knows. But it is there, and it has given up its un-
availing hints of a life which may have been older than
that of Herculaneum and Pompeii, and is as much more
safely hidden from the research of the inquiring day
as its walls are more hopelessly buried beneath the
ironlike stone than are those of the cisalpine cities
beneath their ashen drift.
276 THE HERITAGE OF UNREST
And the great river of rock is there, too, frozen upon
the land like some devouring monster changed by a
Gorgon head into lifeless stone. It is a formidable
barrier across the hardly less formidable bad lands. It
can be crossed in places where it is narrowest, not
quite a mile in width, that is. But horses slip and
clamber, and men cut through the leather of their
heaviest shoes.
If the sea, whipping in huge waves against the fury
of a typhoon, were to become on the instant rocks, it
would be as this. There are heights and crevasses,
hills and gulches, crests and hollows, little caves and
crannies, where quail and snakes and cotton-tails and
jack-rabbits, lizards and coyotes, creatures of desolation
and the barrens, hide and scamper in and out. It is
an impregnable stronghold, not for armies, because they
could not find shelter, but for savages that can scatter
like the quail themselves, and writhe on their bellies
into the coyotes' own holes.
And so the hostiles took shelter there from the cav-
alry that had pursued them hard across the open all
night, and gave battle after the manner of their kind.
It was a very desultory sort of a skirmish, for the
troops did not venture into the traps beyond the very
edge, and the Indians were simply on the defensive.
It was not only desultory, it promised to be unavailing,
a waste of time and of ammunition.
The Chiricahuas might stay there and fire at intervals
as long as they listed, killing a few men perhaps. And
then they might retreat quite safely, putting the barrier
THE HERITAGE OP UNREST 277
between themselves and the pursuers. Obviously there
were only two courses wherein lay any wisdom, to
retreat, or to cut off their retreat. Landor said so to
the major in command.
" And how, may I ask, would you suggest cutting off
their retreat ? " the major inquired a little sharply.
His temper was not improved by the heat and by
twelve hours in the saddle.
It was certainly not apparent, on the face of it, how
the thing was to be done, but the captain explained.
" I've been stationed here, you know, and I know the
roads. We are about a half a mile or more from where
the Stanton road to the railway crosses the lava. It is
narrow and rough, and about from three-quarters of
a mile to a mile wide, but cavalry can go over it with-
out any trouble. I can take my troop over, and then
the Indians will be hemmed in between us. We might
capture the whole band."
The major offered the objection that it would be
foolhardy, that it would be cutting through the enemy
by file. " They'll pick you off, and you'll be absolutely
at their mercy," he remonstrated. " No, I can't hear
of it."
" Suppose you let me call for volunteers," suggested
Landor. He was sure of his own men, down to the
last recruit.
The major consented unwillingly. " It's your look-
out. If you come out alive, I shall be surprised, that's
all. Take some scouts, too," he added, as he lit a cigar
and went on with his walk up and down among his men.
278 THE HERITAGE OF UNREST
The entire command volunteered, as a matter of
course, and Landor had his pick. He took thirty men
and a dozen scouts. Cairness rode up and offered
himself. They looked each other full in the face for
a moment. " Very well," said Landor, and turned on
his heel. Cairness was properly appreciative, despite
the incivility. He knew that Landor could have
refused as well as not, and that would have annoyed
and mortified him. He was a generous enemy, at any
rate. The volunteers mounted and trotted off in a
cloud of dust that hung above them and back along
their trail, to where the road, as Landor had said,
entered the malpais.
Just at the edge of the rock stream there was an
abandoned cabin built of small stones. Whatever sort
of roof it had had in the beginning was now gone
altogether, and the cabin itself was tumbling down.
Through the doorway where there was no door, there
showed a blackened fireplace. Once when a party
from the post had been taking the two days' drive to
the railroad, they had stopped here, and had lunched in
the cabin. Landor remembered it now, and glanced at
the place where Felipa had reclined in the shade of the
walls, upon the leather cushion of the ambulance seat.
She very rarely could be moved to sing, though she
had a sweet, plaintive voice of small volume ; but this
time she had raised her tin mug of beer and, looking
up to the blue sky, had launched into the " Last Ca-
rouse," in a spirit of light mockery that fitted with it
well, changing the words a little to the scene.
THE HEKITAGE OF UNKEST 279
" We meet 'neath the blazing heavens,
And the walls around are bare ;
They shout back our peals of laughter,
And it seems that the dead are there.
Then stand to your glasses steady,
We drink to our comrades' eyes
One cup to the dead already.
Hurrah ! for the next that dies."
"Hurrah! for the next that dies," thought Lan-
dor himself, with a careless cynicism. The barrel of
a Winchester gleamed above a point of rock, a little
sharp sparkle of sunlight on steel, and a bullet deflected
from the big leather hood of his stirrup. He rode on
calmly, and his horse's shoes clicked on the lava.
The men followed, sitting erect, toes in. They
might have been on mounted inspection except for the
field clothes, stained and dusty. They were to go down
a narrow path for close on a mile, between two rows of
rifle barrels, and that not at a run or a gallop, but at a
trot, at the most, for the lava was slippery as glass in
spots. They were willing enough to do it, even anx-
ious not that there was any principle involved, or
glory to be gained, but because their blood was up and
it was part of the chances of the game.
They were not destined to get beyond the first fifty
yards, nevertheless. The rifle that had fired at Landor
as he came upon the malpais went glistening up again.
There was a puff of blue-hearted smoke in the still air,
and Cairness's bronco, struck on the flanks, stung to
frenzy, stopped short, then gathering itself together with
every quivering sinew in a knot, after the way of its
280 THE HERITAGE OP UNREST
breed, bounded off straight in among the jagged boul-
ders. It was all done in an instant, and almost before
Landor could see who had dashed ahead of him the horse
had fallen, neck to the ground, throwing its rider with
his head against a point of stone.
Landor did not stop to consider it. It was one of
the few impulses of his life, or perhaps only the quick-
est thinking he had ever done. Cairness was there
among the rocks, disabled and in momentary danger of
his life. If it had been a soldier, under the same cir-
cumstances, Landor might have gone on and have sent
another soldier to help him. It was only a chief of
scouts, but it was a man of his own kind, for all that
and it was his enemy. Instinct dismounted him be-
fore reason had time to warn him that the affair of an
officer is not to succor his inferiors in the thick of the
fighting when there are others who can be better spared
to do it. He threw his reins over his horse's head and
into the hands of the orderly-trumpeter, and jumped
down beside Cairness.
When the sergeant reported it to the major after-
ward, he said that the captain, in stooping over to
raise the chief of scouts, had been struck full in the
temple by a bullet, and had pitched forward with his
arms stretched out. One private had been wounded.
They carried the two men back to the little cabin of
stones, and that was the casualty list. But the dash
had failed.
They laid Landor upon the ground, in the same patch
of shade he had glanced at in coming by not five min-
THE HERITAGE OF UNREST 281
utes before. His glazed eyes stared back at the sky.
There was nothing to be done for him. But Cairness
was alive. They washed the blood from his face with
water out of the canteens, and bound his head with a
wet handkerchief. And presently he came back to con-
sciousness and saw Landor stretched there, with the
bluing hole in his brow, and the quiet there is no mis-
taking on his sternly weary face. And he turned back
his head and lay as ashy and almost as still as the dead
man, with a look on his own face more terrible than
that of any death.
After a time, when a soldier bent over him and held
a flask to his teeth, he drank, and then he pointed feebly,
and his lips framed the question he could not seem to
speak.
The soldier understood. " Trying to save you, sir,"
he said a little resentfully.
But Cairness had known it without that. It was so
entirely in keeping with the rest of his fate, that every
cup which ought to have been sweet should have been
embittered like this.
He rolled his cut and throbbing head over again, and
watched the still form. And he was conscious of no
satisfaction that now there was nothing in all the world
to keep him from Felipa, from the gaining of the wish
of many years, but only of a dull sort of pity for Landor
and for himself, and of a real and deep regret.
XXIII
IT was a splendid spring morning. There had been
a shower overnight, and the whole mountain world was
aglitter. The dancing, rustling leaves of the cotton-
woods gleamed, the sparse grass of the parade ground
was shining like tiny bayonets, the flag threw out its
bright stripes to the breeze, and when the sun rays
struck the visor of some forage cap, they glinted off as
though it had been a mirror. All the post chickens
were cackling and singing their droning monotonous
song of contentment, the tiny ones cheeped and twit-
tered, and in among the vines of the porch Felipa's
mocking-bird whistled exultantly.
The sound shrilled sweetly through the house, through
all the empty rooms, and through the thick silence of
that one which was not empty, but where a flag was
spread over a rougli box of boards, and Ellton sat by the
window with a little black prayer-book in his hand. He
was going over the service for the burial of the dead,
because there was no chaplain, and it fell to him to read
it. Now and then one of the officers came in alone or
with his wife and stood about aimlessly, then went away
again. But for the rest, the house was quite forsaken.
Felipa was not there. At the earliest, she could not
return for a couple of days, and by then Landor's body
282
THE HERITAGE OF UNKEST 283
would be laid in the dreary little graveyard, with its
wooden headboards and crosses, and its neglected graves
among the coyote and snake holes. The life of the
service would be going on just as usual, after the little
passing excitement was at an end. For it was an excite-
ment. No one in the garrison would have had it end
like this, but since what will be will be, and the right
theory of life is to make the most of what offers and to
hasten as the philosopher has said to laugh at all
things for fear we may have cause to weep, there was a
certain expectation, decently kept down, in the air.
It rose to a subdued pitch as there came the
gradual rattling of wheels and the slow tramp of many
feet. A buckboard, from which the seats had been
removed, came up the line, and behind it marched the
troops and companies, Landor's own troop in advance.
They halted in front of his quarters, and four officers
came down the steps with the long box between them.
The mocking-bird's trill died away to a questioning
twitter.
The box was laid in the buckboard, and covered
with the flag once more. Then the mules started,
with a rattle of traces and of the wheels, and the tramp
of feet began again. The drums thrummed regularly
and slowly, the heart beats of the service, and the
fifes took up the dead march in a weird, shrill Banshee
wail. They went down the line, the commandant with
the surgeon and the officers first, and after them the
buckboard, with its bright-draped burden. Then
Landor's horse, covered with black cloths, the empty
284 THE HERITAGE OP UNREST
saddle upon its back. It nosed at the pockets of the
man who led it. It had been taught to find sugar in
pockets. And then the troops, the cavalry with the
yellow plumes of their helmets drooping, and the
infantry with the spikes glinting, marching with eyes
cast down and muskets reversed. A gap, then the
soldiers' urchins from the laundress row, in for any-
thing that might be doing.
The roll of the drums and the whistle of the fifes
died away in the distance. There was a long silence,
followed by three volleys of musketry, the salute over
the open grave. And then taps was pealed in notes of
brass up to the blue sky, a long farewell, a challenge
aforetime to the trumpet of the Last Day. They
turned and came marching back. The drums and
fifes played " Yankee Doodle " in sarcastic relief. The
men walked briskly with their guns at carry arms, the
black-draped horse curved its neck and pranced until
the empt} 7 stirrups danced. The incident was over
closed. The post picked up its life and went on. Two
afternoons later the ambulance which had been sent for
Felipa came into the post. She stepped out from it
in front of the Elltons' quarters so majestic and awe-
inspiring in her black garments that Mrs. Ellton was
fairly subdued. She felt real grief. It showed in her
white face and the nervous quiver of her lips. u I am
going out to the graveyard," she told Mrs. Ellton
almost at once. Mrs. Ellton prepared to accompany
her, but she insisted that she was going alone, and did
so, to the universal consternation.
THE HEKITAGE OP UNREST 285
In the late afternoon the lonely dark figure crossed
the open and dropped down on the new grave, not in
an agony of tears, but as if there was some comfort to
be gotten out of contact with the mere soil. The old
feeling of loneliness, which had always tinged her char-
acter with a covert defiance, was overwhelming her.
She belonged to no one now. She had no people. She
was an outcast from two races, feared of each because
of the other's blood. The most forsaken man or woman
may claim at least the kinship of his kind, but she had
no kind. She crouched on the mound and looked at
the sunset as she had looked that evening years before,
but her eyes were not fearless now. As a trapped ani-
mal of the plains might watch a prairie fire licking
nearer and nearer, making its slow way up to him in
spurts of flame and in dull, thick clouds of smoke that
must stifle him before long, so she watched the dreary
future rolling in about her. But gradually the look
changed to one farther away, and alight with hope.
She had realized that there was, after all, some one to
whom she belonged, some one to whom she could go
and, for the first time in her life, be loved and allowed
to love.
It had not occurred to her for some hours after Mrs.
Campbell had told her of Landor's death that she was
free now to give herself to Cairness. She had gasped,
indeed, when she did remember it, and had put the
thought away, angrily and self-reproachfully. But it
returned now, and she felt that she might cling to it.
She had been grateful, and she had been faithful, too.
286 THE HEBITAGE OF UNREST
She remembered only that Landor had been kind to
her, and forgot that for the last two years she had
borne with much harsh coldness, and with a sort of
contempt which she felt in her unanalyzing mind to
have been entirely unmerited. Gradually she raised
herself until she sat quite erect by the side of the
mound, the old exultation of her half-wild girlhood
shining in her face as she planned the future, which
only a few minutes before had seemed so hopeless.
And when the retreat gun boomed in the distance,
she stood up, shaking the earth and grasses from her
gown, and started to carry out her plans. A storm
was blowing up again. Clouds were massing in the
sky, and night was rising rather than the sun setting.
There was a cold, greenish light above the snow peak,
and darkness crept up from the earth and down from
the gray clouds that banked upon the northern horizon
and spread fast across the heavens. A bleak, whining
wind rustled the leaves of the big trees down by the
creek, and caught up the dust of the roadway in little
eddies and whirls, as Felipa, with a new purpose in her
step, swung along it back to the post.
She would not be induced to go near her own house
that night. When Ellton suggested it, she turned
white and horrified. It had not occurred to him before
that a woman so fearless of everything in the known
world might be in abject terror of the unknown.
"It's her nature," he told his wife. "Underneath
she is an Apache, and they burn the wigwams and all
the traps of their dead ; sometimes even the whole vil-
THE HERITAGE OF UNREST 287
lage he lived in." Mrs. Ellton said that poor Captain
Landor had had a good deal to endure.
The two children whom Felipa had taken in charge
two years before had been left in the care of the ser-
geant of Landor's troop and his wife, and they mani-
fested no particular pleasure at seeing her again. They
were half afraid of her, so severely black and tall and
quiet. They had been playing with the soldier's chil-
dren, and were anxious to be away again. The young
of the human race are short of memory, and their
gratefulness does not endure for long. There is no
caress so sweet, so hard to win, as the touch of a child's
soft hand, and none that has behind it less of nearly
all that we prize in affection. It is sincere while it
lasts, and no longer, and it must be bought either with
a price or with a wealth of love. You may lavish the
best that is within you to obtain a kiss from baby lips,
and if they rest warm and moist upon your cheek for
a moment, the next they are more eager for a sweet-
meat than for all your adoration.
" Yes," whispered the little girl, squirming in Felipa's
arms, "I am dlad you's come. Let me doe."
" Kiss me," said Felipa.
The child brushed at her cheek and struggled away.
" Come, Billy," she called to the brother who had saved
her life ; and that small, freckle-faced hero, whose
nose was badly skinned from a fall, flung his arms
around his benefactress's neck perfunctorily and es-
caped, rejoicing.
The Elltons' pretty child was like its mother, gen-
288 THE HERITAGE OF UNREST
tier and more caressing. It lay placidly in her arms
and patted her lips when she tried to talk, with the
tips of its rosy fingers. She caught them between
her teeth and mumbled them, and the child chuckled
gleefully. But by and by it was taken away to bed,
and then Felipa was alone with its father and mother.
Through the tiresome evening she felt oppressed and
angrily nervous. The Elltons had always affected
her so.
She asked for the full particulars of her husband's
death, and when Ellton had told her, sat looking
straight before her at the wall. "It was very like
Jack," she said finally, in a low voice, " his whole life
was like that." And then she turned squarely to the
lieutenant. " Where is Mr. Cairness ? Where did
they take him ? " She was surprised at herself that she
had not thought of that before.
He told her that he had gone on to Arizona, to Tomb-
stone, he believed. " By the way," he added, " did you
hear that Brewster has married a rich Jewish widow
down in Tucson?"
" Yes, I heard it," she said indifferently. " Was Mr.
Cairness really much hurt ? "
"Very much," said Ellton; "it was a sharp cut on the
forehead went through the bone, and he was uncon-
scious, off and on, for two or three days. He seemed
to take it hard. He went off yesterday, and he wasn't
fit to travel either, but he would do it for some reason.
I think he was worse cut up about Landor than any-
thing, though he wasn't able to go to the funeral. I like
THE HERITAGE OF UNREST 289
Cairness. He's an all-round decent fellow ; but after
all, his life was bought too dear."
Felipa did not answer.
He did not try to discuss her plans for the future
with her that night ; but two days afterward, when she
had disposed of all her household goods and had packed
the few things that remained, they sat upon two boxes
in the bare hallway, resting ; and he broached it.
"I am going to ask the quartermaster to store my
things for the present, and of course the first sergeant's
wife will look out for the children," she said.
But that was not exactly what he wanted to know,
and he insisted. " But what is going to become of you ?
Are you going back to the Campbells ? " He had asked
her to stay with his wife and himself as long as she
would, but she had refused.
" No," she said, " I told the Campbells I would not
go to them."
And he could get nothing definite from her beyond
that. It annoyed him, of course ; Felipa had a gift for
repulsing kindness and friendship. It was because she
would not lie and could not evade. Therefore, she pre-
served a silence that was, to say the least of it, exasper-
ating to the well-intentioned.
Early in the morning of the day she was to leave she
went to the graveyard alone again. She was beginning
to realize more than she had at first that Landor was
quite gone. She missed him, in a way. He had been
a strong influence in her life, and there was a lack of
the pressure now. But despite the form of religion to
THE HERITAGE OF UNREST
which she clung, she had no hope of meeting him in any
future life, and no real wish to do so.
She stood by the mound for a little while thinking
of him, of how well he had lived and died, true to his
standard of duty, absolutely true, but lacking after all
that spirit of love without which our actions profit so
little and die with our death. She had a clearer reali-
zation of it than ever before. It came to her that
Charles Cairness's life, wandering, aimless, disjointed
as it was, and her own, though it fell far below even her
own not impossibly high ideals, were to more purpose,
had in them more of the vital force of creation, were
less wasted, than his had been. To have known no
enthusiasms which are but love, in one form or an-
other is to have failed to give that impulse to the
course of events which every man born into the world
should hold himself bound to give, as the human debt
to the Eternal.
Felipa felt something of this, and it lessened the vague
burden of self-reproach she had been carrying. She
was almost cheerful when she got back to the post.
Through the last breakfast, which the Elltons took for
granted must be a sad one, and conscientiously did their
best to make so, she had some difficulty in keeping
down to their depression.
It was not until they all, from the commandant down
to the recruits of Landor's troop, came to say good-by
that she felt the straining and cutting of the strong tie
of the service, which never quite breaks though it be
stretched over rough and long years and almost forgot-
THE HERITAGE OP UNREST 291
ten. The post blacksmith to whom she had been kind
during an illness, the forlorn sickly little laundress
whose baby she had eased in dying, the baker to whose
motherless child she had been good all came crpwding
up the steps. They were sincerely sorry to have her
go. She had been generous and possessed of that
charity which is more than faith or hope. It was the
good-bys of Landor's men that were the hardest for
her. He had been proud of his troop, and it had
been devoted to him. She broke down utterly and
cried when it came to them, and tears were as hard
for her as for a man. But with the officers and their
women, it rose up between her and them that they
would so shortly despise and condemn her, that they
would not touch her hands could they but know her
thoughts.
Ellton was going with her to the railroad. They
were to travel with a mounted escort, as she had come,
on account of the uncertain state of the country. And
they must cross, as she had done in coming also, the
road over the malpais, where Landor had fallen. As
the hoofs of the mules and the tires of the wheels be-
gan to slip and screech on the smooth-worn lava, and
the ambulance rattled and creaked up the incline, Ell-
ton leaned forward and pointed silently to a hollow in
the gray rock a few yards away. It was where Landor
had pitched forward over the body of the mounted chief
of scouts. Felipa nodded gravely, but she did not
speak, nor yet weep. Ellton, already thrown back upon