Atlantic Narratives Part 35

Jerry dropped into a chair. Death! Rosita!--a creature so instinct with the life of this world that it was impossible to conceive her in the life of which death is the portal.

'Did she--' He shuddered.

'No! She never rallied from the shock of that night. Her father has been here to ask me to forgive the dead. My G.o.d! I shall not forgive myself!'

Pryor cried, with an anguish none the less intense for the faintness of the voice which uttered it.

Jerry had covered his face, and the other stared enviously at the tears that slipped through his fingers.

'Time is up!' the surgeon exclaimed from outside the closed door.

The eyes of the two men met wistfully.

'I have deserved no favor from you,' Pryor muttered; 'neither is it for my sake that I entreat you to continue silent. There will be no further inquiry into the matter, as the surgeon tells me that I shall recover.

So the garrison must be satisfied only with conjecture as to my temporary madness and your magnanimity.'

'It is you who are magnanimous!'

'I loved her; I persecuted her! The death she desired for me was mercy compared to the life which is all the atonement I can make to her memory.'

With which exceeding bitter whisper Pryor turned himself to the wall.

Out on the parade, the radiant freshness of the prairie morning thrilled Jerry's young veins with an ecstasy of living, and a sharp pang of compa.s.sion stabbed his heart.

Misguided, bewitching,--ah, yes, and loving,--Rosita lay dead in the midst of the summer gladness that seemed akin to her. He pulled his cap over his eyes, and, ignoring some cordial greetings, walked hurriedly to the post-trader's quarters. Presently Lawless came to him in the little drawing-room, which was unfamiliarly dark and still.

'G.o.d bless you!' he said, laying a hand on Jerry's shoulder. 'Those words do not mean much to me. I've wished they did since last night. But you will understand from them that I am grateful. Hus.h.!.+ I have nothing to forgive you. Nor had she. Will you come to see her? She never knew that you were s.h.i.+elding her, or she would have confessed; and she wished you to see her--if she looked pretty.'

Pretty, indeed! Poor flower of a people Christianized just enough to suffer for the savage instincts they do not learn to control! She lay with a crucifix between the hands which seemed so childish, and were so guilty.

'Remember her like this,' Lawless continued. Remember, too, that she loved you; not as the women of our race love, when nature is subdued by civilization and ruled by religion, but with the limitless love of a squaw for her chief, knowing neither right nor wrong in her devotion to him. For under her daintiness and her sweetness Rosita was a squaw.'

Across her grave three men kept silence. There is another regiment at Lawrence now, and when the ----th Cavalry remember what they beheld of this story, they glance at their quiet major with wonder for his fleeting madness. Only the surgeon and one or two ladies murmur to their own thoughts, 'Rosita?'

PERJURED

BY EDITH RONALD MIRRIELEES

A lie well stuck to--

IT began with no more than a word, such as a man might speak and forget he had spoken. At the time of speaking, Robbins Nelson was standing with a group of other youths--lads in their late 'teens and early twenties--on the Sutro Station platform. All their eyes were on the approaching train, and all their tongues were busy with a single topic.

Robbins was the youngest member of the group--barely turned sixteen.

Usually he hung somewhat unregarded on its edge, but to-day, bold in the possession of first-hand knowledge, he thrust himself into the heart of the talk.

'I looked right down on him, close as I am to you. I was walking along over that cut where the train comes through. Gee, his head looked three-cornered! I yelled, but the engineer didn't know what I meant.

Anyhow, they wouldn't have stopped--nothing but a hobo.'

'No good if they had,' an older speaker took up the words. 'He was done for. Didn't speak but once after they got him off. "Don't hit me," he says. I s'pose when they run into the tunnel and whatever it was jammed into him--'

'He didn't get hurt in any tunnel,' Robbins a.s.serted. The color flared into his face with the intensity of his conviction. The horrid memory of the man set him to blinking. 'He couldn't get hurt if he was lying down, could he? And if he was standing up, it'd knock him off, wouldn't it? It wasn't any tunnel--'

He broke off, aware suddenly of the smiling ridicule in the faces round him. Grotend, brother-in-law to the coroner who had held the inquest, laughed good-temperedly.

'Go it, William J. Burns, Junior! I s'pose some fancy murderer crawled up on top between stations. Or he got jolted down out of an air-s.h.i.+p.

It'd take something like that--'

Grotend was popular with the group. Their ready laughter rewarded the attack. And the younger boy's crimson misery was an invitation to further teasing.

'You hadn't ought to be stingy with bright ideas like that, Nelse. He sent you an anonymous letter, didn't he? Or maybe you saw a man in a black mask beating him up--'

'No, I didn't!' said Robbins loudly. He cast about desperately in his mind for a means of escape. 'I didn't see anybody beating him up, but I saw Jim Whiting coming down off the end of the car.'

A hush followed his statement--a tribute to the weight of it. Grotend, his lips parted for a fresh jibe, drew in his breath sharply as though in the shock of a cold douche. Then,--

'You saw Jim Whiting?' he reiterated.

Jim Whiting was brakeman on the local freight, a figure familiar enough to all of them.

'Getting deaf, aren't you?' Robbins retorted.

He turned his back upon his tormentors and walked away across the platform.

He was not much impressed with the importance of his lie. Chiefly, he was elated that there had come to him a lie suitable to turn the tables.

Half-way home his elation lasted, to be crowded out only by the recurring memory of the injured tramp. The boy had never before seen violent death. The picture of the man as he sped past, b.l.o.o.d.y and misshapen, on the swaying car-top; the later picture of him borne up the street on the improvised stretcher, came back upon him hideously. That for such destruction, for such wanton suffering, there should be no punishable agent, seemed intolerable. And the idea once presented, who so likely as Whiting--

He heard the beat of footsteps behind him, and Grotend, breathing quickly, swung into pace at his side.

'I been trying to catch up with you,' he explained unnecessarily. 'Say, when Jim come out on the platform, I spoke to him. I says, "One of the fellows says he saw you up on top that day the tramp got hurt." And you'd ought to seen him. I guess he knew--'

'What'd he say?' Robbins interrupted.

'All he says was, "You tell that fellow he's a liar"; but if you'd seen the look on him--,'

'Don't you tell him I said it,' the younger boy cautioned. 'I don't want him down on me.' A belated stir of conscience set him to hedging.

'Anyhow, I didn't say I saw him up on the car. All I saw was when he was just there on those iron steps on the side. I don't know if he was going up or down.'

They stood at the Nelson gate for a little, talking. It was full dark when Robbins went up the shrub-lined path to the porch. In the lighted dining-room his mother and the younger children were already at supper.

'Late, Robbins,' Mrs. Nelson admonished as he slid into his place. Then, catching sight of his face, 'Tired out? If it's that accident that's worrying you--'

'It's not,' the boy denied. He felt his cheeks grow hot with a sudden flush of annoyance. 'I don't see what I'd worry about that for. Only, Charlie Grotend told Mr. Whiting I saw him on the car that day, and it made Whiting mad. I was wis.h.i.+ng he hadn't.'

'You didn't say anything more than that--that he could have helped it, or anything like that? Well, then!' She put the discussion aside with a gesture. 'Merle Williams telephoned to see if you'd come over there to-night. You might as well. There's no use brooding--'

'I'm _not!_' Robbins flung back angrily.