"It's her nature," he told his wife. "Underneath she is an Apache, and
they burn the wigwams and all the traps of their dead; sometimes even
the whole village he lived in." Mrs. Ellton said that poor Captain
Landor had had a good deal to endure.
The two children whom Felipa had taken in charge two years before had
been left in the care of the sergeant of Landor's troop and his wife,
and they manifested no particular pleasure at seeing her again. They
were half afraid of her, so severely black and tall and quiet. They had
been playing with the soldier's children, and were anxious to be away
again. The young of the human race are short of memory, and their
gratefulness does not endure for long. There is no caress so sweet, so
hard to win, as the touch of a child's soft hand, and none that has
behind it less of nearly all that we prize in affection. It is sincere
while it lasts, and no longer, and it must be bought either with a price
or with a wealth of love. You may lavish the best that is within you to
obtain a kiss from baby lips, and if they rest warm and moist upon your
cheek for a moment, the next they are more eager for a sweetmeat than
for all your adoration.
"Yes," whispered the little girl, squirming in Felipa's arms, "I am dlad
you's come. Let me doe."
"Kiss me," said Felipa.
The child brushed at her cheek and struggled away. "Come, Billy," she
called to the brother who had saved her life; and that small,
freckle-faced hero, whose nose was badly skinned from a fall, flung his
arms around his benefactress's neck perfunctorily and escaped,
rejoicing.
The Elltons' pretty child was like its mother, gentler and more
caressing. It lay placidly in her arms and patted her lips when she
tried to talk, with the tips of its rosy fingers. She caught them
between her teeth and mumbled them, and the child chuckled gleefully.
But by and by it was taken away to bed, and then Felipa was alone with
its father and mother. Through the tiresome evening she felt oppressed
and angrily nervous. The Elltons had always affected her so.
She asked for the full particulars of her husband's death, and when
Ellton had told her, sat looking straight before her at the wall. "It
was very like Jack," she said finally, in a low voice, "his whole life
was like that." And then she turned squarely to the lieutenant. "Where
is Mr. Cairness? Where did they take him?" She was surprised at herself
that she had not thought of that before.
He told her that he had gone on to Arizona, to Tombstone, he believed.
"By the way," he added, "did you hear that Brewster has married a rich
Jewish widow down in Tucson?"
"Yes, I heard it," she said indifferently. "Was Mr. Cairness really much
hurt?"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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