A Trooper Galahad

Nor did he remain at Brooks's. The major's house was big, but so was his household. "You have a vacant room here, Mr. Brayton," he said, the third day after his arrival, as he dropped in at his subaltern's. "It may be a month before I get shaken down into place. I dislike to disturb women and children, and so have decided to ask you to let me move my cot and trunk in here awhile and to propose my name at the mess." And Brayton, blushing at the realization of the fact that the furniture in the room referred to consisted solely of some chairs, a square pine table covered with a cavalry blanket, with a cigar-box half full of smoking-tobacco, another half full of white beans, and a pack of cards for its sole ornaments, nevertheless bravely ushered his new captain into the bower, and Barclay looked neither surprised nor satirical at the sight. "We sometimes play a mild game of draw here, sir," said downright Brayton, "which accounts for the appearance of things; but my striker can clean it up in ten minutes, and you are most welcome."

"It won't put you out in any way?" asked Barclay, without the comment of an uplifted eyebrow on the evidence adduced.

"Not so much as poker, if it does at all," said Brayton, promptly. He was determined his captain should know the extent of his frailties at the start.

Barclay smiled quietly and turned to the boy with liking in his eye. "I'm hardly ten years your senior, Brayton," said he, "and so shall not preach, but I believe we can put that room to a little better use."

The next day he took his seat at the bachelors' mess, where a dozen officers were congregated, all of them but two his juniors in rank. The sideboard was lavishly decked with the indispensables of that benighted day. The old-timers and the new took their anteprandial cocktail or toddy, and hospitably invited Barclay to join. Barclay smiled gratefully, but said he had "never yet got in the way of it, somehow," nor did he more than sip at the Bordeaux which the presiding officer ordered served in honor of the occasion. The mess was rather silent. Most men seemed desirous of listening to Barclay when he spoke at all. They knew every twist and turn of each other's mode of speech by that time, and could repeat verbatim every story in the combination. Barclay might have something new; but if he did he had no chance. Captain Follansbee took and kept the floor from first to last. He was airing his views on the subject of consolidation, reorganization, and purification as practised at the War Department, a topic which the others considered inexcusable, not so much from the fact that it must be most unpalatable to Captain Barclay, a beneficiary of the business, as it turned out, as because Follansbee had worn them all out with it weeks before.

And, to everybody's surprise, so far from seeming annoyed or embarrassed or bored, Barclay led him on from point to point, and, even after coffee was served, sat an apparently absorbed listener, for by that time Follansbee had absorbed most of the claret and was dilating on the matter with especial reference to the case of Colonel Lawrence. Later that evening Barclay spent an hour at the Blythes', and two days after he and Brayton dined there.

It was a seven-o'clock dinner. The doctor and his wife, Major and Mrs. Brooks, Miss Frazier and Miss Amanda Frazier, were the other guests. Those were the days when officers of all grades wore epaulets when in full uniform, but, except in one or two swell messes, full dress was not considered requisite for either dinner or hops. The men wore the uniform frock-coat with shoulder-straps; some few privileged characters even dared to appear in a sack-coat with white tie. Such a thing as the evening dress of civil life was unknown at a military post, and unowned in the fighting force of the army, outside, perhaps, of the artillery. The doctor was a privileged character, a man who said what he thought and did what he thought right; and when Mrs. Blythe, glancing out of her parlor window, saw their favored friend and medical adviser coming along the walk, his hands deep in his trousers-pockets and himself in a fit of abstraction and a new sack-coat, while the partner of his joys and sorrows chatted briskly with the Frazier girls, Mrs. Blythe called up-stairs to her massive liege lord, "Wear your blouse, dear; the doctor has on his"; whereupon Blythe slipped out of the uniform coat of formal cut and into the easy sack, and came trotting down the creaking stair in time to welcome his guests. Brooks, Barclay, and Brayton, who came later, were in the prescribed regulation dress, whereat Dr. Collabone exclaimed, "Hullo! Now that's what I ought to have done, if I'd had as much regard for conventionality as I have for health. Gentlemen, do you know you simply invite an apoplectic seizure by sitting down to dinner in a tightly buttoned uniform coat? It is barbarous. There ought to be a regulation against it."

It was observed that while the doctor included all three of the cavalrymen in his remarks he looked at and apparently addressed only one, Captain Barclay, whose uniform coat was brand-new, very handsomely cut, its buttons and shoulder-straps of the finest make and finish, whereas the doctor's were tarnished, if not actually shabby. Brooks frowned, and Brayton looked embarrassed lest Barclay should take it amiss; but that officer remained smilingly interested, and in nowise troubled. The Frazier girls giggled, and Miss Amanda was prompt to assert that for her part she loved to see the officers wear the proper uniform, and she wasn't alarmed about apoplexy; whereupon Collabone smiled benignly and said, "What did I tell you about the danger of tight lacing?" Amanda couldn't bear the doctor. Her elder and primmer sister only half liked him. Many of the women thought him brusque and rude, but officers and men and mothers of families swore by him, and children adored him. A childless man himself, he seemed to keep open house for the offspring of his comrades. They swarmed about his quarters at all hours of the day. They invaded his parlor, overflowed his dining-room, and ruled his kitchen.

A kindly and placid soul was Mrs. Collabone, a woman who had few cares or perplexities, and these she promptly turned over to her broad-minded, broad-shouldered liege for final disposition, as serenely confident of their speedy dissipation as she was of the prompt conquest of any and all the manifold ills to which childish flesh is heir by that practitioner's infallible remedies. Children ran loose in those days in Texas; and so they ought to, said Collabone. "Savage races are the only scientific rearers," he maintained. "Boys or girls, they should be burdened with but a single garment, or less, from the time they're born until they're eight or ten, and meantime they should be made to eat, sleep, and live outdoors." He preached for children regularity in matters of diet, prescribed four light meals a day, practised heterodoxy, and distributed bread and milk, bread and syrup, bread and jam, cookies, corn dodgers, and molasses candy, morning, noon, and night. Aunt Purlina, the fat and jocund goddess of the Collabones' kitchen, had standing orders on such subjects, and many a time had the post surgeon to wait for his own refreshments because "the kids" had possession of the premises. There was never a worry along officers' row when children strayed from home. "Oh, they're over at the doctor's," was the soothing response to all queries. The doctor's big yard was the garrison play-ground; for, when a soulless, heartless, childless, wifeless post commander, Frazier's predecessor, had dared to prohibit the use of the parade-ground for croquet, hop-scotch, marbles, or "Tom, Tom Pull-away," it was Collabone who rigged up swings and giant strides at his own expense and without the aid of the post quartermaster, and sent away to New Orleans for croquet sets for the exclusive use of the youngsters. It nettled inexpressibly the field officer commanding. He took it as a rebuke from his junior, and took it out in a course of nagging and persecution at the doctor's expense, that roused the energies of the entire post. Frazier was sent from Concho to supersede the objectionable lieutenant-colonel, who thereupon declared his intention of moving the doctor out and taking his quarters; but a courier galloped all the way from Worth to the camp at San Patricio, whither the department commander had gone a-hunting, and another got back in the nick of time with orders for the devastating officer to move to the cantonment on the Pecos, the worst hole in all Texas, as reported by the department inspector. The children had won the day.

At the very moment when the party took their seats at Blythe's, the children of that establishment and their friends the Lawrences were holding high carnival at the doctor's, Aunt Purlina and the colored maid vying with each other in efforts to stuff them to repletion. Over this uproarious feast presided the tall slip of a damsel with whom poor Ned had parted so mournfully when he went away in February. Ada's was the only face in all the merry party that seemed to have known a trace of sorrow. Her big, dark, mournful eyes and shaggy hair, her sallow face and shabby frock, twice let down and still "skimpy," told a pathetic story. Thirteen years of age, the child had already seen much of anxiety and trouble, – much, indeed, beyond the ken of many an elder; and the week going by brought hour after hour of nervous wear and tear, the cause of which only one woman knew, and strove in vain to banish. Ada shrank with actual dread and repulsion from the thought of having to meet the man who had come to take her loved father's place.

Thrice had Barclay spoken to Mrs. Blythe of a desire to see the children of Colonel Lawrence; now he felt confident that he knew the cause of her evasion, and pressed no more. But all through dinner, even while speaking in the low, somewhat measured tones habitual to him, he lost no talk in which the children were mentioned; and at Blythe's they were never forgotten. It was not long before he discovered that the Blythes and Lawrences – the young people – were at the doctor's, Ada presiding. Indeed, with much gusto, almost as soon as soup was served, Collabone began telling of her matronly, motherly ways. Half an hour later a messenger came to the door and asked if Dr. Collabone would please step over and see Mrs. De Lancy a moment. "Tell her I'll be there in just one hour," said the doctor, looking at his watch. Then he added, for the benefit of the party present, "There's nothing in the world the matter with Mrs. De Lancy, and by that time she'll have forgotten she sent for me." Ten minutes later came another call. It was the Collabones' domestic this time. "Little Jimmy's cut his hand, and Miss Ada can't stop the bleeding." "Say I'll come instantly," said he, springing from the table and making his excuses to the lady of the house.

Barclay's face shone with instant sympathy and interest. Dessert was nearly over. He turned to the motherly woman whose own gentle face betrayed her anxiety.

"Will you think me very rude?" he said. "You know I do not smoke, and I do want so much to meet those children. I feel that Ada purposely shuns me, and this is an opportunity not to be lost. May I be excused? I will soon return." Mrs. Blythe's eyes were eloquent as she bade him go.

Three minutes later he softly entered the doctor's sitting-room. There in a big easy-chair sat a tall, sallow-faced, tumbled-haired girl, holding in her arms a burly little fellow whose frightened sobbings she had at last controlled, and who, with only an occasional whimper, was now submitting to the doctor's examination and deriving much comfort from his professional and reassuring manner.

"Why, this is no cut at all, Jimmy, my boy. The reason you bled so much is that you are so uncommonly healthy and full of blood. This won't keep you out of mischief six hours. Hold the basin steady, Purlina. Kick all you want to, Jimmy. Don't you dare to laugh, Kittie Blythe. Well, if here isn't Captain Barclay, too, come in to see you! Here is the little wounded soldier, captain. You had your arm in a sling six long months, didn't you? The Sioux did that for him, Jimmy, and you've only got to be done up in a bandage till to-morrow night. Let Captain Barclay hold you? Indeed I won't. He doesn't know how to hold little boys – like Ada. He's got no little boys, nor big Ada either. Bet your boots he wishes he had, Jimmy." Thus the doctor chatted as he bathed and bandaged the pudgy little fist, while Jimmy lay, half relieved at the rapid termination to his woes, half resentful they should be declared so trifling, and, with eyes much swollen with weeping, critically studied the new captain's appearance and gave token of modified approval. But Ada's white lids and long dark lashes were never once uplifted.

Presently Collabone pronounced everything doing finely, and said he'd go and see Mrs. De Lancy. "You tell them there's nothing much the matter, will you?" he said to Barclay.

"I will – when I get there," was the smiling reply; "but I'm going to tell this little fellow a story first about a Sioux baby boy I knew in Wyoming, and his playmate, a baby bear." And, with wondering, wide-open eyes upon him, Barclay seated himself close to Ada's chair, while the doctor stole silently away.

Half an hour later, when he returned, a circle of absorbed listeners was gazing into Barclay's face. Ada only sat apart, and little Jimmy's curly head was pillowed on the story-teller's breast.