"Thank you. I seem to have hit her off very well."
"Will you exhibit in Washington this winter?" he asked, with boyish eagerness.
"I may--I haven"t quite decided," she said, quite off guard at last.
"If you do I wish you would let me know. I may be able to visit the exhibition and witness your triumph."
She began to suspect his motives. "Oh, my little row of paintings couldn"t be tortured into a triumph. I"ve stolen the time for them from Mr. Lawson, whose ill.u.s.trations I have neglected." She was again cold and repellent.
"Miss Brisbane, this whole situation has become intolerable to me." He rose and faced her, very sincere and deeply earnest. "I do not like to have you go away carrying an unpleasant impression of me. What can I do to change it? If I have been boorish or presuming in any way I sincerely beg your pardon."
She motioned to Peta. "You can go now, dear, I"ve done all I can to-day."
Curtis took up his hat. "I hope I have not broken up your sitting. It would be unpardonable in me."
She squinted back at the picture with professional gravity. "Oh no; I only had a few touches to put in under the chin--that luminous shadow is so hard to get. I"m quite finished."
She went behind a screen for a few moments, and when she reappeared without her brushes and her blouse she was the society young lady in tone and manner.
"Would you like to look at my sketches?" she asked. "They"re jolly rubbish, the whole lot, but they represent a deal of enthusiasm."
Her tone was friendly--too friendly, considering the point at which he had paused, and he was a little hurt by it. Was she playing with him?
His tone was firm and his manner direct as he said: "Miss Brisbane, I am accustomed to deal directly with friends as well as enemies, and I like to have people equally frank with me. I know you are angry because of my action in the case of your uncle. I do not ask pardon for that; I was acting there in line of my duty. But if I have spoken harshly or without due regard to your feelings at any time I ask you to forgive me."
He made a powerful appeal to her at this moment, but she wilfully replied: "You made no effort to soften my uncle"s disgrace."
"I didn"t know he was your uncle at that time," he said, but his face grew grave quickly. "It would have made no difference if I had--my orders were to step between him and the records of the office. So far as my orders enlightened me, he was a man to be watched." He turned towards the door. "Is there anything I can do to help you reach the station to-morrow? My sister and I would gladly drive you down."
She was unrelenting, but very lovely as she replied: "Thank you; you are very kind, but all arrangements are made."
"Good-afternoon, Miss Brisbane."
"Good-bye, Captain Curtis."
"She is hard--hard as iron," he said, as he walked away. "Her father"s daughter in every fibre."
He was ashamed to acknowledge how deeply he felt her rejection of his friendship, and the thought of not seeing her again gave him a sudden sense of weakness and loneliness.
Elsie, on her part, was surprised to find a new nerve tingling in her brain, and this tremor cut into the complete self-satisfaction she expected to feel over her refusal of the peace-pipe. Several times during the afternoon, while superintending her packing, she found herself standing in an att.i.tude of meditation--her inward eye reverting to the fine, manly figure he made, while his grave, sweet voice vibrated in her ears. She began to see herself in an unpleasant light, and when at the dinner-table Lawson spoke of Curtis, she listened to him with more real interest than ever before.
"He is making wonderful changes here," Lawson was saying. "Everywhere you go you see Tetongs working at fence-building, bridge-making, cabin-raising, with their eagle feathers fluttering in the winds, their small hands chapped with cold. They are sawing boards and piling grain in the warehouse and daubing red paint on the roofs. They are in a frenzy of work. Every man has his rations and is happy. In some way he has persuaded the chiefs to bring in all the school-children, and the benches are full of the little shock-heads, wild as colts."
"A new broom, etc.," murmured Elsie.
"His predecessor never was a new broom," retorted Lawson, quickly.
"Sennett always had a nasty slaunch to him. He never in his life cleaned the dirt from the corners, and I don"t see exactly why you take such pains in defending him."
"Because he is my uncle," she replied.
"Uncle Boot-jack! That is pure fudge, Bee Bee. You didn"t speak to him once a week; you privately despised him--anybody could see that. You are simply making a cudgel of him now to beat Curtis with--and, to speak plainly, I think it petty of you. More than this, you"d better hedge, for I"m not at all sure that Sennett has not been peculating."
Elsie stopped him with an angry gesture. "I"ll not have you accusing him behind his back."
Lawson threw out his hands in a gesture of despair. "All right! But make a note of it: you"ll regret this taking sides with a disreputable old b.u.mmer against an officer of Captain Curtis"s reputation."
"You are not my master!" she said, and her eyes were fiercely bright. "I do not wish to hear you use that tone to me again! I resent it!" and she struck the floor with her foot. "Henceforth, if we are to remain friends, you will refrain from lecturing me!" and she left the room with a feeling of having done two men a wrong by being unjust to herself, and this feeling deepened into shame as she lay in her bed that night. It was her first serious difference with Lawson and she grew unhappy over it. "But he shouldn"t take sides against me like that," she said, in an attempt to justify her anger.
On the second morning thereafter Lawson came into the office and said: "Well, Captain, we leave you this morning."
Curtis looked up into his visitor"s fine, sensitive face, and exclaimed, abruptly--almost violently: "I"m going to miss you, old man."
"My heart"s with you," replied Lawson. "And I shall return next spring."
"Bring Miss Brisbane with you."
"I"d like to do so, but she is vastly out of key--and I doubt.
Meanwhile, if I can be of any use to you in Washington let me know."
"Thank you, Lawson, I trust you perfectly," Curtis replied, with a glow of warm liking.
As he stood at the gate looking up into Elsie"s face, she seemed very much softened, and he wished to reach his hand and stay her where she sat; but the last word was spoken, and the wagon rolled away with no more definite a.s.surance of her growing friendship than was to be read in a polite smile.
Jennie was tearful as she said: "After all, they were worth while."
Curtis sighed as he said: "Sis, the realities of our position begin to make themselves felt. Play-spells will be fewer now that our artists are gone."
"They certainly broke our fall," replied Jennie, soberly. "Osborne Lawson is fine, and I don"t believe Elsie Bee Bee is as ferocious as she pretends to be."
"It"s her training. She has breathed the air of rapacity from childhood. I can"t blame her for being her father"s child."
Jennie looked at him as if he were presented from a new angle of vision.
"George, there _is_ a queer streak in you--for a soldier; you"re too soft-hearted. But don"t you get too much interested in Elsie Bee Bee; she"s dangerous--and, besides, Mr. Lawson wears an air of command."
VII
ELSIE RELENTS A LITTLE
The feeling against the redmen, intensified throughout the State by the removal of Sennett, beat against Curtis like a flood. Delegations of citizens, headed by Streeter and Johnson, proceeded at once to Washington, laden with briefs, affidavits, and pet.i.tions, and there laid siege to Congress as soon as the members began to a.s.semble. The twenty original homesteaders were taken as the text for most impa.s.sioned appeals by local orators, and their melancholy situation was skilfully enlarged upon. They were described as hardy and industrious patriots, hemmed in by sullen savages, with no outlet for trade and scant pasturage for their flocks--in nightly fear of the torch and the scalping-knife.
To Curtis, these settlers were by no interpretation martyrs in the cause of civilization--they were quite other. His birth, his military training, and his natural refinement tended to make him critical of them. They were to him, for the most part, "poor whites," too pitiless to be civilized, and too degenerate to have the interest of their primitive red neighbors. "The best of them," he said to Jennie, "are foolhardy pioneers who have exiled their wives and children for no good reason. The others are cattlemen who followed the cavalry in order to fatten their stock under the protection of our guidon."
The citizens of Pinon City wondered why their delegates made so little impression on the department, but Streeter was not left long in doubt.
The Secretary interrupted him in the midst of his first presentation of the matter.