The charge was made, and only la Mancha could withdraw that now. Sarde looked from face to face and all eyes accused him; all these men were witnesses against him on a charge of cowardice in the field. He set his teeth.
“Sergeant,” he said, “when we reach the Fort you will put this constable under close arrest.”
The Blackguard was singing gaily as he drove, singing in vengeful triumph, forgetting the dozen or so of his comrades whose bodies lay on the bloody snow, abandoned. Then he remembered and was silent, while the crackle of musketry dwindled away astern, as the men of the rear guard fell back. Only the lope of the horses, the creaking of the runners, and occasional sobbing gasps of a hurt man in the sleigh, disturbed the silence of the wilderness. La Mancha handed the reins to his off man:
“Take the team, Red; I want—”
He took a letter from his pocket, and sat, all humped up, reading gloomily.
Eight miles away the fellows down in the Fort were waiting for news, the news of victory. Red’s heart, as he drove, was aching; his face burned with shame as he thought of the Outfit thrashed—the Greatest Regiment on Earth disgraced—the dead left in the field, the sleighs full of wounded men in their agony—then the settlements! What could save the far-strung, lonely settlements now from being sacked and burned, the men tortured to death, the women—the children! He dared not think of them at the mercy of Red Indian tribes at war. And Buck was dead; poor old Buck, who had rooked him last night at cribbage—dead!
“Dearest,” the Blackguard read, “I can’t bear him any longer. Meet me behind the stockade at dusk. Your poor Polly.”
Who the deuce was Polly? What had he to tell her anyway from Buck? He put away Buck’s letter, and drove on, climbing the hillocks, swishing down the hollows among lakes and groves, until the deep valley of the Saskatchewan opened ahead, and far down beside the river he saw the old Hudson’s Bay Company’s post, Fort Carlton, where the Union Jack flamed out above the stockade, and the garrison waited for news of victory.
Away to the right, upon the eastern trail, a string of loaded sleighs was sweeping down long slopes toward the Fort, covered by mounted men with all the glitter and pageantry of war—the reinforcement which had come too late—B Troop, triumphant after a tremendous forced march to the rescue. The Blackguard grunted his disparagement, and spoke to his off man:
“Who’s poor Polly?”