Louisiana Lou. A Western Story

Fortunately for De Launay, Snake Murphy and his cohorts were so surprised to see the pose of the late guests that they gave him a moment of respite. He had time to get off of the cowboy and stamp the second boot on his foot. Then, with satisfaction, he turned to face them.

They answered the cowboy’s protesting shout with a charge. De Launay was peaceful, but he did not intend to lose his prize without a fight. He smote the first man with a straight jab that shook all his teeth. The next one he ducked under, throwing him over his shoulder and down the stairs. Another he swept against the wall with a crash.

They were over him and around him, slugging, kicking, and pushing. He fought mechanically, and with incredible efficiency, striking with a snaky speed and accuracy that would have amazed any one capable of noting it. But they were too many for him. He was shoved from the step, crowded back, stumbling downward, losing his balance, struggling gamely but hopelessly, until, like Samson, he fell backward, dragging with him a confused heap of his assailants, who went bumping down the stairs in a squirming, kicking mass.

They brought up at the bottom, striking in all directions, with De Launay beneath, missing most of the destruction. The stair well was dark and obscure, but at the bottom was a narrow space where the battle waged wildly. De Launay managed to get to his hands and knees, but over him surged and swept a murmurous, sweating, reeking crowd who struck and battered each other in the gloom.

The door into the billiard parlor burst open and Johnny the Greek and reënforcements rushed on the scene. But Johnny, not knowing what the fight was about and not being able to find out – the outraged cowboy had thrust himself before a hostile fist in the start of the encounter and now lay unconscious at the top of the stairs – proceeded to deal with what he imagined was impartiality. He simply added his weight to the combat. This naturally increased the confusion.

Such pandemonium was bound to attract attention. Still unable to comprehend the reason of the whole affair, De Launay was crawling between legs and making a more or less undamaged progress to the door, while his enemies battered one another. He had almost reached it, and was rising to his feet, when a new element was injected into the riot. A couple of uniformed policemen threw themselves into the mêlée.

De Launay saw only the uniforms. His wrath surged up. What were policemen doing in this country of range and sheriffs? What had they to do with the West? They stood for all that had come to the country, all the change and innovation that he hated.

He expressed his feelings by letting the first policeman have it on the point of the jaw. The second he proceeded to walk over, to beat back and to drive through the door, out into the big room and clear to the sidewalk. The man resisted, swinging his mace, but he found De Launay a cold, inhumanly accurate and swift antagonist, whom it was difficult to hit and impossible to dodge. Twice he was knocked down, and twice he leaped up, swinging his mace at a head that was never there when the club reached its objective.

The policeman whom De Launay had first knocked down had arisen quickly and, seeing his Nemesis now pursuing his comrade, ran to the rescue. De Launay could avoid a club in the hands of the man in front of him but that wielded by the man behind was another matter. It fell on his head just as he was driving the other policeman through the door into the street. It was a shrewd blow and he went to the ground under it.

While they waited for the patrol wagon, the two policemen tried to gather information about the cause of the fight, but they found Johnny the Greek somewhat reticent. The cowboy still was upstairs, held there by Snake Murphy. The others were more or less confused in their ideas. Johnny was chiefly anxious that the police should remove the prisoner and refrain from any close inquiry into the premises, so he merely stated that the fellow had come in drunk and had made an attack on some of the men playing pool. His henchman was seeing to it that the robbed and wronged cowboy had no opportunity to tell a story that would send the police upstairs.

Half conscious and wholly drunk, De Launay was carted to Sulphur Falls’ imposing stone jail, where he was duly slated before a police sergeant for drunkenness, assault and battery, mayhem, inciting a riot, and resisting an officer in the performance of his duty. Then he was led away and deposited in a cell. Here he went soundly to sleep.

In the course of time he began to dream. He dreamed that he was on a raft which floated on a limitless sea of bunch grass, alkali and sagebrush, where the waves ran high and regularly, rocking the raft back and forth monotonously and as monotonously throwing him from side to side and against a mast to which he clung. Right in front of the raft, floating in the air above the waves, drifted a slender, veiled figure, and through the veil sparkled a pair of eyes which were bottomless and yet held the colors of the rainbow in their depths. Above this figure, which beckoned him on, and after which the raft drifted faster and faster, was a halo of sparkling hair, which caught and broke up the light into prismatic colors.

The raft sailed faster and faster, rotating in a circle until it was spinning about the ghostly figure, which grew more and more distinct as the raft gyrated more crazily. Raft, desert, waves and sky became confused, hazy, fading out, but the figure stood there as he opened his eyes and the stanchion thumped him in the ribs.

His sleep and his liquor-drugged mind came back to him and he found himself lying on his bunk in a cell, while Solange stood before him and a turnkey poked him in the ribs and rocked him to wake him up.

Sick, bruised and battered, he raised himself, swung his feet to the floor and sat up on the edge of the bed. He tried to stand, but his head swam and he became so dizzy that he feared to fall.

“Don’t get up,” said Solange, icily.

The turnkey went to the door. “I reckon he’s all right now, ma’am. You got half an hour. If he gets rough just holler and we’ll settle him.”

“Is the charge serious?” asked Solange.

“It ought to be. He’s a sure-enough hard case. But a fine and six months on the rocks is about all he’ll get.”

De Launay looked up sullenly. The turnkey made a derisive, threatening motion and, grinning, slammed the door behind him, locking it.

De Launay licked his dry lips. There was a pitcher of water on a stand and he seized it, almost draining it as he gulped the lukewarm stuff down his sizzling throat.

It strengthened and revived him. He got up from the bed and stood aside. Solange stood like a statue, but her eyes scorched him through her veil.

“So this is what a general of France has come to,” she said. Words and tone burned him like fire. He said nothing, but motioned to the bed as the only seat in the cell.

He picked up the hat, the battered thing that had brought on this disaster, from the floor and, stooping, felt the sharp throb of his half-fractured skull. His weakened nerves reacted sharply, and he uttered a half-suppressed cry, raising his hand to the lump on his cranium.

Solange started. “They have hurt you?” she said, sharply.

De Launay took hold of himself again.

“Nothing to speak of,” he answered, gruffly. “Will you sit down?”

She sat down, then. Through her veil he could not tell what her expression was, but he was uneasily conscious of the black pools that lurked there, searching his scarred soul to its depths, and finding it evil. He was in no condition to meet her, half drugged with stale alcohol, shaken to his inmost being by reaction against the poisoning of weeks, jumpy, imaginative, broken of mind and body.

His eyes did not meet hers squarely. They shifted, sidelong and bloodshot. But she might have read in them something of despair, something of sullenness, something of shame, but mostly she could have seen a plea for mercy, and perhaps she did.

If so, she did not yield to the plea – at first. In a cold, steely voice she told him what he was. In incisive French she rebaptized him a coward, a beast, a low and disgusting thing. Her voice, curiously beautiful even in rage, cut and dissected him and laid him bare.

She painted for him what a gentleman and a soldier should be and contrasted with it what he was. She sketched for him all the glory and the fame of the men who had led the soldiers of France, neither sparing nor exalting, but showing them to be, at least, men who had courage and command of themselves or had striven for it. She contrasted them with his own weakness and supineness and degradation. Then, her voice softening subtly, she shifted the picture to what he had been, to his days of unutterable lowness in the Legion, the five years of brutal struggle, fiercely won promotion. His gaining of a commission, the cachet of respectability, his years of titanic struggle and study and work through the hardly won grades of the army.

She made him see himself as something glorious, rising from obscurity to respect and influence; made him see himself as he knew he was not; made him see his own courage, which he had; his ability, which he also had; and, what it had not, great pride, noble impulses, legitimate ambition. When she painted the truth, he did not respond, but when she pictured credits he did not deserve he winced and longed to earn them.

“And, after all this,” she said wearily, at last, “you descend – to this? It would seem that one might even gauge the depths from which you rose by the length and swiftness of the fall. Is it that you have exhausted yourself in the effort that went before?”

De Launay stared at the floor with dull eyes.

“What would you expect of a légionnaire?” he muttered.

“Nothing!” she cried, angrily. “Nothing from the légionnaire! But, in the name of God, cannot one expect more than this from the man who wears the medaille militaire, the grand cross of the legion, who won a colonelcy in Champagne, a brigade at Verdun, a division at the Chemin des Dames, and who, as all know, should have had an army corps after the Balkan campaign? From such a man as that, from him, monsieur, one expects everything!”

De Launay twisted the unfortunate hat in his hands and made no reply for some minutes. Solange sat on the bed, one knee crossed over the other and her chin resting in her hand, supported on her elbow. Her head was also bent toward the floor.

“Mademoiselle,” said De Launay, at last, “I think you have guessed the trouble with me.” His manner had reverted to that of his rank and class, and she looked up in instant reaction to it. “I am all that you say except what is good. There is no doubt of that. I have been a soldier for nineteen years; have made it the work of my life, in fact. I know nothing else – except, perhaps, a little of a passing, obsolete trade of this fading West you see around you. I had hoped to win – had won, I thought, place and distinction in that profession. You know what happened. Perhaps I did not deserve more. Perhaps it was necessary to reduce us all. Perhaps I was wrong in despairing. But I had won my way by effort, mademoiselle, that exhausted me. I was too tired to take up again the task of battering my way up through the remaining ranks.

“There was nothing left to me. There is nothing for me to do. There is no one who can use me unless it be some petty state which needs mercenaries. I have served my purpose in the world. Why should I not waste the rest of my time?”

Solange nodded. “Then what you need is an object?” she said, reflectively. “Work?” she asked.

He shook his head. “I have no need of money. And why should I work, otherwise? I know nothing of trade, and there are others who need the rewards of labor more than I.”

“Philanthropy – service?”

At this he grinned. “I am not a sentimentalist, but a soldier. As for service – I served France until she had no further use for me.”

“Marriage; a family?”

He laughed, now. “I am married. As for the love that is said to mitigate that relation, am I the sort of man a woman would care for?”

Solange straightened up, and then rose from the bunk. She came and stood before him.

“If neither love, ambition nor money will stir you,” she said. “Still, you may find an incentive to serve. There is chivalry.”

“I’m no troubadour.”

“Will you serve me?” she asked abruptly. He looked at her in surprise.

“Am I not serving you?”

“You are – after your own fashion – which I do not like. I wish your service – need it. But not this way.”

He nodded slowly. “I will serve you – in any way you wish,” he said.

Solange smiled under the veil, her mouth curving into beautiful lines.

“That is better. I shall need you, monsieur. You cannot, it is clear, serve me effectively by being thrown into jail for months. I must find the mine and the man who killed my father before that.”

De Launay shook his head. “You expect to find the mine and the man, after nineteen years?”

“I expect to make the attempt,” she replied, calmly. “It is in the hands of God, my success. Somehow, I feel that I shall succeed, at least in some measure, but the same premonition points to you as one who shall make that success possible. I do not know why that is.”

“Premonition!” said De Launay, doubtfully. “Still – from Morgan la fée, even a premonition – ”

The shrouding mask was turned upon him with an effect of question as he paused.

“Is entitled to respectful consideration,” he ended. He sat thoughtfully a minute, his throbbing head making mental action difficult. “I see no hope of tracing the man – but one. Have you that bullet, mademoiselle?”

She took it out of the hand bag, shivering a little as she handed it to him.

“It is common – a thirty caliber, such as most hunters use. Yet it is all the clew you possess. As for the mine, there seems to be only one hope, which is, to retrace as closely as possible, the route taken by your father before he was shot. May I keep this?”

She nodded her assent, and he put it in his pocket. Solange was relieved to be rid of it.

“And now,” he added, “I must get out of here.”