An Apache Princess

A man with brains and a bank account had no right to live alone,

said Mrs. Sanders, she having a daughter of marriageable age, if only

moderately prepossessing. All this had the women to complain of in him

before the cataclysm that, for the time at least, had played havoc

with his good looks. All this he knew and bore with philosophic and

whimsical stoicism. But all this and more could not account for the

phenomenon of averted eyes and constrained, if not freezing, manner

when, in the dusk of the late autumn evening, issuing suddenly from

his quarters, he came face to face with a party of four young women

under escort of the post adjutant--Mrs. Bridger and Mrs. Truman

foremost of the four and first to receive his courteous, yet half

embarrassed, greeting. They had to stop for half a second, as they

later said, because really he confronted them, all unsuspected. But

the other two, Kate Sanders and Mina Westervelt, with bowed heads and

without a word, scurried by him and passed on down the line. Doty

explained hurriedly that they had been over to the post hospital to

inquire for Mullins and were due at the Sanders' now for music,

whereupon Blakely begged pardon for even the brief detention, and,

raising his cap, went on out to the sentry post of No. 4 to study the

dark and distant upheavals in the Red Rock country, where, almost

every night of late, the signal fires of the Apaches were reported.

Not until he was again alone did he realize that he had been almost

frigidly greeted by those who spoke at all. It set him to thinking.

Mrs. Plume was still confined to her room. The major had returned from

Prescott and, despite the fact that the regiment was afield and a

clash with the hostiles imminent, was packing up preparatory to a

move. Books, papers, and pictures were being stored in chests, big and

little, that he had had made for such emergencies. It was evident

that he was expecting orders for change of station or extended leave,

and they who went so far as to question the grave-faced soldier, who

seemed to have grown ten years older in the last ten days, had to be

content with the brief, guarded reply that Mrs. Plume had never been

well since she set foot in Arizona, and even though he returned, she

would not. He was taking her, he said, to San Francisco. Of this

unhappy woman's nocturnal expedition the others seldom spoke now and

only with bated breath. "Sleep-walking, of course!" said everybody, no

matter what everybody might think. But, now that Major Plume knew that

in her sleep his wife had wandered up the row to the very door--the

back door--of Mr. Blakely's quarters, was it not strange that he had

taken no pains to prevent a recurrence of so compromising an

excursion, for strange stories were afloat. Sentry No. 4 had heard and

told of a feminine voice, "somebody cryin' like" in the darkness of

midnight about Blakely's, and Norah Shaughnessy--returned to her

duties at the Trumans', yet worrying over the critical condition of

her trooper lover, and losing thereby much needed sleep--had gained

some new and startling information. One night she had heard, another

night she had dimly seen, a visitor received at Blakely's back door,

and that visitor a woman, with a shawl about her head. Norah told her

mistress, who very properly bade her never refer to it again to a

soul, and very promptly referred to it herself to several souls, one

of them Janet Wren. Janet, still virtuously averse to Blakely, laid

the story before her brother the very day he started on the warpath,

and Janet was startled to see that she was telling him no news

whatever. "Then, indeed," said she, "it is high time the major took

his wife away," and Wren sternly bade her hold her peace, she knew not

what she was saying! But, said Camp Sandy, who could it have been but

Mrs. Plume or, possibly, Elise? Once or twice in its checkered past

Camp Sandy had had its romance, its mystery, indeed its scandals, but

this was something that put in the shade all previous episodes; this

shook Sandy to its very foundation, and this, despite her brother's

prohibition, Janet Wren felt it her duty to detail in full to Angela.