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Updated: September 19, 2025
Nola's arms clung to her neck a little, holding her while she whispered in her ear. "For I'm going to be different, I'm going to be good abso-lutely good!" "You don't tell me? So the old colonel's got what his heart's been pinin' for many a year. Well, well!" Mrs.
Macdonald was sleeping, and Frances went softly to tell her. "Nola's askin' for you," Mrs. Chadron told her, "she's all heartbroke and moanin' in her bed. If you'll go to her, and comfort her a little, honey, I'll take as good care of him as if he was my own." Frances was touched by the appeal for sympathy.
"Oh, why didn't you tell me?" Nola's face seemed to clear of something, a shadow of perplexity, it seemed, that Frances had seen in it from time to time since her coming there. She looked frankly and reprovingly at Frances. "I didn't miss it until I was leaving, and I didn't want to delay the rest of them to look for it. It really doesn't matter."
Frances went in for a nearer inspection, and lifted the little saucy bit of headgear from its place in the decorations of Nola's wall. There could be no doubting it; that was Alan Macdonald's bonnet, and there was a bullet hole in it at the stem of the little feather. The close-grazing lead had sheared the plume in two, and gone on its stinging way straight through the bonnet.
"Nola," she whispered, softly. A little shivering sob was the answer. Frances went in, and closed the door. Nola was lying face downward on her pillow, like a child, and Frances found on putting out her comforting hand that the fickle little lady's bolster was wet with tears. She sat on the bedside and tried gently to turn Nola's face toward her.
The struggle was over in a few seconds, and Macdonald stood free of the little fury, a red welt across his cheek, the back of his hand cut until the blood oozed through the skin in heavy black drops. Chadron had not moved a hand to interfere on either side. Only now that the foolish display of Nola's temper was done he rocked in his saddle and shook the empty landscape with his loud, coarse laugh.
Frances was resentful of Nola's interest in him, of her presence in the room. She was on the point of asking her to leave when Nola spoke. "If he hadn't been so proud, if he'd only stooped to explain things to us, to talk to us, even, this could have been avoided, Frances." "What could he have said?"
There was a womanly dignity about her, although the threshold of girlhood must not have been far behind her that bright autumnal morning. Her nod was equal to a stave of Nola's chatter, her smile worth a league of the light laughter from that bounding little lady's lips. Not that she was always so silent as on that morning, there among the young wives of the post, at her own guest's side.
Now we're goin' to clear 'em out." "But Macdonald seemed hurt when I asked him how much money they wanted you to pay as Nola's ransom," she said. "He's deep, and he's tricky too deep and too slick for you."
Penitence that brings only a headache is like plating over brass; it cannot long conceal the baseness of the thing that lies beneath. "Time is the only remedy for that, Nola," she said, her own words slow and sad. "Do you think I've sinned past forgiveness because I because I love him?" Nola's voice trembled with earnestness. "He is free, to love and be loved as it may fall, Nola.
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