CHAPTER XXI.

ON THE BORDERS OF DISGRACE.

He was no sooner out of sight than Wilkins sprang to his feet, his form trembling, his eyes blazing, his brain on fire with rage and hatred.

“You low-down ruffian!” he said, shaking his fist at the retreating man. “Do you think you can treat me that way and me not strike back at you? Well, you can’t! Because you’re a big bruiser you treat me that way. Well, I’ll make things warm for you in this fort, if I hang for it.”

He was fairly crying, yet did not know it, and sobs of violent rage shook him. After all, compared with Barlow, he was a mere boy, his face still beardless.

“I’ll get even with you for that blow, you villain, if it takes me a year!” said Wilkins.

He stooped by the side of the small canal that brought water to the roots of the cottonwoods, and with this water he bathed his face; yet, as he discovered later, in removing the blood from his lip he got a good deal of it on his handkerchief.

He did not leave the shelter of the cottonwoods for half an hour, and not until he had again secured control of his nerves.

There was in his heart a shaking rage against Joel Barlow and an aching desire to “get even.”

As he walked along, going toward his barracks room, he passed close by the stockade gate.

It was swung open, after a challenge and some questions, and by the lamp which brightly lighted the gate he saw Buffalo Bill ride through to the inside.

That the great scout had been out on the vast plains somewhere, and was bringing in some report to the colonel in command, was Wilkins’ conclusion when he saw him. He stood back in the darkness and looked at the handsome horseman who passed on from the gate in the direction of the colonel’s quarters; then, after a minute of hesitation, he turned in that direction and followed.

Buffalo Bill was no more than in the room which had been assigned him before there was a soft rap on his door. When he opened it, he saw before him Wilkins, pale-faced, bright-eyed, with a lip that was fast swelling, and bruises on his cheeks.

“Come in.”

Wilkins slid into the room, and the scout, closing the door, eyed the young man keenly.

Wilkins was slender, not overmuscular, being of the light and wiry build. Just now his dark face was chalky in its pallor, and his dark eyes burning bright.

The scout, keen reader of the human mind that he was, saw that Wilkins had come in that stealthy way because of something he wished to say in private, and he guessed that the young man was in trouble.

Wilkins dropped nervously into a chair, and pulled nervously at the sleeve of his coat.

“Something I can do for you?” Buffalo Bill asked, in a tone so kind that it touched Wilkins’ heart.

“I have come to make a confession!” he blurted out.

“I can guess that you have been fighting,” said the scout.

“No, I have not; but I was struck down, brutally knocked down, by a man who thinks he has me for his life slave simply because he knows certain things against me.”

His face was flaming again, and his manner was excited.

“Yes, I see!” said the scout, trying to help him along.

“That man is Joel Barlow, now in command here in the absence of the commandant.”

“Not Lieutenant Barlow?”

“Yes, Lieutenant Barlow. And I’m going to tell you about it. I know I shall be disgraced and court-martialed, and perhaps sent to prison; but that doesn’t matter now. I’m going to tell it, if I’m hung for it.”

“I shall be pleased to hear what you have to say.”

Wilkins sprang to his feet, he was so excited, and began to walk about the room.

“Cody, you’ve always been an honorable man, but you know about these things! I’m a gambler; I seem to be a slave to cards. Barlow is another, but he’s shrewder than I am, and I think he is tricky. We played, and I got in debt to him. I owe him five thousand dollars. I can never pay it, of course, and he knows I can’t; for I haven’t five thousand cents, and he knows that, too.

“Well, just because I owed him so much he began to get me to do little favors for him. At first they were all square. Later they have begun to be crooked, and I was too weak to refuse to do them, because of that debt.

“The last has to do with you--with you, Buffalo Bill!”

“With me?”

“Yes. You know that nugget you gave to Colonel Montrose--the nugget with the strange marks on it?”

“Ah, yes, I recall that nugget. I gave it to him not long since. And a strange nugget it is. I’ll tell you about it some time.”

“Well, that nugget comes into my story--holds first place there. For it was stolen from Colonel Montrose by Lieutenant Barlow, and----”

The scout came to his feet.

“Be sure you know just what you are talking about!” he warned. “What you charge Barlow with is a crime that will----”

“I know it. It will ruin him, and I want it to ruin him. That’s why I’m telling you about it; that it may ruin him. I hope it will tear the stripes from his uniform and send him to jail. And it will!”

He walked nervously about the room.

“Better sit down and tell me this quietly,” said the scout. “I’d advise you not to shout it out of the windows. And walls have ears, you know.”

“It doesn’t matter who hears me now,” said Wilkins excitedly. “I wish these walls had a thousand ears, and a thousand tongues to tell the story!”

He strode up and down the room in a very fury of excited anger.

“It ruins me, of course, but it will ruin him, and that’s what I want. He is so high now, in the opinion of the colonel, but this will drag him down.”

“Quiet yourself and tell me the story,” said Buffalo Bill.

“As I said, he stole that nugget from the colonel, and by listening under the colonel’s window he heard its story, and knows that there are many more like it.”

“Ah! He knows that?”

“And he knows where they are; in the Moonlight Mountains, far to the southwest, on the borders of New Mexico.”

“I see that he did hear,” said the scout; “and apparently you heard, also.”

“Those gold pieces are the treasure of an old Indian medicine man, and with them he pretends to work his charms; they are sacred to that medicine man, and to all his tribe. That tribe is a branch of the Cheyennes now held on the reservation near here; and if trouble comes these Cheyennes here can be counted on to help those in the mountains.”

“Very true,” Buffalo Bill admitted softly.

“I’m telling you this,” said Wilkins, “to show you that I know what I am talking about.”

“The proof seems good,” the scout admitted, “so far as it goes.”

Young Wilkins continued to walk about the room nervously, in spite of the scout’s invitation to him to sit down.

“Barlow,” he went on, “intended to get permission to lead a small force over into the Moonlight Mountains. There was a disturbance to be made there, to give him an excuse, and he felt sure he could get the colonel to send him. Well, when he got there he meant to scheme in some way to get those Cheyennes involved and slaughtered, and he expected to get hold of that store of gold belonging to the old medicine man.”

The scout’s interest had quickened.

“Perhaps you know Smallpox Dave?” said Wilkins.

“I have heard of him,” was the answer.

“Well, he’s a borderman, a sort of renegade, I take it. Barlow was going to have Smallpox Dave slip over into the Moonlight Mountains and there start the initial trouble which was to give him an excuse for being sent there. So he had some talk with Dave; and then, later, wrote him a letter. At the time he wrote that letter he wrote another.”

“To Smallpox Dave?”

“No, to a girl named May Arlington, who lives out on the prairie here with her father. Barlow is in love with the girl, but he didn’t get on well with her; and this letter had something to do with that. She turned him down a week or so ago.”

“From what you have told me of him I judge she did the right thing.”

“Yes, she did. But about these letters. I was to be the messenger who was to carry them.”

“Then you were in the thing, too?” said the scout, looking hard at him.

Wilkins turned toward him, trembling and white-faced.

“Yes,” he admitted, “I was. I had got down that low, by degrees. I tried to tell you about it, and how it started in my gambling mania and the debt I owed him. I was helping him in this thing; or, rather, was running some errands for him in connection with it.”

“And if those gold nuggets of the medicine man were secured I suppose you were to have had some of them?”

“No; not so far as I know. Barlow made no promises to me. He said he wanted me to help him; and--well, I had so far weakened, under the threats of disgrace he held over me, that lately I had taken to doing anything he told me to, without stopping to ask questions about it. And so I was to carry those letters. They were left on a table by Barlow, who had been called from his room in a hurry. I got them mixed; and the letter with the nugget, intended for Smallpox Dave, I threw out to the girl as I passed the house where she lives. And the other letter I carried on to Smallpox Dave--the letter which rightly belonged to the girl.”

“Yes, I see.”

“It’s a long story, and the rest of it I’ll make short.

“The theft of the nugget from the colonel’s room was discovered. In some way it was believed that a man from outside did the work. In the search that was made, the soldiers--pack of fools that they were!--struck my trail, and followed it.”

“They weren’t so very far wrong,” remarked the scout. “You acknowledge that the nugget was in the letter you carried.”

Wilkins frowned; he did not like the interruption.

“They followed me. Another horseman had come to the house where the girl lived, and they arrested him, thinking they had their man.”

“I should say they were poor trailers, if they couldn’t tell the hoofmarks of your horse from his. No two are ever alike, any more than two faces are alike.”

“But they had the proof right on him, you see! He had the nugget. It was in the letter I threw to the girl as I flew by; she had shown it to him, and he was looking at it when they came on him.

“And so they arrested both him and the girl, and brought them in to the fort. He was the girl’s lover--the one she cared for--and his name is Ben Stevens. He’s a cowboy on one of these ranches.”

“And they’re here now--the young cowboy and the girl?” the scout asked.

“Yes; he’s in the prison pen, and she is with Mrs. McGee.”

“And Barlow is in command here now?”

“Yes.”

“And, being the real thief himself, he has flung this young cowboy into jail, and has held the girl?”

“Yes.”

Buffalo Bill bored Wilkins with a keen glance.

“And you--why did you come to me with this?”

Wilkins’ violent wrath blazed out again as he answered, “Because I want to depose him. I’ve told you already--it’s because I want to ruin him.”

“But why?”

Wilkins flung himself round and faced the scout, and put a finger on his swollen lip, and showed his battered face.

“That’s why!” he almost screamed. “He struck me--he knocked me down; he treated me as no man would treat a dog.”

“What was his reason for striking you? He must have thought he at least had a good reason? You had threatened to betray him?”

“His reason was that he caught me listening under the window at Mrs. McGee’s to some talk he was having with the girl; but he was mistaken in believing that I deliberately eavesdropped. I listened, but it was only by chance I knew he was talking there. And for that he struck me and abused me.”

“I suppose you know the result of this exposure of him?”

“As far as I am concerned? Yes, I know it will disgrace me. But I don’t care now. I’ve ruined myself with gambling. I expect to go down; and when I go down I’m going to pull him down with me.”

He turned toward the door.

“Think what you please of me, Cody,” he said. “It doesn’t matter now. You’re an upright man, and can’t understand these things probably; and I’m a wild and wrecked young fool on the borders of disgrace. But I swore I’d do him, and I’ve done it. The rest is for you. When you want me send for me; I’ll tell all I know, and I’ll then take my medicine. But he goes down with me, and that suits me.”

He flung himself out of the room in wild desperation, and went clattering down the stairs.