A Waif of the Plains

“I should like to wash myself a little,” he returned hesitatingly, thinking of the clean tent, the clean lady, and Susy’s ribbons.

“Certainly,” said his friend, with a pleased look. “Come with me.” Instead of leading Clarence to the battered tin basin and bar of yellow soap which had formed the toilet service of the Silsbee party, he brought the boy into one of the wagons, where there was a washstand, a china basin, and a cake of scented soap. Standing beside Clarence, he watched him perform his ablutions with an approving air which rather embarrassed his protege. Presently he said, almost abruptly,—

“Do you remember your father’s house at Louisville?”

“Yes, sir; but it was a long time ago.”

Clarence remembered it as being very different from his home at St. Joseph’s, but from some innate feeling of diffidence he would have shrunk from describing it in that way. He, however, said he thought it was a large house. Yet the modest answer only made his new friend look at him the more keenly.

“Your father was Colonel Hamilton Brant, of Louisville, wasn’t he?” he said, half-confidentially.

“Yes,” said Clarence hopelessly.

“Well,” said his friend cheerfully, as if dismissing an abstruse problem from his mind, “Let’s go to supper.”

When they reached the tent again, Clarence noticed that the supper was laid only for his host and wife and the second man—who was familiarly called “Harry,” but who spoke of the former always as “Mr. and Mrs. Peyton”—while the remainder of the party, a dozen men, were at a second camp fire, and evidently enjoying themselves in a picturesque fashion. Had the boy been allowed to choose, he would have joined them, partly because it seemed more “manly,” and partly that he dreaded a renewal of the questioning.

But here, Susy, sitting bolt upright on an extemporized high stool, happily diverted his attention by pointing to the empty chair beside her.

“Kla’uns,” she said suddenly, with her usual clear and appalling frankness, “they is chickens, and hamanaigs, and hot biksquits, and lasses, and Mister Peyton says I kin have ‘em all.”

Clarence, who had begun suddenly to feel that he was responsible for Susy’s deportment and was balefully conscious that she was holding her plated fork in her chubby fist by its middle, and, from his previous knowledge of her, was likely at any moment to plunge it into the dish before her, said softly,—

“Hush!”

“Yes, you shall, dear,” said Mrs. Peyton, with tenderly beaming assurance to Susy and a half-reproachful glance at the boy. “Eat what you like, darling.”

“It’s a fork,” whispered the still uneasy Clarence, as Susy now seemed inclined to stir her bowl of milk with it.

“‘Tain’t, now, Kla’uns, it’s only a split spoon,” said Susy.

But Mrs. Peyton, in her rapt admiration, took small note of these irregularities, plying the child with food, forgetting her own meal, and only stopping at times to lift back the forward straying curls on Susy’s shoulders. Mr. Peyton looked on gravely and contentedly. Suddenly the eyes of husband and wife met.

“She’d have been nearly as old as this, John,” said Mrs. Peyton, in a faint voice.

John Peyton nodded without speaking, and turned his eyes away into the gathering darkness. The man “Harry” also looked abstractedly at his plate, as if he was saying grace. Clarence wondered who “she” was, and why two little tears dropped from Mrs. Peyton’s lashes into Susy’s milk, and whether Susy might not violently object to it. He did not know until later that the Peytons had lost their only child, and Susy comfortably drained this mingled cup of a mother’s grief and tenderness without suspicion.

“I suppose we’ll come up with their train early tomorrow, if some of them don’t find us to-night,” said Mrs. Peyton, with a long sigh and a regretful glance at Susy. “Perhaps we might travel together for a little while,” she added timidly.

Harry laughed, and Mr. Peyton replied gravely, “I am afraid we wouldn’t travel with them, even for company’s sake; and,” he added, in a lower and graver voice, “it’s rather odd the search party hasn’t come upon us yet, though I’m keeping Pete and Hank patrolling the trail to meet them.”

“It’s heartless—so it is!” said Mrs. Peyton, with sudden indignation. “It would be all very well if it was only this boy, who can take care of himself; but to be so careless of a mere baby like this, it’s shameful!”

For the first time Clarence tasted the cruelty of discrimination. All the more keenly that he was beginning to worship, after his boyish fashion, this sweet-faced, clean, and tender-hearted woman. Perhaps Mr. Peyton noticed it, for he came quietly to his aid.

“Maybe they knew better than we in what careful hands they had left her,” he said, with a cheerful nod towards Clarence. “And, again, they may have been fooled as we were by Injin signs and left the straight road.”

This suggestion instantly recalled to Clarence his vision in the mesquite. Should he dare tell them? Would they believe him, or would they laugh at him before her? He hesitated, and at last resolved to tell it privately to the husband. When the meal was ended, and he was made happy by Mrs. Peyton’s laughing acceptance of his offer to help her clear the table and wash the dishes, they all gathered comfortably in front of the tent before the large camp fire. At the other fire the rest of the party were playing cards and laughing, but Clarence no longer cared to join them. He was quite tranquil in the maternal propinquity of his hostess, albeit a little uneasy as to his reticence about the Indian.

“Kla’uns,” said Susy, relieving a momentary pause, in her highest voice, “knows how to speak. Speak, Kla’uns!”

It appearing from Clarence’s blushing explanation that this gift was not the ordinary faculty of speech, but a capacity to recite verse, he was politely pressed by the company for a performance.

“Speak ‘em, Kla’uns, the boy what stood unto the burnin’ deck, and said, ‘The boy, oh, where was he?’” said Susy, comfortably lying down on Mrs. Peyton’s lap, and contemplating her bare knees in the air. “It’s ‘bout a boy,” she added confidentially to Mrs. Peyton, “whose father wouldn’t never, never stay with him on a burnin’ ship, though he said, ‘Stay, father, stay,’ ever so much.”

With this clear, lucid, and perfectly satisfactory explanation of Mrs. Hemans’s “Casabianca,” Clarence began. Unfortunately, his actual rendering of this popular school performance was more an effort of memory than anything else, and was illustrated by those wooden gestures which a Western schoolmaster had taught him. He described the flames that “roared around him,” by indicating with his hand a perfect circle, of which he was the axis; he adjured his father, the late Admiral Casabianca, by clasping his hands before his chin, as if wanting to be manacled in an attitude which he was miserably conscious was unlike anything he himself had ever felt or seen before; he described that father “faint in death below,” and “the flag on high,” with one single motion. Yet something that the verses had kindled in his active imagination, perhaps, rather than an illustration of the verses themselves, at times brightened his gray eyes, became tremulous in his youthful voice, and I fear occasionally incoherent on his lips. At times, when not conscious of his affected art, the plain and all upon it seemed to him to slip away into the night, the blazing camp fire at his feet to wrap him in a fateful glory, and a vague devotion to something—he knew not what—so possessed him that he communicated it, and probably some of his own youthful delight in extravagant voice, to his hearers, until, when he ceased with a glowing face, he was surprised to find that the card players had deserted their camp fires and gathered round the tent.

CHAPTER V

“You didn’t say ‘Stay, father, stay,’ enough, Kla’uns,” said Susy critically. Then suddenly starting upright in Mrs. Peyton’s lap, she continued rapidly, “I kin dance. And sing. I kin dance High Jambooree.”

“What’s High Jambooree, dear?” asked Mrs. Peyton.

“You’ll see. Lemme down.” And Susy slipped to the ground.

The dance of High Jambooree, evidently of remote mystical African origin, appeared to consist of three small skips to the right and then to the left, accompanied by the holding up of very short skirts, incessant “teetering” on the toes of small feet, the exhibition of much bare knee and stocking, and a gurgling accompaniment of childish laughter. Vehemently applauded, it left the little performer breathless, but invincible and ready for fresh conquest.

“I kin sing, too,” she gasped hurriedly, as if unwilling that the applause should lapse. “I kin sing. Oh, dear! Kla’uns,” piteously, “WHAT is it I sing?”

“Ben Bolt,” suggested Clarence.

“Oh, yes. Oh, don’t you remember sweet Alers Ben Bolt?” began Susy, in the same breath and the wrong key. “Sweet Alers, with hair so brown, who wept with delight when you giv’d her a smile, and—” with knitted brows and appealing recitative, “what’s er rest of it, Kla’uns?”

“Who trembled with fear at your frown?” prompted Clarence.

“Who trembled with fear at my frown?” shrilled Susy. “I forget er rest. Wait! I kin sing—”

“Praise God,” suggested Clarence.

“Yes.” Here Susy, a regular attendant in camp and prayer-meetings, was on firmer ground.

Promptly lifting her high treble, yet with a certain acquired deliberation, she began, “Praise God, from whom all blessings flow.” At the end of the second line the whispering and laughing ceased. A deep voice to the right, that of the champion poker player, suddenly rose on the swell of the third line. He was instantly followed by a dozen ringing voices, and by the time the last line was reached it was given with a full chorus, in which the dull chant of teamsters and drivers mingled with the soprano of Mrs. Peyton and Susy’s childish treble. Again and again it was repeated, with forgetful eyes and abstracted faces, rising and falling with the night wind and the leap and gleam of the camp fires, and fading again like them in the immeasurable mystery of the darkened plain.

In the deep and embarrassing silence that followed, at last the party hesitatingly broke up, Mrs. Peyton retiring with Susy after offering the child to Clarence for a perfunctory “good-night” kiss, an unusual proceeding, which somewhat astonished them both—and Clarence found himself near Mr. Peyton.

“I think,” said Clarence timidly, “I saw an Injin to-day.”

Mr. Peyton bent down towards him. “An Injin—where?” he asked quickly, with the same look of doubting interrogatory with which he had received Clarence’s name and parentage.