_ CHAPTER XXXV. THE YOKE
When we started to the south on the following morning, I rode far at the rear, under guard. I recall little of our journey toward Laramie, save that after a day or two we swung out from the foothills into a short grass country, and so finally struck the steady upward sweep of a valley along which lay the great transcontinental trail. I do not know whether we traveled two days, or three, or four, since all the days seemed night to me, and all the nights were uniform in torture. Finally, we drove down into a dusty plain, and so presently came to the old frontier fort. Here, then, was civilization--the stage coach, the new telegraph wire, men and women, weekly or daily touch with the world, that prying curiosity regarding the affairs of others which we call news. To me it seemed tawdry, sordid, worthless, after that which I had left. The noise seemed insupportable, the food distasteful. I could tolerate no roof, and in my own ragged robes slept on the ground within the old stockade.
I was still guarded as a prisoner; I was approached by none and had conversation with none until evening of the day after my arrival. When I ate, it was at no gentleman's table, but in the barracks. I resented judgment, sentence and punishment, thus executed in one.
Evening gun had sounded, and the flag had been furled on my second day at Laramie, when finally Colonel Meriwether sent for me to come to his office quarters. He got swiftly enough to the matters on his mind.
"Mr. Cowles," said he, "it is time now that you and I had a talk. Presently you will be leaving Laramie. I can not try you by court martial, for you are a civilian. In short, all I can say to you is to go, with the hope that you may never again cross our lives."
I looked at him a time, silently, hating not him personally as much as I hated all the world. But presently I asked him, "Have you no word for me from her?"
"Miss Meriwether has no word for you," he answered, sternly, "nor ever will have. You are no longer necessary in her plans."
"Ah, then," said I, "you have changed your own mind mightily."
He set his lips together in his grim fashion. "Yes," said he, "I have changed my mind absolutely. I have just come from a very trying interview. It is not necessary for me to explain to you the full nature of it--"
"Then she has sent for me?"
"She will never send for you, I have said."
"But listen. At least, I have brought her back to you safe and sound. Setting aside all my own acts in other matters, why can you not remember at least so much as that? Yet you treat me like a dog. I tell you, I shall not leave without word from her, and when I leave I shall make no promises as to when I shall or shall not come back. So long as one chance remains--"
"I tell you that there is no longer any chance, no longer the ghost of a chance. It is my duty to inform you, sir, that a proper suitor long ago applied for my daughter's hand, that he has renewed his suit, and that now she has accepted him."
For a time I sat staring stupidly at him. "You need speak nothing but the truth with me," I said at last. "Colonel Meriwether, I have never given bonds to be gentle when abused."
"I am telling you the truth," he said. "By God, sir! Miss Meriwether is engaged to Lieutenant Lawrence Belknap of the Ninth Dragoons! You feel your honor too deeply touched? Perhaps at a later time Lieutenant Belknap will do himself the disgrace of accommodating you."
All these things seemed to dull and stupefy me rather than excite. I could not understand.
"If I killed him," said I, finally, "how would it better her case? Moreover, before I could take any more risk, I must go back to Virginia. My mother needs me there most sadly."
"Yes, and Miss Grace Sheraton needs you there sadly, as well," he retorted. "Go back, then, and mend your promises, and do some of those duties which you now begin to remember. You have proved yourself a man of no honor. I stigmatize you now as a coward."
There seemed no tinder left in my spirit to flame at this spark. "You speak freely to your prisoner, Colonel Meriwether," I said, slowly, at length. "There is time yet for many risks--chances for many things. But now I think you owe it to me to tell me how this matter was arranged."
"Very well, then. Belknap asked me for permission to try his chance long ago--before I came west to Laramie. I assigned him to bring her through to me. He was distracted at his failure to do so. He has been out with parties all the summer, searching for you both, and has not been back at Laramie more than ten days. Oh, we all knew why you did not come back to the settlements. When we came in he guessed all that you know. He knew that all the world would talk. And like a man he asked the right to silence all that talk forever."
"And she agreed? Ellen Meriwether accepted him on such terms?"
"It is arranged," said he, not answering me directly, "and it removes at once all necessity for any other arrangement. As for you, you disappear. It will be announced all through the Army that she and Lieutenant Belknap were married at Leavenworth before they started West, and that it was they two, and not you and my daughter, who were lost."
"And Belknap was content to do this?" I mused. "He would do this after Ellen told him that she loved me--"
"Stop!" thundered Colonel Meriwether. "I have told you all that is necessary. I will add that he said to me, like the gentleman he is, that in case my daughter asked it,
he would marry her and leave her at once, until she of her own free will asked him to return. There is abundant opportunity for swift changes in the Army. What seems to you absurd will work out in perfectly practical fashion."
"Yes," said I, "in fashion perfectly practical for the ruin of her life. You may leave mine out of the question."
"I do, sir," was his icy reply. "She told you to your face, and in my hearing, that you had deceived her, that you must go."
"Yes," I said, dully, "I did deceive her, and there is no punishment on earth great enough to give me for that--except to have no word from her!"
"You are to go at once. I put it beyond you to understand Belknap's conduct in this matter."
"He is a gentleman," I said, "and fit to love her. I think none of us needs praise or blame for that."
He choked up. "She's my girl," he said. "Yes, all my boys in the Army love her--there isn't one of them that wouldn't be proud to marry her on any terms she would lay down. And there isn't a man in the Army, married or single, that wouldn't challenge you if you breathed a word of what has gone between you and her."
I looked at him and made no motion. It seemed to me go unspeakably sad, so incredible, that one should be so unbelievably underestimated.
"Now, finally," resumed Colonel Meriwether, after a time, ceasing his walking up and down, "I must close up what remains between you and me. My daughter said to me that you wanted to see me on some business matter. Of course you had some reason for coming out here."
"That was my only reason for coming," I rejoined. "I wanted to see you upon an important business matter. I was sent here by the last message my father gave any one--by the last words he spoke in his life. He told me I should come to you."
"Well, well, if you have any favor to ask of me, out with it, and let us end it all at one sitting."
"Sir," I said, "I would see you damned in hell before I would ask a crust or a cup of water of you, though I were starving and burning. I have heard enough."
"Orderly!" he called out. "Show this man to the gate." _