“No matter,” said Lanark to Jager. “We know that they were both dead, and past our worrying about. Put the other bodies in—our men at this end, the guerrillas at the other.”
The order was carried out. Once again Lanark asked about a prayerbook. A lad by the name of Duckin said that he had owned one, but that it had been burned with the rest of his kit in the blue flame that destroyed the house.
“Then I’ll have to do it from memory,” decided Lanark.
He drew up the surviving ten men at the side of the trench. Jager took a position beside him, and, just behind the sergeant, Enid Mandifer stood.
Lanark self-consciously turned over his clutter of thoughts, searching for odds and ends of his youthful religious teachings. “ ‘Man that is born of woman hath but short time to live, and is full of misery,’ ” he managed to repeat. “ ‘He cometh up, and is cut down, like a flower.’ ” As he said the words “cut down,” he remembered his saber-stroke of the night before, and how he had shorn away a man’s hand. That man, with his heavy black beard, lay in this trench before them, with the severed hand under him. Lanark was barely able to beat down a shudder. “ ‘In the midst of life,’ ” he went on, “ ‘we are in death.’ ”
There he was obliged to pause. Sergeant Jager, on inspiration, took one pace forward and threw into the trench a handful of gritty earth.
“ ‘Ashes to ashes, dust to dust,’ ” remembered Lanark. “ ‘Unto Almighty God we commit these bodies’ ”—he was sure that that was a misquotation worthy of Jager himself, and made shift to finish with one more tag from his memory: “ ‘… in sure and certain hope of the Resurrection unto eternal life.’ ”
He faced toward the file of men. Four of them had been told to fall in under arms, and at his order they raised their carbines and fired a volley into the air. After that, the trench was filled in.
Jager then cleared his throat and began to give orders concerning horses, saddles and what possessions had been spared by the fire. Lanark walked aside, and found Enid Mandifer keeping pace with him.
“You are going back to your army?” she asked.
“Yes, at once. I was sent here to see if I could find and damage Quantrill’s band. I found him, and gave at least as good as I got.”
“Thank you,” she said, “for everything you’ve done for me.”
He smiled deprecatingly, and it hurt his bullet-burnt cheek.
“I did nothing,” he protested, and both of them realized that it was the truth. “All that has happened—it just happened.”
He drew his eyes into narrow gashes, as if brooding over the past twelve hours.
“I’m halfway inclined to believe what your stepfather said about a supernatural influence here. But what about you, Miss Mandifer?”
She tried to smile in turn, not very successfully.
“I can go back to my home. I’ll be alone there.”
“Alone?”
“I have a few servants.”
“You’ll be safe?”
“As safe as anywhere.”
He clasped his hands behind him. “I don’t know how to say it, but I have begun to feel responsible for you. I want to know that all will be well.”
“Thank you,” she said a second time. “You owe me nothing.”
“Perhaps not. We do not know each other. We have spoken together only three or four times. Yet you will be in my mind. I want to make a promise.”
“Yes?”
They had paused in their little stroll, almost beside the newly filled grave trench. Lanark was frowning, Enid Mandifer nervous and expectant.
“This war,” he said weightily, “is going to last much longer than people thought at first. We—the Union—have done pretty well in the West here, but Lee is making fools of our generals back East. We may have to fight for years, and even then we may not win.”
“I hope, Mr.—I mean, Lieutenant Lanark,” stammered the girl, “I hope that you will live safely through it.”
“I hope so, too. And if I am spared, if I am alive and well when peace comes, I swear that I shall return to this place. I shall make sure that you, too, are alive and well.”
He finished, very certain that he could not have used stiffer, more stupid words; but Enid Mandifer smiled now, radiantly and gratefully.
“I shall pray for you, Lieutenant Lanark. Now, your men are ready to leave. Go, and I shall watch.”
“No,” he demurred. “Go yourself, get away from this dreadful place.”
She bowed her head in assent, and walked quickly away. At some distance she paused, turned, and waved her hand above her head.
Lanark took off his broad, black hat and waved in answer. Then he faced about, strode smartly back into the yard beside the charred ruins. Mounting his bay gelding, he gave the order to depart.
VI
Return
It was spring again, the warm, bright spring of the year 1866, when Kane Lanark rode again into the Fearful Rock country.
His horse was a roan gray this time; the bay gelding had been shot under him, along with two other horses, during the hard-fought three days at Westport, the “Gettysburg of the West,” when a few regulars and the Kansas militia turned back General Sterling Price’s raid through Missouri. Lanark had been a captain then, and a major thereafter, leading a cavalry expedition into Kentucky. He narrowly missed being in at the finish of Quantrill, whose death by the hand of another he bitterly resented. Early in 1865 he was badly wounded in a skirmish with Confederate horsemen under General Basil Duke. Thereafter he could ride as well as ever, but when he walked he limped.
Lanark’s uniform had been replaced by a soft hat and black frock coat, his face was browner and his mustache thicker, and his cheek bore the jaggedly healed scar of the guerrilla pistol-bullet. He was richer, too; the death of
