Louisiana Lou. A Western Story

Opposite him, the precise and dapper Mr. Doolittle, expatriated American, waved a carefully manicured hand in acquired Gallic gestures as he expatiated on the circumstances which had summoned the soldier to his office. As he discoursed of these extraordinary matters his sharp eyes took in his client and noted the signs upon him, while he speculated on their occasion.

The steel-blue uniform, which should have been immaculate and dashing, as became a famous cavalry leader, showed signs of wear without the ameliorating attention of a valet. The leather accouterments were scratched and dull. The boots had not been polished for more than a day or two and Paris mud had left stains upon them. The gold-banded képi was tarnished, and it sat on the warrior’s hair at an angle more becoming to a recruit of the class of ’19 than to the man who had burst his way through the Bulgarian army in that wild ride to Nish which marked the beginning of the end of Armageddon.

The banker, though he knew something of the man’s history, found himself wondering at his youthfulness. Most generals, even after nearly five years of warfare, were elderly men, but this fellow looked as much like a petulant boy as anything. It was only when one noted that the hair just above the ears was graying and that there were lines about the eyes that one recalled that he must be close to forty years of age. His features failed to betray it and his small mustache was brown and soft.

Yet the man had served nearly twenty years and had risen from that unbelievable depth, a private in the Foreign Legion, to the rank of general of division. That meant that he had served five years in hell, and, in spite of that, had survived to be sous-lieutenant, lieutenant, capitaine, and commandant during the grueling experience of nine more years of study and fighting in Africa, Madagascar, and Cochin China.

A man who has won his commission from the ranks of the Foreign Legion is a rarity almost unheard of, yet this one had done it. And he had been no garrison soldier in the years that had followed. To keep the spurs he had won, to force recognition of his right to command, even in the democratic army of France, the erstwhile outcast had had to show extraordinary metal and to waste no time in idleness. He was, in a peculiar sense, the professional soldier par excellence, the man who lived in and for warfare.

He had had his fill of that in the last four years, yet he did not seem satisfied. Of course, Mr. Doolittle had heard rumors, as had many others, but they seemed hardly enough to account for De Launay’s depression and general seediness. The man had been reduced in rank, following the armistice, but so had many others; and he reverted no lower than lieutenant colonel, whereas he might well have gone back another stage to his rank when the war broke out. To be sure, his record for courage and ability was almost as extraordinary as his career, culminating in the wild and decisive cavalry dash that had destroyed the Bulgarian army and, in any war less anonymous than this, would have caused his name to ring in every ear on the boulevards. Still, there were too many generals in the army to find place in a peace establishment, and many a distinguished soldier had been demoted when the emergency was over.

Moreover, not one that Mr. Doolittle had ever heard of had been presented with such compensation as had this adventurer. High rank, in the French army, means a struggle to keep up appearances, unless one is wealthy, for the pay is low. A lower rank, when one has been unexpectedly raised to unlimited riches, would be far from insupportable, what with the social advantages attendant upon it.

This was what Doolittle, with a kindly impulse of sympathy, was endeavoring tactfully to convey to the military gentleman. But he found him unresponsive.

“There’s one thing you overlook, Doolittle,” De Launay retorted to his well-meant suggestions. The banker, more used to French than English, felt vaguely startled to find him talking in accents as unmistakably American as had been his own many years ago, though there was something unfamiliar about it, too – a drawl that was Southern and yet different. “Money’s no use to me, none whatever! I might have enjoyed it – or enjoyed the getting of it – if I could have made it myself – taken it away from some one else. But to have it left to me like this after getting along without it for twenty years and more; to get it through a streak of tinhorn luck; to turn over night from a land-poor Louisiana nester to a reeking oil millionaire – well, it leaves me plumb cold. Anyway, I don’t need it. What’ll I do with it? I can’t hope to spend it all on liquor – that’s about all that’s left for me to spend it on.”

“But, my dear general!” Doolittle found his native tongue rusty in his mouth, although the twenty-year expatriate, who had originally been of French descent, had used it with the ease of one who had never dropped it. “My dear general! Even as a lieutenant colonel, the social advantages open to a man of such wealth are boundless – absolutely boundless, sir! And if you are ambitious, think where a man as young as you, endowed with these millions, can rise in the army! You have ability; you have shown that in abundance, and, with ability coupled to wealth, a marshal’s baton is none too much to hope for.”

De Launay chuckled mirthlessly. “Tell it to the ministry of war!” he sneered. “I’ll say that much for them: in France, to-day, money doesn’t buy commands. Besides, I wouldn’t give a lead two-bit piece for all the rank I could come by that way. I fought for my gold braid – and if they’ve taken it away from me, I’ll not buy it back.”

“There will be other opportunities for distinction,” said Mr. Doolittle, rather feebly.

“For diplomats and such cattle. Not for soldiers. There was a time when I had ambition – there are those who say I had too much – but I’ve seen the light. War, to-day, isn’t what it used to be. It’s too big for any Napoleon. It’s too big for any individual. It’s too big for any ambition. It’s too damn big to be worth while – for a man like me.”

Mr. Doolittle was puzzled and said so.

“Well, I’ll try to make it clear to you. When I started soldiering, it was with the idea that I’d make it a life work. I had my dreams, even when I was a degraded outcast in the Legion. I pursued ’em. They were high dreams, too. They are right in suspecting me of that.

“For a good many years it looked as though they might be dreams that I could realize. I’m a good soldier, if I do say it myself. I was coming along nicely, in spite of the handicap of having come from the dregs of Sidi-bel-Abbes up among the gold stripes. And I came along faster when the war gave me an opportunity to show what I could do. But, unfortunately for me, it also presented to me certain things neither I nor any other man could do.

“You can’t wield armies like a personal weapon when the armies are nations and counted in millions. You can’t build empires out of the levy en masse. You can’t, above all, seize the imagination of armies and nations by victories, sway the opinions of a race, rise to Napoleonic heights, unless you can get advertising – and nowadays a kid aviator who downs his fifth enemy plane gets columns of it while nobody knows who commands an army corps outside the general staff – and nobody cares!

“Where do you get off under those circumstances? I’ll tell you. You get a decoration or two, temporary rank, mention in the Gazette– and regretful demotion to your previous rank when the war is over.

“War, Mr. Doolittle, isn’t half the hell that peace is – to a fellow like me. Peace means the chance to eat my heart out in idleness; to grow fat and gray and stupid; to – oh! what’s the use! It means I’m through– through at forty, when I ought to be rounding into the dash for the final heights of success.

“That’s what’s the trouble with me. I’m through, Mr. Doolittle; and I know it. That’s why I look like this. That’s why money means nothing to me. I don’t need it. Once I was a cow-puncher, and then I became a soldier and finally a general. Those are the things I know, and the things I am fit for, and money is not necessary to any of them.

“So I’m through as a soldier, and I have nothing to turn back to – except punching cows. It’s a comedown, Mr. Doolittle, that you’d find it hard to realize. But I realize it, you bet – and that’s why I prefer to feel sort of low-down, and reckless and don’t-give-a-damnish – like any other cow hand that’s approaching middle age with no future in front of him. That’s why I’m taking to drink after twenty years of French temperance. The Yankees say a man may be down but he’s never out. They’re wrong. I’m down – and I’m out! Out of humor, out of employment, out of ambition, out of everything.”

“That, if you will pardon me, general, is ridiculous in your case,” remonstrated the banker. “What if you have decided to leave the army – which is your intention, I take it? There is much that a man of wealth may accomplish; much that you may interest yourself in.”

De Launay shook a weary head.

“You don’t get me,” he asserted. “I’m burned out. I’ve given the best of me to this business – and I’ve realized that I gave it for nothing. I’ve spent myself – put my very soul into it – lived for it – and now I find that I couldn’t ever have accomplished my ambition, even if I’d been generalissimo itself, because such ambitions aren’t realized to-day. I was born fifty years too late.”

Mr. Doolittle clung to his theme. “Still, you owe something to society,” he said. “You might marry.”

De Launay laughed loudly. “Owe!” he cried. “Such men as I am don’t owe anything to any one. We’re buccaneers; plunderers. We levy on society; we don’t owe it anything.

“As for marrying!” he laughed again. “I’d look pretty tying myself to a petticoat! Any woman would have a fit if she could look into my nature. And I hate women, anyway. I’ve not looked sideways at one for twenty years. Too much water has run under the bridge for that, old-timer. If I was a youngster, back again under the Esmeraldas – ”

He smiled reminiscently, and his rather hard features softened.

“There was one then that I threatened to marry,” he chuckled. “If they made ’em like her – ”

“Why don’t you go back and find her?”

De Launay stared at him. “After twenty years? Lord, man! D’you think she’d wait and remember me that long? Especially as she was about six years old when I left there! She’s grown up and married now, I reckon, and she’d sick the dogs on me if I came back with any such intentions.”

He chuckled again, but his mirth was curiously soft and gentle. Doolittle had little trouble in guessing that this memory was a tender one.

But De Launay rose, picked up a bundle of notes that lay on the table in front of him, stuffed them carelessly into the side pocket of his tunic and pushed the képi still more recklessly back and sideways.

“No, old son!” he grinned. “I’m not the housebroke kind. The only reason I’d ever marry would be to win a bet or something like that. Make it a sporting proposition and I might consider it. Meantime, I’ll stick to drink and gambling for the remaining days of my existence.”

Doolittle shook his head as he rose. “At any rate,” he said, regretfully, “you may draw to whatever extent you wish and whenever you wish. And, if America should call you again, our house in New York, Doolittle, Morton & Co., will be happy to afford you every banking facility, general.”

De Launay waved his hand. “I’ll make a will and leave it in trust for charity,” he said, “with your firm as trustee. And forget the titles. I’m nobody, now, but ex-cow hand, ex-gunman, once known as Louisiana, and soon to be known no more except as a drunken souse. So long!”

He strode out of the door, swaggering a little. His képi was cocked defiantly. His legs, in the cavalry boots, showed a faint bend. He unconsciously fell into a sort of indefinable, flat, stumping gait, barely noticeable to one who had never seen it before, but recognizable, instantly, to any one who had ridden the Western range in high-heeled boots.

In some indefinable manner, with the putting off of his soldierly character, the man had instantly reverted twenty years to his youth in a roping saddle.

CHAPTER II

MORGAN LA FEE

In the hands of Doolittle, Rambaud & Cie., was a rather small deposit, as deposits went with that distinguished international banking house. It had originally amounted to about twenty thousand francs when placed with them about the beginning of the war and was in the name of Mademoiselle Solange d’Albret, whose place of nativity, as her dossier showed, was at a small hamlet not far from Biarritz, in the Basse Pyrenees, and her age some twenty-two years at the present time. Her occupation was given as gentlewoman and nurse, and her present residence an obscure street near one of the big war hospitals. The personality of Mademoiselle d’Albret was quite unknown to her bankers, as she had appeared to them very seldom and then only to add small sums to her deposit, which now amounted to about twenty-five thousand francs in all. She never drew against it.

Such a sum, in the hands of an ordinary Frenchwoman would never have remained on deposit for that length of time untouched, but, if not needed, would have been promptly invested in rentes. The unusualness of this fact, however, had not disturbed the bankers and had, in fact, been of so little importance that they had failed to notice it at all. When, therefore, a young woman dressed in a nurse’s uniform appeared at the bank and rather timidly asked to see Mr. Doolittle, giving the name of Mademoiselle d’Albret, there was some hesitancy in granting her request until a hasty glance at the state of her account confirmed the statement that she was a considerable depositor.

Mr. Doolittle, informed of her request, sighed a little, under the impression that he was about to be called upon for detailed advice and fatherly counsel in the investment of twenty-five thousand francs. He pictured to himself some thrifty, suspicious Frenchwoman with a small fortune who would give him far more trouble than any millionaire who used his bank, and whose business could and would actually be handled by one of his clerks, whom she might as well see in the first place without bothering him. As well, however, he knew that she would never consent to see anybody but himself. Somewhat wearily, but with all courtliness of manner, he had her shown into his consultation room.

Mademoiselle d’Albret entered, her nurse’s cloak draped gracefully from her shoulders, the little, nunlike cap and wimple hiding her hair, while a veil concealed her face to some extent. Through its meshes one could make out a face that seemed young and pretty, and a pair of great, dark eyes. Her figure also left nothing to be desired, and she carried herself with grace and easy dignity. Mr. Doolittle, who had an eye for female pulchritude, ceased to regret the necessity of catering to a customer’s whim and settled himself to a pleasant interview after rising to bow and offer her a chair.

“Mademoiselle has called, I presume, about an investment,” he began, ingratiatingly. “Anything that the bank can do in the way of advice – ”

“Of advice, yes, monsieur,” broke in mademoiselle, speaking in a clear, bell-like voice. “But it is not of an investment that I have need. On the contrary, the money which you have so faithfully guarded for me during the years of the war is reserved for a purpose which I fear you would fail to approve. I have come to arrange with you to transfer the account to America and to seek your assistance in getting there myself.”

The account had been profitable to the bank in the years it had lain idle there, the lady was good to look upon and, even if the account was to be lost, he felt benevolent toward her. Besides, her voice and manner were those of a lady, and natural courtesy bade him extend to her all the aid he could. Therefore he smiled acquiescence.

“The transfer of the money is a simple matter,” he stated. “A draft on our house in New York, or a letter of credit – it is all one. They will gladly serve you there as we have served you here. But if you wish to follow your money – that, I fear, is a different matter.”

“It is because it is different – and difficult – that I have ventured to intrude upon you, monsieur, and not for an idle formality. It is necessary that I get to America, to a place called Eo-dah-o – is it not? I do not know how to say it?”

“Spell it,” suggested the tactful Doolittle.