“I’m glad you turned back, honey,” Mrs. Chadron said, shaking her head sadly, “for I was no end worried about you. Them rustlers they’re comin’ down from their settlement and gatherin’ up by Macdonald’s place, the men told Banjo, and no tellin’ what they might ’a’ done if they’d seen you.”
Mrs. Chadron’s face was not red with the glow of peppers and much food this morning. One night of anxiety had racked her, and left hollows under her eyes and a flat grayness in her cheeks.
Banjo had brought no other news. The men had scattered at daybreak to search for the trail of the man who had carried Nola away, but Banjo, sore and shaken, had come back depressed and full of pains. Mrs. Chadron said that Saul surely would be home before noonday, and urged Frances to go to her room and sleep.
“I’m steadier this morning, I’ll watch and wait,” 183 she said, pressing the liniment-soaked cloth to Banjo’s bruised forehead.
Banjo contracted his muscles under the application, shriveling up on himself like a snail in a fire, for it was hot and heroic liniment, and strong medicine for strong beasts and tougher men. Banjo’s face was a picture of patient suffering, but he said nothing, and had not spoken since Frances entered the room, for the treatment had been under way before her arrival and there was scarcely enough breath left in him to suffice for life, and none at all for words. Frances had it in mind to suggest some milder remedy, but held her peace, feeling that if Banjo survived the treatment he surely would be in no danger from his hurt.
The door of Nola’s room was open as Frances passed, and there was a depression in the counterpane which told where the lost girl’s mother had knelt beside it and wet it with her tears. Frances wondered whether she had prayed, lingering compassionately a moment in the door.
The place was like Nola in its light and brightness and surface comfort and assertive color notes of happiness, hung about with the trophies of her short but victorious career among the hearts of men. There were photographs of youths on dressing-table, chiffonier, and walls, and flaring pennants of eastern universities and colleges. Among the latter, as if it was the most triumphant trophy of them all, there hung a little highland bonnet with a broken feather, 184 of the plaid Alan Macdonald had worn on the night of Nola’s mask.
Frances went in for a nearer inspection, and lifted the little saucy bit of headgear from its place in the decorations of Nola’s wall. There could be no doubting it; that was Alan Macdonald’s bonnet, and there was a bullet hole in it at the stem of the little feather. The close-grazing lead had sheared the plume in two, and gone on its stinging way straight through the bonnet.
An exclamation of tender pity rose above her breath. She fondled the little headdress and pressed it to her bosom; she laid it against her cheek and kissed it in consolation for its hurt—the woman’s balsam for all sufferings and heartbreaks, and incomparable among the panaceas of all time.
In spite of her sympathy for Nola in her grave situation, facing or undergoing what terrors no one knew, there was a bridling of resentment against her in Frances’ breast as she hung the marred bonnet back in its place. It seemed to her that Nola had exulted over both herself and Alan Macdonald when she had put his bonnet on her wall, and that she had kept it there after the coming of Frances to that house in affront to friendship and mockery of the hospitality that she professed to extend.