Books: Ranson's Folly
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Richard Harding Davis >> Ranson's Folly
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RANSON'S FOLLY
BY
RICHARD HARDING DAVIS
WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY
Frederic Remington, Walter Appleton Clark,
Howard Chandler Christy, E.M. Ashe
& F. Dorr Steele
CONTENTS
RANSOM'S FOLLY
Illustrated by Frederic Remington.
THE BAR SINISTER
Illustrated by E.M. Ashe.
A DERELICT
Illustrated by Walter Appleton Clark.
LA LETTRE D'AMOUR
Illustrated by Howard Chandler Christy.
IN THE FOG
Illustrated by Frederic Dorr Steele.
ILLUSTRATIONS
"Throw up your hands," he commanded.
Ranson faced the door, spinning the revolver around his fourth
finger.
"I suppose I'm the ugliest bull-dog in America".
"Miss Dorothy snatches me up and kisses me between the ears."
"We've got a great story! We want a clear wire."
He played to the empty chair.
The men around the table turned and glanced toward the gentleman in
front of the fireplace.
"What was the object of your plot?"
RANSON'S FOLLY
PART I
The junior officers of Fort Crockett had organized a mess at the
post-trader's. "And a mess it certainly is," said Lieutenant Ranson.
The dining-table stood between hogsheads of molasses and a blazing
log-fire, the counter of the store was their buffet, a pool-table
with a cloth, blotted like a map of the Great Lakes, their sideboard,
and Indian Pete acted as butler. But none of these things counted
against the great fact that each evening Mary Cahill, the daughter of
the post-trader, presided over the evening meal, and turned it into a
banquet. From her high chair behind the counter, with the cash-
register on her one side and the weighing-scales on the other, she
gave her little Senate laws, and smiled upon each and all with the
kind impartiality of a comrade.
At least, at one time she had been impartial. But of late she smiled
upon all save Lieutenant Ranson. When he talked, she now looked at
the blazing log-fire, and her cheeks glowed and her eyes seemed to
reflect the lifting flame.
For five years, ever since her father brought her from the convent at
St. Louis, Mary Cahill had watched officers come and officers go. Her
knowledge concerning them, and their public and private affairs, was
vast and miscellaneous. She was acquainted with the traditions of
every regiment, with its war record, with its peace-time politics,
its nicknames, its scandals, even with the earnings of each company-
canteen. At Fort Crockett, which lay under her immediate observation,
she knew more of what was going forward than did the regimental
adjutant, more even than did the colonel's wife. If Trumpeter Tyler
flatted on church call, if Mrs. Stickney applied to the quartermaster
for three feet of stovepipe, if Lieutenant Curtis were granted two
days' leave for quail-shooting, Mary Cahill knew it; and if Mrs.
"Captain" Stairs obtained the post-ambulance for a drive to Kiowa
City, when Mrs. "Captain" Ross wanted it for a picnic, she knew what
words passed between those ladies, and which of the two wept. She
knew all of these things, for each evening they were retailed to her
by her "boarders." Her boarders were very loyal to Mary Cahill. Her
position was a difficult one, and had it not been that the boy-
officers were so understanding, it would have been much more
difficult. For the life of a regimental post is as circumscribed as
the life on a ship-of-war, and it would no more be possible for the
ship's barber to rub shoulders with the admiral's epaulets than that
a post-trader's child should visit the ladies on the "line," or that
the wives of the enlisted men should dine with the young girl from
whom they "took in" washing.
So, between the upper and the nether grindstones, Mary Cahill was
left without the society of her own sex, and was of necessity forced
to content herself with the society of the officers. And the officers
played fair. Loyalty to Mary Cahill was a tradition at Fort Crockett,
which it was the duty of each succeeding regiment to sustain.
Moreover, her father, a dark, sinister man, alive only to money-
making, was known to handle a revolver with the alertness of a town-
marshal.
Since the day she left the convent Mary Cahill had held but two
affections: one for this grim, taciturn parent, who brooded over her
as jealously as a lover, and the other for the entire United States
Army. The Army returned her affection without the jealousy of the
father, and with much more than his effusiveness. But when Lieutenant
Ranson arrived from the Philippines, the affections of Mary Cahill
became less generously distributed, and her heart fluttered hourly
between trouble and joy.
There were two rooms on the first floor of the post-trader's--this
big one, which only officers and their women-folk might enter, and
the other, the exchange of the enlisted men. The two were separated
by a partition of logs and hung with shelves on which were displayed
calicoes, tinned meats, and patent medicines. A door, cut in one end
of the partition, with buffalo-robes for portieres, permitted Cahill
to pass from behind the counter of one store to behind the counter of
the other. On one side Mary Cahill served the Colonel's wife with
many yards of silk ribbons to be converted into german favors, on the
other her father weighed out bears' claws (manufactured in Hartford,
Conn., from turkey-bones) to make a necklace for Red Wing, the squaw
of the Arrephao chieftain. He waited upon everyone with gravity, and
in obstinate silence. No one had ever seen Cahill smile. He himself
occasionally joked with others in a grim and embarrassed manner. But
no one had ever joked with him. It was reported that he came from New
York, where, it was whispered, he had once kept bar on the Bowery for
McTurk.
Sergeant Clancey, of G Troop, was the authority for this. But when,
presuming on that supposition, he claimed acquaintanceship with
Cahill, the post-trader spread out his hands on the counter and
stared at the sergeant with cold and disconcerting eyes. "I never
kept bar nowhere," he said. "I never been on the Bowery, never been
in New York, never been east of Denver in my life. What was it you
ordered?"
"Well, mebbe I'm wrong," growled the sergeant.
But a month later, when a coyote howled down near the Indian village,
the sergeant said insinuatingly, "Sounds just like the cry of the
Whyos, don't it?" And Cahill, who was listening to the wolf,
unthinkingly nodded his head.
The sergeant snorted in triumph. "Yah, I told you so!" he cried, "a
man that's never been on the Bowery, and knows the call of the Whyo
gang! The drinks are on you, Cahill."
The post-trader did not raise his eyes, but drew a damp cloth up and
down the counter, slowly and heavily, as a man sharpens a knife on a
whetstone.
That night, as the sergeant went up the path to the post, a bullet
passed through his hat. Clancey was a forceful man, and forceful men,
unknown to themselves, make enemies, so he was uncertain as to
whether this came from a trooper he had borne upon too harshly, or
whether, In the darkness, he had been picked off for someone else.
The next night, as he passed in the full light of the post-trader's
windows, a shot came from among the dark shadows of the corral, and
when he immediately sought safety in numbers among the Indians,
cowboys, and troopers in the exchange, he was in time to see Cahill
enter it from the other store, wrapping up a bottle of pain-killer
for Mrs. Stickney's cook. But Clancey was not deceived. He observed
with satisfaction that the soles and the heels of Cahill's boots were
wet with the black mud of the corral.
The next morning, when the exchange was empty, the post-trader turned
from arranging cans of condensed milk upon an upper shelf to face the
sergeant's revolver. He threw up his hands to the level of his ears
as though expressing sharp unbelief, and waited in silence. The
sergeant advanced until the gun rested on the counter, Its muzzle
pointing at the pit of Cahill's stomach. "You or me has got to leave
this post," said the sergeant, "and I can't desert, so I guess it's
up to you."
"What did you talk for?" asked Cahill. His attitude was still that of
shocked disbelief, but his tone expressed a full acceptance of the
situation and a desire to temporize.
"At first I thought it might be that new 'cruity' in F Troop,"
explained the sergeant "You came near making me kill the wrong man.
What harm did I do you by saying you kept bar for McTurk? What's
there in that to get hot about?"
"You said I run with the Whyos."
"What the h--l do I care what you've done!" roared the sergeant. "I
don't kmow nothing about you, but I don't mean you should shoot me in
the back. I'm going to tell this to my bunky, an' if I get shot up,
the Troop'll know who done it, and you'll hang for it. Now, what are
you going to do?"
Cahill did not tell what he would do; for, from the other store, the
low voice of Mary Cahill called, "Father! Oh, father!"
The two men dodged, and eyed each other guiltily. The sergeant gazed
at the buffalo-robe portieres with wide-opened eyes. Cahill's hands
dropped from the region of his ears, and fell flat upon the counter.
When Miss Mary Cahill pushed aside the portieres Sergeant Clancey, of
G Troop, was showing her father the mechanism of the new regulation-
revolver. He apparently was having some difficulty with the cylinder,
for his face was red. Her father was eying the gun with the critical
approval of an expert.
"Father," said Miss Cahill petulantly, "why didn't you answer? Where
is the blue stationery--the sort Major Ogden always buys? He's
waiting."
The eyes of the post-trader did not wander from the gun before him.
"Next to the blank books, Mame," he said. "On the second shelf."
Miss Cahill flashed a dazzling smile at the big sergeant, and
whispered, so that the officer in the room behind her might not
overhear, "Is he trying to sell you Government property, dad? Don't
you touch it. Sergeant, I'm surprised at you tempting my poor
father." She pulled the two buffalo-robes close around her neck so
that her face only showed between them. It was a sweet, lovely face,
with frank, boyish eyes.
"When the major's gone, sergeant," she whispered, "bring your gun
around my side of the store and I'll buy it from you."
The sergeant nodded in violent assent, laughing noiselessly and
slapping his knee in a perfect ecstasy of delight.
The curtains dropped and the face disappeared.
The sergeant fingered the gun and Cahill folded his arms defiantly.
"Well?" he said.
"Well?" asked the sergeant.
"I should think you could see how it is," said Cahill, "without my
having to tell you."
"You mean you don't want she should know?"
"My God, no! Not even that I kept a bar."
"Well, I don't know nothing. I don't mean to tell nothing, anyway, so
if you'll promise to be good I'll call this off."
For the first time in the history of Fort Crockett, Cahill was seen
to smile. "May I reach under the counter NOW?" he asked.
The sergeant grinned appreciatively, and shifted his gun. "Yes, but
I'll keep this out until I'm sure it's a bottle," he said, and
laughed boisterously.
For an instant, under the cover of the counter, Cahill's hand touched
longingly upon the gun that lay there, and then passed on to the
bottle beside it. He drew it forth, and there was the clink of
glasses.
In the other room Mary Cahill winked at the major, but that officer
pretended to be both deaf to the clink of the glasses and blind to
the wink. And so the incident was closed. Had it not been for the
folly of Lieutenant Ranson it would have remained closed.
A week before this happened a fire had started in the Willow Bottoms
among the tepees of some Kiowas, and the prairie, as far as one could
see, was bruised and black. From the post it looked as though the sky
had been raining ink. At the time all of the regiment but G and H
Troops was out on a practice-march, experimenting with a new-fangled
tabloid-ration. As soon as it turned the buttes it saw from where the
light in the heavens came and the practice-march became a race.
At the post the men had doubled out under Lieutenant Ranson with wet
horse-blankets, and while he led G Troop to fight the flames, H
Troop, under old Major Stickney, burned a space around the post,
across which the men of G Troop retreated, stumbling, with their ears
and shoulders wrapped in the smoking blankets. The sparks beat upon
them and the flames followed so fast that, as they ran, the blazing
grass burned their lacings, and they kicked their gaiters ahead of
them.
When the regiment arrived it found everybody at Fort Crockett talking
enthusiastically of Ranson's conduct and resentfully of the fact that
he had regarded the fire as one which had been started for his
especial amusement.
"I assure you," said Mrs. Bolland to the colonel, "if it hadn't been
for young Ranson we would have been burned in our beds; but he was
most aggravating. He treated it as though it were Fourth of July
fireworks. It is the only entertainment we have been able to offer
him since he joined in which he has shown the slightest interest."
Nevertheless, it was generally admitted that Ranson had saved the
post. He had been ubiquitous. He had been seen galloping into the
advancing flames like a stampeded colt, he had reappeared like a
wraith in columns of black, whirling smoke, at the same moment his
voice issued orders from twenty places. One instant he was visible
beating back the fire with a wet blanket, waving it above him
jubilantly, like a substitute at the Army-Navy game when his side
scores, and the next staggering from out of the furnace dragging an
asphyxiated trooper by the collar, and shrieking, "Hospital-steward,
hospital-steward! here's a man on fire. Put him out, and send him
back to me, quick!"
Those who met him in the whirlwind of smoke and billowing flame
related that he chuckled continuously. "Isn't this fun?" he yelled at
them. "Say, isn't this the best ever? I wouldn't have missed this for
a trip to New York!"
When the colonel, having visited the hospital and spoken cheering
words to those who were sans hair, sans eyebrows and with bandaged
hands, complimented Lieutenant Ranson on the parade-ground before the
assembled regiment, Ranson ran to his hut muttering strange and
fearful oaths.
That night at mess he appealed to Mary Cahill for sympathy.
"Goodness, mighty me!" he cried, "did you hear him? Wasn't it awful?
If I'd thought he was going to hand me that I'd have deserted. What's
the use of spoiling the only fun we've had that way? Why, if I'd
known you could get that much excitement out of this rank prairie I'd
have put a match to it myself three months ago. It's the only fun
I've had, and he goes and preaches a funeral oration at me."
Ranson came into the army at the time of the Spanish war because it
promised a new form of excitement, and because everybody else he knew
had gone into it too. As the son of his father he was made an
adjutant-general of volunteers with the rank of captain, and unloaded
on the staff of a Southern brigadier, who was slated never to leave
Charleston. But Ranson suspected this, and, after telegraphing his
father for three days, was attached to the Philippines contingent and
sailed from San Francisco in time to carry messages through the surf
when the volunteers moved upon Manila. More cabling at the cost of
many Mexican dollars caused him to be removed from the staff, and
given a second lieutenancy in a volunteer regiment, and for two years
he pursued the little brown men over the paddy sluices, burned
villages, looted churches, and collected bolos and altar-cloths with
that irresponsibility and contempt for regulations which is found
chiefly in the appointment from civil life. Incidentally, he enjoyed
himself so much that he believed in the army he had found the one
place where excitement is always in the air, and as excitement was
the breath of his nostrils he applied for a commission in the regular
army. On his record he was appointed a second lieutenant in the
Twentieth Cavalry, and on the return of that regiment to the States--
was buried alive at Fort Crockett.
After six months of this exile, one night at the mess-table Ranson
broke forth in open rebellion. "I tell you I can't stand it a day
longer," he cried. "I'm going to resign!"
From behind the counter Mary Cahill heard him in horror. Second
Lieutenants Crosby and Curtis shuddered. They were sons of officers
of the regular army. Only six months before they themselves had been
forwarded from West Point, done up in neat new uniforms. The
traditions of the Academy of loyalty and discipline had been kneaded
into their vertebrae. In Ranson they saw only the horrible result of
giving commissions to civilians.
"Maybe the post will be gayer now that spring has come," said Curtis
hopefully, but with a doubtful look at the open fire.
"I wouldn't do anything rash," urged Crosby.
Miss Cahill shook her head. "Why, I like it at the post," she said,
"and I've been here five years--ever since I left the convent--and I-
--"
Ranson interrupted, bowing gallantly. "Yes, I know, Miss Cahill," he
said, "but I didn't come here from a convent. I came here from the
blood-stained fields of war. Now, out in the Philippines there's
always something doing. They give you half a troop, and so long as
you bring back enough Mausers and don't get your men cut up, you can
fight all over the shop and no questions asked. But all I do here is
take care of sick horses. Any vet. in the States has seen as much
fighting as I have in the last half-year. I might as well have had
charge of horse-car stables."
"There is some truth in that," said Curtis cautiously. "If you do
resign, certainly no one can accuse you of resigning in the face of
the enemy."
"Enemy, ye gods!" roared Ranson. "Why, if I were to see a Moro
entering that door with a bolo in each fist I'd fall on his neck and
kiss him. I'm not trained to this garrison business. You fellows are.
They took all the sporting blood out of you at West Point; one bad
mark for smoking a cigarette, two bad marks for failing to salute the
instructor in botany, and all the excitement you ever knew were
charades and a cadet-hop a t Cullum Hall. But, you see, before I went
to the Philippines with Merritt, I'd been there twice on a fellow's
yacht, and we'd tucked the Spanish governor in his bed with his spurs
on. Now, I have to sit around and hear old Bolland tell how he put
down a car-strike in St. Louis, and Stickney's long-winded yarns of
Table Mountain and the Bloody Angle. He doesn't know the Civil War's
over. I tell you, if I can't get excitement on tap I've got to make
it, and if I make it out here they'll court-martial me. So there's
nothing for it but to resign."
"You'd better wait till the end of the week," said Crosby, grinning.
"It's going to be full of gayety. Thursday, paymaster's coming out
with our cash, and to-night that Miss Post from New York arrives in
the up stage. She's to visit the colonel, so everybody will have to
give her a good time."
"Yes, I certainly must wait for that," growled Ranson; "there
probably will be progressive euchre parties all along the line, and
we'll sit up as late as ten o'clock and stick little gilt stars on
ourselves."
Crosby laughed tolerantly.
"I see your point of view," he said. "I remember when my father took
me to Monte Carlo I saw you at the tables with enough money in front
of you to start a bank. I remember my father asked the croupiers why
they allowed a child of your age to gamble. I was just a kid then,
and so were you, too. I remember I thought you were the devil of a
fellow."
Ranson looked sheepishly at Miss Cahill and laughed. "Well, so I was-
-then," he said. "Anybody would be a devil of a fellow who'd been
brought up as I was, with a doting parent who owns a trust and
doesn't know the proper value of money. And yet you expect me to be
happy with a fifty-cent limit game, and twenty miles of burned
prairie. I tell you I've never been broken to it. I don't know what
not having your own way means. And discipline! Why, every time I have
to report one of my men to the colonel I send for him afterward and
give him a drink and apologize to him. I tell you the army doesn't
mean anything to me unless there's something doing, and as there is
no fighting out here I'm for the back room of the Holland House and a
rubber-tired automobile. Little old New York is good enough for me!"
As he spoke these fateful words of mutiny Lieutenant Ranson raised
his black eyes and snatched a swift side-glance at the face of Mary
Cahill. It was almost as though it were from her he sought his
answer. He could not himself have told what it was he would have her
say. But ever since the idea of leaving the army had come to him,
Mary Cahill and the army had become interchangeable and had grown to
mean one and the same thing. He fought against this condition of mind
fiercely. He had determined that without active service the army was
intolerable; but that without Mary Cahill civil life would also prove
intolerable, he assured himself did not at all follow. He had laughed
at the idea. He had even argued it out sensibly. Was it reasonable to
suppose, he asked himself, that after circling the great globe three
times he should find the one girl on it who alone could make him
happy, sitting behind a post-trader's counter on the open prairie?
His interest in Miss Cahill was the result of propinquity, that was
all. It was due to the fact that there was no one else at hand,
because he was sorry for her loneliness, because her absurd social
ostracism had touched his sympathy. How long after he reached New
York would he remember the little comrade with the brave, boyish eyes
set in the delicate, feminine head, with its great waves of gorgeous
hair? It would not be long, he guessed. He might remember the way she
rode her pony, how she swung from her Mexican saddle and caught up a
gauntlet from the ground. Yes, he certainly would remember that, and
he would remember the day he had galloped after her and ridden with
her through the Indian village, and again that day when they rode to
the water-fall and the Lover's Leap. And he would remember her face
at night as it bent over the books he borrowed for her, which she
read while they were at mess, sitting in her high chair with her chin
resting in her palms, staring down at the book before her. And the
trick she had, whenever he spoke, of raising her head and looking
into the fire, her eyes lighting and her lips smiling. They would be
pleasant memories, he was sure. But once back again in the whirl and
rush of the great world outside of Fort Crockett, even as memories
they would pass away.
Mary Cahill made no outward answer to the rebellious utterance of
Lieutenant Ranson. She only bent her eyes on her book and tried to
think what the post would hold for her when he had carried out his
threat and betaken himself into the world and out of her life
forever. Night after night she had sat enthroned behind her barrier
and listened to his talk, wondering deeply. He had talked of a world
she knew only in novels, in history, and in books of travel. His view
of it was not an educational one: he was no philosopher, nor trained
observer. He remembered London--to her the capital of the world--
chiefly by its restaurants, Cairo on account of its execrable golf-
links. He lived only to enjoy himself. His view was that of a boy,
hearty and healthy and seeking only excitement and mischief. She had
heard his tales of his brief career at Harvard, of the reunions at
Henry's American bar, of the Futurity, the Suburban, the Grand Prix,
of a yachting cruise which apparently had encountered every form of
adventure, from the rescuing of a stranded opera-company to the
ramming of a slaver's dhow. The regret with which he spoke of these
free days, which was the regret of an exile marooned upon a desert
island, excited all her sympathy for an ill she had never known. His
discourteous scorn of the social pleasures of the post, from which
she herself was excluded, rilled her with speculation. If he could
forego these functions, how full and gay she argued his former life
must have been. His attitude helped her to bear the deprivations more
easily. And she, as a loyal child of the army, liked him also because
he was no "cracker-box" captain, but a fighter, who had fought with
no morbid ideas as to the rights or wrongs of the cause, but for the
fun of fighting.
And one night, after he had been telling the mess of a Filipino
officer who alone had held back his men and himself, and who at last
died in his arms cursing him, she went to sleep declaring to herself
that Lieutenant Ranson was becoming too like the man she had pictured
for her husband than was good for her peace of mind. He had told the
story as his tribute to a brave man fighting for his independence and
with such regret that such a one should have died so miserably, that,
to the embarrassment of the mess, the tears rolled down his cheeks.
But he wiped them away with his napkin as unconcernedly as though
they were caused by the pepper-box, and said simply, "He had sporting
blood, he had. I've never felt so bad about anything as I did about
that chap. Whenever I think of him standing up there with his back to
the cathedral all shot to pieces, but giving us what for until he
died, it makes me cry. So," he added, blowing his nose vigorously, "I
won't think of it any more."
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