The amulet: A novel

by Charles Egbert Craddock

“Stop me—Mervyn—but you are playing the fool!” cried Raymond, quite beside himself with rage.

“I find it my duty as officer of the day in adding my report to the guard report to mention this failure of duty on your part. And unless you change your tone, sir, I shall also report you for insolence and insubordination to your superior officer.”

His steady, steely look forced a mechanical salute from Raymond as Mervyn turned away with the same energy of step, burning cheek, and flashing eye. He resolved within himself that he would be nobody’s fool, and he certainly looked “nobody’s sheep.”

Raymond, hurt, amazed, and angry, dashed off across the parade over the trampled snow, which was melting in the sun and honey-combed with myriads of dark cells that cancelled all its remaining whiteness. Where tufts still clung between the points of the stockade that surmounted the heavy red clay ramparts, it still had its pristine glister and purity. Now and again great masses slipped down from some roof where it had clung on the northern exposure, and it was obvious that all would vanish before the noonday. He hardly paused until he reached the mess-hall, and when he entered it was with so hasty a step, so absorbed a mien, that the officers dully loitering there looked up surprised, expectant of some disclosure or sensation.

The apartment was spacious and commodious, but ill-lighted, save for the largess of the great fireplace, where huge logs blazed or smouldered red and deeply glowing in a bed of ashes. It was of utility as a block-house, and the loop-holes for musketry served better for ventilation than illumination. The walls illustrated the prowess of the mess as sportsmen. They were hung with trophies of the chase,—great branching horns of elk and deer, a succession of scarlet flamingo feathers and white swan’s wings, all a-spread in a gorgeous fiction of flight, and the wide, suggestive pinions of the golden eagle. Among these were many curios,—quivers, tomahawks, aboriginal pictures painted on the interior of buffalo hides, quaint baskets, decorated jugs, and calabashes a kaleidoscopic medley. The red coats of the officers gave a note of intense color in the flare of the flames. On a side table were silver candle-sticks and snuffers—where the tapers of the previous night had not been renewed, and had burned to the socket—a token of luxury in these rude surroundings, intimating the soldier alien to the wilds, not the pioneer. A punch-bowl and goblets of silver gilt, suggestive of post-prandial zest, were on a shelf of sideboard-like usage. A service of silver and china, with the remnants of the breakfast, evidently a substantial meal,—trout, and venison, and honey in the comb, and scones of Indian meal,—was yet on the table in the lower end of the room, and a belated partaker still plied knife and fork.

Raymond might have joined him, for he had not broken his fast, but he had forgotten physical needs in the tumult of his feelings. He had great pride in his efficiency as an officer. He had, too, great hopes of his military career. All that was best and noblest in him vibrated to the idea of honor, responsibility, fitness for high trusts. He could not brook a disparagement in these essentials. He felt maligned, his honor impugned, his fair intentions traduced, that he should be held to have failed in a point of duty—that he should be made the subject of a report for negligence or wilful concealment of a breach of discipline.

He had intended to say nothing of the contention. It seemed a subject which he could not canvass with the mess. He felt that he could not lend his tongue to frame the words that he was accused of a failure of duty. But the languid conversation which had been in progress was not resumed. Raymond’s tumultuous entrance had proved an obliteration rather than an interruption of the subject.

“Anything the matter, Raymond?” asked Lieutenant Jerrold, who had had a glimpse of the two officers in conversation on the parade.

“Nothing,” said Raymond. He had flung himself down in one of the huge, cumbrous, comfortable chairs of the post-carpenter’s construction, covered by buffalo skins. “That is—well—”

The eyes of all were upon him, inquisitive but kindly. The yearning for sympathy, for reassurance, for justification, broke down his reserve.