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Updated: April 30, 2025
"Detail a patrol of twenty men," Major King continued his instructions to his officer, "to keep the roads and disarm all individuals and bands encountered." "That don't apply to my men!" declared Chadron, positively. In his face there was a dark threat of disaster for Major King's future hopes of advancement. "It applies to everybody as they come," said King.
Chadron shook his head with an air of serious concern. There was a look of commiseration in his eyes for her credulity, and shameful duping by the cunning word of Alan Macdonald. "That's one of Macdonald's lies," he said, something so hard and bitter in his voice when he pronounced that name that she shuddered. "I never heard of anybody named Thorn, here or anywheres else.
"I've busted in on you, colonel, because my business is business, not a mess of reportin' and signin' up on nothing, like your fool army doin's." Chadron clamped with clicking spurs across the severe bare floor as he made this announcement, the frown of his displeasure in having been stopped at the door still dark on his face. "I'm waiting your pleasure, sir," Colonel Landcraft returned, stiffly.
Frances was on her knees beside her new friend, her anxiety speaking from her tired eyes, full of their shadows of pain. Mrs. Mathews drew her close, and smoothed back Frances' wilful, redundant hair with soothing touch. For a little while she said nothing, but there was much in her delicate silence that told she understood. "No, Chadron will not do that," she said at last.
Of course there was the exception of Nola Chadron, but she was not of Meander and the railroad's end, and she came only in flashes of summer brightness, like a swift, gay bird. But when Nola was at the ranchhouse on the river the gloom lifted over the post, and the sour leaven in the hearts of unmarried officers became as sweet as manna in the cheer of the unusual social outlet thus provided.
Chadron kept up a moaning like an infant whose distress no mind can read, no hand relieve. Now and then she burst into a shrill and sudden cry, and time and again she imagined that she heard Nola calling her, and dashed off along the road with answering shout, to come back to her sad vigil at the gate by and by on Frances' arm, crushed by this one great and sudden sorrow of her life.
On the other hand, it was not more than twelve miles to his ranch on the river. He believed that he could reach it before Chadron could raise men to stop him and take the prisoner away. Once home with Thorn, he could raise a posse to guard him until the sheriff could be summoned.
"Not much!" Nola denied, more than half serious. "Venus is ascendant; you keep your eye on her and see." There was no mistaking the assiduity with which Major King waited upon Nola Chadron that night at the ball, any more than there was a chance for doubt of that lively little lady's identity.
Chadron looked up from his ham and eggs, with a considerable portion of the eggs on the blade of his knife, handle-down in one fist, his fork standing like a lightning rod in the other, and asked her who the man was and what he wanted at that hour of the day.
She had settled down to her roasts and hot condiments, her knitting and her afternoon naps, as contentedly as an old cat with a singed back under a kitchen stove. She had no desire to go back to the winter home in Cheyenne, with its grandeur, its Chinese cook, and furniture that she was afraid to use. There was no satisfaction in that place for Mrs. Chadron, beyond the swelling pride of ownership.
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