"A Tale of the Wild West" (continued 5)

“Wagh, Golden Face!” exclaimed Sitting Bull, with grim humour. “Our squaws seem to handle your countrymen very tenderly.”

The adventurer made no reply. Even he felt his heart sicken within him at the thought of the hideous fate these two wretched men were about to undergo. Yet drawn by an uncontrollable impulse, he found himself moving beside the three Indians, who were strolling leisurely in the direction taken by the crowd. Not that his red friends manifested any interest in the proceedings. The torture of helpless prisoners was sport for boys and squaws, and unworthy of the attention of great chiefs or warriors of renown. Still, with the characteristic weakness of their race to witness anything unusual, they followed the crowd.

As the latter thundered along the open space, the inmates of the clustering groups of teepes on either side poured forth to swell its ranks. Young bucks would dart out in front, and execute a series of leaps in the air, uttering shrill whoops, and even the river was dotted with bull-boats, as the inhabitants of the villages on the opposite bank crowded over in hundreds to see the fun. Knives were flourished in the prisoners’ faces, kicks and slaps were their portion at every step; indeed, it almost seemed that the ill-usage of the infuriated mob would mercifully end their sufferings before they should reach the terrible stake. Something of this seemed to strike their tormentors themselves, for all of a sudden a compact band of young bucks charged into the mass, drove back the yelling squaws, and seizing the two unhappy wretches, dragged them forward at a smart run.

Just outside the village was a clear space. Here a couple of stout posts, eight or nine feet high, had been driven into the ground about a dozen yards apart.

And now Vipan had an opportunity of estimating the strength of the band or bands into whose midst he had so involuntarily penetrated. Far along the river-banks on either side, extending a distance of five or six miles, the tall lodges stood in lines and clusters among the thin belt of timber which lined the stream. These and the village behind him, roughly reckoning, he estimated to represent some four or five thousand warriors. Overhead the great mountains shot up their craggy heads, blasted into a score of fantastic shapes, frowning down upon the barbarous scene like grim tutelaries of destruction.

The two miserable men were backed against the posts and firmly secured, their arms being drawn up high above their heads and stretched to the utmost. Powerless to move a limb, they were ready for the torturers.

Suddenly a piercing cry for help burst from one of them. In it Vipan recognised his own name.

In deference to their rank, the crowd had made way for the chiefs in whose company he was. At a sign from Sitting Bull, it now gave way further, and Vipan was able to approach within easy speaking-distance of the prisoners.

“Oh, for God’s sake, Mr Vipan, save me from torture! Kill me—put me out of my misery at once!”

Vipan stared at the utterer of this agonised prayer. In the distorted features, cut and bruised out of all knowledge, and livid with the dews of bodily and mental anguish, in the strained eyeballs staring from their sockets in deadly fear, he could hardly recognise the unfortunate Geoffry Vallance.

A curious change passed over the adventurer’s face, so curious that even many of the Indians standing around noticed it and wondered.

“I am the last person in this world, of whom you ought to ask a benefit,” he said curtly.

Had there been time for reflection, poor Geoffry might well have been amazed. Now, half-frenzied with terror, he only moaned:

“Save me from the torture! Kill me, that is all I ask you!”

“I cannot if I would,” was the answer, in a more relenting tone. “How did you manage to let them capture you?”

“It was the day the camp was taken,” gasped the wretched prisoner. “I was lingering behind and got lost, and then my horse ran away when I was dismounted. I don’t know how it was, but I looked up and found myself in the middle of the Indians.”

“Well, I can do nothing for you. Mind me, though. I knew a chap in your position once. He managed to roll his tongue back into his throat and choke himself. He escaped the fire that way. Try it. It’s your only chance.”

The despairing moan with which this gloomy alternative was received was drowned by a loud cry from the other white man.

“Colonel Vipan. Git us out of this fix, for the Lord’s sake! I kin put you on to a good thing, I kin!”

The adventurer turned in amazement. He saw what was a villainous countenance at the best of times, and now with the shaggy beard matted with saliva and gouts of blood, it was hideous and horrible in the extreme. He recognised the man he had felled in the liquor saloon at Henniker City—Bitter Rube.

“How in thunder did you get into this hobble?” he said.

“It’s this way, Colonel. The red devils jumped us at our placer. They scalped the other three.”

“Burntwood Creek?”

“That’s it, Colonel. You get me out of this, and I’ll make you a rich man for life. There’s gold there worth millions and millions.”

“Glad to hear it, Bitter Rube,” was the unconcerned reply. “I know the place all right; going to work it by and by. It’s where your mate jumped me and got laid out for his pains. Remember your scheme to lynch me, eh, Bitter Rube?”

“Oh, Lord, Colonel. It was the other chaps. See here now—”

“Well, I can’t even repay the little service you were going to render me—a short shrift and a long rope,” interrupted Vipan, the scowling glances and increasing murmurs of the throng convincing him of the peril he himself was incurring. A frantic yell burst from the prisoner.

“You snake-spawned white Injun! Here’s a white man being cut into chunks before your eyes. I’ll haunt yer! I’ll ghost yer! I’ll make life a hell to yer!”

The miserable wretch went on to bellow the most frantic blasphemies. One of the young Indians, stepping up behind him, thrust a red-hot faggot into his open mouth. This was greeted as an excellent joke by the onlookers, who shouted and screamed with laughter. Then one of them applied a light to the victim’s unkempt and shaggy beard. It frizzled and flared up, burning the wretched man frightfully about the face and head. The mirth of the spectators became well-nigh uncontrollable.

“How! white brudder,” said a burly buck, grinning hideously into Geoffry’s face, and patting him fraternally on the shoulder. “Injun brudder hab heap fun. Injun brudder not hurt you first. Other man hurt first—you see him—you hab heap good fun. You hurt first, you no laugh—other hurt first, you plenty laugh—Injun brudder plenty laugh. How—how!”

Then the wretched Geoffry understood that with a diabolical refinement of cruelty the savages intended that he should witness the torture and death of his companion in adversity before his own turn came. He could only raise his eyes stupidly to the grinning countenance of his addresser.

Two squaws now stepped forward—hideous hags whose long flattened breasts fell in disgusting flaps below their waists. They were nearly naked, and each held in her hand a sharp knife. Advancing to the sufferer they made an incision down each of his sides, and proceeded to skin him alive as coolly as a butcher would flay a dead sheep.

The anguished shrieks of the victim were terrible to hear; but no spark of pity did they stir in the hearts of the ruthless fiends who crowded around, gloating over this diabolical performance. They danced and laughed, leaping high in the air, hurling taunting epithets at the miserable victim, and exhorting the other prisoner to observe what was in store for him. And in their hellish glee the women, if anything, surpassed the younger and more ferocious of the warriors.

For nearly an hour the scene went on—varied at intervals by the passing of a lighted torch along those portions of the victim’s body already laid bare. The piercing shrieks of the tortured wretch sunk into laboured and hollow groans—then ceased altogether. He had fainted.

A glance having sufficed to show them that he was not dead, the performers stood back, contemplating their handiwork with a grin of ferocious satisfaction. And so deftly had they done it, that from chin to feet, the front and sides of the sufferer’s body was entirely denuded of skin, which hung from his shoulders in a bleeding and ghastly mantle. Yet this was only the first stage of his torture.

Vipan, who had perforce witnessed this hideous spectacle, felt seized with a violent and well-nigh uncontrollable nausea, and would have turned away. But as the exhibition of the slightest repulsion or feeling would have been not merely inexpedient, but highly dangerous, he was constrained to master himself. Besides, a sort of horrible fascination rooted him to the spot—an overmastering and morbid curiosity to see how the other prisoner would fare.

Sitting Bull, who with a few other chiefs had been witnessing the hellish performance with grave impassiveness, must have read his thoughts.

“They are not King George men,” he remarked laconically. “They are not your countrymen, Golden Face.”

Vipan made no reply. The remark suggested an idea. He might be able to save Geoffry by claiming him as a fellow-countryman. A strange struggle took place within him. Why should he? If he attempted to do so it would be at deadly risk to himself, and even then would he meet with success? And apart from these considerations, as he himself had told the unfortunate one, he was the last man from whom the latter should claim any assistance.

Then the bloodthirsty rage of the barbarous horde took a fresh turn. Their one victim was for the time being insensible to pain, but there was another. Him they had been reserving with this end in view. Shouts were raised that it was time to begin upon him.

With a wild-beast laugh, the two fiend-like hags approached the new victim, their reeking knives in hand, the yells and roars of the crowd urging them on. The miserable Geoffry, bound immovably to the stake, watched their approach. His eyes protruded from their sockets, a cold sweat rained down his distorted countenance, and there was a strange hoarse rattle in his throat. It was a sight to haunt the spectator for a lifetime. Then his head fell heavily forward on his chest.

Seizing him by the hair, one of the female fiends forced it back. It was as lead in her grasp. Then the truth became apparent. The miserable captive was stone-dead. He had died of sheer horror and fright.

A moment of silence, then with a wild yell of disappointed fury the ferocious crowd flung itself upon the corpse and hacked and mutilated it into a shapeless and gory mass. Then the blind madness of their bloodthirsty rage fairly let loose, they turned once more to the first victim. The scalp was torn from his head; knives and burning splinters were stuck into his flesh; and the yet warm and palpitating heart was plucked out and reared aloft on the point of a lance. Then bundles of dry brushwood were piled around both of the mangled corpses, and set alight, and soon the red tongues of flame—whose roaring and crackling was drowned by the frenzied yells of the savages as they danced and leaped around like devils let loose from the nethermost hell—shot upward, licking around the cruel stakes of torture, and a horrible and sickening odour of burning flesh hung upon the air. A great volume of smoke mounted to the heavens, and, after watching it for a while, the whole fiend-like crowd surged back to the village, there to hold a gigantic scalp-dance—bearing the reeking trophies aloft on lance-points.

All that remained of the border ruffian and the unfortunate Geoffry Vallance were two little heaps of calcined bones.

Chapter Thirty Five.

The Sun Queen.

A month had gone by. The mountain air had become thin and steely, and the gorgeous glories of the golden-hued woods were falling fast. Winter was in the atmosphere.

In the villages of the hostiles time was of no account. Dancing and warlike exercises, gossip, story-telling and gambling, and hunting in the adjacent mountains, thus this great gathering of savages on a war-footing solaced their leisure hours—which were many. Bands of warriors, under some favourite chief or partisan, would strike the war-post, and sally forth on some more or less desperate foray, returning in due time with scalps or plunder, or both. Once they brought with them a wretched prisoner, who was promptly done to death under the usual circumstances of revolting barbarity.

Now, of this life Vipan had become heartily sick. Accustomed as he was to come and go at will among the camps and villages of the Sioux, the restraint of knowing himself a prisoner galled him. For although allowed a certain amount of liberty, and rather ostentatiously treated as a guest, he was carefully watched. But it is doubtful whether another cause had not more to do with his weariness and disgust. That was no mere passing passion whose expression had so nearly escaped him when standing in the dug-out with Yseulte Santorex. By an inexplicable rebound from his wild and reckless life, this man’s mature mind and strong nature had sprung to the other extreme. Well he knew—none better—his position, or, rather, the utter lack of it, did he return to civilisation, and there were times when he felt tempted to throw himself in heart and soul with his Indian friends, to lead them on the war-path, and in ferocity and daring excelling even the savages themselves, to devote the remainder of his life to acts of vengeance upon that civilisation whose laws had placed it in the power of a specious hypocrite to drive him forth from its midst a pauper and an outcast—acts of barbarous and bloody vengeance that should render his name a terror to the whole of the Western frontier. What had he to do with softness—with love—at his time of life? Yseulte Santorex would be safe in her English home by this time, probably recalling—when she did recall it—their acquaintanceship only as a passing romance embedded among her other adventurous experiences. With such reflections would he lash and torture himself.

More than once when accompanying some of their hunting parties into the mountains he had been seized by a wild impulse to make a dash for liberty. But the cat-like watchfulness of the Indians never flagged, and upon such occasions a glance was enough to show the impracticability of any such scheme. The first step would be the signal for a volley of bullets through his body—moreover, he was never allowed the use of anything but an inferior steed.

And now, day by day, his situation became more precarious. Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, and the other chiefs had somehow waxed more than doubtful of late as to whether his services in regard to a possible British intervention would be of any use at all—and this idea was insidiously fostered by his enemies, who were many and powerful—Mountain Cat, the Ogallalla war-chief, and Crow-Scalper, who hated all whites, and the band of young desperadoes who had attached themselves to the fortunes of War Wolf. The latter brave’s bumptiousness had become simply overwhelming. Full of the recently-acquired importance conferred upon him by his captivity among the whites and subsequent escape, he would strut and swagger around, bedecked in all his war-paint and finery—passing Vipan with a contemptuous laugh or a remark of covert insolence. The only consideration that restrained the latter from inflicting summary chastisement was the certainty that the hour he did so would be his last. And his friend and protector, Mahto-sapa, was frequently absent on warlike or diplomatic expeditions. The sullen and hostile feeling growing around him was written on every grim and scowling face. He felt as helpless as a fly in a spider’s web.

Pondering over these things, he was seated one day alone in the lodge of his host—the latter being away upon one of those absences which constituted such a peril to himself—when a shadow darkened the entry and a feminine voice inquired in English:

“May I come in?”

He started, as well he might. The accent was pure and refined, the tone firm and pleasing. For answer he rose and bowed, and the speaker entered.

Strange as it may seem, during all this while Vipan had seen his host’s white wife by no more than a few stray passing glimpses, and then at a distance. It had always struck him that she avoided him with design, and he had respected her motives. She dwelt in two teepes, which she occupied all to herself—an unwonted luxury—and was attended on by a Shoshone slave girl of unrivalled hideosity, captured on one of the chief’s forays into the country of the Snakes.

He saw before him a tall, fine-looking woman who might or might not have been under forty. She was habited in the tasteful Indian dress, and the tunic and leggings of soft doeskin, beautifully embroidered, brought out every line and curve of a splendidly-moulded figure. Her face, browned and hardened by exposure to the sun, and a life not altogether free from privation, was lighted up by a pair of clear blue eyes, and must formerly have been one of striking beauty. But the chief attraction was her hair. This was not arranged in two long plaits after the Sioux fashion, but rippled over her shoulders in a heavy redundant mass, forming a very mantle of sheeny, ruddy gold, explaining to the astonished spectator the name she bore among her adopted compatriots, The Sun Queen. But—Heavens—what an apparition to meet with in the camp of the hostile Sioux!

“Thanks,” she said, simply, seating herself upon the pile of robes which Vipan had dragged forward for that purpose. Then pausing a moment to see if he would break the silence, she went on: “You do not seem to remember me.”

“Pardon me. I am not likely to have forgotten you,” was the quiet reply, with an undercurrent of cutting satire. “Who that had seen her could ever forget the beautiful Miss D’Arcy—the Belle of the Island?” She broke into a bitter laugh. “Is that what they used to call me? I had forgotten—it seems such a long, long time ago. Could it have been myself? I, Isabel D’Arcy, who held the whole island in thrall; Government House, the garrison—all—all my humble devoted slaves, now the wife of a painted savage! In a word, an Indian squaw!”

“And because I declined to make one of the crowd of your humble devoted slaves you ruined my life. You blighted my whole career as a sacrifice to your ruffled vanity. One word from you would have exonerated me—yet you did not speak it.”

“Why did you not defend yourself? Why did you not explain the matter fully?”

“I was a fool not to, perhaps. In fact, I am sure I was. Well, you see—it was no part of my creed to give away a friend, nor yet a woman—for it was in a secondary degree on your account that I kept silence and set up no defence.”

“On my account?” she echoed.

“Yes. Your only chance of getting clear out of the business was to deny the whole thing and stick to it. If I had cut in with the story of the other man borrowing my charger for the occasion, especially as owing to our striking resemblance we were often taken for each other—why the whole murder would have been out. No, there was nothing for it but the denial.”

“And—and have you never explained a word of it since?”

“Never. What was the use? I was already condemned. Your uncle, Sir George, had more than enough influence for that, and I was practically cashiered. I must, however, give him credit for the astute way in which the business was hushed up. Barentyne, I suppose, couldn’t clear me for fear of giving you away.”

“And what became of Major Barentyne?” she asked eagerly.

“He left the service soon afterwards. He’s a governor-general now, a sort of viceroy, and all sorts of things; while I’m—well, a fair specimen of a Western border ruffian. Thus, in this world, is the saddle clapped upon the wrong horse, and the scapegoat is jerked forth into the wilderness—and it doesn’t much matter.”

There was no heat, no upbraiding in his tone. After the first touch of satire underlying his recognition of her he spoke in an even, almost monotonous voice, puffing slowly at his long Indian pipe with the impassiveness of the red men themselves. Then a silence fell between them. The meeting, the conversation, seemed to have bridged over the weary, hopeless years of captivity of the one, the aimless and chequered wanderings of the other. By magic the Indian teepe, with its confusion of parflèches and robes and cooking-pots and wicker-beds, seemed to have disappeared, and once more their minds were back among the Government House state and the garrison festivities of the island colony, and many a familiar, but long-forgotten, face and memory of other days. And now the once beautiful girl who had queened it there, the descendant of a good old line, was the weary, middle-aged wife of a Sioux chief, doomed to live and die among the red barbarians. Truly the whirligig of Fortune was executing a strange freak when it brought these two face to face thus.

“I have, indeed, injured you,” she said at length. “But I can yet make some amends?”

He shook his head.

“Listen,” she went on. “I can do this. I can give you in writing a full and true statement of the whole affair. Then you can return home and clear yourself.”

“And to what end?” he answered. “Nothing on earth is to be gained by raking up old troubles already forgotten. Besides, you are forgetting; I am a prisoner here, and, candidly, have very small hope of ever knowing liberty again. My time is about run out. Do you know that from hour to hour I live in unceasing apprehension of treachery? Any moment may be my last. See, I have an old pistol here—only one shot. I am keeping it for myself, if necessary, for I will never figure at their hellish stake.”

She shuddered.

“But,” she urged, lowering her voice, and speaking quickly, “but what if I can help you to escape?”

He looked up, a flash of hope in his eyes. Then he shook his head.

“I’m afraid it can’t be done. They would be certain to detect your agency in the matter, and then what would be your fate?”

“What, you can still make that a consideration!” she exclaimed in amazement. Then, suddenly she burst into a flood of tears.

“Forgive me,” she said, quickly recovering herself. “I am very foolish. But you are the first of my race I have conversed with for eight long years. The only white faces I have seen during that time have been those of wretched prisoners brought in for torture and outrage, or of horse thieves and border ruffians, more repulsive and villainous than those of the savages themselves.”

“I had no idea of your identity,” he said, “until you came in here just now. Then I recognised you, for I never forget a face. I am not easily astonished, but I was then. If the subject is not painful I should be glad to know the circumstances of your being here at all.”

She laughed drearily.

“Oh, no! Feeling is pretty well dead by now, and happily so. The story is that of many another, only I suppose I ought to reckon myself fortunate when I think of what I have seen others go through. In an evil moment I arranged to come home from the Islands with some friends, who were anxious to do the trip overland. We landed at San Francisco, and all went well until we reached this side of the mountains. We were a small party, so small that the people at Fort Laramie tried all they could to dissuade us from going on, as most of the tribes were on the war-path. We were attacked on the banks of the North Platte, about two days out from Laramie. It was early in the morning, and we had just hitched up for a start. The spring waggon containing ourselves was a little behind the rest. Suddenly a band of warriors, hundreds of them it seemed, charged in upon us yelling like fiends. The teamsters were shot dead in a moment. Mr Elsdale, under whose protection I was travelling, was run through with a lance almost before he had time to fire a shot, and his wife and I were at the mercy of the savages. Even now I would rather not think of what she had to go through.”

“And yourself?”

“I fainted, mercifully. I must have remained unconscious for hours, for when I came to I found myself tightly held by a powerful Indian in front of his saddle. The party was travelling at a considerable pace, and some of them carried freshly-taken scalps, those of our unfortunate outfit. My captor smiled good-humouredly as I opened my eyes, and, with signs and a word or two of English, told me not to be afraid, they were not going to kill me. Even then it struck me that he had a fine face. There was an expression of humanity and kindness in it totally absent from the hideous and painted visages of the rest. That man was Mahto-sapa.”

She paused, and seemed to make an effort to proceed. Her listener, keenly interested, still smoked gravely without speaking.

“That night, when we halted, there was a frightful scene. Mrs Elsdale was a prisoner too, but I had not seen her until then. Well, you know Indians and their ways. She was dead before morning. That I escaped the same brutal treatment was due to the chief. It appears that he had captured me with his own hand, and he claimed me as his exclusive property. There was nearly a fight over me, and I have since learned that it was little short of a miracle that he carried his point. Well, I was taken to their head village unmolested, for the chief protected me unswervingly the whole way, and then he took me as his wife. What could I do, at the mercy of a band of ruthless savages? Some women might have killed themselves, but I was a full-blooded creature and clung to life; besides I always had a strong dash of the Bohemian in me.”

Vipan remembered how that very thing used to be said of her among the envious gossips of the island colony, who had predicted all sorts of queer futures for Isabel D’Arcy. Surely, however, that which had befallen her was many degrees queerer than even they had ever designed for her.

“The chief was a splendid-looking man,” she continued, “and I felt genuinely grateful to him when I thought what he had saved me from. So I made a virtue of necessity, and resolved to make the best of the situation; and that I succeeded in obtaining a certain amount of ascendancy over him you may judge from the style in which I am allowed to live. He has always treated me well, and I have never been molested in the smallest degree from the time it was an understood thing that I was his property. I have more than once been the means of saving a wretched prisoner, not from death—that would be beyond even my power—but from the frightful ordeal of the stake. The reason why those two unhappy wretches were done to death outside the village the last time instead of here, in its midst, was on my account. The horrible sights I have witnessed here would make even you turn sick. Well, I laid myself out to acquire influence among the Indians, doctoring them in a small way and teaching them various little things; and once my position assured I took no small pains to keep up its dignity. They soon named me The Sun Queen.”

“And do you never contemplate a return to civilisation—to your friends?” said her listener as she paused in her narrative.

“Never. Friends! Why, I never had a real one; and as for relations, they would spurn me from their door. No, I am accustomed to this life now, and I shall live and die among the Sioux, the squaw of a savage. Rather a contemptible object, am I not?” she ended, with a harsh and bitter laugh.

“No, I should not say that,” said Vipan, slowly, puffing out a great cloud of smoke.

“What!” eagerly. “You do not despise me in your heart?”

“Certainly not. Look here. Let us put the case fairly and without prejudice. Supposing you had lived the ordinary society life. You might, as hundreds have done before you, have married some vulgar parvenu—we’ll say from force of circumstances—or a fellow who got drunk on the quiet and threw empty bottles at you, or some execrable gutterling who happened to be rolling in money. Civilised men and Christians, mind. I am brutally frank, you see. Or again, more than one Englishwoman of birth and breeding has been known to espouse some slant-eyed, sallow-skinned Oriental for the sake of his rank and jewels, sometimes not even that. Well, you have allowed that Mahto-sapa, as a man, is not contemptible either in aspect or qualities. Now I call him a king in comparison with such as I have just mentioned. Of those who would define him as a heathen and a savage, not one in a hundred could boast half his good points. My opinion is that you have shown sound judgment in making the best of the situation.”

“Do you know, you have taken a weight off my mind. I had often thought of what you now say, but required someone else’s opinion. No, I shall live and die among these people. But you? I will think out and form some plan for you to escape, but I do not disguise from you that it will be difficult and risky. And should you find yourself threatened with immediate danger, do not delay, take refuge at once in my lodge. I believe they would hesitate to pursue you there.”

She rose from her seat with a lithe, rapid movement, grasped his hand, and glided from the lodge.

Chapter Thirty Six.

A Tardy Reparation.

Vipan, left alone, felt drowsy, and kicking up the lodge fire into a blaze, rolled himself in a blanket and lay down in the long wicker basket which did duty as his bed. But sleep refused to come. This strange meeting had something weird about it. That this woman, whose selfish reticence had ruined his life, to screen whom he had sacrificed his prospects up to blighting point, as to whose whereabouts he had long ceased to speculate, should appear before him alone in the camp of the hostile Sioux—living there as one of themselves—struck him as little short of miraculous, and a superstitious feeling seemed to warn him, eagerly as he strove to dismiss it, that an occurrence so startling, so entirely out of all reckoning, portended some grave crisis to himself. Was her appearance after all these years destined to herald some other turning-point in his life? Thus musing, sleep at length overcame him, and still his dreams were haunted by the sad face of the ex-society belle, doomed to spend her life among savages, even resigned to that deplorable destiny.

A stealthy form wormed itself quickly through the opening of the teepe. Vipan, who slept with one eye open, never moved, but his hand tightened on the stock of the pistol in his breast. Only for a moment, though; for he recognised the hideous lineaments and beady eyes of the Shoshone slave girl.

“Rise quickly, Golden Face,” whispered the latter. “The Sun Queen sends for you. Come at once.”

Prepared for any emergency, he obeyed without a word. It was already dusk, and at the other end of the village were signs of a gathering of some sort which was about to take place. Unobserved, he entered Isabel D’Arcy’s tent.

Enjoining caution by a sign, she beckoned him to a seat. The firelight glinted on her shining hair, and he noticed that her still handsome face was clouded with anxiety. The teepe was furnished in quasi-civilised style. There was a camp bedstead instead of the Indian wicker basket, a table, two trunks, and even a few books.

“I have just learned something,” she began, “that renders it necessary for you to make the attempt at once. Listen. Time is short, and we must lose none of it. There is to be a big scalp-dance to-night in the Ogallalla camp. Hark! They are beginning now. Afterwards you are to be seized and put to the torture. I know the plot—never mind how. Nothing can save you. The Ogallallas have fourteen hundred warriors in the village, and are all-powerful. The whole of our band, except about fifty, are away with Mahto-sapa, and even he could hardly protect you if he were here. Mountain Cat, War Wolf, Long Bull, and a dozen others are all in the plot. Now, quick—quick, I say!” stamping her foot. “Obey me or you are lost. Take as much as you can carry of this,” handing him a parflèche half full of dried meat. “And this is the only weapon I can find.”

With a thrill of satisfaction he found himself in possession of a large navy revolver, loaded in every chamber.

“But,” he objected, “if I get clear will they not visit it upon you?”

“No. They dare not. Quick. You have only an hour’s start, with the best of luck. You may not have ten minutes. Roll your blanket round your chin, so as to hide your beard, and put on this.”

She handed him an Indian head-dress of beadwork and cloth, from whose summit rose a tall eagle-feather. Fixing it on, he stood there transformed into a stalwart savage.

“Now, my plan is simple—in fact, ridiculous. You must personate an Indian larking with my slave girl here. She will pretend to run away, and you must pursue her. She will lead you to the nearest herd of ponies; you must catch one and trust to luck. Now, good-bye. God speed you!”

He thought he detected a quaver in her voice as she grasped his hands, and would have lingered. She stamped her foot angrily.

“Go, go! You are endangering both of us, and the plan will fall through.” And she almost pushed him from the lodge.

A mischievous cackle, and the dark form of the Shoshone girl glided round the outside of the teepe. Vipan, entering thoroughly into his rôle, started boldly in pursuit. So well did he act up to it that a group of squaws whom he passed within ten yards screamed with laughter at the sight of a stalwart buck larking after the Sun Queen’s hideous slave, no less than at the broad jests which he was gruffly hurling after her as she ran.

The dark figure still glided on between the teepes, hardly visible in the falling gloom. To those who did see it the sight was an everyday one, so that beyond a shout of mirth and a boisterous wish for his success, no notice was taken of it.

The last line of teepes was passed. In front lay the timber belt, then a subdued “crunch, crunch,” betokened the proximity of a group of ponies. The dark figure of the Shoshone girl had disappeared. “The nearest,” his deliverer had said. His lariat rope was ready. Gently, soothingly, he approached the one he reckoned the best. Up went the perverse brute’s head with a resentful snort, as it sidled and backed away. He tried another, with the same result. His heart was in his mouth. The ponies had stopped feeding, and were gazing at him in alarm. The least thing might stampede the herd and arouse the attention of its owners. There was no time to lose. Whirling the noose around his head he let fly. The coils tautened out. The affrighted animal thus noosed, plunged, and fell heavily. He was upon it like lightning. Avoiding the kicking hoofs, he wrenched a bight of the rope into its mouth, jerked the trembling and terrified steed to its feet, and was on its back like a circus-rider. The rest of the herd trotted away, snorting and throwing up their heels.

Suddenly a wild, shrill whoop went up from the village. Ah! now for the race for life; but what were the odds in his favour? They had discovered his flight.

On, through the darkness, the fugitive urged his unwilling steed, whose bucking and plunging would have unseated any less skilful horseman. And as he fled, carefully picking his ground with the instinct of a consummate plainsman, he strained his ears through the darkness to catch the first sounds of pursuers behind, of a possible manoeuvre to outflank and head him in front. But the discovery had not, in fact, been made. The wild shouts were the yells of the scalp-dance just beginning. Fainter and fainter behind him sounded the savage chorus, then died away, and amid the solitude of the grim mountain waste only the soft hoof-beats of his steed, and the occasional scream of a panther among the craggy heights, broke upon the dead and ghostly silence of the night.

Chapter Thirty Seven.

Between the Living and the Dead.

With the first lightening of dawn, the fugitive realised that it behoved him to exercise tenfold wariness. Save one brief halt to rest his steed, he had ridden the night through, and now he intended to lie hidden in some snug retreat until darkness again should cover his flight beneath its friendly folds. A shallow stream flowed close at hand, now losing itself in the timber, now gurgling along a grassy bottom, to emerge a few hundred yards further down. Into the water Vipan now guided his steed, and riding down stream, emerged a mile or so further on. This manoeuvre, executed with the object of hiding his trail, he had performed already twice that night.

The morning dawned but slowly; dark and cold, for a thick mist had settled down on the land. And now it seemed to Vipan that the ground was becoming less precipitous. Could he be getting clear of the mountains already? Suddenly the murmur of guttural voices struck upon his ear, and strangely enough they sounded ahead of him.

Softly he checked his horse. Then to his unbounded amazement the subdued murmur arose again. This time it was behind him.

A puff of air drove a space through the mist, and now Vipan’s heart stood still. On either side of him, all around, gigantic in the filmy wrack which swept over them in thickening or decreasing folds, loomed shadowy horsemen. Their deep-toned conversation, their plumed heads and painted faces, were only too familiar to this man who was flying there for his life. He was riding in the very midst of a war-party.

Their strength he could not estimate. Ghostly forms appearing and disappearing as the mist thickened or partially dispersed, no clue could he obtain as to their numbers. One even called out to him a remark. He answered with a laconic grunt, and in his heart fervently blessed the foresight of his deliverer which had invested him with the eagle-crested head-dress. The savages evidently took him for one of their party. Fervently, too, did he bless the welcome fog and its kindly aid, for the fraud could not have lived a moment in broad daylight.

Gradually, imperceptibly, he checked his steed. Any moment the fog might lift. He must back out of this perilous escort as imperceptibly as he had entered it. But, just as he reckoned himself clear, a fresh group of figures would start up on his rear, and canter forward in the wake of those who had gone before. These ceased, and by the time the fog began fairly to roll back beneath the dispelling power of the rising sun, Vipan, to his inexpressible relief, found himself alone. Then spying a confused heap of rocks and bushes high up on the slope of a hill he made for it. As a hiding-place it was perfect. Entering its welcome shelter, he secured his tired steed in such wise that the animal could crop the green herbage growing in the cool shadow of the rocks. Then he lay down and fell fast asleep.

When at length he awoke it was with a shiver of cold. The sun was not an hour from the western horizon. He had slept the whole day.

Cautiously he peered forth. His hiding-place, being at a considerable elevation, afforded a wide view of the surrounding country. The blue line of the Black Hills cleft the sky to the south-eastward, and he could make out the granite cone of the towering Inyan Kara. His course had so far been an accurate one.

Suddenly a moving object caught his eye. Was the land absolutely bristling with enemies? Advancing along his trail far down in the bottom came a file of mounted figures. Though nearly three miles off, there was no mistaking them or their object. Then he chuckled sardonically. The trail of the war-party, under whose escort he had so unwillingly travelled for ever so brief a space, would obliterate his own a hundred times over.

Nearer and nearer they drew, riding at an easy canter. He made out forty-one Indians in war-costume. He watched them with a sneer and a chuckle.

Suddenly, when nearly abreast of his position, the leader halted, gazing intently at the ground. The band clustered round him, then scattered, as if searching for more trail. Then a smothered curse escaped the lips of the watcher. In obedience to a rapid signal, the whole band had diverged from the trail of the war-party, and was heading straight for his place of concealment. It was all up with him. They had lighted upon his trail. It was time to give them the slip.

He sent one more glance at the party. Strung out in single file, the warriors were riding along his trail, like a pack of hounds with their noses to the ground. In their leader he recognised his implacable and untiring foe, War Wolf.

“All right,” he muttered between his teeth, as he twisted the lariat rope into the horse’s mouth. “All right, my friend. You’re bound for the Happy Hunting-Grounds this time. We’ll get there together.”

His horse, fresh and rested, bore him bravely as he dashed forth, leaving the hill and the covert between himself and his pursuers. Well he knew what would happen. The Indians would not ride straight up to the bushes. They would halt and cast round the hill to see if his trail led away again. This would give him a start.

The face of the country on this side was a series of rolling slopes freely dotted with clumps of straggling timber. Some distance ahead he noted a long dark line of forest. Night was at hand; could he reach this in time he might yet hope to escape.

Then a long, pealing whoop went up. The Sioux had discovered him, and with exultant shouts each warrior lashed his pony into the utmost speed.

For half an hour the furious chase continued. Vipan, glancing over his shoulder, became aware that his pursuers were slowly gaining on him. On—on. The forest belt would soon be reached, and meanwhile the dusking shadows were lengthening around.

He gained the first straggling patch of scrub. A few hundred yards and he would be within the welcome refuge, when his horse put a foot on the crusted surface of a mud-hole, turned a somersault, and his rider came whizzing to the earth.

Vipan arose. Throughout the horror of the shock his self-possession did not desert him, for he retained firm hold of the lariat rope. He was on his feet again, active as a cat, though stiff and bruised, but his steed stood shaking with alarm, using its right foreleg limpingly.

A yell of exultation went up from the pursuers. Half-a-dozen warriors, better mounted than the rest, were some distance ahead. So easy a capture would be that of the unarmed fugitive that they had not troubled to hold a weapon in readiness. Now they began to whirl their lassos ready for a throw.

Vipan, perfectly cool, crouched behind a bush, his revolver pointed. On they came, War Wolf leading, a grin of triumph wreathing his fierce features. A hundred yards—then fifty. A ringing report—a jet of flame in the glooming twilight. War Wolf threw up his arms and lurched heavily forward upon his horse’s neck. The terrified animal, snorting and rearing, dashed away at a tangent, dragging his rider, who had somehow become entangled in the caparisonings.

And what a howl of rage and consternation rent the air! They had not bargained for this, for they believed the fugitive to be unarmed. Panic-stricken for the moment, they halted, then some of them dashed off to the succour of their leader. But they need not have done so. The bullet had sped true. The young partisan had shouted his last war-whoop.

Profiting by this temporary check, the hunted man had again sprung on the back of his horse. Lame or not, the animal must carry him further yet. On—on. The forest belt was gained. He plunged beneath its shadows, only to find it was mere straggling timber—not thick enough for hiding purposes. The frosty air cut his face and the leaves crackled crisply under his horse’s hoofs. He drew his knife and pricked the poor brute furiously in the hinder quarters. The fierce yells of the savages drawing nearer and nearer told only too plainly that they had no intention of relinquishing the pursuit, and the horse was beginning to go dead lame.

“Cau—aak!”

He glanced involuntarily upward. A huge raven disturbed on its roost flapped away in alarm. But another sight met his eye. Extending horizontally from two sturdy limbs of a Cottonwood tree, cleaving the wintry sky, was a long dark object. Vipan recognised one of those platforms on which the Indians deposit their dead—like Mohammed’s coffin, midway between earth and heaven.

His mind was made up in a flash. Checking his horse he dismounted, and tearing a bunch of thorns from a bush, proceeded deliberately to insert them beneath the poor animal’s tail. Then, as the horse galloped off in a perfect frenzy of pain and terror, he slipped up the tree and gained the burial platform, literally flattening himself against its ghastly burden. It was a hideous alternative.

Scarcely had he gained this gruesome refuge than the pursuers passed beneath. They were barely fifteen feet below him as he lay flattened there, not even daring to breathe as the savages swept by, guided by the frenzied gallop which, seeming to have gained redoubled speed, they could hear still ahead of them. It was a desperate expedient, but it had answered so far.

“Cau—aak! Cau—aak!”

Like an evil spirit let loose beneath the frosty heavens came the black swoop of the raven he had disturbed, and the hunted man saw it with a cold shiver. He dared not even turn his head. The warriors might return at any moment from their fool’s errand, and then even a breath might seal his fate. A strong shudder of disgust ran through his frame. The hideous croak of the ill-omened bird brought back vividly that other scene—the two grinning blood-stained skulls lying there in the dark forest by Burntwood Creek, and the startling challenge of their would-be avenger. Involuntarily he turned his head, and a revulsion of horror caused him to shrink back in spite of himself, and nearly to fall from his precarious resting-place. For within six inches of his face his glance lighted upon a fearful sight. A human countenance scowled upon him—but such a face. From the blackened and mummified skin drawn tightly over the protruding bones, the glazed eyes seemed to glare anew with menace and hate towards the violator of their resting-place. Shadowy yet distinct in the light of the new moon this horrible countenance, peering as it were from the fantastic cerements of barbarous sepulture, was enough to unhinge the stoutest nerves. A grisly skeleton-claw raised in mid-air, as though about to grapple with the impious intruder, completed the horror, while overhead, like the fierce spirit of the departed warrior yet hovering around its decaying tenement, the grim raven flapped in circles, emitting its gruesome croak.

“Pooh!” said the fugitive to himself, making a strong effort to overcome his not unnatural horror. “Pooh! While the country’s swarming with live redskins hunting for my scalp, am I going to be scared by one dead one? Not much—not much!”

An hour wore on—then two. Wolves howled dismally over the midnight waste, and still that grisly countenance glared menacingly in the moonlight—and still they lay side by side, the dust of the half-forgotten dead, and the living, breathing, vigorous frame—welded together in that weird partnership—its object the saving of a life.

Thus they lay, side by side—the dead warrior preserving the life of the hereditary enemy of his race.

Chapter Thirty Eight.

Another Bomb for the Rev. Dudley.

Once more we must peep into the library at Lant Hall.

Mr Vallance sat in his accustomed chair, thinking. His gaze would wander from the window to the blazing fire and back again, and the frown of anxiety deepened on his features. Without, the wind howled shrilly through the bare boughs, and a few scattered flakes of snow whirled in the air.

“Why did we ever let him go?” he exclaimed aloud. “Why did we ever let him go?”

Even as when last we saw him, Mr Vallance was terribly anxious on behalf of his son. His former misgivings had been allayed by the subsequent receipt of a letter from Geoffry; which missive, however, had given him to understand that it was the last the writer would have an opportunity of sending for some time—in fact, until he should be on his way home again. Characteristically, too, this letter contained only vague and general information that the writer had fallen in with and joined Winthrop’s outfit; and of his meeting with Yseulte Santorex, not a word. It was of no use worrying about the matter, decided the Rev. Dudley. Any post might now bring intelligence that the boy was on his way home. It was poor comfort, and again he found himself repeating:

“Why did we ever allow him to go?”

Of the other affair which had so sorely troubled him—his cousin’s unexpected and preposterous claim—he had heard no more. His apprehensions first were lulled, then subsided altogether. The whole business was palpably a “try on.”

A sound of subdued voices outside, then a knock.

“A gentleman wishes to see you, sir.”

In his then frame of mind, Mr Vallance could not but feel startled by the interruption.

“Who is he, James?” he asked, quickly.

“He wouldn’t give his name, sir. He said as how you’d be sure to see him, sir.”

“Quite right, quite right,” said a deep voice, whose owner entered behind the astonished flunkey. “Er—How do, Dudley!”

If Mr Vallance had been startled before, the expression of his features now betokened a state of mind little short of scare. His face had turned as white as a sheet, and his jaw fell as he stood helplessly staring at his visitor.

“Why—bless my soul—Ralph,” he stammered. Then advancing with outstretched hand, “Why—Ralph—I’m—I’m glad to see you. I hope you have come to stay with us for a time.”

The visitor’s reception of this friendly—this hospitable overture, was singular. Standing bolt upright, he deliberately put his hand behind his back.

“Glad to see me!” he echoed, with a sneer. “No, you are not. Why tell a—tarra-diddle. Such a tarra-diddle, too—and you a preacher—er—I beg your pardon—a priest, it used to be, if I remember right. You would sooner see the devil himself at this moment than me.”

Under the sting of this reply, the parson recovered a certain amount of dignity.

“Really,” he said, stiffly, “your behaviour is strange, to put it mildly. May I ask, then, the object of your intru— your visit.”

“Certainly, if it affords you any satisfaction.” Then glancing around the room, and finishing up with a look out of the window, he went on. “Say, cousin Dudley, this is a pretty shebang enough. The object of my visit is this: You’ve bossed up this show about long enough. Suppose you abdicate now and let me have a turn?”

“Have you taken leave of your senses?”

“Not much. Have you?”

There was a sternness about the speaker’s laconic reply which caused Mr Vallance to quail involuntarily. He made a step towards the bell-pull. The other laughed.

“No, no. Don’t exert yourself. I’m not going yet—and if you bring in all the pap-fed flunkeys and swipe-guzzling stable-hands on your establishment, the poor devils’ll only get badly hurt without furthering your object. I mean what I say—you’ve got to quit sooner or later. If you’re wise it’ll be sooner.”

“Indeed! And why?” was the answer, given with cutting politeness.

“Well, it’s this way. If you agree to clear at once, I’ll give you five hundred a year—no, I’ll make it six—out of the property for your life. That and the parsonic pickings will keep you in clover. If you mean fighting, I’m your man. But I warn you I’m prepared to plank down ever so many thousands of pounds to get you out—and when I’ve got you out I’ll come down on you for every shilling of arrears, by George, I will!”

“Oh, you will?”

“You may bet your life on it.”

For some moments the two men looked full in each other’s faces without speaking. The sneer of conscious power on that of the one was matched by the expression of defiance, hatred, mingled with fear, on that of the other.

“Well, well,” said Mr Vallance at length. “Take your own course. Only, let me remind you that you are in England now, and that in this country we don’t settle important matters in any such rough and ready fashion.”

“Oh don’t make any mistake; I’m not going to hurt you, if that’s what you’re thinking about. You see, I’ve been knocking around a goodish few years, and now I’ve a fancy for settling down—settling down in my own place, you understand.”

There was a smug smile of triumph on the parson’s face now. His cousin was merely “bouncing” to extort terms. It would come to that in a few minutes. But the look aroused a very demon in the other. His eyes burned like live coals, though when he spoke his voice was under perfect control.

“Again, I say, you needn’t be afraid,” he said. “Everything shall be done in due course of law.”

“But—but, my good fellow, surely you are aware you haven’t a leg to stand on?”

“I reckon I’m the best judge of that. See here, most reverend Dudley. Do you remember our last interview, here, in this very room? Safe in the triumph of your successful fraud—fraud, I say, if you prefer it, forgery—you jeered at me, jeered at the man you had robbed. Remember?”

“‘Fraud!’ ‘Robbed!’” sputtered the parson, trying to lash himself into anger to drown the sinking sense that had come over him. “Do you know, sir, that you are using actionable words?”

“Ah, ah! History repeats itself. That is precisely as you spoke on the former occasion, friend Dudley. I will say it again, call in witnesses if you like. Having defrauded and robbed me of my patrimony by lies and intriguing, and worse—you, a preacher of the Gospel, a teacher of Christian morality—you threatened me with the law. You made your lawyers write to threaten me with an action for libel if I dared so much as venture an opinion on your behaviour. Do you remember my words to you as I left this room?”

Well, indeed, did he remember. And now at the sight of the deadly wrath on this man’s features, all the more terrible because so completely held in hand—of the towering form with its back just half a yard from the door, precluding alike entrance or exit—again Mr Vallance could not restrain a shiver of physical fear.

“I told you my time would surely come, didn’t I? How many years ago was it? Nearer twenty than ten—yes. You slandered my name and stole my possessions—you, a sacred dispenser of sacraments—and I went forth a beggar, followed by your jeers of triumph. If you go where I have been during those years, and take the trouble to enquire, you will learn that few persons have played me a scrofulous trick without bitterly rueing it. You have played me the most scrofulous trick of all, and you are going to rue it.”

“Well, I must trouble you to let me pass, please. I shall ask you to excuse me wasting my time any longer,” said Mr Vallance, making a move as if to leave the room. But the other only smiled.

“Not yet. Not quite yet,” he said. “By the way, Dudley. Heard anything of Geoffry lately?”

The tone was easy—smiling—but it struck a chill to the parson’s heart. He glanced up quickly at his interlocutor’s face, his own white with deadly fear. His lips parted, but he was powerless to articulate. The other stood immovable—smilingly enjoying his apprehension, but the smile was that of a fiend.

“Not heard anything of him?” he said, slowly, while like the hellish hiss of red-hot irons in quivering flesh there passed through his mind the recollection of his cousin’s defiant sneers over the successful intrigue that had robbed him of his patrimony, there in that same room, whose very walls seemed to echo their refrain even now. “Not heard anything of him? Well I’m not surprised, for—he’s dead.”

“Dead?” echoed Mr Vallance blankly, as though in a dream.

“As the proverbial door-nail.”

“Murderer!” gasped the wretched man, spasmodically clutching the air with his fingers, and gazing at his tormentor as through a far-off mist.

“Oh, no. You are under a delusion,” was the cool reply. “It’s odd that it should devolve on me—on me above all people—to give you the latest news of him. He died at an Indian stake.”

Even the pitiless, revengeful heart of the man who stood there smilingly unfolding his horrible news was hardly prepared for the awful metamorphosis that came over the smug, smooth-tongued, purring parson at those words. With a scream that rang through the house from top to bottom, and froze the blood of all who heard it, the miserable man leaped at his tormentor’s throat like a wild cat at bay. But he might as well have leaped at a rock. The powerful arm was raised, and the mere shock of the recoil sent the poor wretch sprawling. He lay—his livid features working in mania—the foam flying from his lips in flakes.

The other glanced at him a moment, then opened the door.

“You, James?” he said, coolly, to the trembling flunkey, who had not been many yards from the door during the interview. “You, James? Your boss is taken bad, I guess. Better see after him. Tell him, when he comes round, I’ll call again by-and-bye, and give him further particulars.”

With the same easy smile upon his lips he passed through the crowd of frightened women-folk who met him on the stairs, and who shrunk back before his glittering eyes and towering form, and gained the front door. Then he smiled in fearful glee.

“The last time I passed out this way,” he said to himself, half-aloud. “The last time I passed out this way, I was saying my time would surely come—and it has. Aha! my exemplary and most reverend cousin I think I’m nearly even with you now—very nearly!”

Chapter Thirty Nine.

In the Twilight Oakwood.

Yseulte Santorex was slowly wending her way homeward through the now leafless oak woods which overhung Elmcote.

The lonely ride looked ghostly and drear in the early dusk of the November afternoon. A chill and biting wind moaned through the covert, and now and again a pheasant or rabbit scuttling among the undergrowth, raised a stealthy rustling sound that would have been somewhat startling to any other of her sex who should find herself belated in that lonely place. But in this solitary pedestrian it inspired no fear, only a sweet, sad recollection—albeit reminding her of the most perilous moment in her whole life. For it brought back vividly, by an association of sound and surroundings, the shadowy timber belt, and the stealthy tread of the grim painted savages advancing to seize her on the lonely river-bank in the far Wild West.

But what a change had befallen her! The happy, even-tempered girl who had so gleefully left her home in keen anticipation of a period of adventurous travel amid new and stirring scenes had disappeared, and this pale, wistful-eyed woman walking here seemed but the mere ghost of the Yseulte Santorex of yore.

Often in her dreams she again goes through those terrible experiences—the perilous flight with the scout across the rugged ranges, momentarily expecting the volley of the lurking Sioux ambushed in the dense timber. Often in her dreams she is once more fleeing for dear life across those wild plains, the war-whoops of the painted fiends ringing in her ears, the thunder of their pursuing steeds shaking the ground. Often in her dreams she is again entering the frowning portals of that dread Thermopylae, where one man had unhesitatingly laid down his life in order that she might reach a place of safety. Often, too, she is once more amid her genial, kindly, travelling companions, only to wake up with a start and a shiver to the remembrance of their horrible fate.

But never as long as she lives will she forget the moment when her brother, finding her out at Fort Vigilance, brought the news which had confirmed her fears to the uttermost. He who had offered his life for her was dead—dead amid the horrid torments of the Indian stake, as the savages themselves affirmed—and to her, thenceforward, life seemed a grey and valueless thing. There was nothing further to be gained by opposing her brother’s wish that she should at once accompany him home to Lant-Hanger. Travelling through the British possessions safe beyond the reach of the hostile Sioux, who still carried terror and pillage over the plains of Dakota and Wyoming, they had set forth on their journey and had reached home in due course.

Shocked out of even his philosophy by the change, nothing could exceed the affectionate consideration her father had show for her since her return. Even her mother forgot to grumble and scold in her relief at having the girl back again safe and sound, for George had judiciously put them up to the real state of affairs. It was not in the nature of things that her parents should be well pleased that she had buried her heart in the grave of an unknown adventurer, who had, moreover, met with a horrible death, but time, they hoped, would work a gradual cure, and she was young yet. Then, too, apart from this unfortunate affair, her experiences had been terrible for a refined and luxuriously-nurtured English girl. So no care or trouble was spared to induce her to forget them.

But Yseulte herself was the last to second these well-meant efforts. She would brace herself up to appear cheerful and at ease, but seemed never so happy as when alone, rambling for hours through the fields and woods, to her parents’ concern and alarm. But any expression of the latter would be met by a wan smile and a remark that one who had heard the war-whoop and shots fired in grim earnest, and had twice been chased by red Indians on the war-path, felt pretty secure among the peaceful lanes and meadows of tame Old England. And one other thing noteworthy was that she avoided Lant Hall and its denizens with a horror and a persistency that was little short of feverish. She had never divulged poor Geoffry’s presence with the waggon train, and shrank morbidly from doing so now. He might have escaped, but that he had fallen in the general massacre which overtook the unfortunate emigrants she could hardly doubt.

This evening she was returning from a long walk, having gone out to join at luncheon her father and brother, who were shooting some distant coverts, and who would drive home by the road. She, preferring her solitary ramble through the fields and plantations, had left them early in the afternoon.

The sharp air had brought a tinge of colour to her pale cheeks, as, defying its rigours in her warm winter dress and toque, she stepped along the woodland ride with the easy grace of a perfect physical organisation. An owl dropped softly from overhead, hooting as it glided along on noiseless pinions, the bark of a fox echoed from the depths of the brake; but these weird sounds amid the gathering mists of night caused her no uneasiness, let alone fear. She even stopped to listen to them with a wistful yearning, for in the cry of the wild creatures of the woods, and the swirl of the wind through the denuded branches, she seemed to feel once more borne back to those nights of peril and of fear—but oh! how sweet the recollection—in the wild and blood-stained West, to walk alone in the spirit presence of him whom her mortal eyes should never more behold.

“Would to God we had died together!” she exclaimed aloud, her eyes dimmed with a rush of blinding tears. “Ah, why did I not die with him when it was still in my power to do so? Ah, why?”

And the owl flitting ghostly through the brake, answered:

“Tu-whoo—whoo-whoo!”

A sound smote upon her ear as she turned the bend of the path—a sound as of the footfall and snort of a horse. She looked up, and the sight that met her eyes rooted her to the ground, while the blood at her very heart stood still. But not with fear. Yet—what was that but a phantom—a phantom horseman—advancing towards her at scarce thirty paces? For the noble proportions of the coal-black steed there was no mistaking—and his rider—ah!—through many a night of horror and anguish she had seen in her dreams that towering frame, mangled and mutilated by the barbarous vengeance of the red demons, that splendid face, drawn and livid in the throes of an agonising death. Rider and steed had been parted in life—here in the lonely woods, in the glooming twilight, they were together again.

Her eyes met those of the phantom. An ecstasy shook her frame, and she was powerless to articulate. A sweet smile played on her lips; her gaze was strained upon the apparition, as though in the very strength of her yearning she could constrain it to remain with her, could retard its return to the shadowy unknown.

“Yseulte—love—I am no spectre,” said the voice she knew so well. “I have come straight to you as soon as I learned where to find you. Come to me, darling!”

He had sprung to the ground, and stood awaiting her. The spell was broken. A loud cry rang through the wood, and then she was in his arms—laughing, weeping, sobbing, then laughing again. Words were out of the question.

The wintry night fell black upon the glooming oakwoods, weirdly musical with the mournful hooting of the owls. But there was no gloom in the hearts of these two who now stepped from those thickening shades.

A crunch of wheels on the gravel, a flash of lamps, and the dog-cart deposited the two shooters at the front door.

“Hallo, Chickie! What’s in the wind, now?” exclaimed Mr Santorex, staring in amazement, as his daughter, hardly giving him time to alight, had flown at him and flung her arms around his neck, her face all aglow with more than the happiness of former days.

“Father! He’s in there. Go in and see him!”

“He? What the deuce! In where? Give a fellow a chance! Who’s he?”

“Mr Vipan.”

“Oh, ah—I remember. The champion scalp-hunter. Come to life again, has he? Let’s have a look at him.”

As the door opened a tall figure rose from a chair, advancing with outstretched hand.

“How do, Santorex?”

He thus unceremoniously addressed stared, as well he might. This was Western brusquerie with a vengeance, he thought.

“Confound it! am I altered so dead out of all recognition?” said the other with a careless laugh, standing full in the light.

“Why, no—that is, yes. We none of us grow younger in twenty years. Well, well, Ralph. I’m heartily glad to see you, heartily glad.” And the two men grasped hands in thorough ratification of the sentiment.

“No, by George! I should never have known you,” went on Mr Santorex. “And Chickie, here, called you something else just now—what the deuce was it?”

“Vipan? Yes, it was an old name in the family at one time. I’ve revived it lately for my own convenience. That’s how I was known out West.”

“Think you’d have known the child here?” went on “the child’s” father, turning to Yseulte, who had followed him into the room, and was now staring in amazement at this new revelation.

“Well, I’ve had rather the advantage of her; a mean advantage she’ll say.”

“She” was incapable of saying anything just then. That photograph of the disinherited Ralph Vallance, which, since her return home, she had managed to conjure out of her father’s boxes of old correspondence, and had treasured because it bore some slight resemblance to her dead lover, now turned out to be nothing less than his actual portrait. Yet during all their daily intercourse, so well had he guarded his secret, that not a shadow of a passing instinct had ever warned her of his identity. It was astounding.

“Been to call on Dudley yet, Ralph?” said Mr Santorex, with a twinkle in his eye.

“Oh, yes. We had a talk over old times. By the way, that’s another misnomer. My real name’s Rupert. They used to call me the other for short. Heaven knows why, but they did, and I dropped it when I went West. Shan’t revive it.”

If ever there was a snug family party gathered together, it was that at the Elmcote dinner-table that night, when Rupert Vallance, as we must now call him, yielding to general request, but especially to an appealing glance from Yseulte’s blue eyes, narrated his experiences from the time of his capture to his escape from the camp of the hostiles, only generalising however as to the agency of this latter event, and omitting for the present all mention of poor Geoffry’s horrible death. But when it came to the narrator literally tucking himself in with the grisly denizen of the Indian grave, in the ghostly silence of the darkling forest, Mrs Santorex shivered and announced her intention of fainting; however, this effect was soon dispelled by the more pleasing dénouement of the stirring tale, how just in the nick of time, when alone, dismounted, barely half armed, and the savages still in search of him, he had been found by Smokestack Bill, who all this while, in hourly peril himself, had unweariedly watched his chances of coming to the aid of his friend. Smokestack Bill, too, with no less a companion than old Satanta, who had been wandering the country ever since his escape from the Ogallalla war-party, defying white or red to capture him, until, seeming to recognise his master’s friend, he ran whinnying to the latter of his own accord.

“He’s a grand fellow, that scout,” said Mr Santorex. “Why didn’t you bring him over with you, Rupert?”

“Wouldn’t come. He’s going as chief scout to an expedition just about to be sent against the hostiles. I made him promise, though, to come over directly after the war.”

But the acme of this marvellous and stirring life’s romance was reached when later—after the ladies had retired to bed—Rupert Vallance recounted, in strict confidence, the circumstances of his meeting in the Sioux camp, the unfortunate woman who had ruined his career hitherto by allowing him to suffer for another’s intrigue.

“By Jove!” said George Santorex, junior. “I’ve heard of that party. Always supposed, though, she was a common sort of woman. A lady! and prefers to live among a lot of dirty redskins! Why, the tallest yarn of old Mayne Reid’s is skim-milk to this. But I guess she pretty well wiped out old scores by chousing the reds out of your scalp in that clever way, eh, Rupert!”

He nodded. “That’s so.”

Just then there was an interruption. A messenger had arrived from Lant Hall. The Rev. Dudley was not expected to live through the night, and particularly wished to see Mr Santorex.

“Phew-w!” whistled the latter. “I suppose I must go. What on earth can he want to talk to me about? Perhaps it’s about you, Rupert.”

“Maybe it is,” replied the latter, puffing out a cloud of smoke with as complete nonchalance as though they were discussing the weather. And George Santorex, junior, furtively watching the unconcerned, relentless face, thought he could well understand the reputation which this man had set up in those Western wilds which had been for so many years their common home.

Chapter Forty.

Conclusion.

Summer has come round once more, and again, amid all the glories of a cloudless evening, we stand beside the banks of the rippling Lant—howbeit not without misgiving, for are we not about to enact the part of eavesdroppers towards those two strolling languidly, contentedly, there by the shining water?

“It strikes me, child, you seem inclined to find life rather a happy thing,” a voice well-known to us is saying. “And you’ve no business to.”

A loving pressure of the strong arm on which she is leaning is the only answer Yseulte deigns at first to make. Then:

“Why not?”

“Because you’ve done a very wrong thing. If the late lamented Dudley were alive, he would tell you that a man may not marry his grandmother, and by parity of reasoning a woman may not marry her grandfather. Now this is just what you have done, and it’s very wrong of you.”

She gave his arm a pinch.

“I never liked—boys!” she replied with a sunny smile. And then she sighed. For it was on this very spot, beneath this same spreading oak here on the river-bank, that poor Geoffry had made his passionate and despairing declaration barely a year ago. And now at the thought of the poor fellow and his miserable end far away in that savage land, she could not repress a sigh.

“By Jove!” cried Rupert Vallance, flinging a stone into the river. “Something here seems to remind me of that evening when I came upon you staving in the red brother’s grinders with the butt end of a fishing-rod. I wonder, by the way, what became of that same weapon? I expect Mountain Cat’s band still keep it as a big medicine-stick. Deuced bad medicine it was for the buck you were laying it into. Ho, ho!”

“Don’t remind me of that horrible moment,” she said, coming closer to him with a slight shiver. “Let us go home, it’s getting cold.”

The Rev. Dudley Vallance was dead. The shock of learning his son’s horrible end had brought on a stroke, and the following day he had breathed his last—not, however, before he had made what reparation he could for the wrong he had done his cousin, who, by the way, had so far relented as to satisfy him that he had borne no hand in poor Geoffry’s death, and, in fact was powerless to prevent it; added to which he had himself rescued him from the same fate on a previous occasion. So on his death-bed he had signed a hastily drawn-up will, bequeathing the Lant property to Rupert Vallance absolutely, save and except a yearly charge on the estate for the support of his widow and daughters. To this Rupert had added with ample liberality. Once “the old man had climbed down,” as he euphemistically put it, he himself was willing to let bygones be bygones, and had endowed the widow accordingly; needless to say, without earning the slightest degree of gratitude from the latter.

They strolled homeward across the meadows in the falling eve, and, lo, as they entered the gate of the home paddock there arose a whinny and a stamp of hoofs.

“Dear old Satanta!” said Yseulte, stroking the velvety black nose which the noble animal thrust lovingly against her hand. “You have well earned your ease for life, at any rate.”

“I should rather think he had. No more arrows flying in his wake. No more brack water or willow-bark provender. All oats and fun for life. We shall have to give the war-whoop occasionally, just to remind him of old times.”

“Please, sir,” said a man-servant, meeting them in the hall. “Postman says was he right in leaving this, sir?”

His master took the letter, glanced at the address, and exploded in a roar of laughter. It bore the United States stamp, and was directed—

“Judge Rupert Vipan, Lant Hall, Brackenshire County, Great Britain.”

“Nat Hardroper’s fist! Come along, Yseulte, and let’s see what that ’cute citizen’s got to say. ‘Judge!’ Great Scott! With infinite trouble I got him out of calling me Colonel, and now he’s elevated me to the judicial bench! ‘Vipan,’ too! The old name seems to stick, anyway.”

He broke open the letter and began to read—

Henniker City, Dakota, 14th July, 1876.

Dear Rupe,—Seems to me you’re fixed up pretty tight and snug, after “baching” around all these years. My respects to Madam.

May be you’ll not be sorry to hear I’ve sold your interest in the Burntwood Creek Mine to a New York Syndicate for two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, and five hundred fully paid-up shares in the new Co. If you weren’t so keen on settling down in Great Britain again I reckon this find would make you more than a millionaire. However, I’ve banked the specie here, where it’ll be safe enough till you undertake to ship it to Great Britain—safe enough, that is, while I’m Sheriff of Henniker City—though they did “hold up” the bank in Jabez Humbold’s time.

The pesky Sioux are still on the war-path, as I judge you’ll have learned even in Great Britain, but they’re in a fair way of being soundly whipped. And now I’ve got to tell you what you’ll be dead sorry to hear.

Yseulte, watching her husband’s face, marked the change that came into it, as he turned the sheet and glanced hurriedly down it. A terrible frown—a frown similar to that which she had seen there when, dismounted and alone, he had turned to face the savage pursuers at the entrance of the cañon that never-to-be-forgotten evening of her escape. Mastering himself, he continued to read:

Your old pard, Smokestack Bill, is rubbed out. He fell at the Little Bighorn with Custer and his command, and I reckon the red devils have had many a dance round his hair by this time. Poor Bill! I allow it’s kinder rough when men have been pardners all the years you and he have; but he fell in fair fight, and that’s better, as he himself would allow, than dying of a slow sickness, or being knifed in the back by some slinking wall-eyed rowdy in a saloon. Well, well! There wasn’t a straighter, stauncher, all-round man, nor a better scout on this continent than Smokestack Bill, and if so be as any man says there was, why he’ll be ill-advised to make the remark anywhere around this section. I judge that’s about all the news you’ll care for just now, and with my respects to Madam, now as ever, old hoss, your sincere:

Nathaniel J. Hardroper, Sheriff of Henniker City.

For some time Rupert Vallance stared vacantly at the hateful paper in dead silence. All the stirring experiences they had gone through together crowded upon his mind, and the fate of his friend, staunch, unswerving, true as steel, moved him more than he cared to show, even to his wife.

“Ah, well!” he said at last, laying down the letter with a sigh. “It’s bitterly rough on a fellow. For upwards of a dozen years we’ve chummed together like twin brothers, in tight fixes and out of them, and now the poor chap’s wiped out. Yes, it’s rough!” An arm stole round his neck. “Darling, can I forget that the noble, unselfish fellow saved your life and brought you back to me! And don’t think me unfeeling, but if I had never gone out there you might be lying there too, at this moment, having shared the poor fellow’s terrible fate.”

“That’s so,” he assented. “I hadn’t thought of it in that light.”

The End.

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Preface

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Chapter 1

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Chapter 2

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Chapter 3

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Chapter 4

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Chapter 5

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Chapter 6

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Chapter 7

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Chapter 8

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Chapter 9

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Chapter 10

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Chapter 11

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Chapter 12

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Chapter 13

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Chapter 14

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Chapter 15

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Chapter 16

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Chapter 17

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Chapter 18

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Chapter 19

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Chapter 20

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Chapter 21

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Chapter 22

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Chapter 23

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Chapter 24

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Chapter 25

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Chapter 26

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Chapter 27

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Chapter 28

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Chapter 29

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Chapter 30

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Chapter 31

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Chapter 32

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Chapter 33

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Chapter 34

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Chapter 35

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Chapter 36

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Chapter 37

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Chapter 38

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Chapter 39

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Chapter 40

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