A Public Confession

FORT FLETCHER, though magnificently situated, is as unpicturesque architecturally as other prairie posts. But to Jack Lombard, on a certain September afternoon, the huddle of low white buildings was beautiful as a vision of the Heavenly City. Did not those ill-constructed walls enshrine the woman he loved, and was he not returning to her presence three days earlier than had seemed possible when he went away ?

The cheeriness of his voice, the alertness of his bearing, were fully understood by the dozen troopers who rode beside the empty wagons they were escorting back to Fletcher from a smaller and more isolated post to which they had conveyed supplies.

“ There won’t no grass grow under the lootenant’s feet this day,” an astute observer had remarked when he swung into his saddle that morning; “ though he ain’t likely to overwork man nor beast, even with his sweetheart waiting for him at the end of the march,” — an opinion which was echoed by his comrades, who had proved their lieutenant by that “ summering and wintering ” in garrison and in field which gives good reason for the fact that one officer can win so much more effective service from a command than can another.

The welcomes at Fletcher were pervaded by surprise, when Jack, having dismissed his detail, clanked up the parade in complete accoutrement of sword and spurs to make his report at headquarters. The various verandas were deserted, for Fletcher is a worldly minded post, where they dine late, and dress for dinner as conventionally as though civilization did not stride across three hundred miles of intervening wilderness to reach its gates. Mrs. Stuart, however, was standing in her doorway, thereby maintaining her reputation for omnipresence, which promoted among the garrison a Buddhistic belief in the celerity of movement acquired by bodies belonging to specially endowed souls.

“ Glad to see you. Mr. Lombard ! ” she cried cordially. “ Just in time, too, — Mrs. Colonel will be so pleased.” The wife of the commanding officer was thus familiarly named for certain manifestations of domestic precedence.

“ Any festivity to-night ? ”

“ Merely a gathering of the clan to say good-by to her and to Miss Van Antwerp.”

“ I — I thought that they were not going until next week ? ”

“ Miss Van Antwerp discovered that she must return home more speedily. So by hurrying she has got, Mrs. Colonel ready for to-morrow’s boat. See you there, of course, after dinner,” she added, as her audience deserted her.

“You look rather done, Lombard,” the adjutant declared, a few moments later, when Jack had concluded his report.

“ We made an early start, and I’m disgracefully dusty,” he answered lightly, suspecting sympathy, and spurning it. “ A tub and a square meal will set me right.”

But upon neither of these needs did he bestow the first half-hour after he escaped to his quarters. Sunk in a big chair, his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands, he stated the case to his own loyal heart and asked verdict of it. During his absence Sybil Van Antwerp had become suddenly anxious to leave Fletcher, a week sooner than had been her intention. Was not her reason for this change of plans a desire to avoid giving him a chance to utter the avowal which had trembled on his lips the evening he went away, — a desire to spare him the pain of hearing in words that which she knew her departure would tell him silently ? Sweet! sweet! She found tenderness for all suffering, from that of the broken-legged terrier of whom she had been so careful to this hurt of another egotistical puppy, who had fancied that love might glorify the future of a cavalry lieutenant’s wife even to her, “ queen rose in the rosebud garden of girls.”

Ah, God ! Was it only fancy ?

Jack sprang to his feet. Nothing but her own words should convince him that he had been mistaken. A man must hear his sentence of death explicitly spoken before he can gather courage to meet his fate with steadfastness.

Sybil Van Antwerp was told two bits of news, while at dinner, which disturbed the serenity she was wont to declare that a woman should wear, in hours of conflict, with the same trained endurance which enabled knights of old to support their armor through the battle: Jack Lombard had returned, and the starting of to-morrow’s boat had been postponed twenty-four hours to wait for delayed freight. She was unused to defeat, and it tried her nerves (or her heart ?) that, in spite of the energy she had expended in hastening the movements of her hostess, she should be forced to see Jack again, and probably to bestow that coup de grace whose cruel mercy she shrank from inflicting.

After dinner the drawing-room began immediately to fill with a characteristic garrison gathering, composed of everybody who was anybody at Fletcher, and during a long hour she dreaded the moment whose coming she knew was inevitable. Yet when it came it found her unprepared.

“ Miss Van Antwerp, will you ride with me to - morrow ? ” Jack’s voice asked over her shoulder, while she stood talking to the adjutant on the broad veranda.

She looked away across moonlit prairie and river, and Jack looked at her. She had only to say no. — prettily, as she knew how to say it, — and the thing was done, the story was told. Why should she endure worse than this brief silence to-morrow ? She turned to Jack, caught her breath sharply, and, with an odd sense of involuntariness, answered him, “ Of course I will ride with you to-morrow. At four, as usual.”

“ Thank you,” he murmured, vanishing instantly.

She dropped into a wicker chair, and sent the adjutant for some “ claret cup.” She was tired of that wide, gray prairie. She was tired of the simple, cheery folk about her. Ah, most of all she was tired of herself, her foolish, fickle self, who had been led by a passing whim to try six weeks among frontier-army scenes, so different from her wonted surroundings. This was not her world. She was wise to make haste back to New York, to the opera, the Patriarchs’, the pleasant, familiar round she loved. Loved ? She had always fancied that, nowadays, the word was written small, and meant many things. Why should it confront her in such large type, and mean — a cavalry lieutenant, with a record of which his regiment was proud, and no income beyond his meagre pay ?

An hour later, the adjutant overtook Jack Lombard as he walked down the parade to his quarters, and made an embarrassed announcement.

“ Miss Van Antwerp wishes to see you and me shoot at that outline on the bluff near Zenith City ! ” he exclaimed apologetically. "She has asked me to join your party to-morrow. But I "11 be too busy to go, if you don’t want me.”

“ Come along, old fellow,” Jack answered, with a rather husky laugh. “I remember we boasted to her that we could better Frost’s shot there. You — you can manage that she and I shall ride back alone.”

There was a delicious hint of autumn freshness in the September afternoon, when the three left the post on the next day. After following the bluff for a couple of miles, their road lay through the ragged outskirts of Zenith City, down a steep slope to the riverside. From thence, gazing across the narrow ravine by which a small stream flowed into the Yellowstone, somebody’s imagination had discovered the likeness of a blanketed and beplumed chief in the lightning-blasted fragment of a large cottonwood-tree upon a projecting ledge of the opposite cliff. This was one of the few objects of interest possessed by a neighborhood as yet without a history that anybody cared to remember, and fair visitors to Fletcher were brought to see it; especially since a certain “ crack shot ” on the staff of the general commanding the department had deprived the chief’s war-bonnet of its topmost plume.

“ Behold ! ” Sybil cried gayly, waving her hand toward the somewhat elusive apparition. “ I ask you to knock another feather out of that warrior’s crest, for the honor of the line against the staff ! ”

In reply to this malicious appeal to an established rivalry, the two officers unslung the rifles which they carried for the purpose, and the adjutant won the toss for first trial. The shot was, however, exceedingly difficult at such distance, and the bullet imbedded itself in the chief’s broad shoulder.

“ Lombard will do it,” he said, reiuing his horse back to Sybil’s side as Jack took deliberate aim. “ It is a fluke when I win a prize, but he is a dead shot every day in the year.”

The next instant proved his words. The report of the rifle echoed about the bluffs mingled with a sharp splintering of wood, and the war-bonnet lost a second ornament. In spite of Sybil’s profuse congratulations, Jack’s elation vanished in one boyish “ hurrah,” and he followed his companions silently up to the level of the prairie. There the adjutant announced that an engagement in Zenith City forced him to leave them, with many regrets for the glorious gallop he could not share. Jack wordlessly turned his horse toward the wide stretch of sunburned plain, and Sybil, flushing haughtily, turned with him. She had wished to evade the scene to which these men compelled her, but she would not run away.

The gallop had been far and fleet when they forced their horses to a more sober pace.

“ Nothing in civilization can touch this freedom, this”— she began, and paused. A light leaped into Jack’s eyes as their glances met, and, bending forward, he laid a gauntleted hand on her saddle-bow.

“ Forgive me,” he said, “ I must speak. If I had found you gone on my return to Fletcher, I should have applied for leave. I should have followed you East, to hear — what you meant to spare me. You don’t know the amount of — of imagination of which a plain soldier is capable. I must hear from yourself, beyond doubt, beyond conjecture, beyond dreams, the certainty that you — that you ” —

His voice sank. The dumb, imploring pain of his gaze hurt her fiercely, and there was no reproach in it. Her lips quivered; two tears trembled on her lashes.

“ I’m a brute ! ” he murmured. “ Yet until I hear you say that there is no hope for me, I —I shall never believe it! ”

They had drawn rein, and the horses stood like statues during the moment of silence which ensued, —such silence as fills all the vital moments of our noisy world.

“ I will make a confession to you, though it humiliates me” —

Her eyes faltered away from his, and wandered vaguely. She uttered a low cry.

“ Indians ! Do they mean danger ? ”

His glance, grown keen and cold, strained toward a distant group of unmistakably Indian horsemen.

“ They are quiet everywhere this summer,” he said slowly. “ These are coming from Zenith City, and are probably a harmless party of bucks on their return to the reservation.”

“ Must we pass them ? ”

“ They are between us and Fletcher. But we need not pass them near, unless you still have illusions concerning redskin picturesqueness,” he answered, with lather perfunctory lightness.

Abruptly a chorus of yells arose from the advancing riders, and a wild waving of rifles at the full stretch of the holders’ arms.

“ Devils ! ” Jack muttered, as savagely as they yelled. Then his eyes sought her, and she smiled, a brave, white smile. “ Dismount ! ” he exclaimed. “ Kneel behind your horse ; he stands fire ! ”

As she obeyed, he too slipped from his saddle and leaned across it, steadying his rifle.

“ Thank God that this is not my revolver,” he said. “ I ’ve six of them here at long range. They will run before they reach that tally ! ”

Partially sheltered by her horse, Sybil watched that whirling charge, wordless, prayerless, possessed by one intense longing for the dainty rifle with which she had scored some recent triumphs at target practice.

A puff of smoke, a report, a second — a bullet whistled close by Jack’s head ; yet he remained motionless. Confronting nearly a dozen enemies with six rounds of ammunition, a man does not waste his chances. Another shot — Sybil’s horse shrieked piteously, plunged, and fell, barely clearing her as she scrambled to her feet.

Jack’s rifle barked at last, twice in succession, and two “bucks” swayed from their ponies. There was a dismayed halt in the attack, singularly simultaneous for a seemingly frantic “go as you please.”

Jack glanced swiftly from that hesitating consultation to Sybil’s dead animal, and back to his own which stood stone-still. He had ridden him three years; they had been through a campaign together. But these Montana Indians were rather robbers than warriors. His third bullet crashed straight to the heart of the horse, who died without a struggle.

“ Why P why ? ” Sybil cried, stretching out her hands as though to stay a vanishing hope. He caught the trembling fingers and kissed them vehemently.

“ They want our horses more than our lives,” he said. “ They may leave us, now that they have nothing to gain, and they see that I— Lie down ! ” he broke off, forcing her to her knees, for, with shouts of rage, the Indians swooped forward.

In the face of an almost unanimous volley he fired again, and while the third of their number rolled on the prairie, the others spread out their line, as though to surround that deadly rifle, yet ceased to advance.

Jack swayed, recovered himself as Sybil sprang to his side, and stared wildly at his foes.

“They have had about enough,” he muttered. “ Another pony riderless, and they will give us up.”

“ You are hurt — let me help you — I know how.”

“Two shot left,” he panted. “I’ll risk one.”

He lifted his rifle.

I cannot see them ! ” he cried, in a voice whose anguish echoed through all her being.

Then he turned to her two blue eyes, terrible with that look which burned in eyes as true and tender when, during the Mutiny, English officers spent their last strength to slay their hearts’ beloved — and she understood !

“ Love — forgive — love ” — he gasped, his fingers quivering along the weapon.

Force failed his will; his hold relaxed, and he sank, face down, upon his horse’s flank.

Howling a now assured triumph, the Indians raced toward their prey. But Jack never shot straighter than did the dainty, desperate fingers which lifted his rifle as Sybil fired across his prostrate figure, and a fourth savage fell.

The white squaw could defend herself, those amazed warriors perceived. Within reach of her fatal aim each one felt his life too dear to risk further for her possession. How should they guess that only a single bullet remained to her, or that she meant it for Jack’s unfulfilled purpose ? Lust and greed and vengeance were routed by panic, as they counted their four dead comrades. They fled.

There was a faintest flutter of the heart whose stillness or whose stirring bounded her future, when Sybil opened Jack’s blood-drenched coat. During the previous winter she had acquired slight skill in surgery at a fashionable hospital class, and tearing bandages from his shirt she stanched the hemorrhage. But he gave no sign of rallying.

Prayer, which had found no place in the Berserk ardor of resistance, thrilled her soul as she looked from his deathlike face to the heavens gorgeous with sunset. Save him, dear God! Permit him not to drift out of life for lack of some restorative !

Water ? Surely she remembered the murmur of a stream which she had heard while Jack made his appeal to her, as one hears every tiniest note in life’s great fugues. That stream must be near. Yet at any moment, from any quarter, their enemies might return.

The sun dropped suddenly behind the crimson horizon, and twilight drew grayly over the prairie. Jack sighed faintly. She touched the dark damp locks on his brow with her lips, and stumbled to her feet.

“ God be merciful! Let me not die away from him!” this woman prayed, who an hour since had resolved to live apart from him.

She scarcely shuddered as she passed the bodies of the Indians, so absorbed was she in listening for sound of the survivors. She found the stream ; she filled her straw hat to the brim with the cool freshness of the water, and was swiftly beside Jack again, bathing his face, forcing the drops between his lips, until, presently, his eyes opened, to stare up at her as at a stranger, and he spoke, to falter an order to his troop. His mind was afar, in that brief campaign which had linked his young name with honor. Stupor alternated with feeble restlessness v while the night wore on.

Above them the stars shone one by one in their accustomed places. The mysterious silence of earth’s solitudes surrounded them. Vast and dim the prairie stretched away, — not toward the luxurious familiar life to which Sybil had meant to return, but toward that eternity through whose yet vaster dimness shone a single light of Love Divine, and such poor refractions of it as humanity can cherish.

Morning came at last. The horizon widened slowly, and Sybil, aware of dawn by its rosy reflection on Jack’s white face, lifted her heavy eyes to behold a sight more blessed than that splendid dawn. For the first sunbeams touched gloriously the white canvas of a “ prairie schooner.”

Late in the succeeding afternoon, Sybil lay on a lounge in a sitting-room at Zenith City’s big new International Hotel. Through the half - open door she could see the bed where Jack slept, while Mrs. Colonel watched yet nearer the slumber which the post surgeon pronounced to be so satisfactory after the operation for removing the bullet from his wound. Sleep seemed definitely to have departed from Sybil’s shaken nerves, and she had won permission to rest here thankfully, rather than go to bed wretchedly in a distant room, where she could not realize by actual sight that Jack was safe.

The two ranchmen who rescued them had brought them to Zenith City, as shortening the dangerous journey for the lieutenant. and the town was exceeding proud of its guests. The tale the rescuers told of the group they found, the slain horses, the apparently dying man, and the pale calm of the watching woman, had lost nothing in the telling. Nor had the number of stiffly still witnesses to the fierceness of the fight suffered diminution by their account ; though in the interest of justice it is regrettable that Lombard’s deadly shooting figured slightly beside their report of the prowess of their heroine.

Popular enthusiasm seeks immediate utterance in the primitive frankness of frontier social relations. A tramp of many feet, a murmur of many voices, roused Sybil presently from her trance of happy exhaustion.

“ They will wake him,” she thought, rising nervously.

A knock at the door was followed by the entrance of the landlord, and of a tall individual whose majestic solemnity suggested an important mission.

“ The mayor of Zenith City,” announced the landlord.

“ I have come, madam, to represent my fellow-citizens,” began the mayor. He was the first incumbent of the office, and its glories were yet new to him. “ We are proud to welcome such heroic womanhood to our town, and we are desirous to give public expression to our sentiments. We therefore beg that you will accept a serenade from the Great Western Band — eh ?” he broke off interrogatively, for Sybil had clasped her hands with a murmur that sounded more like dismay than delight.

“ Please, please not a serenade ! ” she exclaimed, while the impulse to laugh, which had hitherto distraught her, quite vanished. “ Lieutenant Lombard is asleep in the next room, and a sudden awakening might be very dangerous for him.”

“The band is already under your window,” hesitated the mayor, embarrassed between her alarm and bis own conviction of powerlessness to prevent the serenade. For the Great Western Band was a yet more recent progress in civilization than the mayoralty, and correspondingly more popular. “ I doubt if my fellow-citizens would listen to me ” —

“ They will listen to the lady. “ interrupted the landlord, who was quick of wit, as a man of his trade needs to be in a Montana town.

Sybil glanced from the mayor’s visible impotence to Jack’s open door. A preliminary shriek of brazen throats decided her purpose.

“ I will explain to them from the window why I cannot accept their pretty compliment,” she said hurriedly.

With an impressive gesture the mayor advanced to the window.

“ Silence, gentlemen !" he exclaimed. “ The lady whom we all desire to honor is about to address you.”

Silence indeed, blended of surprise, gratification, and curiosity, possessed the crowd upon whose upturned faces Sybil looked down. Weather-browned, frontier-roughened faces they were, but with a sincerity of respect written on them which, in spite of the burlesque aspect, the ovation had worn to her, deeply stirred Sybil’s heart. The absurdity of the situation disappeared. She was not Miss Van Antwerp, incredibly forced by circumstances to speak to a Western mob ; she was a woman rescued from the very presence of death, thanking these kind neighbors for rejoicing in her safety.

“ Friends ! ” she said clearly, — a fair picture she made, framed by the window, with her tired dark eyes, her bright loosened hair, and her slight, swaying figure in the riding-habit she yet wore, — “ I thank you heartily for your sympathy ; but I must ask you not to utter it, either by your band or by your voices, because Lieutenant Lombard is so ill that any excitement might be dangerous for him.”

“ Ain’t we even to raise one hurrah for the first heroine we ’ve seen in Zenith City ? ” somebody demanded.

“Not even one ! ” Sybil answered, with a smile that revealed other aspects of womanhood as unknown to her interlocutor as her heroism. “ And Zenith City is full of such heroines as I am,” she added, her voice thrilling with tears.

“‘Go home and ask your wives and your sweethearts whether there is a woman among them who will not fight for the man she loves ! ”

“ Sybil,” Mrs. Colonel said presently, when the crowd and the band and the mayor had quiely dispersed, “ Jack heard you ! Of course he wants you at once. But don’t let him talk.”

“ That was not the confession you meant to make to me yesterday,” Jack whispered after a while, his haggard eyes adoring her. “ Are you sure that you will mean this to-morrow—and next year — and all our lives ? ”

“ My love — my love ! ” she murmured. “ You are to say just one word. Will you have the selfish woman who needed such terrible teaching to learn that love means as much nowadays as ever it did ? ”

But Jack, overstepping with masculine promptitude the boundary between submission and authority, faltered his first command, “ Kiss me.” And she obeyed him.

Ellen Mackubin.