tufts of his hair stood out stiffly.
The Reverend Taylor and Cairness had managed,
with a good deal of adroitness, to keep the identity of
their patient a secret. Stone was consequently not at
all prepared to have her stride in upon him. But he
was not a man to be caught exhibiting emotions. The
surprise which he showed and expressed was of a
perfectly frank and civil, even of a somewhat pleased,
sort. He called her " my dear madam," and placed
a chair for her. She sat in it under protest. He kept
up the social aspect of it all for quite five minutes,
but sociability implies conversation, and Cairness
and the minister were silent. So was the woman
rigidly.
When all his phrases were quite used up, Stone
changed the key. What could be done for Mr. Taylor ?
Mr. Taylor motioned with his usual urbanity that the
burden of speech lay with Cairness. What could he
do for Mr. Cairness, then ?
"Well," said Cairness, twisting at the small mus-
tache, and levelling his eyes straight as the barrels of a
shot-gun and they gave the journalist a little of the
same sensation "I think, Mr. Stone, that you can get
out of the country within the next three days."
Stone did not understand. He believed that he
missed Mr. Cairness's meaning. " I don't think you
do," said Cairness ; " but I'll make it plainer, anyway.
I want you to get out of the country, for the country's
good, you know, and for your own. And I give you
THE HERITAGE OF UNREST 259
three days to do it in, because I don't wish to hurry
you to an inconvenient extent."
Stone laughed and inquired if he were joking, or just
crazy.
" Neither," drawled Cairness. " But Mrs. Lawton,
here, has been good enough to tell me that you have
known the exact truth about the Kirby massacre ever
since a week after its occurrence, and yet you have
shielded the criminals and lied in the papers. Then, too,"
he went on, " though there is no real proof against you,
and you undoubtedly did handle it very well, I know
that it was you that set Lawton on to try and bribe
for the beef contract. You see your friends are
unsafe, Mr. Stone, and I have been around yours and
Lawton's ranches enough to have picked up a few
damaging facts."
"Always supposing you have," interposed Stone,
hooking his thumbs in his sleeve holes and tipping back
his chair, " always supposing you have, what could you
do with the facts ? "
"Well," drawled Cairness again, he had learned
the value of the word in playing the Yankee game of
bluff, " with those about the beef contract and those
about the Kirby massacre, also a few I gathered
around San Carlos (you may not be aware that I have
been about that reservation off and on for ten years),
with those facts I could put you in the penitentiary,
perhaps, even with an Arizona jury ; but at any rate I
could get you tarred and feathered or lynched in about
a day. Or failing all those, I could shoot you myself.
260 THE HEKITAGE OF UNREST
And a jury would acquit me, you know, if any one
were ever to take the trouble to bring it before one,
which is doubtful, I think."
Stone glanced at the Lawton woman. She was grin-
ning mirthlessly at his discomfiture. " What have you
been stuffing this fellow here with ? " he asked her
contemptuously.
" Just what he's dishin' up to you now," she told
him.
"It's a lot of infernal lies, and you know it." But
she only shook her head and laughed again, shortly.
Stone made a very creditable fight. A man does not
throw up the results of years of work without a strong
protest. He treated it lightly, at first, then seriously.
Then he threatened. " I've got a good deal of power
myself," he told Cairness angrily ; " I can roast you in
the press so that you can't hold up your head."
" I don't believe you can," Cairness said ; " but you
might try it, if it will give you any pleasure. Only
you must make haste, because you've got to get out in
three days."
" I can shoot, myself, when it comes to that," sug-
gested Stone.
Cairness said that he would of course have to take
chances on that. " You might kill me, or I might
kill you. I'm a pretty fair shot. However, it wouldn't
pay you to kill me, upon the whole, and you must take
everything into consideration." He was still twisting
the curled end of his small mustache and half closing
his eyes in the way that Stone had long since set down
THE HERITAGE OF UNREST 261
as asinine. " My friend Mr. Taylor would still be
alive. And if you were to hurt him, he's a very
popular man, it might be bad for your standing in the
community. It wouldn't hurt me to kill you, particu-
larly, on the other hand. You are not so popular
anyway, and I haven't very much to lose."
Then the journalist tried entreaty. He had a wife
and children.
Cairness reminded him that Kirby had had a wife
and children, too.
" Well, I didn't kill them, did I ? " he whined.
" Not exactly, no. But you were an accessory after
the fact."
" Why are you so all-fired anxious to vindicate the
law ? " He dropped easily into phrases.
Cairness assured him that he was not. "It is not
my mission on earth to straighten out the territories,
heaven be praised. This is purely a personal matter,
entirely so. You may call it revenge, if you like.
Lawton's in jail all safe, as you know. I got him
there, and if he gets out anyway, I'll put him back
again on this count."
Mrs. Lawton started forward in her chair. " What's
he in for now ? Ain't it for this ? " she demanded.
" For destruction of government property," Cairness
told her, and there was just the faintest twinkle
between his lids. "I didn't know all these interest-
ing details about the Kirbys until you told me, Mrs.
Lawton."
She sat with her jaw hanging, staring at him, baffled,
262 THE HERITAGE OF UNREST
and he went on. " I've got Lawton jailed, as I was
saying. I'll have you out of the country in three days,
and as for Mrs. Lawton, I'll keep an eye on her. I'll
know where she is, in case I need her at any time.
But I'm not fighting women."
He stood up. " I'll see you off inside of three days
then, Stone," he said amicably.
" Where do you want me to go ? " he almost moaned,
and finished with an oath.
" Anywhere you like, my dear chap, so that it's
neither in Arizona or New Mexico. I want to stop
here myself, and the place isn't big enough for us both.
You'll be a valuable acquisition to any community, and
you can turn your talent to showing up the life here.
You are right on the inside track. Now I won't ask
you to promise to go. But I'll be round to see that
you do."
He held the door open for the Texan woman and
the parson to go out. Then he followed, closing it
behind him.
Two days later Stone left the town. He took the
train for California, and his wife and children went
with him. He was a rich man by many an evil means,
and it was no real hardship that had been worked him,
as Cairness well knew.
The Lawton woman had heard of an officer's family
at Grant, which was in need of a cook, and had gone
there.
"And now," said the Reverend Taylor, fingering
the lock of hair over the little Reverend's right ear,
THE HERITAGE OF UNREST 263
as that wise little owl considered with uncertain ap-
proval a whistle rattle Cairness had bought for him,
" and now what are you going to do ? "
Cairness stood up, ran his hands into his pockets,
and going over to the window looked down at the
geraniums as he had done once, long before.
" I am going back to my ranch on the reservation,"
he said measuredly.
" Cairness," said the parson, fixing his eyes upon the
back of the bent head, as if they were trying to see
through into the impenetrable brain beneath, " are
you going to spend the rest of your life at this sort
of thing ? "
" I don't know," Cairness answered, with a lightness
that was anything but cheering.
" You are too good for it."
" I am certainly not good enough for anything else."
He began to whistle, but it was not a success, and he
stopped.
" See here," insisted Taylor ; " turn round here
and answer me." Cairness continued to stand with
his head down, looking at the geraniums. The parson
was wiser than his wife in that he knew when it was of
no use to insist. " What's keeping you around here,
anyway? You ought to have gotten out when you
left the service and you half meant to then. What
is it?"
Cairness raised his shoulders. " My mines," he said,
after a while. The Reverend Taylor did not believe
that, but he let it go.
264 THE HERITAGE OF UNKEST
" Well," hie said more easily, " you've accomplished
the thing you set out to do, anyway."
" One thing," muttered Cairness.
" Eh ? " the parson was not sure he had heard.
"Just nothing," Cairness laughed shortly, and break-
ing off one of the treasured geranium blossoms, stuck
it in a buttonhole of his flannel shirt.
"I heard you," said the little man; "what's the
other ? " " Oh, I dare say I'll fail on that," he answered
indifferently, and taking up his sombrero went out to
saddle his horse.
XXI
THE civilization of the Englishman is only skin deep.
And therein lies his strength and his salvation. Beneath
that outer surface, tubbed and groomed and prosperous,
there is the man, raw and crude from the workshops of
Creation. Back of that brain, trained to a nicety of
balance and perception and judgment, there are the
illogical passions of a savage. An adaptation of the
proverb might run that you scratch an Englishman and
you find a Briton one of those same Britons who
stained themselves blue with woad, who fell upon their
foes with clumsy swords and flaming torches, who wore
the skins of beasts, and lived in huts of straw, and who
burned men and animals together, in sacrifice to their
gods.
And the savage shows, too, in that your Englishman
is not gregarious. His house is his castle, his life is to
himself, and his sentiments are locked within him. He
is a lonely creature, in the midst of his kind, and he
loves his loneliness.
But it is because of just this that no scion of ultra-
civilization degenerates so thoroughly as does he. Ret-
rogression is easy to him. He can hardly go higher,
because he is on the height already; but he can slip back.
Set him in a lower civilization, he sinks one degree
265
266 THE HERITAGE OF UNREST
lower than that. Put him among savages, and he is
nearer the beasts than they. It does not come to pass
in a day, nor yet at all if he be part of a community,
which keeps in mind its traditions and its church, and
which forms its own public opinion. Then he is the
leaven of all the measures of meal about him, the surest,
steadiest, most irresistible civilizing force. But he can-
not advance alone. He goes back, and, being cursed
with the wisdom which shows him his debasement, in
loathing and disgust with himself, he grows sullen and
falls back yet more.
It was so with Cairness. He was sinking down, and
ever down, to the level of his surroundings ; he was even
ceasing to realize that it was so. He had begun by
studying the life of the savages, but he was so entirely
grasping their point of view that he was losing all other.
He was not so dirty as they not yet. His stone cabin
was clean enough, and their villages were squalid. A
morning plunge in the river was still a necessity, while
with them it was an event. But where he had once
spent his leisure in reading in several tongues in keep-
ing in touch with the world and in painting, he would
now sit for hours looking before him into space, thinking
unprofitable thoughts. He lived from hand to mouth.
Eventually he would without doubt marry a squaw.
The thing was more than common upon the frontier.
He was in a manner forgetting Felipa. He had forced
himself to try to do so. But once in a way he remem-
bered her vividly, so that the blood would burn in his
heart and head, and he would start up and beat off the
THE HEKITAGE OF UNREST 267
thought, as if it were a visible thing. It was happen-
ing less and less often, however. For two years he had
not seen her and had heard of her directly only once.
An officer who came into the Agency had been with her,
but having no reason to suppose that a scout could be
interested in the details of the private life of an officer's
wife, he had merely said that she had been very ill, but
was better now. He had not seen fit to add that it was
said in the garrison which observed all things with
a microscopic eye that she was very unhappy with
Landor, and that the sympathy was not all with her.
" Mrs. Landor is very beautiful," Cairness hazarded.
He wanted to talk of her, or to make some one else
do it.
"She is very magnificent," said the officer, coldly.
It was plain that magnificence was not what he admired
in woman. And there it had dropped.
Cairness remembered with an anger and disgust with
himself he could still feel, that last time he had seen her
in the mouth of the cave. That had been two springs
ago. Since then there had been no occupation for him
as a guide or scout. The country had been at peace.
The War Department and the Indian Department
were dividing the control of the Agency, with the War
Department ranking. Crook had been trying his
theories as practice. He had been demonstrating that
the Indian can work, with a degree of success that was
highly displeasing to the class of politicians whose
whole social fabric for the southwest rested on his
only being able to kill.
268 THE HERITAGE OF UNREST
But the star of the politician was once more in the
ascendant. For two years there had been not one dep-
redation, not one outrage from the Indians, for whose
good conduct the general had given his personal word.
They were self-supporting, and from the products of
their farms they not only kept themselves, but sup-
plied the neighboring towns. It was a state of affairs
entirely unsatisfactory to the politician. So he set
about correcting it.
His methods were explained to Cairness by an old
buck who slouched up to the cabin and sat himself
down cross-legged in front of the door. He meant to
share in the venison breakfast Cairness was getting
himself.
" So long as these stones of your house shall remain
one upon the other," began the Apache, " so long shall
I be your friend. Have you any tobacco ? " Cairness
went into the cabin, got a pouch, and tossed it to him.
He took a package of straw papers and a match from
somewhere about himself and rolled a cigarette deftly.
" I have been lied to," came the muttering voice
from the folds of the red I. D. blanket, which almost
met the red flannel band binding down his coarse and
dirty black hair. It was early dawn and cold. Cair-
ness himself was close to the brush fire.
"I have been cheated."
Cairness nodded. He thought it very likely.
" The Sun and the Darkness and the Winds were
all listening. He promised to pay me dos reales each
day. To prove to you that I am now telling the truth,
THE HEEITAGB OF UNEEST 269
here is what he wrote for me." He held it out to Cair-
ness, a dirty scrap of wrapping-paper scrawled over
with senseless words.
" Yes," said Cairness, examining it, " but this has no
meaning."
" That is a promise," the Indian insisted, " to pay me
dos reales a day if I would cut hay for him."
The White explained carefully that it was not a con-
tract, that it was nothing at all, in fact.
" Then he lied," said the buck, and tucked the scrap
back under his head band. " They all lie. I worked
for him two weeks. I worked hard. And each night
when I asked him for money he would say to me that
to-morrow he would pay me. When all his hay was
cut he laughed in my face. He would pay me noth-
ing." He seemed resigned enough about it.
Cairness gave a grunt that was startlingly savage
so much so that he realized it, and shook himself
slightly as a man does who is trying to shake himself
free from a lethargy that is stealing over him.
" And then, there was the trouble about the cows.
They promised us one thousand, and they gave us not
quite six hundred. And those the Dawn and the
Sky hear that what I tell you is true and those were
so old we could not use them."
Cairness nodded. He knew that the Interior Depart-
ment had sent an agent out to investigate that com-
plaint, and that the agent had gone his way rejoicing
and reporting that all was well with the Indian and
honest with the contractor. It was not true. Every
270 THE HERITAGE OP UNREST
one who knew anything about it knew that. Cairness
supposed that also was the work of the politicians.
But there are things one cannot make plain to a savage
having no notions of government.
The buck went on, the while he held a piece of veni-
son in his dirty hand and dragged at it with his teeth,
to say that there was a feeling of great uneasiness upon
the reservation.
The Chiricahuas could see that there was trouble be-
tween the officials, both military and civil, and the gov-
ernment. They did not know what it was. They did
not understand that the harassed general, whose word
and his alone had their entire belief, nagged and
thwarted, given authority and then prevented from en-
forcing it, had rebelled at last, had asked to be relieved,
and had been refused. But they drew in with delight
the air of strife and unrest. It was the one they loved
best, there could and can be no doubt about that.
" Geronimo," mumbled the Apache, " has prayed to
the Dawn and the Darkness and the Sun and the Sky
to help him put a stop to those bad stories that people
put in the papers about him. He is afraid it will be
done as they say." The press of the country was full just
then, and had been for some time past, of suggestions
that the only good use the much-feared Geronimo could
be put to would be hanging, the which he no doubt
richly deserved. But if every one in the territories who
deserved hanging had been given his dues, the land
would have been dotted with blasted trees.
" Geronimo does not want that any more. He has
THE HERITAGE OF TJNKEST 271
tried to do right. He is not thinking bad. Such stories
ought not to be put in the newspapers."
Cairness also thought that they should not, chiefly
because they had a tendency to frighten the timid
Apaches. But he went on quietly eating his breakfast,
and said nothing. He knew that only silence can
obtain loquacity from silent natures. He was holding
his meat in his fingers, too, and biting it, though he did
not drag it like a wild beast yet ; and, moreover, he
had it upon a piece of bread of his own baking.
"There will be trouble with Geronimo's people
soon."
" Shall you go with them ? " asked Cairness.
" No, I am a friend of the soldier. And I am a friend
of Chato, who is the enemy of Geronimo. I have no
bad thoughts," he added piously.
" And you think there will be trouble ? " He knew
that the buck had come there for nothing but to inform.
"I think that Geronimo will make trouble. He
knows that the agent and the soldiers are quarrelling,
and he and his people have been drinking tizwin for
many days."
Cairness stood up and walked down to the water to
wash his hands. Then he went into the cabin and
brought out a small mirror, and all the shaving appara-
tus he had not used for months, and proceeded to take
off his thick brown beard, while the Indian sat stolidly
watching him with that deep interest in trifles of the
primitive brain, which sees and marks, and fails to learn
or to profit correspondingly.
272 THE HERITAGE OF UNREST
And later in the day, when the buck had shuffled off
again, Cairness brought out his pony, a new one now,
for the little pinto one had died of a rattlesnake bite,
from which no golondrina weed had been able to save
it, and saddled it. Then he went again into the
cabin. There was but one thing there that he valued,
a life-size head of Felipa he had done in charcoal. It
was in a chest beneath his cot. He locked his chest,
and going out locked the door also, and putting both
keys upon a ring, mounted and rode off along the trail.
It was his intention to go to Crook and to warn him
if he needed warning, which was not probable, since he
was never napping. He would then offer his services
as a scout. He was sincerely attached to the general,
and felt his own career in a way involved with that
of the officer, because he had been with him, in one
capacity or another, in every campaign he had made in
the southwest.
Already he felt more respectable at the mere prospect
of contact with his kind again. He was glad that the
unkempt beard was gone, and he was allowing himself
to hope, no, he was deliberately hoping, that he would
see Felipa.
XXII
HE failed in the warning. He had barely gotten off
the reservation before Geronimo and Nachez and their
sympathizers broke out and started to reach again that
fastness in the Sierra Madre from which they had been
routed two years before. But he succeeded without
the least difficulty in obtaining the position of chief of
scouts.
And he succeeded in seeing Felipa. It was most
unexpected. He had believed her to be in Stanton, a
good many hundred miles away. But Landor having
been sent at once into the field, she had come on to
Grant to visit the Campbells, who were again stationed
there. He met her face to face only once, and he
measured with one quick look all the changes there
were between the girl of ten years before and the
woman of to-day. The great, sad pity that rose within
him, and seemed to grasp at his throat chokingly, was
the best love he had felt for her yet. It wiped out the
wrong of the short madness in the cave's mouth.
She was quite alone, wandering among the trees and
bushes in the creek bottom, and her hands were full of
wild flowers. She had pinned several long sprays of
the little ground blossoms, called " baby-blue eyes," at
her throat, and they lay along her white gown prettily.
T 273
274 THE HEKITAGE OF UNREST
She stopped and spoke to him, with a note of lifeless-
ness in her high, sweet voice; and while he answered
her question as to what he had been doing since she
had seen him last, she unpinned the " baby -blue eyes "
and held them out to him. " Would you like these ? "
she asked simply. He took them, and she said
" Good-by " and went on.
She was broken to the acceptance of the inevitable
now, he could see that, any one could see it. She had
learned the lesson of the ages the futility of struggle
of mere man against the advance of men. That it had
been a hard lesson was plain. It showed in her face,
where patience had given place to unrest, gentleness
to the defiance of freedom. She had gained, too, she
had gained greatly. She was not only woman now,
she was womanly. But Cairness did not need to be
told that she was not happy.
He went on the next day with his scouts, and even-
tually joined Landor in the field. Landor was much
the same as ever, only more gray and rather more
deeply lined. Perhaps he was more taciturn, too, for
beyond necessary orders he threw not one word to the
chief of scouts. Cairness could understand that the
sight of himself was naturally an exasperation, and in
some manner a reproach, too. He was sorry that he
had been thrown with this command, but, since he was,
it was better that Landor should behave as he was
doing. An assumption of friendliness would have
been a mockery, and to some extent an ignoble one.
Landor's troop, with one other, was in the San
THE HERITAGE OF UNREST 275
Andres Mountains of New Mexico when Cairness
joined it. They were on the trail of a large band of
renegades, and it led them through the mountains,
across the flats, and down to the lava beds.
Once in the aeons which will never unfold their se-
crets now, when the continent of the Western seas was
undreamed of by the sages and the philosophers of the
Eastern world, when it was as alone, surrounded by its
wide waters, as the planets are alone in their wastes of
space, when it was living its own life, which was to
leave no trace upon the scroll of the wisdom of the
ages, the mountains and the bowels of the earth
melted before the wrath of that same Lord whose voice
shook the wilderness of Judaea. At His bidding they
ran as water, and poured down in waves of seething
fire, across the valley of death.
It is a valley of death now, parched and desolate, a
waste of white sand the dry bone dust of the cycles.
But then, when the lava came surging and boiling and
flaming across the plain, not a thin stream, but a wide,
irresistible current, there was life ; there was a city
one city at least. It is there now, under the mass of
sharp, gray, porous rock ; how much of it no one