"All well, sir; leastwise Mrs. Winn and the baby is, so Miss Purdy said yesterday evenin'. Mrs. Blythe with her children and Colonel Lawrence's have gone to San Antonio. They're all goin' home together. Any luck, sir?"
"I should say so! Hit 'em hard twice, and caught Marsden alive."
"Great—— Beg pardon, lieutenant, but that's the best news yet!" The soldier's eyes danced and pleaded for more, but Winn was eager to reach home, to tiptoe up to Laura's room, to kneel by the bedside and fold her, waking, in his strong, yearning arms, to bend and kiss his baby's sleeping face. He spurred on across the parade. The long, low line of officers' quarters lay black and unrelieved against the reddening sky. Only in one or two were faint night-lights burning, one down near the southern end, the room of the officer of the day, another in his own. The slats of the blinds, half turned, revealed the glimmer of a lamp within. Probably baby was awake and demanding entertainment, and there could be no surprising Laura as he had planned. Still, he guided his horse so as to avoid pebbles or anything that would click against the shod hoofs. The home-coming would be the sweeter for its being unheralded.
"Never mind the saddle-bags now," he murmured to his orderly. "Take the horses to stables, and bring the traps over by and by." Then he tiptoed around to the back of the house. The front door, he knew, would be locked; so would that opening on the little gallery in rear; but there was the window of his den; he could easily raise it from outside and let himself in without any one's being the wiser. A glance at his watch showed him that in ten minutes the morning gun would fire and the post wake up to the shrill reveille of the infantry fifes and drums. Even though Laura should be awake and up with her baby, the surprise might be attempted. The back porch was lighted up with the glow from the east. The back door of the Barclay-Brayton establishment was ajar, and some one was moving about in the kitchen,—Hannibal, probably, getting coffee for his master in time for morning stables. Just to try it, Winn tiptoed up the low steps to the rear door, and there it stood, not wide open, but just ajar. "Miss Purdy" had mended her ways, then, and was rising betimes, he said. Softly entering, he passed through the little kitchen into the dark dining-room beyond, felt his way through into his deserted den to the left,—the blinds were tightly closed,—thence to the narrow hall, and up the carpeted, creaking stairs. The door of the back room at the east, the nursery, as right at the landing. The light of the dawn was strong enough to reveal dimly objects within. That door, too, was wide open, and there by the bedside was the cradle of his baby, and the little one placidly asleep. There in her bed, innocent of the possibility of masculine observation, her ears closed, her mouth wide open in the stupor of sleep, lay the domestic combination of nurse and maid-of-all-work. He tiptoed past the door and softly approached that of the front, the westward room,—his and Laura's. It, too, was partly open. A lamp burned dimly on the bureau. The broad, white bed, with its tumbled pillows and tossed-back coverlet, was empty, as he found the room to be. Laura, then, and not the maid, was the early riser. Softly he searched about the upper floor. She had heard him, after all, and was hiding somewhere to tease him. No; there on the back of her rocking-chair hung the pink, beribboned wrapper that was so becoming to her, and on another the dainty, lace-trimmed night-robe. She must be up and dressed,—his languid, lazy Laura, who rarely rose before nine o'clock, as a rule, and now it was only five. A strange throbbing began at his heart. Quickly he turned and scurried down the stairs, struck a match in the parlor, another in the dining-room. Both were empty. The den and its closets were explored. No one there.
Out he went through the kitchen to the eastward porch again. The light was stronger. Over the level mesa to the edge of the bluff, not fifty yards away, his eager eyes swept in search of the truant form. There stood at the very brow of the projecting point at the northeast side a little, latticed summer-house where sentimental couples sometimes sat and looked over the shallow valley of moonlight nights; and there, close beside it, switching the skirt of her stylish riding-habit with her whip, stood Laura Winn. Just as she turned and glanced impatiently over her shoulder, out from the adjoining door came a soldierly form in riding-dress. For an instant three forms seemed to stand stock-still; then came the shock and roar of the reveille gun, and before the echoes rolled away Lieutenant Winn, striding up to Barclay with fury in his eyes, struck the captain full in the face and sent him crashing over a kitchen chair.
CHAPTER XV.
Ten miles out to the northwest the stream that curved and twisted around the low mesa of Fort Worth burst its way through a ridge in the foot-hills, and, brawling and dashing at its rocky banks, rolled out over the lowlands, foaming at the mouth with the violence of its own struggles. Far in the heart of the hills it had its source in several clear, cold springs, while the deep hoarded snows of the harsh winters fed and swelled it in the springtide until it reached the proportions of a short-lived torrent. Huge heaps of uprooted trees and tangled brushwood it deposited along its shores as far down even as the fort, but nothing was carried below the sutler's. "Ahl's fish that comes to Fuller's net," said Sergeant McHugh, "an' sorra a sliver av a sardine iver got away from it." Once in a while, after unusual flood, the flotsam and jetsam of the creek would be diversified with wagon-bodies, ranch roofs, camp equipage, and the like, for "the Range," as this odd upheaval was locally termed, was a famous place for prospectors.
A beautiful stream was the Blanca within its mountain gates, but an ashen pallor overspread it after its fight for freedom. It was never the same stream after it got away. It danced and sparkled past pretty nooks and shaded ravines among the hills, but issued from the gateway, like the far-famed Stinking River of the Bannocks and Shoshones of Northwestern Wyoming, a metamorphosed stream. It had a bad reputation. It was solely responsible for the fact that Worth had been located away out here in the bald, bleak, open prairie country, instead of among those bold and beautiful heights to the northwest. "The very spot for a military post!" said the officers of the earlier scouting parties, as they camped within the gates in the midst of a lonely glade. "Lovely," said the Texan guides, in reply, "so long as you don't mind being drowned out every spring." It seems that snows would melt of a sudden, tremendous thunderstorms burst among the crags, and flood and deluge the valleys, for the Blanca could not with sufficient swiftness discharge its swollen torrents through that narrow gorge. Beautiful it lay, ordinarily, as a summer sea, and the bridle-path that wound through the pass was a favorite route for picnic-parties from Worth. But storm-clouds would rise and turn summer seas to raging water-demons, and then the flood that tore through the gates would sweep all before it, like the unloosed waters of the Conemaugh that awful May of '89.