III.
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THE LIBRARY
OF
THE UNIVERSITY
OF CALIFORNIA
LOS ANGELES
THE HERITAGE OF UNREST
THE
HERITAGE OF UNREST
BY
GWENDOLEN OVERTON
f orfe
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., LTD.
1901
All rights reserved
COPYRIGHT, 1901,
BT THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
Nortooofc
J. 8. dishing & Co. - Berwick ft Smith
Norwood Mass. U.S.A.
THE HERITAGE OF UNREST
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THE HEKITAGE OF UNREST
IT is one thing to be sacrificed to a cause, even if it
is only by filling up the ditch that others may cross
to victory; it is quite another to be sacrificed in a
cause, to die unavailingly without profit or glory of
any kind, to be even an obstacle thrown across the
way. And that was the end which looked Cabot in the
face. He stood and considered his horse where it lay
in the white dust, with its bloodshot eyes turned up to
a sky that burned like a great blue flame. Its tongue,
all black and swollen, hung out upon the sand, its
flanks were sunken, and its forelegs limp.
Cabot was not an unmerciful man, but if he had had
his sabre just then, he would have dug and turned it in
the useless carcass. He was beside himself with fear ;
fear of the death which had come to the cow and the
calf whose chalk-white skeletons were at his feet, of
the flat desert and the low bare hills, miles upon miles
away, rising a little above the level, tawny and dry,
giving no hope of shelter or streams or shade. He had
foreseen it all when the horse had stumbled in a snake
hole, had limped and struggled a few yards farther,
and then, as he slipped to the ground, had stood quite
still, swaying from side to side, with its legs wide apart,
until it fell. He gritted his teeth so that the veins
B 1
2 THE HERITAGE OF UNREST
stood out on his temples, and, going closer, jerked at
the bridle and kicked at its belly with the toe of his
heavy boot, until the glassy eye lighted with keener
pain.
The column halted, and the lieutenant in command
rode back. He, too, looked down at the horse, pulling
at his mustache with one gauntleted hand. He had
played with Cabot when they had been children to-
gether, in that green land of peace and plenty which
they called the East. They had been schoolmates, and
they had the same class sympathies even now, though
the barrier of rank was between them, and the dis-
mounted man was a private in Landor's own troop.
Landor liked the private for the sake of the old times
and for the memory of a youth which had held a better
promise for both than manhood had fulfilled.
" Done up, is it? " he said thoughtfully. His voice
was hard because he realized the full ugliness of it.
He had seen the thing happen once before.
Cabot did not answer. The gasping horse on the
sand, moving its neck in a weak attempt to get up,
was answer enough. He stood with his hands hanging
helplessly, looking at it in wrath and desperation.
Landor took stock of the others. There had been
five led horses twenty-four hours before, when they
had started on a hot trail after the chief Cochise.
But they had taken the places of five others that had
dropped in their tracks to feed the vultures that fol-
lowed always, flying above in the quivering blue.
They were a sorry lot, the two score that remained.
THE HERITAGE OF UNREST 3
In the spring of '61, when the handful of frontier
troops was pressed with enemies red and brown and
white, the cavalry was not well mounted.
Landor saw that his own horse was the best ; and it
bid very fair to play out soon enough. But until it
should do so, his course was plain. He gathered his
reins in his hands. " You can mount behind me,
Cabot," he said. The man shook his head. It was
bad enough that he had come down himself without
bringing others down too. He tried to say so, but
time was too good a thing to be wasted in argument,
where an order would serve. There was a water hole
to be reached somewhere to the southwest, over beyond
the soft, dun hills, and it had to be reached soon.
Minutes spelled death under that .white hot sun.
Landor changed from the friend to the officer, and
Cabot threw himself across the narrow haunches that
gave weakly under his weight.
It went well enough for a time, and the hills seemed
coming a little nearer, to be rougher on the surface.
Then the double-loaded horse fagged. Cabot felt that
it did, and grasped hard on the burning cantle as he
made his resolve. When Landor used his spurs for
the first time, he loosed his hold and dropped to the
ground.
Landor drew rein and turned upon him with oaths
and a purpled face. " What the devil are you trying
to do now ? " he said.
Cabot told him that he was preparing to remain
where he was. His voice was firm and his lips were
4 THE HERITAGE OF UNREST
set under the sun-bleached yellow of his beard, but his
face was gray, for all the tan. He lapsed into the
speech of other days. "No use, Jack," he said; "it's
worse than court-martial what I've got to face here.
Just leave me some water and rations, and you go
on."
Landor tried another way then, and leaned from his
saddle in his earnestness. He put it in the light of a
favor to himself. But Cabot's refusal was unanswer-
able. It was better one than two, he said, and no
horse in the command could carry double.
" I will try to reach the water hole. Leave a man
there for me with a horse. If I don't " he forced a
laugh as he looked up at the buzzard which was drop-
ping closer down above him.
" You could take turns riding behind the men."
"No," Cabot told him, "I couldn't not without
delaying you. The trail's too hot for that. If you'll
put a fourth and last bullet into Cochise, the loss of a
little thing like me won't matter much." He stopped
short, and his chin dropped, weakly, undecided.
" Jack," he said, going up and running his hand in
and out underneath the girths. He spoke almost too
low to be heard, and the men who were nearest rode a
few feet away. " Jack, will you do something for me ?
Will you that is there is a fellow named McDonald
up at the Mescalero Agency. He's got a little four-
year-old girl he's taking care of." He hurried along,
looking away from Landor's puzzled face. " She's the
daughter of a half-breed Mescalero woman, who was
THE HERITAGE OF UNREST 5
killed by the Mexicans. If I don't come out of all this,
will you get her ? Tell McDonald I told you to. I'm
her father."
He raised his eyes now, and they were appealing.
"It's an awful lot to ask of you, Jack, even for old
sake's sake. I know that. But the little thing is
almost white, and I cared for her mother in a way.
I can't let her go back to the tribe." His lips quivered
and he bit at them nervously. " I kept meaning to get
her away somehow." There was a sort of pity on
Lander's face, pity and half contempt. He had heard
that from Cabot so often for so many years, " I kept
meaning to do this thing or the other, somehow, some
day." " But it looks as though you might have to do
it now. Will you, lieutenant?" He tugged at the
cinchings while he waited.
Landor was without impulses ; the very reverse from
boyhood of the man on the ground beside him, which
was why, perhaps, it had come to be as it was now.
He considered before he replied. But having consid-
ered, he answered that he would, and that he would
do his best for the child always. Once he had said it,
he might be trusted beyond the shadow of a doubt.
" Thank you," said Cabot, and drew his hand from
the girths. He cut Landor short when he tried to
change him again. " You are losing time," he told
him, " and if you stay here from now to next week it
won't do any good. I'll foot it to the water hole, if I
can. Otherwise " the feeble laugh once more as his
eyes shifted to where a big, gray prairie wolf was going
6 THE HERITAGE OF UNREST
across the flat, stopping now and then to watch them,
then swinging on again.
They came around him and offered him their horses,
dismounting even, and forcing the reins into his hands.
" You don't know what you are doing," a corporal urged.
" You'll never get out alive. If it ain't Indians, it'll
be thirst." Then he looked into Cabot's face and saw
that he did know, that he knew very well. And so
they left him at last, with more of the tepid alkali water
than they well could spare from their canteens, with two
days' rations and an extra cartridge belt, and trotted on
once more across the plain.
He stood quite still and erect, looking after them, a
dead light of renunciation of life and hope in his eyes.
They came in search of him two days later and scoured
the valley and the hills. But the last they ever saw of
him was then, following them, a tiny speck upon the
desert, making southwest in the direction of the water
hole. The big wolf had stopped again, and turned about,
coming slowly after him, and two buzzards circled above
him, casting down on his path the flitting shadows of
their wings.
THERE was trouble at the San Carlos Agency, which
was in no wise unusual in itself, but was upon this
occasion more than ever discouraging. There had been
a prospect of lasting peace, the noble Red-man was
settling down in his filthy rancheria to become a good
citizen, because he was tagged with little metal num-
bers, and was watched unceasingly, and forbidden
the manufacture of tizwin, or the raising of the dead
with dances, and was told that an appreciative govern-
ment was prepared to help him if he would only help
himself.
Then some bull-teams going to Camp Apache had
stopped over night at the Agency. The teamsters had
sold the bucks whiskey, and the bucks had grown very
drunk. The representatives of the two tribes which
were hereditary enemies, and which the special agent
of an all-wise Interior Department had, nevertheless,
shut up within the confines of the same reservation,
therewith fell upon and slew each other, and the sur-
vivors went upon the warpath metal tags and all.
So the troops had been called out, and Landor's was at
San Carlos.
Landor himself sat in his tent, upon his mess-chest,
and by the light of a candle wrote a despatch which
7
8 THE HERITAGE OF UNREST
was to go by courier the next morning. Gila valley
mosquitoes were singing around his head, a knot of
chattering squaws and naked children were peering into
his tent, the air was oven-hot, coyotes were filling the
night with their weird bark, and a papoose was bawling
somewhere close by. Yet he would have been sufficiently
content could he have been let alone the one plea of
the body military from all time. It was not to be.
The declared and standing foes of that body pushed
their way through the squaws and children. He knew
them already. They were Stone of the Tucson press,
sent down to investigate and report, and Barnwell, an
Agency high official, who would gladly assist the mis-
representations, so far as in his power lay.
Landor knew that they were come to hear what he
might have to say about it, and he had decided to say,
for once, just what he thought, which is almost inva-
riably unwise, and in this particular case proved ex-
ceedingly so, as any one could have foretold. On the
principle that a properly conducted fist fight is opened
by civilities, however, he mixed three toddies in as
many tin coffee cups.
They said "how," and drank. After which Stone
asked what the military were going to do about certain
things which he specified, and implied the inability of
the military to do anything for any one. Landor
smiled indolently and said "Quien sabe?" Stone
wished to be told if any one ever did know and sug-
gested, acridly, that if the by-word of the Mexican
were poco-tiempo, that of the troops was certainly
THE HERITAGE OF UNREST 9
quien-sabe ? Between the two the citizen got small
satisfaction.
"I don't know," objected Landor; "you get the
satisfaction of beginning the row pretty generally
as you did this time and of saying what you think
about us in unmistakable language after we have tried
to put things straight for you."
Stone considered his dignity as a representative of the
press, and decided that he would not be treated with
levity. He would resent the attitude of the soldiery ;
but in his resentment he passed the bounds of courtesy
altogether, forgetting whose toddy he had just drunk,
and beneath whose tent pole he was seated. He said
rude things about the military, that it was pampered
and inefficient and gold laced, and that it thought its
mission upon earth fulfilled when it sat back and drew
princely pay.
Landor recalled the twenty years of all winter cam-
paigns, dry camps, forced marches, short rations, and
long vigils and other annoyances that are not put down
in the tactics, and smiled again, with a deep cynicism.
Barnwell sat silent. He sympathized with Stone be-
cause his interests lay that way, but he was somewhat
unfortunately placed between the military devil and
the political deep sea.
Stone was something of a power in Tucson politics,
and altogether a great man upon the territorial stump.
He was proud of his oratory, and launched into a dis-
play of it now, painting luridly the wrongs of the
citizen, who, it appeared, was a defenceless, honest, law-
10 THE HERITAGE OF UNREST
abiding child of peace, yet passed his days in seeing his
children slaughtered, his wife tortured, his ranches
laid waste, and himself shot down and scalped.
Landor tried to interpose a suggestion that though
the whole effect was undoubtedly good and calculated
to melt a heart of iron, the rhetoric was muddled ; but
the reporter swept on ; BO he clasped his hands behind
his head and leaning back against a tent pole, yawned
openly. Stone came to an end at length, and had to
mop his head with a very much bordered handkerchief.
The temperature was a little high for so much effort.
He met Lander's glance challengingly.
" Well done ! " the officer commended. " But con-
sidering how it has heated you, you ought to have
saved it for some one upon whom it would have had
its effect some one who wasn't round at the time of
the Aravaypa Canon business, for instance."
The Agency man thought a question would not com-
mit him. He had not been round at that time, and he
asked for information. The lieutenant gave it to him.
" It was a little spree they had here in '71. Some
Tucson citizens and Papago Indians and Greasers under-
took to avenge their wrongs and show the troops how
it ought to be done. So they went to Aravaypa Canon,
where a lot of peaceable Indians were cutting hay, and
surprised them one day at sunrise, and killed a hundred
and twenty-five of them mostly women and children.
The reporter interposed that it was the act of men
maddened by grief and their losses.
"I dare say," Landor agreed; "it is certainly more
THE HERITAGE OP UNREST 11
charitable to suppose that men who hacked up the
bodies of babies, and abused women, and made away
with every sort of loot, from a blanket to a string of
beads, were mad. It was creditably thorough for mad-
men, though. And it was the starting-point of all the
trouble that it took Crook two years to straighten out."
Stone held that the affair had been grossly exagger-
ated, and that the proof thereof lay in the acquittal of
all accused of the crime, by a jury of their peers; and
Landor said that the sooner that highly discreditable
travesty on justice was forgotten, the better for the
good fame of the territory. The press representative
waxed eloquent once more, until his neck grew violet
with suppressed wrath, which sputtered out now and
then in profanity. The officer met his finest flights with
cold ridicule, and the Agency man improved the oppor-
tunity by pouring himself a drink from the flask on the
cot. In little it was the reproduction of the whole
situation on the frontier and the politician profited.
In those days some strange things happened at
agencies. Toilet sets were furnished to the Apache,
who has about as much use for toilet sets as the Green-
lander has for cotton prints, and who would probably
have used them for targets if he had ever gotten them
which he did not. Upon the table of a certain agent
(and he was an honest man, let it be noted, for the
thing was rare) there lay for some time a large rock,
which he had labelled with delicate humor "sample
of sugar furnished to this agency under " but
the name doesn't matter now. It was close on a
12 THE HERITAGE OP UNREST
quarter of a century ago, and no doubt it is all changed
since then. By the same working out, a schoolhouse
built of sun-baked mud, to serve as a temple of learning
for the Red-man, cost the government forty thousand
dollars. The Apache children who sat within it could
have acquired another of the valuable lessons of Ojo-
blanco from the contractors.
Beef was furnished the Indians on the hoof and cal-
culated by the pound, and the weight of some of those
long-horn steers, once they got upon the Agency scales,
would have done credit to a mastodon. By this method
the Indian got the number of pounds of meat he was
entitled to per capita, and there was some left over that
the agent might dispose of to his friends. As for the
heavy-weight steers, when the Apache received them,
he tortured them to death with his customary ingenuity.
It made the meat tender ; and he was an epicure in his
way. The situation in the territory, whichever way
you looked at it, was not hopeful.
When the moon rose, Barnwell and Stone went away
and left Landor again with the peeping squaAvs and the
wailing papooses, the mosquitoes and the legacy of
their enduring enmity, an enmity not to be lightly
despised, for it could be as annoying and far more
serious than the stings of the river-bottom mosquitoes.
As they walked across the gleaming dust, their bodies
throwing long black shadows, two naked Indian boys
followed them, creeping forward unperceived, dropping
on the ground now and then, and wriggling along like
snakes. They were practising for the future.
II
IN the '70's the frontier was a fact and not a
memory, and a woman in the Far West was a blessing
sent direct from heaven, or from the East, which was
much the same thing. Lieutenants besought the wives
of their brother officers to bring out their sisters and
cousins and even aunts, and very weird specimens of
the sex sometimes resulted. But even these could
reign as queens, dance, ride, flirt to their hearts' content
also marry, which is not always the corollary in these
days. The outbreak of a reservation full of Indians
was a small thing in comparison with the excitement
occasioned by the expectation of a girl in the post.
There was now at Grant the prospect of a girl, and
for days ahead the bachelors had planned about her.
She was Lander's ward, it was news to them that he
had a ward, for he was not given to confidences, and
she was going to visit the wife of his captain, Mrs.
Campbell. When they asked questions, Landor said
she was eighteen years old, and that her name was
Cabot, and that as he had not seen her for ten years
he did not know whether she were pretty or not. But
the vagueness surrounding her was rather attractive
than otherwise, on the whole. It was not even known
when she would arrive. There was no railroad to
13
14 THE HERITAGE OP UNKEST
Arizona. From Kansas she would have to travel by
ambulance with the troops which were changing
station.
There was only Mrs. Campbell who knew the whole
story. Landor had gone to her for advice, as had been
his custom since the days before she had preferred
Campbell to him. "Felipa," he said, "writes that she
is going to run away from school, if I don't take her
away. She says she will, and she undoubtedly means
it. I have always noticed that there is no indecision
in her character."
Mrs. Campbell asked where she proposed running to.
Landor did not know ; but she was part Apache,
he said, and Harry Cabot's daughter, and it was pretty
certain that with that blood in her veins she had the
spirit of adventure.
She asked what he had thought of doing about it.
" I've thought of bringing her on here. But how
can I ? In a bachelor establishment ? My sister won't
have her at any terms. She suggested an orphan asylum
from the first, and she hasn't changed her mind."
Mrs. Campbell appliqued a black velvet imp on a
green felt lambrequin, and thought. "Do you ever
happen to realize that you have your hands very full ? "
"Yes," he said shortly, " I realize it."
He sat staring over her head for a moment of silence.
" I foresaw it when I told Cabot I'd take her."
" Might not an orphan asylum have been best, after
all?"
** It might for me," he said, " but not for her, and I
THE HERITAGE OF UNREST 15
told Cabot I'd do my best for her." It had seemed
to him his plain duty, and he had done it, and he asked
no approbation.
Mrs. Campbell took it as he did, for a matter of
course. She wasted no words in expressing admira-
tion for what he had done, but kept to the main issue,
making herself useful, as women are rarely content to
do when they deal with men, without indulging her
taste for the sentimental. " Suppose I were to take
her ? " she suggested.
He opposed drawbacks. "You can't keep her
always."
She smiled. "The chances that she will marry
are excellent."
He did not answer at once, but sat watching the
trumpeter come out of the adjutant's office to sound
recall. "Yes, she will marry," he agreed; "if no one
else marries her, I will. I am as old as her father would
have been but it would save telling some fellow about
her birth."
" Did the girl know her own story ? " she asked.
She did not. He had merely told her that her father
was his friend and had died on the plains. " She
thinks her mother died at Stanton. It is so near the
Mescalero Agency that I let it go at that."
They argued it from all sides during the whole of
a day, and Campbell lent his advice, and the end of it
was that Felipa Cabot came out to the land of her
forbears.
Pending her arrival, Landor brought himself to look
16 THE HERITAGE OF UNREST
upon it as his plain duty and only course to marry
her. It would save her, and any man who might
otherwise happen to love her, from learning what
she was. That she might refuse to look at it in that
way, did not much enter into his calculations. It
required a strong effort for him to decide it so, but
it was his way to pick out the roughest possible path
before him, to settle within himself that it was that
of duty, and to follow it without fagging or complaint.
He dreaded any taint of Apache blood as he dreaded
the venom of a rattler. He had seen its manifestations
for twenty odd years, had seen the hostile savage and
the civilized one, and shrank most from the latter.
But he had promised Cabot to do his best by the
waif, and the best he could see was to marry her.
There was always before him, to urge him on to the
sacrifice, the stalwart figure of his boyhood's friend,
standing forsaken in the stretch of desert with the
buzzards hovering over him in the burning sky. He
permitted himself to hope, however, that she was not
too obviously a squaw.
When the day came he rode out with most of
the garrison to meet her. He was anxious. He
recalled Anne of Cleves, and had a fellow-feeling for
the King. By the time they came in sight of the
marching troops, he had worked himself to such an
implicit faith in the worst that he decided that the
wide figure, heavily blue-veiled, and linen-dustered, on
the back seat of the Dougherty was she. It is one
of the strongest arguments of the pessimist in favor
THE HERITAGE OP UNREST 17
of his philosophy, that the advantage of expecting
the disagreeable lies in the fact that, -if he meets with
disappointment, it is necessarily a pleasant one.
Felipa Cabot proved to be a lithe creature, who rode
beside the ambulance with the officers, and who, in
spite of the dust and tan and traces of a hard march,
was beautiful. In the reaction of the moment Landor
thought her the most beautiful woman he had ever seen.
But she froze the consequent warmth of his greeting
with a certain indefinable stolidity, and she eyed him
with an unabashed intention of determining whether
he were satisfactory or not, which changed his position
to that of the one upon approbation. If she had been
less handsome, it would have been repellent.
Before they had reached the post, he had learned a
good deal about her. The elderly major who had come
with her from Kansas told him that a lieutenant by the
name of Brewster was insanely in love with her, that