Page:West of Dodge (1926).pdf/115

 pathway was worn from gateless gap in the wire fence to the front door.

To this dreary appearing abode Major Cottrell had been conveyed the day before in his own phaëton, making quite a show of his virility by walking down and taking a seat in it without assistance. Dr. Hall feared he might have overdone himself. He expected to find the old man stretched out in bed.

Major Cottrell was sitting in an armchair by a sunny window, chewing a strip of dried beef. There was nothing equal to it, he said, for building a man up after the weakness of a wound. He was cheerful among the Indian scalps and war bonnets, robes, weapons and barbaric pictures on tanned skins, which adorned his walls.

The sod house was much more comfortable within than its crude exterior promised, even cheerful with its bright Indian trappings and trophies. A door stood open between Major Cottrell's apartment and another, where an ancient grand piano, huge and sombre, could be seen standing well out from the wall. A red tam-o'-shanter cap was thrown carelessly on the keys, yellow as the teeth of some old smoker. The cap suggested youth and sprightliness, but youth had not appeared.

In spite of his romantic appearance, Major Cottrell was a well-balanced, modest man. Living in the isolation of his prairie home, for almost a generation the outpost of civilization, he had kept to the fashions and habits of a time long past, not aware that romance and chivalry had perished out of the frontier when Custer fell on that bleak Montana hill.

His long hair and great white mustache, his little pat of beard, were not the theatrical affectations of a vain,