Campaigning with Crook, and Stories of Army Life

by Charles King

"Who did you say?" asked Ransom, turning suddenly, and looking inquiringly at his friends. There was an instant of embarrassment. Then one of the officers replied,

"Maud Carleton, Ransom. Those are poor Phil Carleton's little ones."

"Wait for me at the office, fellows; I'll be along in a minute," was the response; and the captain went striding back to the Bald Eagle.

It was an old story in the cavalry. Very few there were who knew not that Captain Ransom was a hard-hit man when Kate Perry—the beauty of her father's regiment—came back from school, and with all the wealth of her grace and loveliness and winning ways, refusing to see how she had impressed one or two "solid" men of the garrison, fell rapturously in love with Philip Carleton, the handsome, dashing scapegrace of the subalterns. It was "hard lines" for old Colonel Perry; it would have been misery to her devoted mother; but she was spared it all—the grass had been growing for years over her distant grave.

The wedding was a glitter of gold-lace, champagne glasses, and tears. Every one wished her—and him—all happiness, but dreaded the future. There was a year of bliss, and little Phil was born; another year when she was much taken up with her baby boy, and the father much abroad—a year of clouds and silence. Then came sudden call to the field, and one night with reeling senses she read the despatch that told her he was shot dead in battle with the Sioux. When little Maudie came there was no father to receive her in his arms. The gray-haired colonel took the widow and her children a few short years to his own roof; then he, too, was called to his account, and with a widow's pension and the relic of her father's savings the sorrowing woman moved from the garrison that had so long been her home, and took up arms against her sea of troubles. She need not have gone. All Fort Rains knew that there were officers who would gladly have taken her and her beautiful children to their fireside. But she was loyal, proud, high-spirited, and she could not stay. All the roof her father had to leave her was the frame cottage at the ranch he had bought and stocked, a mile below the fort. She was a soldier's daughter, brave and resolute, she had her father's old soldier-servant and his wife to help her, and she moved to the ranch, and declared she would be dependent on no one. When first she had come into that glorious valley, a girl of eighteen, a large force of cavalry was encamped around the garrison in which her father's regiment of foot was stationed, and Captain Harold Ransom became one of her most devoted admirers, though nearly twice her age. Few men had much chance against such a lover as Phil Carleton, buoyant, brilliant, gallant, the pride of all the juniors in the infantry, the despair of many a prudent mother; and when that engagement was announced, the cavalry were rather glad to be ordered away, and to comfort themselves with the perilous distractions of Indian fighting for three or four stirring years. But, before they left, Ransom and others had bought much of the land on which Argentopolis gleamed to-day. Perhaps it was the silver that came into his hair as well as his pockets, but silver did not cause the lines that crept under his kindly eyes and around the corners of the firm mouth. He was rich, as army men go, but his heart was sorely wrenched. He went abroad when the Indian campaigns were over, and rejoined while his comrades were on the Pacific coast, and became the delight of the children and the children's mothers. Captain Santa Claus they called him at Walla Walla and Vancouver, where he was the life of those garrisons; and while men honored and women waxed sentimental towards him, it was the children who took possession of the tall soldier and made his house their home, who trooped unbidden all over it at any hour of the day, and made it the garrison play-ground when the rainy season set in and drove them to cover.

And then, after their four years in the Columbia country, the regiment crossed the big range, and, wonder of wonders, headquarters and six troops, one of them Ransom's, were ordered to Fort Rains! He was again on long leave when the change of station occurred, and the widow drew a long breath. She found life very different, with her father's old friends and hers removed. As the children grew in years their needs increased. She sold the stock and much of the land of the Ranch, keeping only the homestead and the patch around it, but she was glad to find employment at the fort as teacher of the piano and singing. She played well, but her voice was glorious, and had been carefully trained. The news that he was coming had given her a shock. It was more than eight years since she had seen him. It was more than five since she had briefly answered the letter he wrote her on hearing of her husband's death. It was so manly, sympathetic, and so full of something he knew not how to express—a longing to shield her from want or care. She had gently but firmly ended it all.

And yet—She was bitterly poor now. Handsomer than ever, said the officers who knew her in the old days; still wearing her mourning, and looking so tall and majestic in her rusting weeds. She was a woman whose form and carriage would be noticeable anywhere—tall, slender, graceful, with a certain slow, languorous ease of motion that charmed the senses. Her face was exquisite in contour and feature—a pure type of blond, blue-eyed, Saxon beauty, with great masses of shimmering golden-brown hair. No wonder Ransom felt a thrill when he looked into Maudie's eyes—the child was her mother in miniature. At twenty-seven, with all her trials, Mrs. Carleton was a lovelier woman than in her maiden radiance at eighteen. What she had gained in strength and character, through her years of poverty and self-abnegation, God alone knew, and He had been her comforter.

For nearly a year the garrison children had been going in to town for school, an excellent teacher having been secured in the East, and Mrs. Carleton eagerly embraced the chance of sending hers. She could no longer afford a nurse to look after the wee one. She could not take her on her daily round of lessons, and her infantry friends had gladly seen to it that the little Carletons were carried to and fro with their own. So, too, when the cavalry came had Colonel Cross assured her that the ambulance should always come for them and bring them back to the post. Everybody wanted to be kind to her, or said so at least; but the ladies were all new and strange. She had never been the pet among them she was in her own regiment. They had not known and loved her father, as had the colonel. They had heard of handsome Phil Carleton, as who had not? but they had heard of Hal Ransom's old-time devotion to her, and now he would soon be back. Rich, growing gray, everybody's friend, the children's idol—oh! what if she should set that widow's cap for him now! The possibility was appalling.