Long before, she had turned over fruitlessly in her mind every means of getting money for this journey besides the obvious way of asking Father Meadows for her own. She had guessed that her friends were suspicious of Henniker's good faith, and believed that if they should come to know of her intention of running away to follow him they would prevent her for her own good,—which was quite the case.
That was the point Father Meadows made with his wife, when she argued that Meta, being a married woman now, ought to learn the purchasing power of money and its limitations by experimenting with a little of her own.
"We shall do wrong if we keep her a child now," she said.
"But if she has money, she'll lay it by till she gets enough to slip off to her soldier with. There's that much Injun about her; she'll follow to heel like a dog."
Father Meadows could not have spoken in this way of Meta a year ago. She had lost caste with him, also.
"Don't, father," the mother said, with a hurt look. "She'll not follow far with ten dollars in her pocket; but that much I want to try her with. She's like a child about shopping. She'll take anything at all, if it looks right and the man persuades her. And those Jew clerks will charge whatever they think they can get."
Mrs. Meadows had her way, and the trial sum was given to Meta one day, and the next day she and the child were missing.
At dusk, that evening, a group of Bannock squaws, more or less encumbered with packs, and children, climbed upon one of the flat cars of a freight train bound for Pocatello. The engine steamed out of the station, and down the valley, and away upon the autumn plains. The next morning the Bannocks broke camp, and vanished before the hoar frost had melted from the sage. Their leave-taking had been sullen, and their answers to questions about Meta, with which Father Meadows had routed them out in the night, had been so unsatisfactory that he took the first train to the Fort Hall Agency. There he waited for the party of squaws from Bisuka; but when they came, Meta was not with them. They knew nothing of her, they said; even the agent was deceived by their counterfeit ignorance. They could tell nothing, and were allowed to join their men at Eagle Rock, to go hunting into the wild country around Jackson's Hole.
Father Meadows went back and relieved his wife's worst fear,—that the girl had fulfilled the wrong half of her destiny, and gone back to hide her grief in the bosom of her tribe.
"Then you'll find her at Custer," said she. "You must write to the quartermaster-sergeant. And be sure you tell him she's married to him. He may be carrying on with some one else by this time."