第70章

The office was very still.A few subdued noises trickled in through the open door from the other departments--a dull tinkling crash from the treasurer's office adjoining, as a clerk tossed a bag of silver to the floor of the vault--the vague, intermittent clatter of a dilatory typewriter--a dull tapping from the state geologist's quarters as if some woodpecker had flown in to bore for his prey in the cool of the massive building--and then a faint rustle and the light shuffling of the well-worn shoes along the hall, the sounds ceasing at the door toward which the commissioner's lethargic back was presented.

Following this, the sound of a gentle voice speaking words unintelligible to the commissioner's somewhat dormant comprehension, but giving evidence of bewilderment and hesitation.

The voice was feminine; the commissioner was of the race of cavaliers who make salaam before the trail of a skirt without considering the quality of its cloth.

There stood in the door a faded woman, one of the numerous sisterhood of the unhappy.She was dressed all in black--poverty's perpetual mourning for lost joys.Her face had the contours of twenty and the lines of forty.She may have lived that intervening score of years in a twelve-month.There was about her yet an aurum of indignant, unappeased, protesting youth that shone faintly through the premature veil of unearned decline.

"I beg your pardon, ma'am," said the commissioner, gaining his feet to the accompaniment of a great creaking and sliding of his chair.

"Are you the governor, sir?" asked the vision of melancholy.

The commissioner hesitated at the end of his best bow, with his hand in the bosom of his double-breasted "frock." Truth at last conquered.

"Well, no, ma'am.I am not the governor.I have the honour to be Commissioner of Insurance, Statistics, and History.Is there anything, ma'am, I can do for you? Won't you have a chair, ma'am?"

The lady subsided into the chair handed her, probably from purely physical reasons.She wielded a cheap fan--last token of gentility to be abandoned.Her clothing seemed to indicate a reduction almost to extreme poverty.She looked at the man who was not the governor, and saw kindliness and simplicity and a rugged, unadorned courtliness emanating from a countenance tanned and toughened by forty years of outdoor life.Also, she saw that his eyes were clear and strong and blue.Just so they had been when he used them to skim the horizon for raiding Kiowas and Sioux.His mouth was as set and firm as it had been on that day when he bearded the old Lion Sam Houston himself, and defied him during that season when secession was the theme.Now, in bearing and dress, Luke Coonrod Sandifer endeavoured to do credit to the important arts and sciences of Insurance, Statistics, and History.

He had abandoned the careless dress of his country home.Now, his broad-brimmed black slouch hat, and his long-tailed "frock" made him not the least imposing of the official family, even if his office was reckoned to stand at the tail of the list.

"You wanted to see the governor, ma'am?" asked the commissioner, with a deferential manner he always used toward the fair sex.

"I hardly know," said the lady, hesitatingly."I suppose so." And then, suddenly drawn by the sympathetic look of the other, she poured forth the story of her need.

It was a story so common that the public has come to look at its monotony instead of its pity.The old tale of an unhappy married life --made so by a brutal, conscienceless husband, a robber, a spendthrift, a moral coward and a bully, who failed to provide even the means of the barest existence.Yes, he had come down in the scale so low as to strike her.It happened only the day before--there was the bruise on one temple--she had offended his highness by asking for a little money to live on.And yet she must needs, woman-like, append a plea for her tyrant--he was drinking; he had rarely abused her thus when sober.

"I thought," mourned this pale sister of sorrow, "that maybe the state might be willing to give me some relief.I've heard of such things being done for the families of old settlers.I've heard tell that the state used to give land to the men who fought for it against Mexico, and settled up the country, and helped drive out the Indians.My father did all of that, and he never received anything.He never would take it.I thought the governor would be the one to see, and that's why I came.If father was entitled to anything, they might let it come to me."

"It's possible, ma'am," said Standifer, "that such might be the case.

But 'most all the veterans and settlers got their land certificates issued, and located long ago.Still, we can look that up in the land office, and be sure.Your father's name, now, was--"

"Amos Colvin, sir."

"Good Lord!" exclaimed Standifer, rising and unbuttoning his tight coat, excitedly."Are you Amos Colvin's daughter? Why, ma'am, Amos Colvin and me were thicker than two hoss thieves for more than ten years! We fought Kiowas, drove cattle, and rangered side by side nearly all over Texas.I remember seeing you once before, now.You were a kid, about seven, a-riding a little yellow pony up and down.

Amos and me stopped at your home for a little grub when we were trailing that band of Mexican cattle thieves down through Karnes and Bee.Great tarantulas! and you're Amos Colvin's little girl! Did you ever hear your father mention Luke Standifer--just kind of casually--as if he'd met me once or twice?"

A little pale smile flitted across the lady's white face.

"It seems to me," she said, "that I don't remember hearing him talk about much else.Every day there was some story he had to tell about what he and you had done.Mighty near the last thing I heard him tell was about the time when the Indians wounded him, and you crawled out to him through the grass, with a canteen of water, while they--"

"Yes, yes--well--oh, that wasn't anything," said Standifer, "hemming"