An Apache Princess | Page 6

Apache with
hostile intent ventured near enough to Sandy to risk reprisals. Miners,
prospectors, and ranchmen were few in numbers, but, far and wide they
knew the captain's bonny daughter, and, like the men of her father's
troop, would have risked their lives to do her a service. Their aversions
as to Sandy were centered in the other sex.
Aunt Janet, therefore, had some reason for doubting the report of Mrs.
Bridger. It was so unlike Angela to be so very late returning, although,
now that Mrs. Bridger had mentioned it, she, too, remembered hearing
the rapid thud of Punch's galloping hoofs homeward bound, as was she,

at 5.45. Yet, barely five minutes thereafter, Angela, who usually spent
half an hour splashing in her tub, appeared full panoplied, apparently,
at the head of the stairs upon her aunt's arrival, and was even now
somewhere down the row, hobnobbing with Kate Sanders. That
Lieutenant Blakely should have missed retreat roll-call was in itself no
very serious matter. "Slept through at his quarters, perhaps," said Plume.
"He'll turn up in time for dinner." In fine the major's indifference struck
the captain as an evidence of official weakness, reprehensible in a
commander charged with the discipline of a force on hostile soil. What
Wren intended was that Plume should be impressed by his formal word
and manner, and direct the adjutant to look up the derelict instanter. As
no such action was taken, however, he felt it due to himself to speak
again. A just man was Wren, and faithful to the core in his own
discharge of duty. What he could not abide was negligence on part of
officer or man, on part of superior or inferior, and he sought to "stiffen"
Plume forthwith.
"If he isn't in his quarters, shall I send a party out in search, sir?"
"Who? Blakely? Dear, no, Wren! What for?" returned the post
commander, obviously nettled. "I fancy he'll not thank you for even
searching his quarters. You may stumble over his big museum in the
dark and smash things. No, let him alone. If he isn't here for dinner, I'll
'tend to it myself."
And so, rebuffed, as it happened, by an officer much his inferior in
point of experience and somewhat in years, Wren silently and stiffly
saluted and turned away. Virtually he had been given to understand that
his suggestion was impertinent. He reached his quarters, therefore, in
no pleasant mood, and found his sister waiting for him with Duty in her
clear and shining eyes.
A woman of many a noble trait was Janet Wren,--a woman who had
done a world of good to those in sickness, sorrow, or other adversity, a
woman of boundless faith in herself and her opinions, but not too much
hope or charity for others. The blood of the Scotch Covenanters was in
her veins, for her mother had been born and bred in the shadow of the
kirk and lived and died in the shadow of the cross. A woman with a

mission was Janet, and one who went at it unflinchingly. She had loved
her brother always, yet disapproved his marriage to so young and
unformed a woman as was his wife. Later, she had deprecated from the
start the soldier spirit, fierce in his Highland blood, that tore him from
the teachings of their gentle mother and her beloved meenister, took
him from his fair young wife when most she needed him and sent him
straightway into the ranks of the one Highland regiment in the Union
Army at the outbreak of the Civil War. His gallant colonel fell at First
Bull Run, and Sergeant Wren fought over his body to the fervent
admiration of the Southerners who captured both. The first War
Secretary, mourning a beloved brother and grateful to his defender,
commissioned the latter in the regulars at once and, on his return from
Libby, Wren joined the army as a first lieutenant. With genuine
Scottish thrift, his slender pay had been hoarded for him, and his now
motherless little one, by that devoted sister, and when, a captain at the
close of the war, he came to clasp his daughter to his heart, he found
himself possessed of a few hundreds more than fell to the lot of most of
his associates. It was then that Janet, motherless herself, had stepped
into the management of her brother's army home, and sought to
dominate in that as she had in everything else from early girlhood.
Wren loved her fondly, but he, too, had a will. They had many a clash.
It was this, indeed, that led to Angela's going so early to an Eastern
school. We are all paragons of wisdom in the management of other
people's children. It is in dealing with our