Rutland weekly herald. [volume] (Rutland, Vt.) 1859-1877, 1873-06-19


and that q file of soldiers, with esc0ptds,
had made her an orphan. She was then
nineteen, and if the years betwean 1874
and 1865, filled as they had been with
career that would have wrecked dozen
women bred in any cline, let alone that
one where they grow old before they
have had time to be young, had faded
her, she must have been in that June
time of her womanhood brunette blaze
of loveliness incarnated. A Spanish
naval officer who had been her fellow
passenger had won her heart and the
promise of her hand, but he fell in a
duel within forty-eight hours after he
landed. at Havana, leaving La Senorita
Juez de Porterow a widow without ever
having been a wife. Two years later
her regal beauty was feigning in the gar
dens and the S0I0gas of Baden-Baden, and
her black eyes flashing delirium to the
soul of a Russian whose mistress she
was. A little later she was in Paris with
a hotel in the Rue Chatelaine, carriages
and servants at her call and a French
count at her feet Next she was reign
ing at Monaco, the temporary infatuation
of an American, and the next year at
Naples she scandalized diplomatic circles
and brought disgrace upon young Eng
lish Gttache of legation by appearing on
his arm at State ball. Her next scene
of exploit was the Austrian capital,
where she was as stunning a sensation as
ever, and from whence she departed from
Paris in blaze of glory and scandal,
with colonel of Bravarian hussars in
her train. But it was not Chataline that
received her this time, and the descend
ant of the D0ns Of CASTLE swelled the
glory of the second empire in the upper
walks of its de71j monde, Here she again
met her American lover of Monaco five
years before, and when he came home
TO New Orleans she followed him. She
deserted him at Indianola afterWard to
follow the fortunes of a handsome and
wicked man-Budd McAllister-and to
become the proprietress of a gambling
establishment in Brownsville, where she
went by the oddly-miXed name of "Salley
Camanch. This Brownsville faro-bank
she endowed with the jewels her beauty
had extOTted from. Russian noblemen
and French grandees, and that had erst-
while blaZed under the chandeliers of
German spas and in prosCenium opera
boxes is Eugenie's capital. And the
bosom that had pillOwed titled heads,
now gave its soiled love to an American
gambler and desperate.
Budd McAllister, like his ''pard, as
he used to call Sale, had history with
a pulsation of romance to its arteries,
too. Born and raised on little farm
perched upon a granite boulder in New
Hampshire, the year before the war had
him teaching school in Mississippi, and,
like many another hspless Yankee adj
venturer, in helpless, hopeless love with
an imperious daughter Of King Cotton.
The Puritanic straight lacing had not
chnked, nor had the bleak SHOWS Of his
native cline frozen in his bosom, a spirit
of chiyalTy that might in other times
have won a chair at Authors Round
Table, or a place in the lists of tourney
for Guineyere So his imperiOus Mis-
sissippi queen had flashed her black eyes
upon him witchingly, and her dark, Gu
ban face had lighted up sometimes at his
coming. and her stately neck had bent
softly to his wooing; for he was a delic-
ious plaything for her, and she could af
ford the condescention, for the sake of
her ROYAL pleasure, to let him love her as
he did, till his soul fioated about her in a
/ billowY dclirium, like a brandy and
morphine dream, or the wild waltz of
the Ghawazee. And when the chivalry
I, Of the South rose up against the yoeman-
ry Of the North when the Beauty of
! the one section sent its lovers forth to
war with battle-charms of nose-gays, and
/ the Wemanhood of the other section,
/ less .poetical, scraped lint and let the
! flowers 90 unculled, this Mississippi
princess had her Yankee lover prove his
devotion by joining her kindred in dead
/ ly battle against his own; and he did 1t
/ loyally. She let him kiss her velvet
cheek, and bound little scarlet ribbon
4 from her blue-black hair in his button
/ hole. a gage d amour ct de Ia guerre.
/ And the fellow wore it there in 65 faded
! with campaigns and discolored with some
/ blood of Chickamauga; the token of q
4 love that had cursed him, and the keep
4 sake of woman who had laughed at him
when he brought it back to her, with all
/ the mournful history that had cluste-
/ ed round it, Born for the blue,'
/ he had worn the gray for the
sake of romance that had danced
4 before him as mirage in the smoke OF
/ Stone River and Cornith and Kennesaw;
behind the black-throated cannon in the
beleagured trenches of Port Hudson, and
in the weary, dreary prison-pens of
/ Johnson's Island, to vanish with the
dawn of peace. For when he came back
to her, after Bentonville, to claim that,
though the Cause was lost, she was
fairly won, she laughed at him and told
him he had omitted one proof OF his
fealty and that was to have died for Her
and the Cause she loved so. In vain he
pleaded that a bullet-hole in his bosom
and some stains on the sod OF Chlcka-
mauga proved that he done all that he
| I,riyN q
would have given half his life to kiss,
though their touch had stung to death
the other half, curled cruelty; the great
black-violet eyes Knocked him from be-
meath their sweeping fringe OF lashes, and
she said, ':Mr. McAllister, please don't
annoy me-" Then he choked little,
there was a flutter in his lung where the
ball of Chichamauga had torn through
it, and Budd McAllister turned his W hite
face toward Texas, with teeth hard set
and no more hope in his heart, nor any
purpose left in his life. He had gradua-
ted with the highest honors from that
college the widest of desperadOes are
whose alumni.
Budd McAllister was the cool-headed-
est and cold-bloodedest desperate in that
hard town, populated as 1t was with
| colony OF muTueToTS. nc COulu lSt q
life out as gracefully and as laughingly
and as languidly as his Mississippi prin-
cess might have thrown away a love
that she had so toyed with for an after.
noon. In his widest moods and in his
cruelest lenses, he would go about
Brownsville with his hat jocularIy
perched on the back of his head neal
little lock of his brown hair looped down
upon lis artistic neghge; a wicked smile
| playing about his handsome mouth; 9
reckless joke always at his tongues end
a dim devilment deep down in his moist
brown eyes, like the swimming shadow
/ of shark under the sea-and hanC
:: that would find his reyolver-butt or hi:
, knife-hilt asa flash of tightening finds
f its mark. Yet as wicked and as desper
ate as he was, and as bitter as his nature
t had become, Budd was sometimes a!
, gentle and as melting as fawn or a girl
) Among the Federal subalterns on duty
/ there at Brownsville, was one to whom
Rudd owed a debt of gratitude and bu