When Major King delivered Frances—his punctilious military observance made her home-coming nothing less—to Colonel Landcraft, they found that grizzled warrior in an electrical state of excitement. He was moving in quick little charges, but with a certain grim system in all of them, between desk and bookcases, letter files, cabinets, and back to his desk again. He drew a document here, tucked one away there, slipped an elastic about others assembled on his desk, and clapped a sheaf of them in his pocket.

Major King saluted within the door.

“I have the honor to report the safe return of the detachment dispatched to Alamito Ranch for the convoy of Miss Landcraft,” he said.

Colonel Landcraft returned the salute, and stood stiffly while his officer spoke.

“Very well, sir,” said he. Then flinging away his official stiffness, he met Frances half-way as she ran to meet him, and enfolded her to his breast, just as if his dry old heart knew that she had come to him through perils.

Breathlessly she told him the story, leaving no word unsaid that would mount to the credit of Alan Macdonald. Colonel Landcraft was as hot as blazing 228 straw over the matter. He swore that he would roast Saul Chadron’s heart on his sword, and snatched that implement from the chair where it hung as he spoke, and buckled it on with trembling hand.

King interposed to tell him that Chadron was not at the ranch, and begged the colonel to delegate to him the office of avenger of this insult and hazard that Frances had suffered at the hands of his men. For a moment Colonel Landcraft held the young officer’s eye with thankful expression of admiration, then he drew himself up as if in censure for wasted time, saluted, took a paper from his desk, and said with grave dignity:

“It must fall to you, Major King, to demand the reparation for this outrage that I shall not be here to enforce. I am ordered to Washington, sir, to make my appearance before the retiring board. The department has vested the command of this post in you, sir—here is the order. My soldiering days are at an end.”

He handed the paper to Major King, with a salute. With a salute the young officer took it from his hand, an eager light in his eyes, a flush springing to his pale face. Frances clung to her father’s arm, a little trembling moan on her lips as if she had received a mortal hurt.

“Never mind, never mind, dear heart,” said the old man, a shake in his own voice. Frances, looking up with her great pity into his stern, set face, saw 229 a tear creeping down his cheek, toughened by the fires of thirty years’ campaigns.

“I’ll never soldier any more,” he said, “the politicians have got me. They’ve been after me a long time, and they’ve got me. But there is one easement in my disgrace—”

“Don’t speak of it on those terms, sir!” implored Major King, more a man than a soldier as he laid a consoling hand on the old man’s arm.

“No, no!” said Frances, clinging to her father’s hand.

Colonel Landcraft smiled, looking from one to the other of them, and a softness came into his face. He took Major King’s hand and carried it to join Frances’, and she, in her softness for her father, allowed it to remain in the young soldier’s grasp.

“There is one gleam of joy in the sundown of my life,” the colonel said, “and that is in seeing my daughter pledged to a soldier. I must live in the reflection of your achievements, if I live beyond this disgrace, sir.”

“I will try to make them worthy of my mentor, sir,” Major King returned.

Frances stood with bowed head, the major still holding her hand in his ardent grasp.

“It’s a crushing blow, to come before the preferment in rank that I have been led to expect would be my retiring compensation!” The colonel turned from them sharply, as if in pain, and walked in marching stride across the room. Frances withdrew 230 her hand, with a little struggle, not softened by the appeal in the major’s eyes.

“My poor wife is bowed under it,” the colonel spoke as he marched back and forth. “She has hoped with me for some fitting reward for the years of service I have unselfishly given to my country, sir, for the surrender of my better self to the army. I’ll never outlive it, I feel that I’ll never outlive it!”

Colonel Landcraft had no thought apart from what he felt to be his hovering disgrace. He had forgotten his rage against Chadron, forgotten that his daughter had lived through a day as hazardous as any that he had experienced in the Apache campaigns, or in his bleak watches against the Sioux. He turned to her now, where she stood weeping softly with bowed head, the grime of the dugout on her habit, her hair, its bonds broken, straying over her face.

“I had counted pleasurably on seeing you two married,” he said, “but something tells me I shall never come back from this journey, never resume command of this post.” He turned back to his marching, stopped three or four paces along, turned sharply, a new light in his face. “Why shouldn’t it be before I leave—tonight, within the hour?”

“Oh, father!” said Frances, in terrified voice, lifting her face in its tear-wet loveliness.

“I must make the train that leaves Meander at four o’clock tomorrow morning, I shall have to leave here within—” he flashed out his watch with his 231 quick, nervous hand—“within three-quarters of an hour. What do you say, Major King? Are you ready?”

“I have been ready at any time for two years,” Major King replied, in trembling eagerness.

Frances was thrown into such a mental turmoil by the sudden proposal that she could not, at that moment, speak a further protest. She stood with white face, her heart seeming to shrivel, and fall away to laboring faintness. Colonel Landcraft was not considering her. He was thinking that he must have three hours’ sleep in the hotel at Meander before the train left for Omaha.

“Then we shall have the wedding at once, just as you stand!” he declared. “We’ll have the chaplain in and—go and tell your mother, child, and—oh, well, throw on another dress if you like.”

Frances found her tongue as her danger of being married off in that hot and hasty manner grew imminent.

“I’m not going to marry Major King, father, now or at any future time,” said she, speaking slowly, her words coming with coldness from her lips.

“Silence! you have nothing to say, nothing to do but obey!” Colonel Landcraft blazed up in sudden explosion, after his manner, and set his heel down hard on the floor, making his sword clank in its scabbard on his thigh.

“I have not had much to say,” Frances admitted, bitterly, “but I am going to have a great deal to 232 say in this matter now. Both of you have gone ahead about this thing just as if I was irresponsible, both of you—”

“Hold your tongue, miss! I command you—hold your tongue!”

“It’s the farthest thing from my heart to give you pain, or disappoint you in your calculations of me, father,” she told him, her voice gathering power, her words speed, for she was a warrior like himself, only that her balance was not so easily overthrown; “but I am not going to marry Major King.”

“Heaven and hell!” said Colonel Landcraft, stamping up and down.

“Heaven or hell,” said she, “and not hell—if I can escape it.”

“I’ll not permit this insubordination in a member of my family!” roared the colonel, his face fiery, his rumpled eyebrows knitted in a scowl. “I’ll have obedience, with good grace, and at once, or damn my soul, you’ll leave my house!”

“Major King, if you are a gentleman, sir, you will relieve me of this unwelcome pressure to force me against my inclination. It is quite useless, sir, I tell you most earnestly. I would rather die than marry you—I would rather die!”

“Sir, I have no wish to coerce the lady”—Major King’s voice shook, his words were low—“as she seems to have no preference for me, sir. Miss Landcraft perhaps has placed her heart somewhere else.”

“She has no right to act with such treachery to 233 me and you, sir,” the colonel said. “I’ll not have it! Where else, sir—who?”

“Spare me the humiliation of informing you,” begged Major King, with averted face, with sorrow in his voice.

“Oh, you slanderous coward!” Frances assailed him with scorn of word and look. Colonel Landcraft was shaking a trembling finger at her, his face thrust within a foot of her own.

“I’ll not have it! you’ll not—who is the fellow, who?”

“There is nothing to conceal, there is no humiliation on my part in speaking his name, but pride—the highest pride of my heart!”

She stood back from them a little, her lofty head thrown back, her face full of color now, the strength of defense of the man she loved in her brave brown eyes.

“Some low poltroon, some sneaking civilian—”

“He is a man, father—you have granted that. His name is—”

“Stop!” thundered the colonel. “Heaven and hell! Will you disgrace me by making public confession of your shame? Leave this room, before you drive me to send you from it with a curse!”

In her room Frances heard the horses come to the door to carry her father away. She had sat there, trembling and hot, sorry for his foolish rage, hurt by his narrow injustice. Yet she had no bitterness in her heart against him, for she believed that she 234 knew him best. When his passion had fallen he would come to her, lofty still, but ashamed, and they would put it behind them, as they had put other differences in the past.

Her mother had gone to him to share the last moments of his presence there, and to intercede for her. Now Frances listened, her hot cheek in her hand, her eyes burning, her heart surging in fevered stroke. There was a good deal of coming and going before the house; men came up and dismounted, others rode away. Watching, her face against the cool pane, she did not see her father leave. Yet he had not come to her, and the time for his going was past.

Her heart was sore and troubled at the thought that perhaps he had gone without the word of pacification between them. It was almost terrifying to her to think of that. She ran down the stairs and stood listening at his closed door.

That was not his voice, that heavy growl, that animal note. Saul Chadron’s; no other. Her mother came in through the front door, weeping, and clasped Frances in her arms as she stood there, shadowy in the light of the dim hall lamp.

“He is gone!” she said.

Frances did not speak. But for the first time in her life a feeling of bitterness against her father for his hardness of heart and unbending way of injustice lifted itself in her breast. She led her mother to her own room, giving her such comfort as she could put into words.

“He said he never marched out to sure defeat before,” Mrs. Landcraft told her. “I’ve seen him go many a time, Frances, but never with such a pain in my heart as tonight!”

And Saul Chadron was the man who had caused his going, Frances knew, a new illumination having come over the situation since hearing his voice in the colonel’s office a few minutes past. Chadron had been at Meander, telegraphing to the cattlemen’s servants in Washington all the time. He had demanded the colonel’s recall, and the substitution of Major King, because he wanted a man in authority at the post whom he could use.

This favoritism of Chadron made her distrustful at once of Major King. There must be some scheming and plotting afoot. She went down and stood in the hall again, not even above bending to listen at the keyhole. Chadron was talking again. She felt that he must have been talking all the time that she had been away. It must be an unworthy cause that needed so much pleading, she thought.

“Well, he’ll not shoot, I tell you, King; he’s too smart for that. He’ll have to be trapped into it. If you’ve got to have an excuse to fire on them—and I can’t see where it comes in, King, damn my neck if I can—we’ve got to set a trap.”

“Leave that to me,” returned Major King, coldly.

“How much force are you authorized to use?”

“The order leaves that detail to me. ‘Sufficient force to restore order,’ it says.”

“I think you ort to take a troop, at the least, King, and a cannon—maybe two.”

“I don’t think artillery will be necessary, sir.”

“Well, I’ll leave it to you, King, but I’d hate like hell to take you up there and have that feller lick you. You don’t know him like I do. I tell you he’d lay on his back and fight like a catamount as long as he had a breath left in him.”

“Can you locate them in the night?”

“I think we’d have to wait up there somewheres for daybreak. I’m not just sure which caÑon they are in.”

There was silence. Frances peeped through the keyhole, but could see nothing except thick smoke over bookcases and files.

“Well, we’ll not want to dislodge them before daylight, anyway,” said King.

“If Macdonald can back off without a fight, he’ll do it,” Chadron declared, “for he knows as well as you and I what it’d mean to fire on the troops. And I want you to git him, King, and make sure you’ve got him.”

“It depends largely on whether the fellow can be provoked into firing on us, Chadron. You think he can be; so do I. But in case he doesn’t, the best we can do will be to arrest him.”

“What good would he be to me arrested, King? I tell you I want his scalp, and if you bring that feller out of there in a sack you’ll come back a brigadier. I put you where you’re at. Well, I can put 237 you higher just as easy. But the purty I want for my trouble is that feller’s scalp.”

There was the sound of somebody walking about, in quick, nervous strides. Frances knew that Major King had got up from his usurped place at the desk—place unworthily filled, this low intrigue with Chadron aside, she knew—and was strutting in the shadow of his promised glory.

“Leave it to me, Chadron; I’ve got my own account to square with that wolf of the range!”

A sharp little silence, in which Frances could picture Chadron looking at King in his covert, man-weighing way. Then Chadron went on:

“King, I’ve noticed now and then that you seemed to have a soft spot in your gizzard for that little girl of mine. Well, I’ll throw her in to boot if you put this thing through right. Is it a go?”

“I’d hesitate to bargain for the young lady without her being a party to the business,” King replied, whether from wisdom born of his recent experience, or through lack of interest in the proposal Frances could not read in his even, well-pitched voice.

“Oh, she’d jump at you like a bullfrog at red flannel,” Chadron assured him. “I could put your uniform on a wooden man and marry him off to the best girl in seven states. They never think of lookin’ under a soldier’s vest.”

“You flatter me, Mr. Chadron, and the uniform of the United States army,” returned King, with barely covered contempt. “Suppose we allow events to 238 shape themselves in regard to Miss Chadron. She’ll hardly be entertaining marriage notions yet—after her recent experience.”

Chadron got up so quickly he overturned his chair.

“By God, sir! do you mean to intimate you wouldn’t have her after what she’s gone through? Well, I’ll put a bullet through any man that says—”

“Oh, hold yourself in, Chadron; there’s no call for this.”

King’s cold contempt would have been like a lash to a man of finer sensibilities than Saul Chadron. As it was, Frances could hear the heavy cattleman breathing like a mad bull.

“When you talk about my little girl, King, go as easy as if you was carryin’ quicksilver in a dish. You told me she was all right a little while ago, and I tell you I don’t like—”

“Miss Chadron was as bright as a redbird when I saw her this afternoon,” King assured him, calmly. “She has suffered no harm at the hands of Macdonald and his outlaws.”

“He’ll dance in hell for that trick before the sun goes down on another day!”

“His big play for sympathy fell flat,” said King, with a contemptuous laugh. “There wasn’t much of a crowd on hand when he arrived at the ranch.”

Silence. A little shifting of feet, a growl from Chadron, and a curse.

“But as for your proposal involving Miss Chadron, I am honored by it,” said King.

“Any man would be!” Chadron declared.

“And we will just let it stand, waiting the lady’s sanction.”

That brightened Chadron up. He moved about, and there was a sound as if he had slapped the young officer on the back in pure comradeship and open admiration.

“What’s your scheme for drawin’ that feller into firin’ on your men?” he asked.

“We’ll talk it over as we go,” said King.

A bugle lifted its sharp, electrifying note in the barracks.

“Boots and saddles!” Chadron said.

“Yes; we march at nine o’clock.”