II
It was at Laramie, between the mountains, and Henniker was celebrating the present and drowning the past in a large, untrammeled style, when he received a letter from the quartermaster-sergeant at Custer,—a plain statement until the end, where Henniker read:—
"If you should happen at any time to wish for news of your son, Meadows and his wife have taken the child. They came on here to get him, and Meadows insisted on standing the expense of the funeral, which was the best we could give her for the credit of the troop. He put a handsome stone over her, with 'Meta, wife of Trumpeter Henniker, K Troop, —th U. S. Cavalry,' on it; and there it stands to her memory, poor girl, and to your shame, a false, cruel, and cowardly man in the way you treated her. And so every one of us calls you, officers and men the same,—of your old troop that walked behind her to her grave. And where were you, Henniker, and what were you doing this day two weeks, when we were burying your poor wife? The twenty dollars you sent her by Billy, Meadows has, and says he will keep it till he sees you again. Which some of us think it will be a good while he will be packing that Judas piece around with him.—And so good-by, Henniker. I might have said less, or I might have said nothing at all, but that the boy is a fine child, my wife says, and must have a grand constitution to stand what he has stood; and I have a fondness for you myself when all is said and done.
"P. S. I would take a thought for that boy once in a while, if I was you. A man doesn't care for the brats when he is young, but age cures us of all wants but the want of a child."
But Henniker was not ready to go back to the Meadows cottage and be clothed in the robe of forgiveness, and receive his babe like a pledge of penitence on his hand.
The shock of the letter sobered him at first, and then the sting of it drove him to drinking harder than ever. He did not run upon that "good thing" at Laramie, nor in any of the cities westward, that one after another beheld the progress of his deterioration. It does not take long in the telling, but it was several years before he finally struck upon the "Barbary Coast" in San Francisco, where so many mothers' sons who never were heard of have gone down. He went ashore, but he did not quite go to pieces. His constitution had matured under healthy conditions, and could stand a good deal of ill-usage; but we are "no stronger than our weakest part," and at the end of all he found himself in a hospital bed under treatment for his knee,—the same that had been mulcted for him twice before.
He listened grimly to the doctor's explanations,—how the past sins of his whole impenitent system were being vicariously reckoned for through this one afflicted member. It was rough on his old knee, Henniker remarked; but he had hopes of getting out all right again, and he made the usual sick-bed promises to himself. He did get out, eventually, without a penny in the world, and with a stiff knee to drag about for the rest of his life. And he was just thirty-four years old.
His splendid vitality, that had been wont to express itself in so many attractive ways, now found its chief vent in talk—inexpensive, inordinate, meddlesome discourse—wherever two or three were gathered together in the name of idleness and discontent. The members of these congregations were pessimists to a man. They disbelieved in everybody and everything except themselves, and secretly, at times, they were even a little shaken on that head; but all the louder they exclaimed upon the world that had refused them the chance to be the great and successful characters nature had intended them to be.
It need hardly be said that when Henniker raved about the inequalities of class, the helplessness of poverty, the tyranny of wealth, and the curse of labor; and devoted in eloquent phrases the remainder of a blighted existence to the cause of the Poor Man, he was thinking of but one poor man, namely, himself. He classed himself with Labor only that he might feel his superiority to the laboring masses. There were few situations in which he could taste his superiority, in these days. The "ego" in his Cosmos was very hungry; his memories were bitter, his hopes unsatisfied; his vanity and artistic sense were crucified through poverty, lameness, and bad clothes. Now all that was left him was the conquests of the mind. For the smiles of women, give him the hoarse plaudits of men. The dandy of the garrison began to shine in saloon coteries and primaries of the most primary order. He was the star of sidewalk convocations and vacant-lot meetings of the Unemployed. But he despised the mob that echoed his perorations and paid for his drinks, and was at heart the aristocrat that his old uniform had made him.