Ranson's Folly

by Richard Harding Davis

Ranson looked sheepishly at Miss Cahill and laughed. “Well, so I was—then,” he said. “Anybody would be a devil of a fellow who'd been brought up as I was, with a doting parent who owns a trust and doesn't know the proper value of money. And yet you expect me to be happy with a fifty-cent limit game, and twenty miles of burned prairie. I tell you I've never been broken to it. I don't know what not having your own way means. And discipline! Why, every time I have to report one of my men to the colonel I send for him afterward and give him a drink and apologize to him. I tell you the army doesn't mean anything to me unless there's something doing, and as there is no fighting out here I'm for the back room of the Holland House and a rubber-tired automobile. Little old New York is good enough for me!”

As he spoke these fateful words of mutiny Lieutenant Ranson raised his black eyes and snatched a swift side-glance at the face of Mary Cahill. It was almost as though it were from her he sought his answer. He could not himself have told what it was he would have her say. But ever since the idea of leaving the army had come to him, Mary Cahill and the army had become interchangeable and had grown to mean one and the same thing. He fought against this condition of mind fiercely. He had determined that without active service the army was intolerable; but that without Mary Cahill civil life would also prove intolerable, he assured himself did not at all follow. He had laughed at the idea. He had even argued it out sensibly. Was it reasonable to suppose, he asked himself, that after circling the great globe three times he should find the one girl on it who alone could make him happy, sitting behind a post-trader's counter on the open prairie? His interest in Miss Cahill was the result of propinquity, that was all. It was due to the fact that there was no one else at hand, because he was sorry for her loneliness, because her absurd social ostracism had touched his sympathy. How long after he reached New York would he remember the little comrade with the brave, boyish eyes set in the delicate, feminine head, with its great waves of gorgeous hair? It would not be long, he guessed. He might remember the way she rode her pony, how she swung from her Mexican saddle and caught up a gauntlet from the ground. Yes, he certainly would remember that, and he would remember the day he had galloped after her and ridden with her through the Indian village, and again that day when they rode to the water-fall and the Lover's Leap. And he would remember her face at night as it bent over the books he borrowed for her, which she read while they were at mess, sitting in her high chair with her chin resting in her palms, staring down at the book before her. And the trick she had, whenever he spoke, of raising her head and looking into the fire, her eyes lighting and her lips smiling. They would be pleasant memories, he was sure. But once back again in the whirl and rush of the great world outside of Fort Crockett, even as memories they would pass away.

Mary Cahill made no outward answer to the rebellious utterance of Lieutenant Ranson. She only bent her eyes on her book and tried to think what the post would hold for her when he had carried out his threat and betaken himself into the world and out of her life forever. Night after night she had sat enthroned behind her barrier and listened to his talk, wondering deeply. He had talked of a world she knew only in novels, in history, and in books of travel. His view of it was not an educational one: he was no philosopher, nor trained observer. He remembered London—to her the capital of the world—chiefly by its restaurants, Cairo on account of its execrable golf-links. He lived only to enjoy himself. His view was that of a boy, hearty and healthy and seeking only excitement and mischief. She had heard his tales of his brief career at Harvard, of the reunions at Henry's American bar, of the Futurity, the Suburban, the Grand Prix, of a yachting cruise which apparently had encountered every form of adventure, from the rescuing of a stranded opera-company to the ramming of a slaver's dhow. The regret with which he spoke of these free days, which was the regret of an exile marooned upon a desert island, excited all her sympathy for an ill she had never known. His discourteous scorn of the social pleasures of the post, from which she herself was excluded, rilled her with speculation. If he could forego these functions, how full and gay she argued his former life must have been. His attitude helped her to bear the deprivations more easily. And she, as a loyal child of the army, liked him also because he was no “cracker-box” captain, but a fighter, who had fought with no morbid ideas as to the rights or wrongs of the cause, but for the fun of fighting.

And one night, after he had been telling the mess of a Filipino officer who alone had held back his men and himself, and who at last died in his arms cursing him, she went to sleep declaring to herself that Lieutenant Ranson was becoming too like the man she had pictured for her husband than was good for her peace of mind. He had told the story as his tribute to a brave man fighting for his independence and with such regret that such a one should have died so miserably, that, to the embarrassment of the mess, the tears rolled down his cheeks. But he wiped them away with his napkin as unconcernedly as though they were caused by the pepper-box, and said simply, “He had sporting blood, he had. I've never felt so bad about anything as I did about that chap. Whenever I think of him standing up there with his back to the cathedral all shot to pieces, but giving us what for until he died, it makes me cry. So,” he added, blowing his nose vigorously, “I won't think of it any more.”

Tears are properly a woman's weapon, and when a man makes use of them, even in spite of himself, he is taking an advantage over the other sex which is unfair and outrageous. Lieutenant Ranson never knew the mischief the sympathy he had shown for his enemy caused in the heart of Mary Cahill, nor that from that moment she loved him deeply.

The West Point graduates before they answered Ranson's ultimatum smoked their cigarettes for some time in silence.

“Oh, there's been fighting even at Fort Crockett,” said Crosby. “In the last two years the men have been ordered out seven times, haven't they, Miss Cahill? When the Indians got out of hand, and twice after cowboys, and twice after the Red Rider.”

“The Red Rider!” protested Ranson; “I don't see anything exciting in rounding up one miserable horse thief.”

“Only they don't round him up,” returned Curtis crossly. “That's why it's exciting. He's the best in his business. He's held up the stage six times now in a year. Whoever the fellow is, if he's one man or a gang of men, he's the nerviest road-agent since the days of Abe Case.”

Ranson in his then present mood was inclined toward pessimism. “It doesn't take any nerve to hold up a coach,” he contradicted.