Golden Face: A Tale of the Wild West

Nathaniel J. Hardroper, Sheriff of Henniker City.

For some time Rupert Vallance stared vacantly at the hateful paper in dead silence. All the stirring experiences they had gone through together crowded upon his mind, and the fate of his friend, staunch, unswerving, true as steel, moved him more than he cared to show, even to his wife.

“Ah, well!” he said at last, laying down the letter with a sigh. “It’s bitterly rough on a fellow. For upwards of a dozen years we’ve chummed together like twin brothers, in tight fixes and out of them, and now the poor chap’s wiped out. Yes, it’s rough!” An arm stole round his neck. “Darling, can I forget that the noble, unselfish fellow saved your life and brought you back to me! And don’t think me unfeeling, but if I had never gone out there you might be lying there too, at this moment, having shared the poor fellow’s terrible fate.”

“That’s so,” he assented. “I hadn’t thought of it in that light.”

The End

1

Part of the initiatory festival during which, by virtue of undergoing various forms of ghastly self-torture, the growing-up boys are admitted among the ranks of the warriors.

2

This chief, over and above his skill and intrepidity as a warrior, enjoyed a high reputation among the Indians of the Northern Plains as a magician and a seer – a reputation really due to his astuteness, keen foresight, and extraordinary luck.

3

A cache is a sort of underground storeroom or place of concealment – generally jar-shaped – wherein peltries and other goods are deposited, pending their convenient removal.

4

A Western joke, from the passage in Pope’s Essay on Man which runs: “Lo, the poor Indian, whose untutored mind.”

5

General George A. Custer, who fell into an ambuscade on the Little Bighorn river, and perished with his entire command at the hands of the hostile Sioux, under Sitting Bull, on the 25th June, 1876.