Northern Lights

Summary

A saber-scarred captain of the cavalry, dispatched to smother a Plains uprising, absorbs a bullet meant for the flag; the telegram that ferries this grief home detonates inside the womb of his wife, seeding her unborn with a tremor that will echo through bone and blood for decades. The child—Wallace Gray—emerges into candlelight already flinching from thunder, branded prenatally with cowardice as indelibly as if the word had been seared onto the amnion. Raised beneath the iron shadow of a colonel-father who once wore epaulettes like sunrise, Wallace is sent east to be polished into manhood, only to forge an ironclad friendship with Swiftwind, a Lakota youth whose tribe has gambled its future on one educated son. Campus corridors become proving grounds where laughter ricochets like minié balls; each burst of mockery drives Wallace deeper into the refuge of Swiftwind’s calm, while Florence Dunbar—ward, heiress, and incandescent promise—hovers between them like a match held too close to powder. Years compress; diplomas bloom; the frontier reclaims its children. At Fort Terry, Dr. Sherwood—scalpel-wielding Mephistopheles in a frock coat—presides over pestilence and petty treacheries, while Florence, now promised to the doctor, rides westward beside the same quaking Wallace. Stagecoach dust spirals into an ambush; arrows sing of mortality; Wallace’s spine liquefies; he flees, leaving Florence to the mercy of arriving carbines. Disgrace metastasizes: enlistment under General Crook, desertion beneath a blood-red moon, self-surrender to the father who must now sit in judgment. The sentence is not death but the pyramids—Yuma’s sun-baked stone pens where men drag iron balls through alkaline eternity—until word arrives that Colonel Gray’s scouting party is corked inside a canyon, doomed by an aurora the Indians read as omen of massacre. A volunteer is sought to ride through night and nemesis; Swiftwind staggers forward, collapses; Wallace seizes the death-duty, gallops across a canvas of green fire, and skids into the beleaguered perimeter clutching dispatches that shatter a false truce. Simultaneously, in a dim dispensary, Sherwood’s plot to murder his bride with cholera masquerading as morphine recoils: the vial is swapped, the doctor injected, Swiftwind’s Hippocratic hand unwittingly becoming Fate’s own. The aurora drapes victory across the mesa; Wallace’s pulse finally beats without dread; Florence’s gaze rewrites him as hero; drums soften to wedding bells.

Synopsis

Captain Gray, of the United States Army, detailed to quell the Indian uprising, is wounded. A courier is dispatched to Gray's home with the news. Mrs. Gray, about to become a mother, receives a violent shock at the recital of the details of her husband's injury by the courier. The child born at this inopportune time is Wallace Gray. The prenatal influence exercised over the child at the time of his mother being informed of her husband's injury marks him as a coward. The report of a shot or the sound of an explosion throws the lad into spasms of fear. He is sent to college and there forms a strong comradeship with Swiftwind, an Indian, sent by his tribe to be educated. Wallace also forms a strong attachment for Florence Dunbar, a ward of his father, who is now Colonel Gray. Swiftwind is made acquainted with the moral defect inherent in Wallace and pities and protects him whenever the lad is made the subject of the jeers of his friends because of his born defect. Swiftwind becomes a graduate physician and receives a commission as assistant army surgeon, detailed to Fort Terry, in command of Colonel Gray. His immediate superior is Dr. Sherwood, an unscrupulous man. Florence Dunbar and Wallace Gray, traveling in a stagecoach to Fort Terry, are attacked by Indians. Wallace, with a cringing fear, deserts his companion, who is saved only by the timely arrival of Dr. Sherwood and troops. Sherwood marries Florence, nothing more being heard of Wallace, who, however, enlists in another regiment under General Crook, deserts under fire, and ultimately surrenders himself to his father, in the hope that he will be condemned to death. The boy, however, is sentenced to the "pyramids." While working under "ball and chain" he hears that his father and a small band of Americans are hemmed in a canyon by Indians with no hope of relief. The latter, having observed the Northern Lights in the heavens, follow their belief that the "Lights" foretell victory in battle and start on a massacre. General Crook calls for a volunteer to pass through the Indian lines to deliver a message to Colonel Gray. Swiftwind volunteers, but being weak from exhaustion and privation, falls as he is about to commence his ride. Wallace begs for the opportunity to redeem himself, and mounting his horse, arrives with the message to the besieged band just as they are about to recognize a false flag of truce of the Indians. Sherwood attempts to kill his wife by substituting cholera germs in a bottle labeled morphine. He is injured, however, and Swiftwind, intending to alleviate Dr. Sherwood's suffering with morphine, inoculates him with the cholera germs, unwittingly putting an end to him. Wallace's redemption restores him to the affection of Florence, whom he marries.