FAITHFUL UNTO DEATH.
“
Oh, Kit; I can’t bear to leave you behind! It breaks my old heart all to flinders!” lamented Abel, laboriously climbing into the great wagon which Jim and Pete were now to draw back to their old home and wherein were already seated Mercy, with Kitty’s children. “If it wasn’t for these babies of yourn, I’d never stir stick nor stump out this afflicted town.”
“Well, dear Abel, the babies are, and must be cared for. I know that you and Mother Mercy will spoil them with kindness; but I hope we’ll soon be all together again. Good-by, good-by.”
The Sun Maid’s voice did not tremble nor the light in her brave face grow dim, though her heart was nearer breaking than Abel’s; in that she realized far more keenly than he the peril in which she was voluntarily placing herself.
“Well, Kitty, lamb, do take care. Take the herb tea constant and keep your feet dry.”
“That will be easy to do, if this heat remains,” answered the other quietly, looking about her as she spoke upon the sun-parched ground and the hot, brazen sky. “And you must not worry, any of you. Gaspar says the tepees are as comfortable as the best log cabins, though so hastily put up. You will have plenty of air and the delicious shade of the trees; the blessed spring water, too; and if you don’t keep well and be as happy as kittens, I—I’ll be ashamed of you. I declare, Mercy dear, your face is all a-beam with the thought of the old clearing, and the bleaching ground, and all. So you needn’t try to look grave, for, as soon as we can, Wahneenah and I will follow.”
Then she turned to speak to Gaspar, who sat on Tempest close at hand, his handsome face pale with anxiety and divided interests, but stern and resolute to do his duty as his young wife had shown it to him. And what these two had to say to one another is not for others to hear; for it was a parting unto death, it might be, and the hearts of the twain were as one flesh.
Also, if Mercy’s face was alight with the glow of her home returning, it was moved by the sight of the two women—Wahneenah and her daughter—who were taking their lives in their hands for the service of their fellow-men.
Never had the Indian woman’s comeliness shown to such advantage; and her bearing was of one who neither belittled nor overrated the dignity of the self-sacrifice she was making. She wore a white cotton gown, which draped rather than fitted her tall figure, and about her dark head was bound a white kerchief that seemed a crown. With an impulse foreign to her, Mercy held out her hand; because in ordinary she “hated an Indian on sight.”
“Well, Wahneeny, I’d like to shake hands for good-by. There hain’t never been no love lost ’twixt you an’ me, but I ’low I might have been more juster than I was. I think you’re—you’re as good as ary white women I ever see, savin’ our Kit, of course; an’—an’—I—I wish you well.”
There was a moment’s hesitation on Wahneenah’s part; then her slim brown hand was extended and closed upon Mercy’s fat palm with a friendly pressure.
“In the light of the Unknown Beyond, the little hates and loves of earth must disappear. You have judged according to the wisdom that was in you, and if I bore you a grudge, it is forgotten. Farewell.”
Then the foster-mother slipped her arm about the waist of her beloved Sun Maid and supported her firmly as the oxen moved slowly forward, the heavy wheels creaking and the three children shouting and clapping their hands in innocent glee, quite unconscious of the tragedy of the parting they had witnessed.
Abel gee-ed and haw-ed indiscriminately and confusingly, then belabored his patient beasts because they did not understand conflicting orders. Mercy sat twisted around upon the buffalo-covered seat, her arms holding each a child as in a vise and her neck in danger of dislocation, as long as her swimming eyes could catch one glimpse of the two white-robed women left on the dusty road.
“They look as pure as some them Sisters of Charity I’ve seen in Boston city. And they won’t spare themselves no more, neither. Poor Gaspar boy! How’ll he ever stand it without his Kit, and if—ah, if—she should catch—Oh, my soul! oh—my—soul! I wonder if he’s takin’ it terrible hard!”
But though she brought her body back to a normal poise, her morbid curiosity was doomed to disappointment, for Tempest had already borne his master out of sight at a mad pace across the prairie.
The enemy which had come with the infantry over the great water was the most terrible known,—a disease so dread and devastating that men turned pale at the mere mention of its name—the Asiatic cholera.
When it appeared, the garrison was crowded with the settlers who had fled before the anticipated attacks of the Indians and, as has been said, every roof in the community sheltered all it could cover. But when the soldiers began to die by dozens and scores the refugees were terrified. Death by the hand of the red man was possible, even probable; but death of the pestilence was certain.
The town was now emptied far more rapidly than it had filled; and early in this new disaster Gaspar had hastened to the old clearing of the Smiths and had made Osceolo, aided by a few more frightened, willing men, toil with himself to erect wigwams enough to accommodate many persons. He had then returned for his household and had been met by his wife’s first resistance to his will.
“No, Gaspar, I cannot go. I have no fear. I am perfectly ‘sound.’ Probably no healthier woman ever lived than I am. I have learned much of nursing from Wahneenah, and my place, my duty, is here. I cannot go.”
“Kit! my Kitty! Are you beside yourself? Where is your duty, if not to me and to our children?”
“Here, my husband, right here; in our beloved town, among the lonely strangers who have come to save it from destruction and have laid their lives at our feet.”
“That is sheer nonsense. Your life is at stake.”
“Is my life more precious than theirs?”
“Yes. Infinitely so. It is mine.”
“It is God’s—and humanity’s—first, Gaspar.”
“Your children, then; if you scorn my wishes.”
“Don’t make it hard for me, beloved; harder than God Himself has made it. Do you take Mother Mercy and Abel and go to the place you have prepared. The children will be as safe with her as with me; safer, for she will watch them constantly, while I believe in leaving them to grow by themselves. Between them and us you may come and go—up to a certain point; but not to the peril of your taking the disease. The Indians are no less on the war-path because the cholera has come. Your duty is afield, guarding, watching, preventing all the evil that a wise man can. Mine is here, using the skill I have learned from Wahneenah and faithfully at her side.”
“Wahneenah? Does she wish to stay too; to nurse the pale-faces, the men who have come here to fight her own race?”
“Yes, Gaspar, she is just so noble. Can I do less? I, with my education, which the dear Doctor has given me, and my youth, my perfect health, my entire fearlessness. You forget, sweetheart; I am the Unafraid. Never more unafraid than now, never more sure that we will come out of this trouble as we have come out of every other. Why, dear, don’t you remember old Katasha and her prophecy? I am to be great and rich and beneficent. I am to be the helper of many people. Well, then, since I am not great, and rich only through you, let me begin at the last end of the prophecy, and be beneficent. Wait; even now there is somebody coming toward us asking me for help.”
“Kit, I can’t have it. I won’t. You are my wife. You shall obey me. You shall stop talking nonsense. You may as well understand. Pick together what duds you need and let’s get off as soon as possible. Every hour here is fresh danger. Come. Please hurry.”
But she did not hurry, not in the least. Indeed, had she followed her heart wholly, she would never have hastened one degree toward the end she had elected. But she followed it only in part; so she stole quietly up to where the man fumed and flustered and clasped her arms about his neck and laid her beautiful face against his own.
“Love: this is not our first separation, nor our longest. Many a month have you been away from me, up there in the north, getting money and more money, till I hated its very name,—only that I knew we could use it for others. In that, and in most things, I will obey you as I have. In this I must obey the voice of God. Life is better than money, and to save life or to comfort death is the price of this, our last separation.”
After that he said no more; but recognizing the nobility of her effort, even though he still felt it mistaken, and with a credulous remembrance of Katasha’s saying, he made her preparations and his own without delay and parted from her as has been told.
“Well, my dear Other Mother, there is one thing to comfort! Hard as it was to see them all go, we shall have no time to brood. And we shall be together. Let us get on now to our work. There were five new cases this morning; and time flies! Oh, if I were wiser and knew better what to do for such a sickness! The best we can—that’s all.”
“What the Great Spirit puts into our hands, that we can always lift,” replied Wahneenah, and, with her arm still about her darling’s waist, they walked together Fortward. It may be that in the Indian’s jealous, if devoted, heart there was just a tinge of thankfulness for even an evil so dire, since it gave her back her “White Papoose” quite to herself again.
“Well, I can watch her all I choose, and no burden shall fall to her share that I can spare her. The easy part—the watching and the soothing and the Bible reading—that shall be hers. Mine will be the coarsest tasks,” she thought, and—as Gaspar had done—reckoned without her host.
“It is turn and turn about, Other Mother, or I will drive you out of the place,” Kitty declared; and after a few useless struggles, which merely wasted the time that should have been given their patients, it was so settled; and so continued during the dreadful weeks that followed.
Until just before midsummer the nurses were almost wholly at the Fort, where it seemed to Kitty that a “fresh case” and a “burial” alternated with the regularity of a pendulum; and then a little relief was gained by taking their sick across to Agency House and its ampler accommodations. But even these were meagre compared to the needs; and more and more as the days went by did the Sun Maid long for greater wisdom.
“That is one of the things Gaspar and I must do. We must have a regular hospital, such as are in Eastern cities; and there must be men and women taught to understand all sorts of diseases and how to care for them. I know so little—so little.”
But experience taught more than schools could have done; and many a poor fellow who had come from a far-away home sank to his last rest with greater confidence because of the ministrations of these two devoted women. And at last, very suddenly, there appeared one among them whom both Wahneenah and her daughter recognized with a sinking heart.
“Doctor! Oh, Doctor Littlejohn! I thought you were safe at the ‘Refuge’ with Mercy and Abel. How came you here? and why? You must go away at once. You must, indeed. Where is the horse you rode?”
“I rode no horse, my dear. If I had asked for one, I should have been prevented,—even forcibly, I fear. So I walked.”
“Walked? In this heat, all that distance? Will you tell me why?”
But already, before it was spoken, the Sun Maid guessed the answer.
“Because, at length, through all the shifting talk about me, it penetrated to my study-dulled brain that there was a need more urgent than that the Indian dialects should be preserved; that I, a minister of the gospel, was letting a woman take the duty, the privilege, that was mine. I have come, daughter of my old age, to encourage the sufferers you relieve and bury the dead you cannot save.”
“But—for you, in your feebleness——”
He held up his thin white hand that trembled as an aspen leaf.
“It is enough, my dear. Consider all is said. I heard a fresh groan just then. Somebody needs you—or me.”
Wahneenah now had two to watch, and she did it jealously, at the cost of the slight rest she had heretofore allowed herself. The result of overstrain, in the midst of such infection, was inevitable. One evening she crept languidly toward the empty house which had been her darling’s home and behind which still stood her own deserted lodge. She was a little wearier than usual, she thought, but that was all. To lie down on her bed of boughs and draw her own old blanket over her would make her sleep. She longed to sleep—just for a minute; to shut out from her eyes and her thoughts the scenes through which she had gone. How long ago was it since the wagon and the fair-haired babies went away?
She was a little confused. She was falling asleep, though, despite the agony that tortured her. Her? She had always hated pain and despised it. It couldn’t be Wahneenah, the Happy, crouching thus, in a cramped and becrippled attitude. It was some other woman,—some woman she had used to know.
Why, there was her warrior: her own! And the son she had lost! And now—what was this in the parting of the tent curtains? The moonlight made mortal?
No. Not a moon-born but a sun-born maiden she, who stooped till her white garments swept the earth and her beautiful, loving face was close, close. Even the glazing eyes could see how wondrously fair it was in the sight of men and spirits. Even the dulled ears could catch that agonized cry:
“Wahneenah! Wahneenah! My Mother! Bravest and noblest! and yet—a savage!”
“Who called her so knew not of what he spake. From one God we all came and unto Him we must return. Blessed be His Name!” answered the clergyman who had followed.
Then the frail man, who had so little strength for himself, was given power to lift the broken-hearted Maid and carry her away into a place of safety.