Golden Face: A Tale of the Wild West

“There is no question of offence,” protested Vipan. “I am a confirmed wanderer, you see, Mrs Winthrop – here to-day, away to-morrow. The country is clear of reds now, and you will no longer need our additional rifles. If we have rendered you some slight service, I can answer for it, my partner is as glad as I am myself.”

No man living was less liable to be swayed by caprice than the speaker. Yet suddenly he became as resolved to remain a little longer, as he had been a moment before to leave. And this change was brought about by the most trivial circumstance in the world. While he was speaking, his eyes had met those of Yseulte Santorex.

Only for a moment, however.

When Vipan, in his usual laconic manner, informed his comrade that he concluded to wait a bit longer, the latter merely remarked, “Right, pard. Jest as you fancy.” But as he rolled over to go to sleep, he nodded off to the unspoken soliloquy —

“It’s a rum start – a darn rum start. At his time of life, too! Yes, sir.”

Chapter Twenty Seven

In the “Dug-Out.”

Yseulte Santorex was conscious of a new and unwonted sensation. She felt nervous.

Yet why should she have felt so, seeing that this was by no means the first time she had undertaken an expedition à deux under her present escort? But somehow it seemed to her that his tone had conveyed a peculiar significance when he suggested this early morning antelope-stalk at the time of making up his mind to remain.

It was a lovely morning. The sun was not an hour high, and the air was delicious. But their success had been nil. To account for the absolute lack of game was a puzzle to Vipan, but it could hardly be the cause of his constrained taciturnity.

Yseulte felt nervous. Why had he induced her to come out like this to-day? Instinctively she felt that he was on the eve of making some revelation. Was he about to confide to her the history of his past? Her nervousness deepened as it began to dawn upon her what an extraordinary fascination this adventurer of the Western Plains, with his splendid stature and magnificent face, was capable of exercising over her. A silence had fallen between them.

“I want you to see this,” said Vipan suddenly as they came upon the ruins of what had once been a strong and substantial building. “It’s an old stage-station which was burnt by the reds in ’67.”

There was eloquence in the ruins of the thick and solid walls which even now stood as high as ten or twelve feet in places, and which were still spanned by a few charred and blackened beams, like the gaping ribs of a wrecked ship. The floor was covered with coarse herbage, sprouting through a layer of débris, whence arose that damp, earthy smell which seems inseparable from ancient buildings of whatever kind. Standing within this relic of a terrible epoch, Yseulte could not repress a shudder. What mutilated human remains might they not actually be walking over? Even in the cheerful daylight the flap of ghostly wings seemed to waft past her.

“If these old walls could speak they’d tell a few queer yarns,” said her companion. “Look at these loop-holes. Many a leaden pill have they sent forth to carry ‘Mr Lo’ to the Happy Hunting-Grounds. I don’t know the exact history of this station, but it’s probably that of most others of the time. A surprise – a stiff fight – along siege in the ‘dug-out’ when the reds had set the building on fire – then either relief from outside, or the defenders, reduced by famine or failure of ammunition, shooting each other to avoid capture and the stake.”

“Horrible!” she answered, with a shiver. “But what is a ‘dug-out’?”

“Let’s get outside, and I’ll tell you all about it. Look – you see that mound of earth over there,” pointing to a round hump about a score of yards from the building, and rising three or four feet above the ground. “Well, that is a roof made of earth and stones, and therefore bullet and fire proof. It is loop-holed on a level with the ground, though it’s so overgrown with buffalo-grass that the holes’ll be choked up, I reckon. This roof covers a circular hole about ten or twelve feet in diameter, and just high enough for a man to stand up in. It is reached by a covered way from the main building, and its object was this: – When the reds were numerous and daring enough they had not much difficulty in setting the building on fire by throwing torches and blazing arrows on the roof, just as they threw them into our camp the other day. Then the stage people got into the ‘dug-out,’ and with plenty of rations and ammunition could hold their own indefinitely against all comers. The ‘dug-out’ was pretty nearly an essential adjunct to every stage-station, and a good many ranches had them as well. And now, if you feel so disposed, we will try and explore this one, and then it will be time to start camp-wards.”

She assented eagerly. First going to the mound, the removal of the overgrowth of grass revealed the loop-holes.

“It is like looking into the oubliettes of a mediaeval castle,” said Yseulte, striving to peer through the apertures into the blackness beneath.

“Now come this way,” said her companion, leading the way into the building once more.

A moment’s scrutiny – then advancing to a corner of the building he wrenched away great armfuls of the thick overgrowth. A hole stood revealed – a dark passage slanting down into the earth.

“Wait here a moment,” he said. “I’ll go in first and see that the way is clear.”

The tunnel was straight and smooth. Once inside there was not much difficulty in getting along. But it suddenly occurred to Vipan that he might be acting like a fool. What if he were to encounter a snake in this long-closed-up oubliette, or foul air? Well, for the latter, the matches that he lighted from time to time burnt brightly and clear. For the former – he was already within the “dug-out” when the thought struck him.

He glanced around in the subterranean gloom. It was not unlikely that the floor of the tomb-like retreat might be strewn with the remains of its former owners, who had perished miserably by their own hands rather than fall into the power of their savage foe. But no grim death’s-head glowered at him in the darkness. The place was empty. Quickly he returned to his companion.

“It’s pretty dark in there,” he said. “Think you’d care to undertake it? It may try your nerves.”

But Yseulte laughingly disclaimed the proprietorship of any such inconvenient attributes. She was resolved to see as much wild adventure as she could, she declared. Nevertheless, when she found herself buried in the earthy darkness as she crawled at her companion’s heels, she could not feel free from an inclination to turn back there and then.

But when she stood upright within the underground fortress, and her eyes became accustomed to the half-light, she forgot her misgivings.

“How ingenious!” she cried, looking first around the earthy cell and then out through the loop-holes. “Now, let’s imagine we are beleaguered here, and that the savages are wheeling and circling around us. We could ‘stand them off’ – isn’t that the expression? – till next week.”

“And then if nobody came to get us out of our fix next week?”

“Oh, then we could hold out until the week after.”

“You think that would be fun, eh?”

“Of course,” she answered, her eyes dancing with glee in response to his queer half-smile.

“H’m. Well I’m very glad there’s no chance of your undergoing the actual experience,” he answered drily, turning away to gaze out on the surrounding country, but really that she should not see the expression that swept across his face. For it had come to this. Rupert Vipan – adventurer, renegade, freebooter – a stranger, for many a year, to any softening or tender feeling – a man, too, who had already attained middle age – thought, as he listened to her words, how willingly he would give the remainder of his life for just that experience. To be besieged here for days with this girl – only they two, all alone together – himself her sole protector, with a violent and horrible death at the end of it, he admitted at that moment would be to him Paradise. Yet a consciousness of the absurdity of the idea struck him even then. Who was he in her eyes, in the eyes of those around her, her friends and protectors? An unknown adventurer – a mere commonplace border ruffian. And – at his time of life, too!

“Were you ever besieged in one of these places?” asked Yseulte.

Her voice recalled him to himself.

“Once,” he answered. “In ’67, on the Smoky Hill route, four stagemen and myself. The reds burnt us out the first night, and we got into the dug-out. It was wearisome work, for they preserved a most respectful distance once we were down there. They wouldn’t haul off, though. So one man kept a look-out at the loop-holes, while the rest of us played poker or varied the tedium by swapping lies.”

“Doing what?”

“Oh, exchanging ‘experiences.’ Tall twisters some of them were, too. Well, by the third night we got so sick of it that we made up our minds to try and quit. The reds were still hanging around. We needn’t have, for we had plenty of rations and ammunition, but the business was becoming so intolerably monotonous. Well, we started, and the upshot was that out of the five, three of us fell in with a cavalry patrol the next evening, having dodged the reds all day, each of us with an arrow or two stuck more or less badly into him, and the Cheyennes went home with a brace of new scalps. Otherwise the affair was tame enough.”

“Tame, indeed? But you tell it rather tamely. Now, how did the Indians first come to attack you? You left that out.”

“Did I? Oh, well, I happened to discover their propinquity, and concluded to warn the stage people. The red brother divined my intention afar off, and came for me – and them.”

“You ought to be called the Providence of the Plains,” she said, with a laugh that belied the seriousness of her face. “There, I christen you that on the spot.”

“That would be a good joke to tell them over in Henniker City! But to be serious, in these latter days I never go out of my way to spoil the red brother’s fun. None of my business, any way.”

“But you made an exception in favour of us. I don’t believe you are talking seriously at all.”

“You don’t?” he echoed, turning suddenly upon her, and there was that in his tones which awed her into wonder and silence. “You don’t? Well, let me tell you all about it. It was you, and you alone, who saved every soul in that outfit from the scalping-knife and the stake. I sighted your party straggling along just anyhow, and I’d already been watching the Sioux preparing to ambush it. Then while promising my self a good time lying up there on the butte, and looking on at the fun, I chanced to catch sight of – you. That decided the business. Instead of assisting at a grand pitched battle in the novel character of a spectator, I elected to warn your people. Otherwise – ambling along haphazard as they were – they’d have lost their head-coverings to a dead certainty. That is how you saved them.”

“What! You would have done nothing to warn them? I cannot believe it.”

“Wouldn’t have lifted a finger. Why should I?” he broke off, almost angrily. “What interest had I in a few ranchmen and bullwhackers more or less? They were no more to me than the painted savages lying in wait to scalp them. Stop, you were going to say something about colour, religion, and all that sort of thing. But a white skin as often as not covers as vile a nature as a red one, and for the other consideration look at its accredited teachers. About as good Christians as the average Sioux medicine-man, neither better nor worse. It was a blessed good thing, though, that I had a first rate field-glass on that occasion.”

She raised her eyes to his as if expecting him to continue, and they seemed to grow soft and velvety. But he did not continue. Instead, he had taken a rigid attitude, and appeared to be listening intently.

“What can you hear?” she began, wonderingly.

But the words died away on her lips, and she grew ashy pale as her dilated glance read her companion’s face in the gloomy half-light of the “dug-out.” No need to pursue her enquiry now.

For, audible to both, came a dull muffled roar, distant, faint, but of unmistakable import. Even Yseulte did not require her companion to explain the sound. Even she recognised in the long, dropping roll the heavy discharge of firearms.

Chapter Twenty Eight