The Last Shot | Page 4

of snuff when he was on a campaign; that the baron's
youngest daughter had lost her eyesight from a bodkin thrust for telling
her sister, who had her father's temper, that she was developing a
double chin.
For the people of Maria's visions were humanly real to her, and as such
she liked and understood them. If the first Galland were half a robber,
to disguise the fact because he was her ancestor was not playing fair. It
made him only a lay figure of romance.
One or two afternoons a week Colonel Hedworth Westerling,
commander of the regimental post of the Grays on the other side of the
white posts, stretched his privilege of crossing the frontier and appeared
for tea at the Gallands'. It meant a pleasant half-hour breaking a long
walk, a relief from garrison surroundings. Favored in mind and person,
favored in high places, he had become a colonel at thirty-two. People
with fixed ideas as to the appearance of a soldier said that he looked
every inch the commander. He was tall, strong-built, his deep, broad
chest suggesting powerful energy. Conscious of his abilities, it was not
without reason that he thought well of himself, in view of the order,
received that morning, which was to make this a farewell call.

He had found Mrs. Galland an agreeable reflection of an aristocratic
past. The daughter had what he defined vaguely as girlish piquancy. He
found it amusing to try to answer her unusual questions; he liked the
variety of her inventive mind, with its flashes of downright
matter-of-factness.
Ascending the steps with his firm, regular tread, he suggested poise and
confidence and, perhaps, vanity also in his fastidious dress. As Marta's
slight, immature figure came to the edge of the veranda, he wondered
what she would be like five years later, when she would be twenty-two
and a woman. It was unlikely that he would ever know, or that in a
month he would care to know. He would pass on; his rank would keep
him from returning to South La Tir, which was a colonel's billet except
in time of war.
Not until tea was served did he mention his new assignment; he was
going to the general staff at the capital. Mrs. Galland murmured her
congratulations in conventional fashion.
"Into the very holy of holies of the great war machine, isn't it?" Marta
asked.
"Yes--yes, exactly!" he replied.
Her chair was drawn back from the table. She leaned forward in a
favorite position of hers when she was intensely interested, with hands
clasped over her knee, which her mother always found aggravatingly
tomboyish. She had a mass of lustrous black hair and a mouth rather
large in repose, but capable of changing curves of emotion. Her large,
dark eyes, luminously deep under long lashes, if not the rest of her face,
had beauty. Her head was bent, the lashes forming a line with her brow
now, and her eyes had the still flame of wonder that they had when she
was looking all around a thing and through it to find what it meant.
Westerling knew by the signs that she was going to break out with one
of her visions, rather than one of her whimsical ideas. She was seeing
the Roman general, the baron, the first Galland, and the fat, pompous
little man, no less in the life than Hedworth Westerling. She had fused
them into one.

"Some day you will be chief of staff, the head of the Gray army!" she
suddenly exclaimed.
Westerling started as if he had been surprised in a secret. Then he
flushed slightly.
"Why?" he asked with forced carelessness. "Your reasons? They're
more interesting than your prophecy."
"Because you have the will to be," she said without emphasis, in the
impersonal revelations of thought. "You want power. You have
ambition."
He looked the picture of it, with his square jaw, his well-moulded head
set close to the shoulders on a sturdy neck, his even teeth showing as
his lips parted in an unconscious smile.
"Marta, Marta! She is--is so explosive," Mrs. Galland remarked
apologetically to the colonel.
"I asked for her reasons. I brought it on myself--and it is not a bad
compliment," he replied. Indeed, he had never received one so thrilling.
His smile, a smile well pleased with itself, remained as Mrs. Galland
began to talk of other things, and its lingering satisfaction disappeared
only with Marta's cry at sight of the speck in the sky over the Brown
range. She was out on the lawn before the others had risen from their
seats.
"An aeroplane! Hurry!" she called.
This was a summons that aroused even Mrs. Galland's serenity to haste.
For the first time they were seeing the new wonder in all the fascination