“It’s a crushing blow, to come before the preferment in rank that I have been led to expect would be my retiring compensation!” The colonel turned from them sharply, as if in pain, and walked in marching stride across the room. Frances withdrew 230 her hand, with a little struggle, not softened by the appeal in the major’s eyes.
“My poor wife is bowed under it,” the colonel spoke as he marched back and forth. “She has hoped with me for some fitting reward for the years of service I have unselfishly given to my country, sir, for the surrender of my better self to the army. I’ll never outlive it, I feel that I’ll never outlive it!”
Colonel Landcraft had no thought apart from what he felt to be his hovering disgrace. He had forgotten his rage against Chadron, forgotten that his daughter had lived through a day as hazardous as any that he had experienced in the Apache campaigns, or in his bleak watches against the Sioux. He turned to her now, where she stood weeping softly with bowed head, the grime of the dugout on her habit, her hair, its bonds broken, straying over her face.
“I had counted pleasurably on seeing you two married,” he said, “but something tells me I shall never come back from this journey, never resume command of this post.” He turned back to his marching, stopped three or four paces along, turned sharply, a new light in his face. “Why shouldn’t it be before I leave—tonight, within the hour?”
“Oh, father!” said Frances, in terrified voice, lifting her face in its tear-wet loveliness.
“I must make the train that leaves Meander at four o’clock tomorrow morning, I shall have to leave here within—” he flashed out his watch with his 231 quick, nervous hand—“within three-quarters of an hour. What do you say, Major King? Are you ready?”
“I have been ready at any time for two years,” Major King replied, in trembling eagerness.
Frances was thrown into such a mental turmoil by the sudden proposal that she could not, at that moment, speak a further protest. She stood with white face, her heart seeming to shrivel, and fall away to laboring faintness. Colonel Landcraft was not considering her. He was thinking that he must have three hours’ sleep in the hotel at Meander before the train left for Omaha.
“Then we shall have the wedding at once, just as you stand!” he declared. “We’ll have the chaplain in and—go and tell your mother, child, and—oh, well, throw on another dress if you like.”
Frances found her tongue as her danger of being married off in that hot and hasty manner grew imminent.