I met O'mie at Topeka and brought him to Springvale. It was not until in May of the next year that he went away from us and came not back any more, save in loving remembrance.
In August Tillhurst went East. Somehow I was not at all surprised when the Rockport, Massachusetts, weekly newspaper, that had come to our house every Tuesday while we had lived on Cliff Street, contained the notice of the marriage of Richard Tillhurst and Rachel Agnes Melrose. The happy couple, the paper said, would reside in Rockport.
"They may reside at the bottom of the sea for all that I care," I said thoughtlessly, not understanding then the shadow that fell for the moment on my aunt's serene face.
Long afterwards when she slept beside my father in the quiet Springvale cemetery on the bluff beyond Fingal's Creek, I found among her letters the romance of her life. I knew then for the first time that Rachel's uncle, the Ferdinand Melrose whose life was lost at sea, was the one for whom this brave kind woman had mourned. Loving as the Baronets do, even unto death, she had gone down the lonely years, forgetting herself in the broad, beautiful, unselfish life she gave to those about her.
It was late in the August of the following year, when the Kansas prairies were brownest and the summer heat the fiercest, that I was met at the courthouse door one afternoon by a lithe, coppery Osage Indian boy, who handed me a bundle, saying, "From Hard Rope, for John Baronet's son."
"Well, all right, sonny; only it's about time for the gentleman in there to be known as Philip Baronet's father. He never fought the Cheyennes. He's just the father of the man who did. What's the tariff due on this junk?"
The Osage did not smile, but he answered mildly enough, "What you will pay."
I was not cross with the world. I could afford to be generous, even at the risk of having the whole Osage tribe trailing at my heels, and begging for tobacco and food and trinkets. I loaded that young buck to the guards with the things an Indian prizes, and sent him away.
Then in my own office I undid the bundle. It was the old scarlet blanket with the white circular centre, the pattern Jean Pahusca always wore. This one was dirty and frayed and splotched. I turned from it with loathing. In the folds of the cloth a sealed letter was securely fastened. Some soldier had written it for Hard Rope, and the penmanship and language were more than average fine. But the story it told I could not exult over, although a sense of lifted pressure in some corner of my mind came with the reading.
Briefly it recited that Jean Pahusca, Kiowa renegade, was dead. Custer's penalty for him had been to give him over to the Kiowas as their captive. When the tribe left Fort Sill in March, Satanta had had him brought bound to the Kiowa village then on the lower Washita. His crime, committed on the day of Custer's fight with Black Kettle, was the heinous one of stealing his Uncle Satanta's youngest and favorite wife, and leaving her to perish miserably in the cold of that December month in which we also had suffered. His plan had been to escape from the Kiowas and reach the Cheyennes on the Sweetwater before we did, to meet me there, and this time, to give no moment for my rescue. So Hard Rope's message ran. But this was not all. The punishment that fell on Jean Pahusca was in proportion to his crime, as an Indian counts justice. He was sold as a slave to the Apaches and carried captive to the mountains of Old Mexico. Nor was he ever liberated again. Up above the snow line, with the passes guarded (for Jean was as dangerous to his mother's race as to his father's), he had fretted away his days, dying at last of cold and cruel neglect among the dreary rocks of the icy peaks. This much information Hard Rope's letter brought. I burned both the letter and the blanket, telling no one of them except my father.