“You needn’t select any lands for me, Captain,” said Mrs. Benson. “I have decided to go to Portland to-morrow with the team that’s going down for supplies. I shall not return. But my daughter will remain and take a claim. She has decided to turn rancher, but I do not like the life.”
“Isn’t this a rather sudden change in your programme, Mrs. Benson?”
“Not at all. I didn’t intend to remain when I came here. I wouldn’t have come any farther than Oregon City, but I wanted to get a view of the future home of Daphne; and now, as she has chosen for herself and has a fair prospect of happiness ahead, I am ready to look out for myself. I shall stop awhile in Portland, and be ready to take the next steamer for San Francisco. I will go to New York by way of the Isthmus, and will spend the evening of my days in Paris or London.”
“I’m sure I wish you well, Mrs. Benson.”
“Thank you, Captain. My heart is too full for words! I know you will always be a friend to my dear daughter.”
“You surely do not mean to go where you can never see your daughter again!”
“Yes, Captain. Do you recall that tall and bronzed and handsome man of whom you bought the buffalo robe you gave to your wife a short time before her death?”
“You mean Donald McPherson?”
“Yes, sir. The fates have settled it. He is to be my husband, and Daphne and I must part.”
“You have my best wishes for success and happiness,” said the Captain, earnestly, as he offered his hand.
“There is some peculiar mystery about all this!” he exclaimed to himself the next day, as Mrs. Benson climbed into the wagon and started off to meet her fate. “But it’s the way of women. They are as fickle as the wind.” He thought bitterly of his own budding and now blighted hopes.
“Don’t grieve for her, Daphne,” said Mr. Burns, in a husky voice, as the wagon disappeared. “She was kind to me when I was crippled and cross, and I shall never forget her watchfulness and care for me under the most trying conditions. She is your mother, too, and that of itself is enough to inspire my everlasting gratitude. I have no respect for the man who fails to appreciate the woman to whom he is indebted for his wife.”
“It is well for the three of us that we have learned our lesson, Rollin. We are all young yet, and all eternity is before us.”
“Yes, Daphne! Eternity is both before and behind us. We are henceforth to be all in all to each other, as I believe we have been in the past, my darling.”
“No, Mr. Burns, do not ‘darling’ me yet. We must await the tardy action of that human imperfection called the law before I can honorably become your ‘darling.’”
Nevertheless, being human, she feigned not to notice the prolonged pressure of his hand at parting, nor did she refrain from answering his eager and tender gaze with a look that quickened every pulse and sent a thrill of gladness to his heart.
At the primitive hotel in the primitive little city of Portland, Mrs. Benson met an Indian woman, the mother of many children, who was introduced to her as Mrs. Addicks. The woman was richly and stylishly gowned and seemed much at home among the guests. Her mien and carriage were queenly, as she moved about the little parlor, exchanging a word here and there among the loiterers, with whom she seemed a general favorite.
“Haven’t I met you somewhere before?” asked Mrs. Benson, with whom, in truth, she had exchanged greetings on the plains under circumstances quite different from the present, as one, at least, had cause to remember.
“I do not recall a former meeting, madam. But you might have met me on the plains. I was on my way to Portland when you saw me, if you saw me at all. A frontier trading-post is no proper place to bring up a lot of Indian half-breeds. I came here to educate my children.”
“Then your husband is a white man?”
“Yes.”
“I beg your pardon, but you do not speak and act like the other Indians I have met.”
“I am a chieftain’s daughter, and I was educated in London. You spoke of travelling in the Ranger train. Mr. Ranger is my husband’s brother.”
“Does Captain Ranger know of this?”
“I neither know nor care! One thing is certain. I shall do my best to train and educate my children in such a way that he will be proud some day to own them as relatives. I have the girls in school at the Academy of the Sacred Heart. The boys are at the Brothers’ School.”
“Do you know Dr. McLoughlin?”
“Yes, and my husband knows him well. I saw him as the children and I passed through Oregon City. He was very kind, and bade me be of good cheer. He has an Indian wife himself, as you know. But he did not ask me in to see her, so we did not meet.”
As Donald McPherson had not yet arrived in Portland, Mrs. Benson had ample leisure for letter-writing.
“My dear Daphne,” she wrote, “a letter from Mr. McPherson awaited me, as I expected. He had sent it forward by a courier from the plains, in care of one of Dr. McLoughlin’s agents. I need not repeat its contents. Suffice it to say, that I am serene and calm. God has been very merciful to us all. Within the letter was a letter of credit, upon which I am now able to draw ample funds. I will place on deposit, subject to your order, all the money you will need. Do not hesitate to accept it. It is mine, to do with as I choose; and this is my choice of methods to expend the portion I have assigned to you.
“I have decided not to meet him till after you are a free woman, Daphne. I know you and Donald will guard our secret carefully; but I have doubts about Jean Ranger. She brought me that unsealed note, and, as you know, she is such a precocious little witch she might have read it before giving it into my possession. Could you, in some way, get at the truth of this without letting her see just what you are after?”
To which Mrs. McAlpin replied: “I will not do Jean the injustice to imagine for a moment that she would read a private note that was intrusted to her care and honor. Tell Donald that I will honor him as my step-father, but I will never see his face again. He was very patient with me during all the trying years when the Juggernaut of public opinion, combined with the inquisition of the law, kept us in bondage; and I thank him for his patience with all my heart. I am as painfully aware of the unconventionality of our proceedings as yourself, dear mamma, but as what the public doesn’t know doesn’t disturb that composite being in the least, we’ll keep our own counsel and be happy.
“My donation claim lies parallel to Sally O’Dowd’s. Captain Ranger’s claim adjoins hers on the south,—a plan that implies foreknowledge, if not foreordination.
“Mr. Burns and Albert Evans, our faithful teamster, have selected their land adjacent to mine. Evans has chosen a double allotment, having in prospect a wife who is a mere child, belonging to a neighbor about three miles away. I am disgusted with the venality of the transaction, which the child’s father regards with satisfaction, and the mother with tears.”
A few days later, Mrs. Benson wrote to Captain Ranger, as follows:—
“I have met here an interesting and highly educated Indian woman, who says she is the wife of the post-trader you met in Utah. She says that trader is your brother Joseph, whom for many years you mourned as dead. She is here to educate her boys at the Brothers’ School, and her girls at the Academy of the Sacred Heart.
“When we saw her on the plains, she looked nothing but an ordinary squaw. Now she and the children are well and fashionably dressed, and as presentable in every way as any family in this primitive hostelry; and that is saying a good deal, for there are ladies here of high rank and breeding from the Eastern cities, and also from over the seas. Mrs. Ranger (she still answers to the name of Addicks) was educated in London, she says, where, as the daughter of an Indian chieftain of the land of the Dakotas, she was admitted into the most aristocratic circles. After completing her education she returned to her native haunts and met your brother, who made her his wife. She seems to have plenty of money; her children are bright and intelligent,—the girls especially so, they being, she says, more like their father than the boys; and for this, as you know, there is a physiological reason.”
“I’ll see that woman the very first time I go to Portland,” said the Captain, aloud, as he folded the letter deliberately.
“What woman?” asked Sally O’Dowd.
“Nobody in particular,” he answered, thrusting the letter hurriedly into his pocket, and looking confused and foolish as he returned to his work.
The labor of felling, hewing, hauling, and finally raising into houses the timbers for the big log buildings which were to afford homes for the half-dozen or more families who had, by common consent, adopted a sort of corporate method for residing upon and cultivating their claims, told heavily upon the men, who, already depleted in strength by much hardship, were poorly equipped for their tasks. But there was no shirking of duties nor complaint over backaches, and the borderers’ homes arose like magic.
“How do you like the appearance of the new buildings?” asked Captain Ranger, addressing Sally O’Dowd.
“Why should you ask me?” was the curt response.
Surprised at her reply but disposed to be communicative, he added: “If all goes well, I’ll have a sawmill up yonder in the timber by this time next year.”
“That’s none of my business,” she retorted testily.
He looked at her for a moment in blank astonishment. “Why isn’t it your business?” he asked, at length. “Haven’t we agreed to first get you free from a bad bargain, and after that take up our line of march together? And won’t your belongings then be mine, and mine yours?”
“What about that other woman you are going to Portland to see? Do you take me for an idiot, Squire?”
He looked her in the face for an instant, nonplussed. Then as the reason for her change of manner dawned upon him, he threw back his head and laughed heartily.
“So that’s what the matter with us, is it?” he exclaimed, approaching her with a proffered caress. “We’ve been a trifle jealous, haven’t we?”
“Behave yourself, sir!” elbowing him away. “Go to Portland and see that other woman. No doubt a party by the name of Benson is expecting you.”
He guffawed again, making her angrier still.
“Come, Sally; let’s have no more nonsense,” he said, after his laughter had ceased, motioning her to a seat beside him on the doorway.
She stood irresolute.
“Very well, if you prefer to do so, you can sit a-standing, like the Dutchman’s hen. I’ve been keeping a letter that’s been burning my pocket for three days waiting for an opportunity to show it to you, Mrs. O’Dowd; but you’ve been so shy I couldn’t touch you with a forty-foot pole.”
“What do you suppose I care for your letters from that other woman?” she asked, dropping into the space in the doorway, all eagerness and attention, in spite of her disclaimer.
“Read it yourself, Sally. It is from my brother-in-law, Lije Robinson.”
“The latest sensation is the suicide of Sam O’Dowd,” the letter went on to say, after the usual preliminaries of the border scribe.
“No!” cried the widow, now such de facto, rising to her feet and turning deathly pale. “Sam wouldn’t commit suicide. He’d be afraid to meet his Maker.”
“But he did it, Sally. Read on.”
“He left a confession, saying it was remorse that drove him to it, and extolling his wife as a model woman, whom he had wronged beyond reparation in every way imaginable.
“His mother is wellnigh crazy. The home the two of them had wrested from his wife and her mother, in which the old woman had allotted to spend her days, goes back to Sally now, as, by his confession, his mother has no right to it.”
“Poor Sam!” cried the widow, dropping again into the proffered space in the doorway. “He had his faults, but he wasn’t all bad. This letter and his confession prove it. I shall try hard to think that he atoned for his greatest crime by his voluntary death. But I’d be sorry myself to meet the reception that he’ll get in heaven!”
“Why, Sally? What do you mean?”
“Nothing. Let the dead past bury its dead.”
Captain Ranger, who, in first proposing matrimony, had stated earnestly that his heart was still with Annie, gazed tenderly at the weeping woman, who arose and stood before him in a mute yet beseeching attitude, while a warm love for her sprang spontaneously within him.
“Come, Sally dear,” he pleaded; “sit down by me again, and let us talk it out.”
She obeyed mechanically, her frame convulsed with weeping.
“I can never talk again about a platonic union,” he said feelingly. “I know that Annie would sanction our marriage now if she could speak to us; and I believe with all my heart that she knows of our proposed relations, and that she will, under the peculiar circumstances, also approve.”
Ah, John Ranger! Materialist as you used always to proclaim yourself, you cannot, in the deepest recesses of your soul, rebel against the faith that is “the evidence of things not seen.” What have you done with your agnosticism?
“Captain,” said Sally, in a subdued tone, “I have seen the day when I would have followed Sam O’Dowd to the ends of the earth if he had commanded. I could and would have lived on the acorns of the forest rather than have failed to be his wife. Do not ask me to love you now. I cannot be your wife.”
“Are we not engaged?” he asked, astonished.
“Yes; conditionally. But I cannot think about it now. If I can ever bring myself to think it right for me to be your wife, I will not hesitate to tell you so. But not now, Captain; not now.”
She arose abruptly, and was gone.