even Indian faces, I knew him at once for the boy who had followed us into Agua Fria and out of it again.
Just then the frolickers came to the door and peered in at me.
“Are you awake?” Eloise asked.
Then seeing my face, she came romping in, followed by Mat and Beverly and little Charlie Bent, all wet and hilarious. They gave no heed to the Indian boy, who pretended to be asleep. Once, however, I caught him watching Beverly, and his eyes were like dagger points.
“We are having the best times. You must get well right away, because we are going to stay.” They all began to clatter, noisily.
Rex Krane appeared at the door just then and they stopped suddenly.
“Clear out of here, you magpies,” he commanded, and they scuttled away into the warm rain and the puddles again.
“Do you want anything, Gail?” Rex asked, bending over me.
I drew his head down with my right arm.
“I want that Indian out of here,” I whispered.
“Out he goes,” Rex returned, promptly, and almost before I knew it the boy was taken away. When we were alone the tall young man sat down beside me.
“You want to ask me a million questions. I’ll answer ’em to save you the trouble,” he began, in his comfortable way.
“You are wounded in your shoulder. Slight, bullet, that’s Mexican; deep, arrow, that’s Indian. But you are here and pretty much alive and you will be well soon.”
“And Uncle Esmond? Jondo? Bill?” I began, lifting myself up on my well arm.
“Keep quiet. I’ll answer faster. Everybody all right. Clarenden and Jondo leave for Independence the minute you are better, and a military escort permits.”
I dropped down again.
“The U.S. Army, en route for perdition, via Santa Fé, is camping in the big timbers down-stream now. Jondo and Esmond Clarenden will leave you boys and girls here till it’s safe to take you out again. And I and Daniel Boone, vestal god and goddess of these hearth-fires, will keep you from harm till that time. Bill’s joining the army for sure now, and our happy family life is ended as far as the Santa Fé Trail is concerned. I’m a well man now, but not quite army-well yet, they tell me.”
“Tell me about this.” I pointed to my shoulder.
“All in good time. It was a nasty mess of fish. A dozen Mexicans and as many Indians had followed us all the way from the sunny side of the Gloriettas. You and Bev and Mat had got by the Mexics. Daniel Boone and ‘Little Lees’ were climbing the North Pole by that time. The rest of us were giving battle straight from the shoulder; and someway, I don’t know how, just as we had the gang beat back behind us—you had a sniff of a bullet just then—an Indian slipped ahead in the dust. I was tendin’ to mite of an arrow wound in my right calf, and I just caught him in time, aimin’ at Bev; but he missed him for you. I got him, though, and clubbed his scalp a bit loose.”
Rex paused and stared at his right leg.
“How did that boy get here, Rex? Is he a friendly Indian?” I asked.
“Oh, Jondo brought him in out of the wet. Says the child was made to come along, and as soon as he could get away from the gang he had to run with up here; he came right into camp to help us against them. Fine young fellow! Jondo has it from them in authority that we can trust him lyin’ or tellin’ the truth. He’s all right.”
“How did he get hurt?” I inquired, still remembering in my own mind the day at Agua Fria.
“He’d got into our camp and was fightin’ on our side when it happened,” Rex replied.
“Some of them shot at him, then?” I insisted. “No, I beat him up with the butt of my gun for shootin’ you,” Rex said, lazily.
“At me! Why don’t you tell Jondo?”
“I tried to,” Rex answered, “but I can’t make him see it that way. He’s got faith in that redskin and he’s going to see that he gets back to New Mexico safely—after while.”
“Rex, that’s the same boy that was down in Agua Fria, the one Bev laughed at. He’s no good Indian,” I declared.
“You are too wise, Gail Clarenden,” Rex drawled, carelessly. “A boy of your brains had ought to be born in Boston. Jondo and I can’t agree about him. His name, he says, is Santan. There’s one ’n’ too many. If you knock off the last one it makes him Santa—‘holy’; but if you knock out the middle it’s Satan. We don’t knock out the same ’n’, Jondo and me.”
Just then the little child came tumbling noisily into the room.
“Look here, youngun. You can’t be makin’ a racket here,” Rex said.
The boy stared at him, impudently.
“I will, too,” he declared, sullenly, kicking at my cot with all his might.
Rex made no reply but, seizing the child around the waist, he carried him kicking and screaming outside.
“You stay out or I’ll spank you!” Rex said, dropping him to the ground.
The boy looked up with blazing eyes, but said nothing.
“That’s little Charlie Bent. His daddy runs this splendid fort. His mother is a Cheyenne squaw, and he’s a grim clinger of a half-breed. Some day he’ll be a terror on these plains. It’s in him, I know. But that won’t interfere with us any. And you children are a lot safer here than out on the trail. Great God! I wonder we ever got you here!” Rex’s face was very grave. “Now go to sleep and wake up well. No more thinkin’ like a man. You can be a child again for a while.”
Those were happy days that followed. Safe behind the strong walls of old Fort Bent, we children had not a care; and with the stress and strain of the trail life lifted from our young minds, we rebounded into happy childhood living. Every day offered a new drama to our wonder-loving eyes. We watched the big hide-press for making buffalo robes and furs into snug bales. We climbed to the cupola of the headquarters department and saw the soldiers marching by on their way to New Mexico. We saw the Ute and the Red River Comanche come filing in on their summer expeditions from the mountains. We saw the trade lines from the far north bearing down to this wilderness crossroads with their early fall stock for barter.
Our playground was the court off which all the rooms opened. And however wild and boisterous the scenes inside those walls in that summer of 1846, in four young lives no touch of evil took root. Stronger than the six-feet width of wall, higher than the eighteen feet of adobe brick guarding us round about, was the stern strength of the young Boston man interned in the fort to protect us from within, as the strength of that structure defended us from without.
And yet he might have failed sometimes, had it not been for Aunty Boone. Nobody trifled with her.
“You let them children be. An give ’em the run of this shack,” she commanded of the lesser powers whose business was to domineer over the daily life there. “The man that makes trouble wide as a needle is across is goin’ to meet me an’ the Judgment Day the same minute.”
“When Daniel gets on her crack-o’-doom voice, the mountains goin’ to skip like rams and the little hills like lambs, an’ the Army of the West won’t be necessary to protect the frontier,” Rex declared. But he knew her worth to his cause, and he welcomed it.
And so with her brute force and his moral strength we were unconsciously intrenched in a safety zone in this far-isolated place.
With neither Uncle Esmond nor Jondo near us for the first time in our remembrance, we gained a strength in self-dependence that we needed. For with the best of guardianship, there are many ways in which a child’s day may be harried unless the child asserts himself. We had the years of children but the sturdy defiance of youth. So we were happy within our own little group, and we paid little heed to the things that nobody else could forestall for us.
Outside of our family, little Charlie Bent, the half-breed child of the proprietor of the fort, was a daily plague. He entered into all of our sports with a quickness and perseverance and wilfulness that was thoroughly American. He took defeat of his wishes, and the equal measure of justice and punishment, with the silent doggedness of an Indian; and on the edge of babyhood he showed a spirit of revenge and malice that we, in our rollicking, affectionate lives, with all our teasing and sense of humor, could not understand; so we laughed at his anger and ignored his imperious demands.
Behind him always was his Cheyenne mother, jealously defending him in everything, and in manifold ways making life a burden—if we would submit to the making, which we seldom did.
And lastly Santan, the young boy who had deserted his Mexican masters for Jondo’s command, contrived, with an Indian’s shrewdness, never to let us out of his sight. But he gave us no opportunity to approach him. He lived in his own world, which was a savage one, but he managed that it should overlap our world and silently grasp all that was in it. Beverly had persistently tried to be friendly for a time, for that was Beverly’s way. Failing to do it, he had nick-named the boy “Satan” for all time.
“We found Little Blue Flower a sweet little muggins,” Beverly told the Indian early in our stay at the fort. “We like good Indians like her. She’s one clipper.”
Santan had merely looked him through as though he were air, and made no reply, nor did he ever by a single word recognize Beverly from that moment.
The evening before we left Fort Bent we children sat together in a corner of the court. The day had been very hot for the season and the night was warm and balmy, with the moonlight flooding the open space, edging the shadows of the inner portal with silver. There was much noise and boisterous laughter in the billiard-room where the heads of affairs played together. Rex Krane had gone to bed early. Out by the rear gate leading to the fort corral, Aunty Boone was crooning a weird African melody. Crouching in the deep shadows beside the kitchen entrance, the Indian boy, Santan, listened to all that was said.
To-night we had talked of to-morrow’s journey, and the strength of the military guard who should keep us safe along the way. Then, as children will, we began to speculate on what should follow for us.
“When I get older I’m going to be a freighter like Jondo, Bill and me. We’ll kill every Indian who dares to yell along the trail. I’m going back to Santa Fé and kill that boy that stared at me like he was crazy one day at Agua Fria.”
In the shadows of the porchway, I saw Santan creeping nearer to us as Beverly ran on flippantly:
“I guess I’ll marry a squaw, Little Blue Flower, maybe, like the Bents do, and live happily ever after.”
“I’m going to have a big fine house and live there all the time,” Mat Nivers declared. Something in the earnest tone told us what this long journey had meant to the brave-hearted girl.
“I’m going to marry Gail when I grow up,” Eloise said, meditatively. “He won’t ever let Marcos pull my hair.” She shook back the curly tresses, gold-gleaming in the moonlight, and squeezed my hand as she sat beside me.
“What will you be, Gail?” Mat asked.
“I’ll go and save Bev’s scalp when he’s gunning too far from home,” I declared.
“Oh, he’ll be ‘Little Lees’s’ husband, and pull that Marcos cuss’s nose if he tries to pull anybody’s curls. Whoo-ee! as Aunty Boone would say,” Beverly broke in.
I kept a loving grip on the little hand that had found mine, as I would have gripped Beverly’s hand sometimes in moments when we talked together as boys do, in the confidences they never give to anybody else.
A gray shadow dropped on the moon, and a chill night wind crept down inside the walls. A sudden fear fell on us. The noises inside the billiard room seemed far away, and all the doors except ours were closed. Santan had crept between us and the two open doorways leading to our rooms. What if he should slip inside. A snake would have seemed better to me.
A silence had fallen on us, and Eloise still clung to my hand. I held it tightly to assure her I wasn’t afraid, but I could not speak nor move. Aunty Boone’s crooning voice was still, and everything had grown weird and ghostly. The faint wailing cry of some wild thing of the night plains outside crept to our ears, making us shiver.
“When the stars go to sleep an’ the moon pulls up the gray covers, it’s time to shut your eyes an’ forget.” Aunty Boone’s soft voice broke the spell comfortingly for us. “Any crawlin’ thing that gits in my way now, goin’ to be stepped on.”
At the low hissing sound of the last sentence there was a swift scrambling along the shadows of the porch, and a door near the kitchen snapped shut. The big shining face of the African woman glistened above us and the court was flooded again with the moon’s silvery radiance. As we all sprang up to rush for our rooms, “Little Lees” pulled me toward her and gently kissed my cheek.
“You never would let Marcos in if he came to Fort Leavenworth, would you?” she whispered.
“I’d break his head clear off first,” I whispered back, and then we scampered away.
That night I dreamed again of the level plains and Uncle Esmond and misty mountain peaks, but the dark eyes were not there, though I watched long for them.
The next day we left Fort Bent, and when I passed that way again it was a great mass of yellow mounds, with a piece of broken wall standing desolately here and there, a wreck of the past in a solitary land.