to sleep. He sent Felipa off to bed, and sat watching
where her lithe young figure had gone out of the door
for some minutes. Then he ran his hand across his
mouth contemplatively, stroked his mustache, and
finally went out of the house and down to Ellton's
quarters.

When the baby began to cry, as it was always quite
sure to do sooner or later, and Mrs. Ellton went up to
it, Landor spoke. " If I should come for you at any
hour to-night, I wish you would hold yourself in readi-
ness to go out with me immediately."

He was not the sort of a man of whom to ask ex-
planations. Ellton said " Very well," and proceeded to
talk about the troop's hogs and gardens, both of which
were a source of increase to the troop funds.

Mrs. Ellton returned before long, and Landor went
back home.

" I shall be in and out all night, more or less," he told
Felipa. She reached her hands from the bedclothes
and stroked the deep lines on his forehead, the lines she
had had most to do with putting there. But she did
not ask for confidences. She never did. It was not
her way. He kissed her and went out into the night
again, to sit upon his porch at a spot where, through
the cottonwood branches, he commanded a view of
Brewster's front door and of the windows of the com-
missary office.

The silence of the garrison was absolute. Over in



190 THE HERITAGE OF UNREST

the company clerk's office of one of the infantry bar-
racks there was a light for a time. Then, at about
midnight, it too was put out. A cat came creeping
from under the board walk and minced across the road.
He watched it absently.

When he looked up again to Brewster's house, there
was a chink of faint light showing through a curtain.
He got up then and went down to Ellton's quarters.

Ellton himeolf answered the muffled knock. " I didn't
turn in," he said to the mysterious figure, shrouded in
a cape, with a visor down to its peering eyes.

Landor told him to get his cap and come out. He
followed the shadows of the trees near the low commis-
sary building, and they stood there, each behind a thick
cottonwood trunk. Landor watched the light in
Brewster's window. It disappeared before long, and
they held their breaths. Ellton began to guess what
was expected to happen. Yet Brewster himself did
not come out.

Landor had almost decided that he had made an un-
generous mistake, when Ellton came over with one
light spring and, touching him on the shoulder, pointed
to the window of the commissary office. A thick, dark
blanket had evidently been hung within, but the faint-
est red flicker showed through a tiny hole.

Then Landor remembered for the first time that there
was a back door to Brewster's quarters and to the com-
missary. He crept over to the commissary and tried the
door gently. It was fast locked. Then he went to
the window. It was a low one, on a level with his



THE HERITAGE OF UNREST 191

chest, with wide-apart iron bars. He ran his hand be-
tween them now, and, doubling his fist, broke a pane
with a sudden blow. As the glass crashed in, he grasped
the gray blanket and drew it back. Brewster was
standing in front of the open safe, the package of bids in
his hands, and the big rancher was beside him holding a
candle and shading it with his palm. They had both
turned, and were staring, terror-eyed, at the bleeding
hand that held back the blanket.

" Can you see, Ellton ? " Landor asked in his re-
strained, even voice. He evidently meant that there
should be no more noise about this than necessary, that
the post should know nothing of it.

" I can see, sir," the lieutenant answered.

Then Landor spoke to the commissary officer. " You
will oblige me, Mr. Brewster, by returning those bids
to the safe and by opening the door for me." He
dropped the blanket, drew back his cut hand, warm
and wet with blood, and wrapped it in a handkerchief
very deliberately, as he waited.

Presently the front door opened. The commissary
officer evidently had all the keys. Landor and Ellton
who were commandant and adjutant as well, went
through the close-smelling storeroom, which reeked
with codfish and coffee, into the office.

The citizen was still there, still holding the candle
and shading it, scared out of the little wits he had at
the best of times. He was too frightened as yet to
curse Brewster and the wary scoundrel back in Arizona,
who had set him on to tampering with the military,



192 THE HERITAGE OF UNREST

and had put up the funds to that end a small risk
for a big gain.

Landor pointed to him. " Who is this ? " he asked.

Brewster told him. " It is Mr. Lawton, of the Circle
K Ranch."

" What is he doing here ? "

" He was helping me."

" Helping you to do what ? "

" To get out the bids." His courage was waxing a
little.

" For what purpose ? " went on the cross questions.

" To take them over to rny quarters and keep them
safe."

" Yes ? " said Landor. The inflection was not pleas-
ing. It caused Brewster to answer somewhat weakly,
"Yes."

" Do you think, sir, that you could tell that to twelve
officers and make them believe it ? "

Brewster was silent, but he neither flinched nor
cowered, nor yet shifted his eyes.

Landor turned to the citizen. " Where is your bid,
Mr. Lawton ? "

" I ain't put it in yet," he stammered feebly.

" Don't put it in, then. Leave the reservation to-
night. You understand me, do you ? Now go ! "

Lawton set down the candle upon the desk, and
crept away by the rear door.

After he had gone, Landor turned to Brewster once
more. " Are all the bids in the safe again ? "

They were.



THE HERITAGE OP UNREST 193

Is it closed ? "

It was.

" Give me the keys all the keys."

He handed them over.

Ellton stood by the door, with his hands in his pock-
ets, and a countenance that tried hard to maintain the
severity of discipline. But he was plainly enjoying it.

" Now, Mr. Brewster," said Landor, going to the safe
and resting his elbow upon it, and leaning forward in
his earnestness, " I am going to tell you what you
are to do. It would be better for the service and for
all concerned if you do it quietly. I think you will
agree with me, that any scandal is to be avoided. Come
to the opening of the bids to-morrow, at noon, quite as
though nothing of this disgraceful sort had happened.
I will keep the keys until then. But by retreat to-
morrow evening I want your resignation from the
service in the hands of the adjutant. If it is not, I
shall prefer charges against you the next morning.
But I hardly think you will deem it advisable to stand
a court-martial." He stopped and stood erect again.

Brewster started to protest, still with the almost
unmoved countenance of an innocent man. At any
rate, he was not an abject, whining scoundrel, thought
Ellton, with a certain amount of admiration.

Landor held up a silencing hand. " If you have any
explanations that you care to make, that it would be
worth any one's time to listen to, you may keep them
for a judge advocate." He pointed to the door.

Brewster hesitated for a moment, then walked out,



194 THE HERITAGE OF UNREST

a little unsteadily. They blew out the candle and
took down the gray blanket. " A stone can have
broken that pane, and I cut my hand on a bottle,"
said Landor.

Ellton answered " Very good," and they went out,
locking the door.



XVI

THE contract went to a needy and honest contractor
when the bids were opened. And by night the whole
garrison was in excitement over Brewster's inexplica-
ble resignation. It was inexplicable, but not unex-
plained. He went around to all the officers with the
exception only of Landor and Ellton, and told that
he had some time since decided to give up the service
and to read and practise law in Tucson. No one was
inclined to believe it. But no one knew what to
believe, for Ellton and his captain held their tongues.
They left the commandant himself in ignorance.

Brewster got hunting leave, pending the acceptance
of his resignation, and went to the railway. In less than
a week he was all but forgotten in a newer interest.

A raiding party of hostiles had passed near the fort,
and had killed, with particular atrocity, a family of
settlers. The man and his wife had been tortured to
death, the baby had had its brains beaten out against
the trunk of a tree, a very young child had been hung
by the wrist tendons to two meat hooks on the walls of
the ranch-house, and left there to die. One big boy
had had his eyelids and lips and nose cut off, and had
been staked down to the ground with his remains of a
face lying over a red-ant hole. Only two had man-

195



196 THE HERITAGE OF UNREST

aged to escape, a child of ten, who had carried his tiny
sister in his arms, twenty miles of canons and hills, to
the post.

Felipa had taken charge of the two, being the only
woman in the place not already provided with children
of her own, and had roused herself to an amount of
capability her husband had never suspected her of.
She belonged to the tribe of unoccupied women, as a
rule, not that she was indolent so much as that she
appeared to have no sense of time nor of the value of
it. Landor, who had always one absorbing interest or
another to expend his whole energy upon, even if it
were nothing larger than running the troop kitchen,
thought her quite aimless, though he never addressed
that or any other reproach to her. He was contented
at the advent of the hapless orphans for one thing, that
they superseded the Ellton baby, which he secretly
detested with a kind of unreasonable jealousy.

His contentment was not to last for long, however.
The quartermaster broke in upon it rudely as he sat on
the porch one morning after guard-mounting, " Have
you seen the man who came up with the scouts from
Grant?"

Landor knew that the scouts had come in the after-
noon before, and were in camp across the creek ; but he
had not seen their chief, and he said so.

" Handsome fellow," went on the quartermaster,
" and looks like a gentleman. Glories in the Ouida-
esque name of Charles Merely Cairness, and signs it
in full."



THE HERITAGE OF UNREST 197

"Sounds rather like a family magazine novel hero,
doesn't it ? " Landor said, with a hint of a sneer, then
repented, and added that Cairness had been with him
as guide, and was really a fine fellow. He turned his
eyes slowly, without moving, and looked at Felipa.
She was sitting near them in a patch of sun-sifted shade
behind the madeira vines, sewing on a pinafore for the
little girl who was just then, with her brother, crossing
the parade to the post school, as school call sounded.
He knew well enough that she must have heard, her
ears were so preternaturally sharp. But the only sign
she gave was that her lips had set a little. So he
waited in considerable uneasiness for what might hap-
pen. He understood her no more than he had that
first day he had met her riding with the troops from
Kansas, when her indifferent manner had chilled him,
and it was perhaps because he insisted upon working
his reasoning from the basis that her character was
complicated, whereas it was absolutely simple. He met
constantly with her with much the same sort of men-
tal sensation that one has physically, where one takes a
step in the dark, expecting a fall in the ground, and
comes down upon a level. The jar always bewildered
him. He was never sure what she would do next,
though she had never yet, save once, done anything
flagrantly unwise. He dreaded, however, the moment
when she might chance to meet Cairness face to face.

Which happened upon the following day. And he
was there to see it all, so that the question he had not
cared to ask was answered forever beyond the possibility



198 THE HERITAGE OF UNEEST

of a misunderstanding. It was stable time, and she
walked down to the corrals with him. He left her for
a moment by the gate of the quartermaster's corral
while he went over to the picket line. The bright clear
air of a mountain afternoon hummed with the swish
click-clock, swish click-clock of the curry-combs and
brushes, and the busy scraping of the stable brooms in
the stalls.

Felipa stood leaning against the gate post, her bare
head outlined in bold black and white against the white
parasol that hung over her shoulders. She was watch-
ing one of the troop herds coming up from water, the
fine, big horses, trotting, bucking, rearing, kicking, bit-
ing at each other with squeals and whinnyings, tossing
their manes and whisking their tails. Some of them
had rolled in the creek bed, and then in the dust, and
were caked with mud from neck to croup. They frisked
over to their own picket line, and got into rows for the
grooming.

She was looking at them with such absorbed delight
that she started violently when close behind her a voice
she had not heard in four long, repressed years spoke
with the well-remembered intonation : " He had better
go to the farrier the first thing in the morning. I can't
have him stove-up," and Cairness came out of the gate.

He saw her, and without the hesitation of an instant
raised his slouch hat and kept on. A government scout
does not stop to pass the time of day with an officer's
wife.

It would have been best so, and she knew it, had



THE HERITAGE OF UNREST 199

indeed meant to make it like this on her part, but a
feeling swept over her that if they did not speak now,
they would pass down to their deaths in silence. She
reached out her hand to stop him, and spoke.

He turned about and stood still, with his head un-
covered, looking straight into her face. Another man
might have wished it a little less open and earnest, a
little more downcast and modest, but he liked it so. Yet
he waited, erect and immovable, and she saw that he
meant that every advance should come from her. He
was determined to force her to remember that he was a
chief of scouts.

She waited, too, made silent by sudden realization of
how futile anything that she might say would be. " I
am glad to see you again," she faltered ; " it is four years
since Black River and the cloud-burst. " She was angry
at her own stupidity and want of resource, and her tone
was more casual than she meant it to be.

His own was instantly as cold. " I supposed you had
quite forgotten all that," he said.

She had done very well, up to then, but she was at
the end of her strength. It had been strained to the
snapping for a long while, and now it snapped. Slowly,
painfully, a hot, dark flush spread over her face to the
black line of her hair. The squaw was manifested in
the changed color. It altered her whole face, while it
lasted, then it dropped back and left a dead gray pallor.
Her lips were quivering and yellow, and her eyes paled
oddly, as those of a frightened wild beast do. But
still they were not lowered.



200 THE HERITAGE OF UNREST

Cairness could not take his own from them, and they
stood so for what seemed to them both a dumb and
horrible eternity, until Landor came up, and she caught
at his arm to steady herself. The parasol whirled around
on its stick and fell. Cairness picked it up, knocked
off the dust, and handed it to Landor. He could see
that he knew, and it was a vast relief.

It is only a feeble love in need of stimulants and spic-
ing that craves secrecy. A strong one seeks the open
and a chance to fight to the end, whatever that may
be, before the judges of earth and heaven. They stood
facing each other, challenging across the woman with
the look in their eyes that men have worn since long
ere ever the warriors of old disputed the captive before
the walls of Troy.

It made it none the better that only Landor had the
right to give her the strength of his arm, and that only
Cairness had the right to the desperate, imploring look
she threw him. It was a swift glance of a moment, and
then she reached out a steady enough hand for the para-
sol, and smiled. It had been much too tragic to last
and in those surroundings. It was a flash of the naked
swords of pain, and then they were sheathed. But each
had left a sharp gash. No one had seen it. Perhaps to
many there would have been nothing to see.

Landor was the first to find speech. In the harsh
light of the pause he saw that it was foolish as well as
useless to beg the issue. " Has Mrs. Landor told you
that I found your letter to her on the body of the pro-
spector, and delivered it to her?" The words were



THE HERITAGE OF UNREST 201

sufficiently overbearing, but the manner was unendur-
able.

It occurred to Cairness that it was ungenerous of Lan-
dor to revenge himself by a shot from the safe intrench-
ment of his rank. " Mrs. Landor has had time to tell
me nothing," he said, and turned on his spurred heel
and went off in the direction of the post. But it was
not a situation, after all, into which one could infuse
much dignity. He was retreating, anyway it might be
looked at, and there is bound to be more or less igno-
miny in the most creditable retreat.

As they walked back to the post, Landor did not
speak to Felipa. There was nothing he could say un-
less he were to storm unavailingly, and that was by no
means his way. And there was nothing for which he
could, with reason, blame her. All things considered,
she had acted very well. She moved beside him
serenely, not in the least cowed.

Later, when he came in from dress parade, he found
her reading in the sitting room. She looked up and
smiled, but his face was very angry, and the chin strap
of his helmet below his mouth and the barbaric yellow
plume added to the effect of awful and outraged majesty.
He stopped in front of her. "I have been thinking
things over," he said. She waited. " Three years ago
I offered you your liberty to marry that man. I repeat
the offer now."

She stood up very deliberately and faced him with a
look he had never seen before in her eyes, dark and
almost murderous. But she had her fury under con-



202 THE HERITAGE OF UNREST

trol. He had guessed that her rage might be a very
ugly thing, but he drew back a step at the revelation
of its possibilities. Twice she tried hard to speak.
She put her hand to her throat, where her voice burned
away as it rose. Then it came from the depths of that
being of hers, which he had never fathomed.

" Are you trying to drive me off ? " she said meas-
uredly. " Do you wish me to go away from you ? If
you do, I will go. I will go, and I will never come back.
But I will not go to him not on my own account.
It doesn't matter what happens to me ; but on your
account and on his, I will never go to him not while
you are alive." She stopped, and every nerve in her
body was tense to quivering, her drawn lips worked.

"And if I were out of the way ? " he suggested.

She had never been cruel intentionally before, and
afterward she regretted it. But she raised her eye-
brows and turned her back on him without answering.



XVII

LAWTON believed himself to be ill-used. He had
written to Stone a strangely composed and spelled
account of the whole matter, and mingled reproaches
for having gotten him into it ; and Stone had replied
that it was no affair of his one way or another, but so
far as he could make out Lawton had made a mess of
it and a qualified fool of himself.

Whereupon the rancher, his feelings being much
injured, and his trust in mankind in general shat-
tered, did as many a wiser man has done before him,
made himself very drunk, and in his cups told all
that he knew to two women and a man. " I'd like to
know whose affair it is, if it ain't his, the measly sneak.
He sicked me on," oaths, as the grammars phrase it,
"understood." The tears dribbled off his fierce mus-
tache, and the women and the man laughed at him, but
they were quite as drunk as he was, and they forgot all
about it at once. Lawton did not forget. He thought
of it a great deal, and the more he thought, the more
he wanted revenge.

Now if one cannot have revenge upon the real male-
factor himself, because one is afraid of him, there is
still satisfaction to be derived, to a certain extent, from

203



204 THE HERITAGE OF UNREST

wreaking it upon the innocent, of whom one is not
afraid. Lawton felt, in his simple soul, that Stone was
astute with the astuteness of the devil and all his
angels. On the other hand, he believed the govern-
ment to be dull. It was big, but it was stupid. Was
not the whole frontier evidence of that fact to him?
Clearly, then, the government was the one to be got
even with.

He had been in hiding three weeks. Part of the
time he had stayed in the town near the post, small,
but as frontier towns went, eminently respectable and
law-abiding. For the rest he had lain low in a house
of very bad name at the exact edge of the military
reservation. The poison of the vile liquor he had
drunk without ceasing had gotten itself into his brain.
He had reached the criminal point, not bold, he was
never that, but considerably more dangerous, upon the
whole. He drank more deeply for two days longer,
after he received Stone's letter, and then, when he was
quite mad, when his eyes were bleared and fiery and
his head was dry and hot and his heart terrible within
him, he went out into the black night.

It was still early. The mountain echoes had not
sung back the tattoo of the trumpets as yet. There
was a storm coming on from the snow peak in the west,
and the clouds, dark with light edges, were thick in the
sky. Lawton was sober enough now. Not so far
away in its little pocket among the hills he could see
the post, with all its lights twinkling, as though one
of the clear starry patches in the heavens were reflected



THE HERITAGE OF UNREST 205

in a black lake in the valley. And the road stretched
out faint and gray before him.

He went in through the gate, and was once more upon
that reservation he had been commanded by the over-
bearing tyrant representative of the military to leave,
several weeks before. As he trudged along, tattoo
went. In the clear silence, beneath the sounding-
boards of the low clouds, he heard the voice of one of
the sergeants. He shook his fist in the direction.
Tattoo being over, some of the lights were put out,
but there were still plenty to guide him. He did not
want to get there too early, so he walked more slowly,
and when he came to the edge of the garrison, he
hesitated.

The chances of detection would certainly be less if
he should go back of the officers' quarters, instead of
the barracks. But to do that he would have to cross
the road which led from the trader's to the quadrangle,
and he would surely meet some one, if it were only
some servant girl and her lover. He had observed and
learned some things in his week of waiting in the post
that week which otherwise had gone for worse than
nothing. He took the back of the barracks, keeping
well away from them, stumbling in and out among
rubbish heaps. He had no very clear idea of what he
meant to do, or of why he was going in this particular
direction ; but he was ready for anything that might
offer to his hand. If he came upon Landor or the
adjutant or any of them, he would put a knife into
him. But he was not going to the trouble of hunting



206 THE HERITAGE OF UNREST

them out. And so he walked on, and came to the hay-
stacks, looming, denser shadows against the sky.

Then taps sounded, ringing its brazen dirge to the
night in a long, last note. It ended once, but the
bugler went to the other side of the parade and began
( again. Lawton repeated the shaking of his fist. He
was growing impatient, and also scared. A little more
of that shrill music, and his nerves would go into
a thousand quivering shreds he would be useless.
Would the cursed, the many times cursed military
never get to bed? He waited in the shadow of the
corrals, leaning against the low wall, gathering his
forces. The sentry evidently did not see him. The
post grew more and more still, the clouds more and
more thick.

Gradually it began to form itself in his softened
brain what he meant to do. It is safest to avenge
oneself upon dumb beasts, after all. By and by he
began to feel along the adobe wall, and when he found
a niche for his foot, he started to clamber up. He had
climbed so many corral walls, to sit atop of them with
his great, booted legs dangling, and meditatively whit-
tle when he should have been at work, that it was easy
for him, and in a moment he was on the shingled roof,
lying flat. In another he had dropped down upon a
bed of straw.

He put out his hand and touched a warm, smooth
flank. The horse gave a little low whinny. Quick as
a flash he whipped out his knife and hamstrung it, not