The Lieutenant's Lady by Bess Streeter Aldrich

Author:Bess Streeter Aldrich
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Western
Publisher: Reading Essentials
Published: 1942-09-15T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter XII

For the first time Linnie witnessed dress parade with all officers and men in full uniform. She found herself thrilling to bugles and banners and marching men, that showy frame-work of the old Indian-fighting army which at times held the vision away from the real picture, allowing one to forget the dangers and the deaths.

There were four officers’ wives besides Linnie—who was no wife at all, only a guest. But that no one knew.

There was the colonel’s wife, Mrs. Talcott, with her little fat body, her full-moon face and easy laughter.

Mrs. Norris, the captain’s wife, was the mother of two girls and a boy, a harassed woman who was in a perpetual state of worry over her offspring, their lack of educational advantages, their boisterous activities, their democratic associations with tough old sergeants and tough young orderlies. The children were Effie, Essie, and Ezra, and sometimes, in their boyish clothes and hoyden-like ways, the only possible means for telling Effie and Essie from Ezra was by the tied-back horse-tail appearance of their flying long hair.

Mrs. Houghtaling had come recently from Fort Snelling with the lieutenant and their seven-year-old boy Jimmie, whose energies added many more units of power to that of the potent Norris children. She was expecting another child and slipped in and out of her quarters these days like a shawled shadow.

Mrs. Lane, the room-mate of the Luella, reunited with Lieutenant Lane, made the fourth of the other officers’ wives. When in St. Louis she had cried to be with her husband. Now that she was here with him she shed tears daily for the parents in St. Louis.

“We have to be good friends, whether we want to or not,” the colonel’s wife chuckled. “There isn’t another woman for miles around.”

Strangely enough there were not many Indians here just now, only a few Crows and Peigans who seemed friendly and came in to trade. The colonel’s wife said most of them were away hunting meat and berries. After the swarms of Indians at Fort Berthold it was a great relief, and, with more companies, the other women, and some formality in daily army life here, it made the whole place seem less wild.

Lieutenant and Mrs. Lane and Norman and Linnie took the children of the post fishing on one of those summer afternoons. They found the Judith a clear mountain stream, very beautiful, and what was more to the point, a great fishing spot. With grasshoppers for bait the women and children began landing fish as fast as the two men could hurry from one to another and take them off the hooks. But after several hours, during which Jimmie Houghtaling was fished out of the stream with consistent regularity, Ezra Norris was pried loose from a fishhook, Effie was stung by a bee, and Essie had sprained her ankle in a hole, the adults went home in a fairly wrecked condition, although bearing much finny tribute to the officers’ families.

But life during these days was not entirely made of such episodes.

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