Tonio, Son of the Sierras | Page 6

previous evening Archer had
come to his office to receive the aide-de-camp, and there listened to his
message. "The Old Man" looked up suddenly as he sat in the lamplight
at the rude wooden table that served for his official desk, surprise and
concern mingling in his kindly face.

"The general said that?" he asked.
"No, sir: the adjutant-general who was left in charge. The general is
away hunting."
"I might have known that," said Archer to his inner self. To the
aide-de-camp he merely bowed--bowed most courteously. He liked
boys, and the Lord had seen fit to take back to himself the one lad poor
Archer had liked most, and loved unspeakably.
"I think I shall say--nothing of it," said he, presently, after some
reflection, "and--you can find out, through Harris, all there is to be
told."
And not a word had he said, even to the post adjutant, from the moment
of Willett's reporting to him at nine the night before, yet every man of
the officers' mess knew well that something had sent the young staff
officer to Almy--that something was to be looked into--and every man,
including Harris, felt it in his bones that that something was the recent
and unprofitable scout. That being the case, it placed them all on the
defensive, and Willett, unhappily, upon his mettle.
A silence fell upon the party when it was found Harris was gone. 'Tonio
himself had risen again, had stood gazing awhile along the eastward
mountains, tumbling up toward a brazen sky, then had slowly vanished
from sight round the corner of the adobe wall.
"Sticks closer'n a brother," said Stannard, epigrammatically, with a
look at Turner, his comrade captain, whereat the latter shot a warning
glance, first at Stannard, then toward the unconscious N.A., now
hobnobbing with Briggs at the mess-room door.
"Harris doesn't like the young swell! What's the matter, d'ye s'pose?"
asked Bucketts, the post quartermaster, a man of much weight, but not
too much discrimination.
"Bosh! They're classmates and old chums," was Stannard's quick reply.
"Harris is hipped because his scout was a fizzle, and he simply doesn't

feel like talking."
"All the same, he doesn't like Willett, classmate or no classmate. You
mark my words," persisted the man of mops and brooms, and Stannard,
who had seen the youngster's face as he turned away, knew well the
quartermaster was right. Therefore was it his duty, for the sake of the
regiment, said he, to stand by Harris as hailing from the cavalry. He
scoffed at the quartermaster and began to pace the veranda. 'Twas high
time for evening stables, and the brief and perfunctory grooming the
short-coupled, stocky little mountain climbers daily received. The herds
had been driven in, watering in the shallows as they forded the stream
full fifteen minutes before. There were only the surgeon, the adjutant,
the quartermaster, and Lieutenant Willett seated on the veranda when
Harris presently came back, silent as before, but clad in undress
uniform, as neat and trim as that of the Latest Arrival, if not so new.
Then came General Archer, his daughter, and the meeting. Then, a few
minutes later, the bid to dinner, and then, barely an hour from that time,
the dinner itself--a function the classmates marched to almost arm in
arm when either would rather have been without the other.
The members of what there was of the mess, six officers in all, sat
waiting the summons to their own board, and gazing idly after.
Stannard, the only married captain whose wife had had the nerve to go
to that desolate and distant station, was sitting under his own figurative
vine and fig-tree represented by a pine veranda, about which neither
vine nor fig nor other tree had ever been induced to grow, but that was
not without other extravagances, since it represented to Uncle Sam an
aggregate sum that could be best computed at a shilling a shingle.
Stannard, hearing footsteps on the sandy soil, glanced up from the
columns of an Alta California, ten days old, and growled through the
adjacent blinds "They're coming now," whereat there was sound of
rustling skirt within, and between the slats there came a glimpse of
shining, big blue eyes, alive with womanly interest, and parted lips
disclosing two opposing rows of almost perfect teeth, all the whiter by
contrast with the sunburned, "sonsy" face that framed them. Together,
yet separated, this Darby and Joan of the far frontier sat and watched
the coming pair. "Isn't it good to see the real uniform again?" said she.

"Isn't it absurd to think of trying a dinner here?" said he. Then both
subsided as the two young officers stepped upon the resounding boards
of the next veranda to the south, knocked at the commander's open door
and