I owned up.
Name sounded Dago, but I seemed to be white. Had treated her white, anyways. He thanked me, and I bowed.
At Troy this lady got off the cars to marry an officer, name of Sarde. Was he any good?
"No."
She was Sarde's wife, she wrote, and heaps miserable.
I could have opened Mr. Chambers' eyes. His lady had a smile for one man, "Oh, thank you, how nice!" for another, dropped her gloves for a third—she was great at dropping parcels—made eyes at all the rest. She had three-fourths of our garrison in a state of day-dreams and fond hopes for more, the kind of flirt who ogles niggers so that they go crazy and have to be burned. I could not tell Chambers all I thought of his lady, who wrote that her heart was broke.
Nothing had this real man to say about his own engagement to the woman, of the ranch he had stocked with cattle under her brand, registered in her name, not his own "with the stock association up to Helena." He told me nothing then of the 'dobe cabin, the fixings, the pi-anner, all for her, of the months' wages he had given that she might get eddicated down in civilization, or of the callous way she had betrayed him.
Only he stiffened, and his voice came near to breaking as he told me of suspicions. This guy she'd married up with must be some swine, and needed shooting a whole lot for making her unhappy. So he'd rode to Troy and found her gone. That meant, I suppose, that he had sacrificed his living, to ride a thousand miles for a woman who had not even troubled to send a post-card. At Troy he reckoned to find the preacher who had hitched up that team. I had tried also, but only discovered that Miss Burrows went with Mr. Sarde from Fort Qu'Appelle for a sleigh-ride, and came back married.
Chambers had tracked the pair to Troy, where he found that the ceremony had been performed by Happy Bill, a converted railroad fireman, not in holy orders; not licensed to marry people. He had broken the law to perform a sacrilege.
"He ain't no branded preacher," so Chambers put it, "but a maverick which ain't allowed in the herd, and railroad men is worse than sheep herders, anyhow."