University of Virginia Library

11. CHAPTER XI

The doctor looked more dishevelled than his wife had
ever seen him before, even on camping trips. Amusement and des-
peration mingled in his expression. She did not need to ask what
was wrong.

“The cook has left!” she exclaimed.

“Yes! How did you know?”

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“By your face.” She could not help laughing.

Reed sighed. “He's gone, all right. Out the window, too.
After I found him drunk last night, I made him go to bed and locked
his door and pocketed the key.”

“Oh dear! And after he promised you to keep sober until I
was up again.”

“Twice he promised me: when I hired him, and when the baby
was born,” Reed said bleakly. “And you should see the kitchen this
morning, too -all yesterday's dirty dishes. What would you sug-
gest?” he asked helplessly.

Mrs. Reed lay back on her pillow and smiled sweetly at her
husband. “There's only one thing I can think of,” she said. “I'm
surprised it hasn't occurred to you.”

“It has. But I was hoping for something better from your
ingenuity, my dear.” He grinned ruefully and went over to the bu-
reau. “Where do you keep your aprons?”

Mrs. Reed could follow his progress from the noises downstairs.
She heard him shake the stove; next came the slam of the door as he
stepped into the lean-to shed for wood; the clank of the stove lid
and the thump of wood being tossed in followed, and the slosh of
water ladled into the tea-kettle. After a bit came the clatter of
dishes inexpertly washinged and dried. She slipped off to sleep
again to the sound of pots being impatiently banged on the stove,
and to the rising smell of fresh hot coffee.

When Reed came upstairs again, carrying a tray, she woke
up. His face was flushed, and her apron was knotted around his
middle in a most unmilitary manner.

“I'm all worn out from hanging over the hot stove,” he
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grumbled in comic imitation of a disgruntled housewife, setting
the tray on the bedside table. Whisking the napkin off, the way the
waiters did it at the Fifth Avenue Hotel, he exposed bread, butter,
coffee and boiled eggs.

“If you were getting this superb breakfast in a city ho-
tel,” he pointed out to his hungry wife, “it would be listed on the
menu as pan frésco, mantéca, café caliente y huevos asados. Biut it
wouldn't taste a bit better.” He served her and began to eat with
enjoyment. “I don't know what we want with a cook when I do so nicely.”

“How did you like the dishes?”

“Well, that's something else. I suppose I shall have to
be severe with Private Anmach when he comes back. In fact, I feel
like being severe,” he added grimly.

“Oh, the poor man,” Mrs. Reed protested. “He must have
such a dull life. Anyway, Christmas comes only once a year.”

“A good thing, too. We couldn't afford to have our cook
disappear much more often. He may be eccentric, but as soldier-
cooks go, he's pretty good.”

Private James Anmach had agreed to cook for the Reeds on
the first of December. Although officers could not have enlisted
men as cooks in more civilized stations, wherever it was impossible
to get civilian help they could, if the soldier was willing. An-
mach, when approached by Reed with the suggestion, had been willing.
He had been at one time or another a plasterer, painter, carpenter,
tinner, plumber and farmer. He wouldn't mind learning to cook, he
said; it might come in handy some time.

His cooking, under Reed's direction, had developed well;
but he had original ideas about serving. His favorite crockery
was soup plates. Steak, chicken, vegetables, flannel cakes, every-
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thing, appeared on the table in soup plates. Reed was expected to
eat from a soup plate, too. Thankful that his wife was upstairs
in bed, beyond the reach of such barbarism, the doctor remonstrated
mildly that soup plates were for soup. Whether the explanation
offended Anmach, or merely baffled him, Reed never knew. But the
next day at dinner he found potatoes in the soup tureen, and pickles
in the gravy boat. He wisely refrained from comment.

It became a point of honor with him not to betray surprise
at Anmach's ingenious flouting of table convention. When a boiled
potato rolled out of the water pitcher and plunked into his
glass, Reed blandly speared it onto his plate, like a man accus-
tomed all his life to having boiled potatoes served in water pit-
chers. Anmach's little game was harmless, Reed thought with amuse-
ment, and since he took a great deal of pains with the cooking, he
was willing to indulge him.

Then Anmach, carried away by the holiday spirit, disappeared
Christmas night, leaving behind him the day's dirty dishes. For
three days Reed saw nothing of him. And for three days Reed did
the cooking and housework. By his own account, the dishes he pre-
pared were barely fit to eat. Sympathetic ladies at the post
sent Mrs. Reed her meals. Distrust of the culinary prowess of
husbands was general among them.

On the morning of the fourth day, while Reed was start-
ing the fire in the stove, he heard a meek rap at the door. He
opened it to Anmach, a penitent Anmach who asserted that he was a
“dog” and reproached himself so movingly for his base conduct
that Reed did not have the heart to add reproaches of his own.
Besides, he was too happy to see him again to think of any. That
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night, as he warily reconnoitred his dinner, which Anmach had
served with his usual talent for surprise, Reed was conscious only
of gratitude: he would not have to wash the dishes. His troubles
were over.

So he thought. But he had reckoned without his wife's
feeling for the fitness of things. Eating from soup plates and
finding dumplings in the cream pitcher did not conform to it. By
the middle of January she was up again, and having her meals with
Reed. Disregarding her husband's urgent advice, she protested.
Anmanch, offended, disappeared again; and Reed, for another five
days, took over the kitchen department, since Mrs. Reed was not
yet well enough. Finally he found another private as cook.

Powers, Mrs. Reed reported, was a jewel. He was sober,
pleasant, took suggestions kindly and outraged no conventions.
Her satisfaction was so great that she did not conceal it.
Powers' renown came to the ears of the Commanding Officdr, whose
cook had lately deserted the stove for the bottle. The Commanding
Officer, therefore, found himself under the “painful necessity,” as
he regretfully put it, of taking Powers to cook for his household.
The “painful necessity” was neither painful nor necessary, Reed
knew, but what could a mlieutenant do when the CO coveted his cook?
He could look around for another cook, that was all.

He engaged Private Howard, who had the reputation of being
a good one. The reputation was undeserved. His cooking was deplor-
able, his disposition worse. Mrs. Reed hotly insisted that he be
discharged. Reed, remembering thos mornings when he had shiveringly
come down to the icy kitchen to start the fire and make the break-
fast, begged her to be patient. Tapping her foot, she replied that
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she could be patient with that impudent lazy-bones only so long.
Howard relieved the situation by asserting that he was being over-
worked, and asked to be sent back to his company. Reed paid him
off and tried to find another cook. It seemed impossible.

“I simply don't know what to do about it,” he lamented the
next evening. Mrs. Reed was preparing the dinner, and he had just
finished setting the table. The despair in his voice was only half
comicl.

She took the roast out of the oven and put it on the platter -
not a soup plate.

“That gives me the most wonderful idea!” she exclaimed sud-
denly. “Why shouldn't we get Anmach to come back?”

Reed looked at her with admiration. “Why shouldn't we, in-
deed? I can't think of any reason of earth. My dear, you are
wonderful!”

So Anmach came back. Reed, cannily determined to avoid
shoals this time, drew up a contract: Private Anmach James Anmach
agreed to cook, to do general work such as milking and gardening,
and to serve food in the traditional vessels; and Dr. Walter Reed
agreed that Private Anmach should have a week's bender after every
pay day, or once every two months.

Reed knew how to compromise.

He summed up his experience in a quotation from Edward
Lytton's “Lucile” which he sent to his wife's sister.

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This was the lighter side of post life, but there was
more to it than comedy. There was, for instance, nothing funny
about the Indians.

* * *

“There are no good Indians but dead Indians,” General
Philip Sheridan had sweepingly declared in a caallous epigram that
was widely taken for truth.

The majority of the settlers and soldiers in the far
west knew little about the rights and wrongs of white and Indian
affairs. All they knew was that they were trying to open up the
country and make it safe, and that the Apaches would sweep down
without warning, burn and kill and capture, and then dissolve into
the mountains or across the Mexican border. It would probably
have surprised them to know President Hayes' opinion: “Many, oif
not most, of our Indian wars have had their origin in brokien pro-
mises and acts of injustice on our part.”

By the time that Reed was stationed in Arizona,
however, most of the Apaches, submitting to the pressure of the
inevitable, had given up the unequal war against the white men and
were living as government wards at San Carlos Indian Reservation.
But Geronimo, an outlaw, was irreconcilable. When John Clum gave
up his post as Indian agent, the war chief, crafty and vengeful,
was set at liberty again. He spent the swinter of 1877-1878 at the
reservation, living at government expense in more ease and comfort
than he could otherwise have enjoyed; but when spring came, and
the snow began to melt from the mountains and game was easier to
find, he ahnd his lieutenants and followers slipped away from the
reservation and headed south toward Mexico's Sierra Madre
range, the “Mother Mountains” of the Apaches, raiding on the way.

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The Camp Apache cavalry was sent in pursuit, with the
friendly Coyotero Apaches who had enlisted in the Army acting
as scouts. They followed Geronimo's trail, but were unable to
catch him. The Apahes Apaches, when pursued, usually broke up
into small bands of two and three and escaped separately, to re-
unite later at some prearranged safe place.

Reed, who had not been ordered to accompany the expedi-
tion, was awakened before dawn one morning by persistent knocking
on his door. When he stepped out on the porch, he could distinguish
by the starlight two enlisted men standing there, one of them with
a bundle in his arms. Before the anyone could speak the bundle
whimpered. Reed stepped sharply forward and demanded,

“What's this?”

“A child, sir,” the soldier holding the bundle answered.
“A little Indian girl, badly burned. Two days ago our force came
into a camp that Geronimo had just left, and found her there. They'd
left her to die, so we volunteered to bring her back. We'd have
got here quicker, but the captain ordered us to travel only at night,
because of hostile Indians.”

“Good men,” Reed approved them. “Carry her to the hospi-
tal and have the steward stir up the fire and put water on to heat.
I'll join you right away.”

He dressed hastily and hurried over to the rough log
hospital. A wood fire was roaring in the stove, and the water
was already heating. The child lay in the middle of the single
ward on the pine table tjat that served as operating table. Dex-
terously Reed snipped away the makeshift bandages from her burned
side. A youthful cavalryman with a broken leg woke up and, rais-
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ing himself on his elbow, watched from hisbe bed. He admired the
young doctor's skill and gentleness -he had recently experienced
them himself -and noticed that his slight frown of concentration
did not at all detract from the kindliness of his expression. As
his skillful hands moved, he spoke once or twice. “Closer,” he
said, to the soldier holding the candle which flickered in the
cold air seeping through chinks in the logs, and “Water, now,” to
the steward. The boy drifted off to sleep again. When he opened
his eyes the sun was rising. The doctor, smiling, was rolling
down his sleeves and advising one of the soldiers, who was looking
very green and miserable, to go over to his quarters and ask An-
mach for some coffee: that would put him back on his feet after
his hard night. The child had stopped moaning and was sleep-
ing under an opiate. Reed smoothed the straight black hair
off her low forehead and lightly patted the round cheek.

“She'll come through, all right,” he said confidently.

Funny, the young soldier thought, an educated man like
the doctor taking so much trouble just for an Indian kid.

Reed walked briskly out, whistling softly between his
teeth, to get his breakfast and tell his wife about the little
Indian girl whom he hoped to save.

He thought live Indians were good, too.

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