Red Men and White
by Owen Wister · English · Gutenberg #28675 · 467,959 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: Red Men and White
Author: Owen Wister
Illustrator: Frederic Remington
Release date: May 4, 2009 [eBook #28675]
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/28675
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK RED MEN AND WHITE ***
Produced by D. Alexander and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
produced from images generously made available by The
Internet Archive)
RED MEN AND WHITE
BY
OWEN WISTER
ILLUSTRATED
BY FREDERIC REMINGTON
NEW YORK AND LONDON
HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
Copyright, 1895, by HARPER & BROTHERS.
_Printed in the United States of America._
[Illustration: SPECIMEN JONES (Page 36)]
TO
S. B. W. AND O. J. W.
FROM THEIR SON
PREFACE
These eight stories are made from our Western Frontier as it was in a
past as near as yesterday and almost as by-gone as the Revolution; so
swiftly do we proceed. They belong to each other in a kinship of life
and manners, and a little through the nearer tie of having here and
there a character in common. Thus they resemble faintly the separate
parts of a whole, and gain, perhaps, something of the invaluable weight
of length; and they have been received by my closest friends with
suspicion.
Many sorts of Americans live in America; and the Atlantic American, it
is to be feared, often has a cautious and conventional imagination. In
his routine he has lived unaware of the violent and romantic era in
eruption upon his soil. Only the elk-hunter has at times returned with
tales at which the other Atlantic Americans have deported themselves
politely; and similarly, but for the assurances of Western readers, I
should have come to doubt the truth of my own impressions. All this is
most natural.
If you will look upon the term "United States" as describing what we
are, you must put upon it a strict and Federal construction. We
undoubtedly use the city of Washington for our general business office,
and in the event of a foreign enemy upon our coasts we should stand
bound together more stoutly than we have shown ourselves since 1776. But
as we are now, seldom has a great commonwealth been seen less united in
its stages of progress, more uneven in its degrees of enlightenment.
Never, indeed, it would seem, have such various centuries been jostled
together as they are to-day upon this continent, and within the
boundaries of our nation. We have taken the ages out of their
processional arrangement and set them marching disorderly abreast in our
wide territory, a harlequin platoon. We citizens of the United States
date our letters 18--, and speak of ourselves as living in the present
era; but the accuracy of that custom depends upon where we happen to be
writing. While portions of New York, Chicago, and San Francisco are of
this nineteenth century, we have many ancient periods surviving among
us. What do you say, for example, to the Kentucky and Tennessee
mountaineers, with their vendettas of blood descending from father to
son? That was once the prevailing fashion of revenge. Yet even before
the day when Columbus sailed had certain communities matured beyond it.
This sprout of the Middle Ages flourishes fresh and green some five
hundred miles and five hundred years from New York. In the single State
of Texas you will find a contrast more violent still. There, not long
ago, an African was led upon a platform in a public place for people to
see, and tortured slowly to death with knives and fire. To witness this
scene young men and women came in crowds. It is said that the railroad
ran a special train for spectators from a distance. How might that
audience of Paris, Texas, appropriately date its letters? Not Anno
Domini, but many years B.C. The African deserves no pity. His hideous
crime was enough to drive a father to any madness, and too many such
monsters have by their acts made Texas justly desperate. But for
American citizens to crowd to the retribution, and look on as at a
holiday show, reveals the Inquisition, the Pagans, the Stone Age,
unreclaimed in our republic. On the other hand, the young men and women
who will watch side by side the burning of a negro shrink from using
such words as bull or stallion in polite society; many in Texas will
say, instead, _male cow_ and _caviard horse_ (a term spelled as they
pronounce it), and consider that delicacy is thus achieved. Yet in this
lump Texas holds leaven as sterling as in any State; but it has far to
spread.
It were easy to proceed from Maine to California instancing the remote
centuries that are daily colliding within our domain, but this is enough
to show how little we cohere in opinions. How many States and
Territories is it that we count united under our Stars and Stripes? I
know that there are some forty-five or more, and that though I belong
among the original thirteen, it has been my happiness to journey in all
the others, in most of them, indeed, many times, for the sake of making
my country's acquaintance. With no spread-eagle brag do I gather
conviction each year that we Americans, judged not hastily, are sound at
heart, kind, courageous, often of the truest delicacy, and always
ultimately of excellent good-sense. With such belief, or, rather,
knowledge, it is sorrowful to see our fatal complacence, our as yet
undisciplined folly, in sending to our State Legislatures and to that
general business office of ours at Washington a herd of mismanagers that
seems each year to grow more inefficient and contemptible, whether
branded Republican or Democrat. But I take heart, because often and
oftener I hear upon my journey the citizens high and low muttering,
"There's too much politics in this country"; and we shake hands.
But all this is growing too serious for a book of short stories.
They are about Indians and soldiers and events west of the Missouri.
They belong to the past thirty years of our development, but you will
find some of those ancient surviving centuries in them if you take
my view. In certain ones the incidents, and even some of the names,
are left unchanged from their original reality. The visit of
Young-man-afraid-of-his-horses to the Little Big Horn and the rise and
fall of the young Crow impostor, General Crook's surprise of E-egante,
and many other occurrences, noble and ignoble, are told as they were
told to me by those who saw them. When our national life, our own soil,
is so rich in adventures to record, what need is there for one to call
upon his invention save to draw, if he can, characters who shall fit
these strange and dramatic scenes? One cannot improve upon such
realities. If this fiction is at all faithful to the truth from which
it springs, let the thanks be given to the patience and boundless
hospitality of the Army friends and other friends across the Missouri
who have housed my body and instructed my mind. And if the stories
entertain the ignorant without grieving the judicious I am content.
CONTENTS
PAGE
LITTLE BIG HORN MEDICINE 3
SPECIMEN JONES 36
THE SERENADE AT SISKIYOU 64
THE GENERAL'S BLUFF 82
SALVATION GAP 115
THE SECOND MISSOURI COMPROMISE 131
LA TINAJA BONITA 159
A PILGRIM ON THE GILA 211
ILLUSTRATIONS
SPECIMEN JONES _Frontispiece_
"BOASTING IN INDIAN FASHION" _Facing page_ 6
"HIS HORSE DREW CLOSE, SHOVING THE HORSE
OF THE MEDICINE-MAN" " 14
"THE HEAD LAY IN THE WATER" " 34
AN APACHE " 38
CUMNOR'S AWAKENING " 52
THE MEXICAN FREIGHT-WAGON " 58
"'AIN'T Y'U GOT SOMETHING TO SELL?'" " 90
THE CHARGE " 102
"HE HESITATED TO KILL THE WOMAN" " 112
THE SHOT-GUN MESSENGER " 122
"'I'D LIKE TO HAVE IT OVER'" " 128
"HIS PLAN WAS TO WALK AND KEEP QUIET" " 148
"'DON'T NOBODY HURT ANYBODY,' SAID SPECIMEN
JONES" " 156
"'YOU DON'T WANT TO TALK THIS WAY.
YOU'RE ALONE'" " 204
"EACH BLACK-HAIRED DESERT FIGURE" " 238
RED MEN AND WHITE
LITTLE BIG HORN MEDICINE
Something new was happening among the Crow Indians. A young pretender
had appeared in the tribe. What this might lead to was unknown alike to
white man and to red; but the old Crow chiefs discussed it in their
councils, and the soldiers at Fort Custer, and the civilians at the
agency twelve miles up the river, and all the white settlers in the
valley discussed it also. Lieutenants Stirling and Haines, of the First
Cavalry, were speculating upon it as they rode one afternoon.
"Can't tell about Indians," said Stirling. "But I think the Crows are
too reasonable to go on the war-path."
"Reasonable!" said Haines. He was young, and new to Indians.
"Just so. Until you come to his superstitions, the Indian can reason as
straight as you or I. He's perfectly logical."
"Logical!" echoed Haines again. He held the regulation Eastern view that
the Indian knows nothing but the three blind appetites.
"You'd know better," remarked Stirling, "if you'd been fighting 'em for
fifteen years. They're as shrewd as AEsop's fables."
Just then two Indians appeared round a bluff--one old and shabby, the
other young and very gaudy--riding side by side.
"That's Cheschapah," said Stirling. "That's the agitator in all his
feathers. His father, you see, dresses more conservatively."
The feathered dandy now did a singular thing. He galloped towards the
two officers almost as if to bear them down, and, steering much too
close, flashed by yelling, amid a clatter of gravel.
"Nice manners," commented Haines. "Seems to have a chip on his
shoulder."
But Stirling looked thoughtful. "Yes," he muttered, "he has a chip."
Meanwhile the shabby father was approaching. His face was mild and sad,
and he might be seventy. He made a gesture of greeting. "How!" he said,
pleasantly, and ambled on his way.
"Now there you have an object-lesson," said Stirling. "Old Pounded Meat
has no chip. The question is, are the fathers or the sons going to run
the Crow Nation?"
"Why did the young chap have a dog on his saddle?" inquired Haines.
"I didn't notice it. For his supper, probably--probably he's getting up
a dance. He is scheming to be a chief. Says he is a medicine-man, and
can make water boil without fire; but the big men of the tribe take no
stock in him--not yet. They've seen soda-water before. But I'm told this
water-boiling astonishes the young."
"You say the old chiefs take no stock in him _yet_?"
"Ah, that's the puzzle. I told you just now Indians could reason."
"And I was amused."
"Because you're an Eastern man. I tell you, Haines, if it wasn't my
business to shoot Indians I'd study them."
"You're a crank," said Haines.
But Stirling was not a crank. He knew that so far from being a mere
animal, the Indian is of a subtlety more ancient than the Sphinx. In his
primal brain--nearer nature than our own--the directness of a child
mingles with the profoundest cunning. He believes easily in powers of
light and darkness, yet is a sceptic all the while. Stirling knew this;
but he could not know just when, if ever, the young charlatan Cheschapah
would succeed in cheating the older chiefs; just when, if ever, he would
strike the chord of their superstition. Till then they would reason that
the white man was more comfortable as a friend than as a foe, that
rations and gifts of clothes and farming implements were better than
battles and prisons. Once their superstition was set alight, these three
thousand Crows might suddenly follow Cheschapah to burn and kill and
destroy.
"How does he manage his soda-water, do you suppose?" inquired Haines.
"That's mysterious. He has never been known to buy drugs, and he's
careful where he does his trick. He's still a little afraid of his
father. All Indians are. It's queer where he was going with that dog."
Hard galloping sounded behind them, and a courier from the Indian agency
overtook and passed them, hurrying to Fort Custer. The officers hurried
too, and, arriving, received news and orders. Forty Sioux were reported
up the river coming to visit the Crows. It was peaceable, but untimely.
The Sioux agent over at Pine Ridge had given these forty permission to
go, without first finding out if it would be convenient to the Crow
agent to have them come. It is a rule of the Indian Bureau that if one
tribe desire to visit another, the agents of both must consent. Now,
most of the Crows were farming and quiet, and it was not wise that a
visit from the Sioux and a season of feasting should tempt their hearts
and minds away from the tilling of the soil. The visitors must be taken
charge of and sent home.
"Very awkward, though," said Stirling to Haines. He had been ordered to
take two troops and arrest the unoffending visitors on their way. "The
Sioux will be mad, and the Crows will be madder. What a bungle! and how
like the way we manage Indian affairs!" And so they started.
Thirty miles away, by a stream towards which Stirling with his command
was steadily marching through the night, the visitors were gathered.
There was a cook-fire and a pot, and a stewing dog leaped in the froth.
Old men in blankets and feathers sat near it, listening to young
Cheschapah's talk in the flighty lustre of the flames. An old squaw
acted as interpreter between Crow and Sioux. Round about, at a certain
distance, the figures of the crowd lounged at the edge of the darkness.
Two grizzled squaws stirred the pot, spreading a clawed fist to their
eyes against the red heat of the coals, while young Cheschapah harangued
the older chiefs.
[Illustration: "BOASTING IN INDIAN FASHION"]
"And more than that, I, Cheschapah, can do," said he, boasting in
Indian fashion. "I know how to make the white man's heart soft so
he cannot fight." He paused for effect, but his hearers seemed
uninterested. "You have come pretty far to see us," resumed the
orator, "and I, and my friend Two Whistles, and my father, Pounded
Meat, have come a day to meet you and bring you to our place. I have
brought you a fat dog. I say it is good the Crow and the Sioux shall
be friends. All the Crow chiefs are glad. Pretty Eagle is a big chief,
and he will tell you what I tell you. But I am bigger than Pretty
Eagle. I am a medicine-man."
He paused again; but the grim old chiefs were looking at the fire, and
not at him. He got a friendly glance from his henchman, Two Whistles,
but he heard his father give a grunt.
That enraged him. "I am a medicine-man," he repeated, defiantly. "I have
been in the big hole in the mountains where the river goes, and spoken
there with the old man who makes the thunder. I talked with him as one
chief to another. I am going to kill all the white men."
At this old Pounded Meat looked at his son angrily, but the son was not
afraid of his father just then. "I can make medicine to bring the rain,"
he continued. "I can make water boil when it is cold. With this I can
strike the white man blind when he is so far that his eyes do not show
his face."
He swept out from his blanket an old cavalry sabre painted scarlet.
Young Two Whistles made a movement of awe, but Pounded Meat said, "My
son's tongue has grown longer than his sword."
Laughter sounded among the old chiefs. Cheschapah turned his impudent
yet somewhat visionary face upon his father. "What do you know of
medicine?" said he. "Two sorts of Indians are among the Crows to-day,"
he continued to the chiefs. "One sort are the fathers, and the sons are
the other. The young warriors are not afraid of the white man. The old
plant corn with the squaws. Is this the way with the Sioux?"
"With the Sioux," remarked a grim visitor, "no one fears the white man.
But the young warriors do not talk much in council."
Pounded Meat put out his hand gently, as if in remonstrance. Other
people must not chide his son.
"You say you can make water boil with no fire?" pursued the Sioux, who
was named Young-man-afraid-of-his-horses, and had been young once.
Pounded Meat came between. "My son is a good man," said he. "These words
of his are not made in the heart, but are head words you need not count.
Cheschapah does not like peace. He has heard us sing our wars and the
enemies we have killed, and he remembers that he has no deeds, being
young. When he thinks of this sometimes he talks words without sense.
But my son is a good man."
The father again extended his hand, which trembled a little. The Sioux
had listened, looking at him with respect, and forgetful of Cheschapah,
who now stood before them with a cup of cold water.
"You shall see," he said, "who it is that talks words without sense."
Two Whistles and the young bucks crowded to watch, but the old men sat
where they were. As Cheschapah stood relishing his audience, Pounded
Meat stepped up suddenly and upset the cup. He went to the stream and
refilled it himself. "Now make it boil," said he.
Cheschapah smiled, and as he spread his hand quickly over the cup, the
water foamed up.
"Huh!" said Two Whistles, startled.
The medicine-man quickly seized his moment. "What does Pounded Meat
know of my medicine?" said he. "The dog is cooked. Let the dance begin."
The drums set up their dull, blunt beating, and the crowd of young and
less important bucks came from the outer circle nearer to the council.
Cheschapah set the pot in the midst of the flat camp, to be the centre
of the dance. None of the old chiefs said more to him, but sat apart
with the empty cup, having words among themselves. The flame reared high
into the dark, and showed the rock wall towering close, and at its feet
the light lay red on the streaming water. The young Sioux stripped naked
of their blankets, hanging them in a screen against the wind from the
jaws of the canon, with more constant shouts as the drumming beat
louder, and strokes of echo fell from the black cliffs. The figures
twinkled across each other in the glare, drifting and alert, till the
dog-dance shaped itself into twelve dancers with a united sway of body
and arms, one and another singing his song against the lifted sound of
the drums. The twelve sank crouching in simulated hunt for an enemy back
and forth over the same space, swinging together.
Presently they sprang with a shout upon their feet, for they had taken
the enemy. Cheschapah, leading the line closer to the central pot, began
a new figure, dancing the pursuit of the bear. This went faster; and
after the bear was taken, followed the elk-hunt, and a new sway and
crouch of the twelve gesturing bodies. The thudding drums were
ceaseless; and as the dance went always faster and always nearer the dog
pot, the steady blows of sound inflamed the dancers; their chests
heaved, and their arms and bodies swung alike as the excited crew filed
and circled closer to the pot, following Cheschapah, and shouting
uncontrollably. They came to firing pistols and slashing the air with
knives, when suddenly Cheschapah caught up a piece of steaming dog from
the pot, gave it to his best friend, and the dance was done. The
dripping figures sat quietly, shining and smooth with sweat, eating
their dog-flesh in the ardent light of the fire and the cool splendor of
the moon. By-and-by they lay in their blankets to sleep at ease.
The elder chiefs had looked with distrust at Cheschapah as he led the
dance; now that the entertainment was over, they rose with gravity to go
to their beds.
"It is good for the Sioux and the Crows to be friends," said Pounded
Meat to Young-man-afraid-of-his-horses. "But we want no war with the
white man. It is a few young men who say that war is good now."
"We have not come for war," replied the Sioux. "We have come to eat much
meat together, and remember that day when war was good on the Little
Horn, and our warriors killed Yellow Hair and all his soldiers."
Pounded Meat came to where he and Cheschapah had their blankets.
"We shall have war," said the confident son to his father. "My medicine
is good."
"Peace is also pretty good," said Pounded Meat. "Get new thoughts. My
son, do you not care any more for my words?"
Cheschapah did not reply.
"I have lived a long while. Yet one man may be wrong. But all cannot be.
The other chiefs say what I say. The white men are too strong."
"They would not be too strong if the old men were not cowards."
"Have done," said the father, sternly. "If you are a medicine-man, do
not talk like a light fool."
The Indian has an "honor thy father" deep in his religion too, and
Cheschapah was silent. But after he was asleep, Pounded Meat lay
brooding. He felt himself dishonored, and his son to be an evil in the
tribe. With these sore notions keeping him awake, he saw the night wane
into gray, and then he heard the distant snort of a horse. He looked,
and started from his blankets, for the soldiers had come, and he ran to
wake the sleeping Indians. Frightened, and ignorant why they should be
surrounded, the Sioux leaped to their feet; and Stirling, from where he
sat on his horse, saw their rushing, frantic figures.
"Go quick, Kinney," he said to the interpreter, "and tell them it's
peace, or they'll be firing on us."
Kinney rode forward alone, with one hand raised; and seeing that sign,
they paused, and crept nearer, like crafty rabbits, while the sun rose
and turned the place pink. And then came the parley, and the long
explanation; and Stirling thanked his stars to see they were going to
allow themselves to be peaceably arrested. Bullets you get used to; but
after the firing's done, you must justify it to important personages who
live comfortably in Eastern towns and have never seen an Indian in their
lives, and are rancid with philanthropy and ignorance.
Stirling would sooner have faced Sioux than sentimentalists, and he was
fervently grateful to these savages for coming with him quietly without
obliging him to shoot them. Cheschapah was not behaving so amiably; and
recognizing him, Stirling understood about the dog. The medicine-man,
with his faithful Two Whistles, was endeavoring to excite the prisoners
as they were marched down the river to the Crow Agency.
Stirling sent for Kinney. "Send that rascal away," he said. "I'll not
have him bothering here."
The interpreter obeyed, but with a singular smile to himself. When he
had ordered Cheschapah away, he rode so as to overhear Stirling and
Haines talking. When they speculated about the soda-water, Kinney smiled
again. He was a quiet sort of man. The people in the valley admired his
business head. He supplied grain and steers to Fort Custer, and used to
say that business was always slow in time of peace.
By evening Stirling had brought his prisoners to the agency, and there
was the lieutenant of Indian police of the Sioux come over from Pine
Ridge to bring them home. There was restlessness in the air as night
fell round the prisoners and their guard. It was Cheschapah's hour, and
the young Crows listened while he declaimed against the white man for
thwarting their hospitality. The strong chain of sentinels was kept busy
preventing these hosts from breaking through to fraternize with their
guests. Cheschapah did not care that the old Crow chiefs would not
listen. When Pretty Eagle remarked laconically that peace was good, the
agitator laughed; he was gaining a faction, and the faction was feeling
its oats. Accordingly, next morning, though the prisoners were meek on
being started home by Stirling with twenty soldiers, and the majority of
the Crows were meek at seeing them thus started, this was not all.
Cheschapah, with a yelling swarm of his young friends, began to buzz
about the column as it marched up the river. All had rifles.
"It's an interesting state of affairs," said Stirling to Haines. "There
are at least fifty of these devils at our heels now, and more coming.
We've got twenty men. Haines, your Indian experiences may begin quite
early in your career."
"Yes, especially if our prisoners take to kicking."
"Well, to compensate for spoiling their dinner-party, the agent gave
them some rations and his parting blessing. It may suffice."
The line of march had been taken up by ten men in advance, followed in
the usual straggling fashion by the prisoners, and the rear-guard was
composed of the other ten soldiers under Stirling and Haines. With them
rode the chief of the Crow police and the lieutenant of the Sioux. This
little band was, of course, far separated from the advance-guard, and it
listened to the young Crow bucks yelling at its heels. They yelled in
English. Every Indian knows at least two English words; they are
pungent, and far from complimentary.
"It's got to stop here," said Stirling, as they came to a ford known as
Reno's Crossing. "They've got to be kept on this side."
"Can it be done without gunpowder?" Haines asked.
"If a shot is fired now, my friend, it's war, and a court of inquiry in
Washington for you and me, if we're not buried here. Sergeant, you will
take five men and see the column is kept moving. The rest remain with
me. The prisoners must be got across and away from their friends."
The fording began, and the two officers went over to the east bank to
see that the instructions were carried out.
"See that?" observed Stirling. As the last of the rear-guard stepped
into the stream, the shore they were leaving filled instantly with the
Crows. "Every man jack of them is armed. And here's an interesting
development," he continued.
It was Cheschapah riding out into the water, and with him Two Whistles.
The rear guard passed up the trail, and the little knot of men with the
officers stood halted on the bank. There were nine--the two Indian
police, the two lieutenants, and five long muscular boys of K troop of
the First Cavalry. They remained on the bank, looking at the thick
painted swarm that yelled across the ford.
"Bet you there's a hundred," remarked Haines.
"You forget I never gamble," murmured Stirling. Two of the five long
boys overheard this, and grinned at each other, which Stirling noted;
and he loved them. It was curious to mark the two shores: the feathered
multitude and its yells and its fifty yards of rifles that fronted a
small spot of white men sitting easily in the saddle, and the clear,
pleasant water speeding between. Cheschapah and Two Whistles came
tauntingly towards this spot, and the mass of Crows on the other side
drew forward a little.
"You tell them," said Stirling to the chief of the Crow police, "that
they must go back."
Cheschapah came nearer, by way of obedience.
"Take them over, then," the officer ordered.
[Illustration: "HIS HORSE DREW CLOSE, SHOVING THE HORSE OF THE
MEDICINE-MAN"]
The chief of Crow police rode to Cheschapah, speaking and pointing.
His horse drew close, shoving the horse of the medicine-man, who now
launched an insult that with Indians calls for blood. He struck the
man's horse with his whip, and at that a volume of yells chorussed
from the other bank.
"Looks like the court of inquiry," remarked Stirling. "Don't shoot,
boys," he commanded aloud.
The amazed Sioux policeman gasped. "You not shoot?" he said. "But he hit
that man's horse--all the same hit your horse, all the same hit you."
"Right. Quite right," growled Stirling. "All the same hit Uncle Sam. But
we soldier devils have orders to temporize." His eye rested hard and
serious on the party in the water as he went on speaking with jocular
unconcern. "Tem-po-rize, Johnny," said he. "You savvy temporize?"
"Ump! Me no savvy."
"Bully for you, Johnny. Too many syllables. Well, now! he's hit that
horse again. One more for the court of inquiry. Steady, men! There's Two
Whistles switching now. They ought to call that lad Young Dog Tray. And
there's a chap in paint fooling with his gun. If any more do that--it's
very catching--Yes, we're going to have a circus. Attention! Now what's
that, do you suppose?"
An apparition, an old chief, came suddenly on the other bank, pushing
through the crowd, grizzled and little and lean, among the smooth,
full-limbed young blood. They turned and saw him, and slunk from the
tones of his voice and the light in his ancient eye. They swerved and
melted among the cottonwoods, so that the ford's edge grew bare of
dusky bodies and looked sandy and green again. Cheschapah saw the
wrinkled figure coming, and his face sank tame. He stood uncertain in
the stream, seeing his banded companions gone and the few white soldiers
firm on the bank. The old chief rode to him through the water, his face
brightened with a last flare of command.
"Make your medicine!" he said. "Why are the white men not blind? Is the
medicine bad to-day?" And he whipped his son's horse to the right, and
to the left he slashed the horse of Two Whistles, and, whirling the
leather quirt, drove them cowed before him and out of the stream, with
never a look or word to the white men. He crossed the sandy margin, and
as a man drives steers to the corral, striking spurs to his horse and
following the frightened animals close when they would twist aside, so
did old Pounded Meat herd his son down the valley.
"Useful old man," remarked Stirling; "and brings up his children
carefully. Let's get these prisoners along."
"How rural the river looks now!" Haines said, as they left the deserted
bank.
So the Sioux went home in peace, the lieutenants, with their command of
twenty, returned to the post, and all white people felt much obliged to
Pounded Meat for his act of timely parental discipline--all except one
white person.
Sol Kinney sauntered into the agency store one evening. "I want ten
pounds of sugar," said he, "and navy plug as usual. And say, I'll take
another bottle of the Seltzer fizz salts. Since I quit whiskey," he
explained, "my liver's poorly."
He returned with his purchase to his cabin, and set a lamp in the
window. Presently the door opened noiselessly, and Cheschapah came in.
"Maybe you got that now?" he said, in English.
The interpreter fumbled among bottles of liniment and vaseline, and from
among these household remedies brought the blue one he had just bought.
Cheschapah watched him like a child, following his steps round the
cabin. Kinney tore a half-page from an old Sunday _World_, and poured a
little heap of salts into it. The Indian touched the heap timidly with
his finger. "Maybe no good," he suggested.
"Heap good!" said the interpreter, throwing a pinch into a glass. When
Cheschapah saw the water effervesce, he folded his newspaper with the
salt into a tight lump, stuck the talisman into his clothes, and
departed, leaving Mr. Kinney well content. He was doing his best to
nourish the sinews of war, for business in the country was
discouragingly slack.
Now the Crows were a tribe that had never warred with us, but only with
other tribes; they had been valiant enough to steal our cattle, but
sufficiently discreet to stop there; and Kinney realized that he had
uphill work before him. His dearest hopes hung upon Cheschapah, in whom
he thought he saw a development. From being a mere humbug, the young
Indian seemed to be getting a belief in himself as something genuinely
out of the common. His success in creating a party had greatly increased
his conceit, and he walked with a strut, and his face was more unsettled
and visionary than ever. One clear sign of his mental change was that he
no longer respected his father at all, though the lonely old man looked
at him often with what in one of our race would have been tenderness.
Cheschapah had been secretly maturing a plot ever since his humiliation
at the crossing, and now he was ready. With his lump of newspaper
carefully treasured, he came to Two Whistles.
"Now we go," he said. "We shall fight with the Piegans. I will make big
medicine, so that we shall get many of their horses and women. Then
Pretty Eagle will be afraid to go against me in the council. Pounded
Meat whipped my horse. Pounded Meat can cut his hay without Cheschapah,
since he is so strong."
But little Two Whistles wavered. "I will stay here," he ventured to say
to the prophet.
"Does Two Whistles think I cannot do what I say?"
"I think you make good medicine."
"You are afraid of the Piegans."
"No, I am not afraid. I have hay the white man will pay me for. If I go,
he will not pay me. If I had a father, I would not leave him." He spoke
pleadingly, and his prophet bore him down by ridicule. Two Whistles
believed, but he did not want to lose the money the agent was to pay for
his hay. And so, not so much because he believed as because he was
afraid, he resigned his personal desires.
The next morning the whole band had disappeared with Cheschapah. The
agent was taken aback at this marked challenge to his authority--of
course they had gone without permission--and even the old Crow chiefs
held a council.
Pretty Eagle resorted to sarcasm. "He has taken his friends to the old
man who makes the thunder," he said. But others did not feel sarcastic,
and one observed, "Cheschapah knows more than we know."
"Let him make rain, then," said Pretty Eagle. "Let him make the white
man's heart soft."
The situation was assisted by a step of the careful Kinney. He took a
private journey to Junction City, through which place he expected
Cheschapah to return, and there he made arrangements to have as much
whiskey furnished to the Indian and his friends as they should ask for.
It was certainly a good stroke of business. The victorious raiders did
return that way, and Junction City was most hospitable to their thirst.
The valley of the Big Horn was resonant with their homeward yells. They
swept up the river, and the agent heard them coming, and he locked his
door immediately. He listened to their descent upon his fold, and he
peeped out and saw them ride round the tightly shut buildings in their
war-paint and the pride of utter success. They had taken booty from the
Piegans, and now, knocking at the store, they demanded ammunition,
proclaiming at the same time in English that Cheschapah was a big man,
and knew a "big heap medicine." The agent told them from inside that
they could not have any ammunition. He also informed them that he knew
who they were, and that they were under arrest. This touched their
primitive sense of the incongruous. On the buoyancy of the whiskey they
rode round and round the store containing the agent, and then rushed
away, firing shots at the buildings and shots in the air, and so
gloriously home among their tribe, while the agent sent a courier
packing to Fort Custer.
The young bucks who had not gone on the raid to the Piegans thronged to
hear the story, and the warriors told it here and there, walking in
their feathers among a knot of friends, who listened with gay
exclamations of pleasure and envy. Great was Cheschapah, who had done
all this! And one and another told exactly and at length how he had seen
the cold water rise into foam beneath the medicine-man's hand; it could
not be told too often; not every companion of Cheschapah's had been
accorded the privilege of witnessing this miracle, and each narrator in
his circle became a wonder himself to the bold boyish faces that
surrounded him. And after the miracle he told how the Piegans had been
like a flock of birds before the medicine-man. Cheschapah himself passed
among the groups, alone and aloof; he spoke to none, and he looked at
none, and he noted how their voices fell to whispers as he passed; his
ear caught the magic words of praise and awe; he felt the gaze of
admiration follow him away, and a mist rose like incense in his brain.
He wandered among the scattered tepees, and, turning, came along the
same paths again, that he might once more overhear his worshippers.
Great was Cheschapah! His heart beat, a throb of power passed through
his body, and "Great is Cheschapah!" said he, aloud; for the fumes of
hallucination wherewith he had drugged others had begun to make him
drunk also. He sought a tepee where the wife of another chief was alone,
and at his light call she stood at the entrance and heard him longer
than she had ever listened to him before. But she withstood the
temptation that was strong in the young chief's looks and words. She did
not speak much, but laughed unsteadily, and, shaking her head with
averted eyes, left him, and went where several women were together, and
sat among them.
Cheschapah told his victory to the council, with many sentences about
himself, and how his medicine had fended all hurt from the Crows. The
elder chiefs sat cold.
"Ump!" said one, at the close of the oration, and "Heh!" remarked
another. The sounds were of assent without surprise.
"It is good," said Pretty Eagle. His voice seemed to enrage Cheschapah.
"Heh! it is always pretty good!" remarked Spotted Horse.
"I have done this too," said Pounded Meat to his son, simply. "Once,
twice, three times. The Crows have always been better warriors than the
Piegans."
"Have you made water boil like me?" Cheschapah said.
"I am not a medicine-man," replied his father. "But I have taken horses
and squaws from the Piegans. You make good medicine, maybe; but a cup of
water will not kill many white men. Can you make the river boil? Let
Cheschapah make bigger medicine, so the white man shall fear him as well
as the Piegans, whose hearts are well known to us."
Cheschapah scowled. "Pounded Meat shall have this," said he. "I will
make medicine to-morrow, old fool!"
"Drive him from the council!" said Pretty Eagle.
"Let him stay," said Pounded Meat. "His bad talk was not to the council,
but to me, and I do not count it."
But the medicine-man left the presence of the chiefs, and came to the
cabin of Kinney.
"Hello!" said the white man. "Sit down."
"You got that?" said the Indian, standing.
"More water medicine? I guess so. Take a seat."
"No, not boil any more. You got that other?"
"That other, eh? Well, now, you're not going to blind them yet? What's
your hurry?"
"Yes. Make blind to-morrow. Me great chief!"
A slight uneasiness passed across the bantering face of Kinney. His
Seltzer salts performed what he promised, but he had mentioned another
miracle, and he did not want his dupe to find him out until a war was
thoroughly set agoing. He looked at the young Indian, noticing his eyes.
"What's the matter with you, anyway, Cheschapah?"
"Me great chief!" The raised voice trembled with unearthly conviction.
"Well, I guess you are. I guess you've got pretty far along," said the
frontier cynic. He tilted his chair back and smiled at the child whose
primitive brain he had tampered with so easily. The child stood looking
at him with intent black eyes. "Better wait, Cheschapah. Come again.
Medicine heap better after a while."
The Indian's quick ear caught the insincerity without understanding it.
"You give me that quick!" he said, suddenly terrible.
"Oh, all right, Cheschapah. You know more medicine than me."
"Yes, I know more."
The white man brought a pot of scarlet paint, and the Indian's staring
eyes contracted. Kinney took the battered cavalry sabre in his hand, and
set its point in the earth floor of the cabin. "Stand back," he said, in
mysterious tones, and Cheschapah shrank from the impending sorcery. Now
Kinney had been to school once, in his Eastern childhood, and there had
committed to memory portions of Shakespeare, Mrs. Hemans, and other
poets out of a Reader. He had never forgotten a single word of any of
them, and it now occurred to him that for the purposes of an incantation
it would be both entertaining for himself and impressive to Cheschapah
if he should recite "The Battle of Hohenlinden." He was drawing squares
and circles with the point of the sabre.
"No," he said to himself, "that piece won't do. He knows too much
English. Some of them words might strike him as bein' too usual, and
he'd start to kill me, and spoil the whole thing. 'Munich' and
'chivalry' are snortin', but 'sun was low' ain't worth a damn. I
guess--"
He stopped guessing, for the noon recess at school came in his mind,
like a picture, and with it certain old-time preliminaries to the game
of tag.
"'Eeny, meeny, money, my,'"
said Kinney, tapping himself, the sabre, the paint-pot, and Cheschapah
in turn, one for each word. The incantation was begun. He held the sabre
solemnly upright, while Cheschapah tried to control his excited
breathing where he stood flattened against the wall.
"'Butter, leather, boney, stry;
Hare-bit, frost-neck,
Harrico, barrico, whee, why, whoa, whack!'
"You're it, Cheschapah." After that the weapon was given its fresh coat
of paint, and Cheschapah went away with his new miracle in the dark.
"He is it," mused Kinney, grave, but inwardly lively. He was one of
those sincere artists who need no popular commendation. "And whoever he
does catch, it won't be me," he concluded. He felt pretty sure there
would be war now.
Dawn showed the summoned troops near the agency at the corral, standing
to horse. Cheschapah gathered his hostiles along the brow of the ridge
in the rear of the agency buildings, and the two forces watched each
other across the intervening four hundred yards.
"There they are," said the agent, jumping about. "Shoot them, colonel;
shoot them!"
"You can't do that, you know," said the officer, "without an order from
the President, or an overt act from the Indians."
So nothing happened, and Cheschapah told his friends the white men were
already afraid of him. He saw more troops arrive, water their horses in
the river, form line outside the corral, and dismount. He made ready at
this movement, and all Indian on-lookers scattered from the expected
fight. Yet the white man stayed quiet. It was issue day, but no families
remained after drawing their rations. They had had no dance the night
before, as was usual, and they did not linger a moment now, but came and
departed with their beef and flour at once.
"I have done all this," said Cheschapah to Two Whistles.
"Cheschapah is a great man," assented the friend and follower. He had
gone at once to his hay-field on his return from the Piegans, but some
one had broken the little Indian's fence, and cattle were wandering in
what remained of his crop.
"Our nation knows I will make a war, and therefore they do not stay
here," said the medicine-man, caring nothing what Two Whistles might
have suffered. "And now they will see that the white soldiers dare not
fight with Cheschapah. The sun is high now, but they have not moved
because I have stopped them. Do you not see it is my medicine?"
"We see it." It was the voice of the people.
But a chief spoke. "Maybe they wait for us to come."
Cheschapah answered. "Their eyes shall be made sick. I will ride among
them, but they will not know it." He galloped away alone, and lifted his
red sword as he sped along the ridge of the hills, showing against the
sky. Below at the corral the white soldiers waited ready, and heard him
chanting his war song through the silence of the day. He turned in a
long curve, and came in near the watching troops and through the agency,
and then, made bolder by their motionless figures and guns held idle, he
turned again and flew, singing, along close to the line, so they saw his
eyes; and a few that had been talking low as they stood side by side
fell silent at the spectacle. They could not shoot until some Indian
should shoot. They watched him and the gray pony pass and return to the
hostiles on the hill. Then they saw the hostiles melt away like magic.
Their prophet had told them to go to their tepees and wait for the great
rain he would now bring. It was noon, and the sky utterly blue over the
bright valley. The sun rode a space nearer the west, and the thick black
clouds assembled in the mountains and descended; their shadow flooded
the valley with a lake of slatish blue, and presently the sudden
torrents sluiced down with flashes and the ample thunder of Montana.
Thus not alone the law against our soldiers firing the first shot in an
Indian excitement, but now also the elements coincided to help the
medicine-man's destiny.
Cheschapah sat in a tepee with his father, and as the rain splashed
heavily on the earth the old man gazed at the young one.
"Why do you tremble, my son? You have made the white soldier's heart
soft," said Pounded Meat. "You are indeed a great man, my son."
Cheschapah rose. "Do not call me your son," said he. "That is a lie."
He went out into the fury of the rain, lifting his face against the
drops, and exultingly calling out at each glare of the lightning. He
went to Pretty Eagle's young squaw, who held off from him no longer, but
got on a horse, and the two rode into the mountains. Before the sun had
set, the sky was again utterly blue, and a cool scent rose everywhere in
the shining valley.
The Crows came out of their tepees, and there were the white soldiers
obeying orders and going away. They watched the column slowly move
across the flat land below the bluffs, where the road led down the river
twelve miles to the post.
"They are afraid," said new converts. "Cheschapah's rain has made their
hearts soft."
"They have not all gone," said Pretty Eagle. "Maybe he did not make
enough rain." But even Pretty Eagle began to be shaken, and he heard
several of his brother chiefs during the next few days openly declare
for the medicine-man. Cheschapah with his woman came from the mountains,
and Pretty Eagle did not dare to harm him. Then another coincidence
followed that was certainly most reassuring to the war party. Some of
them had no meat, and told Cheschapah they were hungry. With consummate
audacity he informed them he would give them plenty at once. On the same
day another timely electric storm occurred up the river, and six steers
were struck by lightning.
When the officers at Fort Custer heard of this they became serious.
"If this was not the nineteenth century," said Haines, "I should begin
to think the elements were deliberately against us."
"It's very careless of the weather," said Stirling. "Very inconsiderate,
at such a juncture."
Yet nothing more dangerous than red-tape happened for a while. There was
an expensive quantity of investigation from Washington, and this gave
the hostiles time to increase both in faith and numbers.
Among the excited Crows only a few wise old men held out. As for
Cheschapah himself, ambition and success had brought him to the weird
enthusiasm of a fanatic. He was still a charlatan, but a charlatan who
believed utterly in his star. He moved among his people with growing
mystery, and his hapless adjutant, Two Whistles, rode with him, slaved
for him, abandoned the plans he had for making himself a farm, and,
desiring peace in his heart, weakly cast his lot with war. Then one day
there came an order from the agent to all the Indians: they were to come
in by a certain fixed day. The department commander had assembled six
hundred troops at the post, and these moved up the river and went into
camp. The usually empty ridges, and the bottom where the road ran,
filled with white and red men. Half a mile to the north of the
buildings, on the first rise from the river, lay the cavalry, and some
infantry above them with a howitzer, while across the level, three
hundred yards opposite, along the river-bank, was the main Indian camp.
Even the hostiles had obeyed the agent's order, and came in close to the
troops, totally unlike hostiles in general; for Cheschapah had told them
he would protect them with his medicine, and they shouted and sang all
through this last night. The women joined with harsh cries and
shriekings, and a scalp-dance went on, besides lesser commotions and
gatherings, with the throbbing of drums everywhere. Through the
sleepless din ran the barking of a hundred dogs, that herded and hurried
in crowds of twenty at a time, meeting, crossing from fire to fire among
the tepees. Their yelps rose to the high bench of land, summoning a
horde of coyotes. These cringing nomads gathered from the desert in a
tramp army, and, skulking down the bluffs, sat in their outer darkness
and ceaselessly howled their long, shrill greeting to the dogs that sat
in the circle of light. The general sent scouts to find the nature of
the dance and hubbub, and these brought word it was peaceful; and in the
morning another scout summoned the elder chiefs to a talk with the
friend who had come from the Great Father at Washington to see them and
find if their hearts were good.
"Our hearts are good," said Pretty Eagle. "We do not want war. If you
want Cheschapah, we will drive him out from the Crows to you."
"There are other young chiefs with bad hearts," said the commissioner,
naming the ringleaders that were known. He made a speech, but Pretty
Eagle grew sullen. "It is well," said the commissioner; "you will not
help me to make things smooth, and now I step aside and the war chief
will talk."
"If you want any other chiefs," said Pretty Eagle, "come and take them."
"Pretty Eagle shall have an hour and a half to think on my words," said
the general. "I have plenty of men behind me to make my words good. You
must send me all those Indians who fired at the agency."
The Crow chiefs returned to the council, which was apart from the war
party's camp; and Cheschapah walked in among them, and after him,
slowly, old Pounded Meat, to learn how the conference had gone.
"You have made a long talk with the white man," said Cheschapah. "Talk
is pretty good for old men. I and the young chiefs will fight now and
kill our enemies."
"Cheschapah," said Pounded Meat, "if your medicine is good, it may be
the young chiefs will kill our enemies to-day. But there are other days
to come, and after them still others; there are many, many days. My son,
the years are a long road. The life of one man is not long, but enough
to learn this thing truly: the white man will always return. There was a
day on this river when the dead soldiers of Yellow Hair lay in hills,
and the squaws of the Sioux warriors climbed among them with their
knives. What do the Sioux warriors do now when they meet the white man
on this river? Their hearts are on the ground, and they go home like
children when the white man says, 'You shall not visit your friends.' My
son, I thought war was good once. I have kept you from the arrows of our
enemies on many trails when you were so little that my blankets were
enough for both. Your mother was not here any more, and the chiefs
laughed because I carried you. Oh, my son, I have seen the hearts of the
Sioux broken by the white man, and I do not think war is good."
"The talk of Pounded Meat is very good," said Pretty Eagle. "If
Cheschapah were wise like his father, this trouble would not have come
to the Crows. But we could not give the white chief so many of our
chiefs that he asked for to-day."
Cheschapah laughed. "Did he ask for so many? He wanted only Cheschapah,
who is not wise like Pounded Meat."
"You would have been given to him," said Pretty Eagle.
"Did Pretty Eagle tell the white chief that? Did he say he would give
Cheschapah? How would he give me? In one hand, or two? Or would the old
warrior take me to the white man's camp on the horse his young squaw
left?"
Pretty Eagle raised his rifle, and Pounded Meat, quick as a boy, seized
the barrel and pointed it up among the poles of the tepee, where the
quiet black fire smoke was oozing out into the air. "Have you lived so
long," said Pounded Meat to his ancient comrade, "and do this in the
council?" His wrinkled head and hands shook, the sudden strength left
him, and the rifle fell free.
"Let Pretty Eagle shoot," said Cheschapah, looking at the council. He
stood calm, and the seated chiefs turned their grim eyes upon him.
Certainty was in his face, and doubt in theirs. "Let him send his bullet
five times--ten times. Then I will go and let the white soldiers shoot
at me until they all lie dead."
"It is heavy for me," began Pounded Meat, "that my friend should be the
enemy of my son."
"Tell that lie no more," said Cheschapah. "You are not my father. I have
made the white man blind, and I have softened his heart with the rain. I
will call the rain to-day." He raised his red sword, and there was a
movement among the sitting figures. "The clouds will come from my
father's place, where I have talked with him as one chief to another. My
mother went into the mountains to gather berries. She was young, and the
thunder-maker saw her face. He brought the black clouds, so her feet
turned from home, and she walked where the river goes into the great
walls of the mountain, and that day she was stricken fruitful by the
lightning. You are not the father of Cheschapah." He dealt Pounded Meat
a blow, and the old man fell. But the council sat still until the sound
of Cheschapah's galloping horse died away. They were ready now to risk
everything. Their scepticism was conquered.
The medicine-man galloped to his camp of hostiles, and, seeing him, they
yelled and quickly finished plaiting their horses' tails. Cheschapah had
accomplished his wish; he had become the prophet of all the Crows, and
he led the armies of the faithful. Each man stripped his blanket off and
painted his body for the fight. The forms slipped in and out of the
brush, buckling their cartridge-belts, bringing their ponies, while many
families struck their tepees and moved up nearer the agency. The spare
horses were run across the river into the hills, and through the yelling
that shifted and swept like flames along the wind the hostiles made
ready and gathered, their crowds quivering with motion, and changing
place and shape as more mounted Indians appeared.
"Are the holes dug deep as I marked them on the earth?" said Cheschapah
to Two Whistles. "That is good. We shall soon have to go into them from
the great rain I will bring. Make these strong, to stay as we ride. They
are good medicine, and with them the white soldiers will not see you any
more than they saw me when I rode among them that day."
He had strips and capes of red flannel, and he and Two Whistles fastened
them to their painted bodies.
"You will let me go with you?" said Two Whistles.
"You are my best friend," said Cheschapah, "and to-day I will take you.
You shall see my great medicine when I make the white man's eyes grow
sick."
The two rode forward, and one hundred and fifty followed them, bursting
from their tepees like an explosion, and rushing along quickly in
skirmish-line. Two Whistles rode beside his speeding prophet, and saw
the red sword waving near his face, and the sun in the great still sky,
and the swimming, fleeting earth. His superstition and the fierce ride
put him in a sort of trance.
"The medicine is beginning!" shouted Cheschapah; and at that Two
Whistles saw the day grow large with terrible shining, and heard his
own voice calling and could not stop it. They left the hundred and
fifty behind, he knew not where or when. He saw the line of troops
ahead change to separate waiting shapes of men, and their legs and
arms become plain; then all the guns took clear form in lines of
steady glitter. He seemed suddenly alone far ahead of the band, but
the voice of Cheschapah spoke close by his ear through the singing
wind, and he repeated each word without understanding; he was watching
the ground rush by, lest it might rise against his face, and all the
while he felt his horse's motion under him, smooth and perpetual.
Something weighed against his leg, and there was Cheschapah he had
forgotten, always there at his side, veering him around somewhere. But
there was no red sword waving. Then the white men must be blind
already, wherever they were, and Cheschapah, the only thing he could
see, sat leaning one hand on his horse's rump firing a pistol. The
ground came swimming towards his eyes always, smooth and wide like a
gray flood, but Two Whistles knew that Cheschapah would not let it
sweep him away. He saw a horse without a rider floated out of blue
smoke, and floated in again with a cracking noise; white soldiers
moved in a row across his eyes, very small and clear, and broke
into a blurred eddy of shapes which the flood swept away clean and
empty. Then a dead white man came by on the quick flood. Two Whistles
saw the yellow stripe on his sleeve; but he was gone, and there was
nothing but sky and blaze, with Cheschapah's head-dress in the middle.
The horse's even motion continued beneath him, when suddenly the
head-dress fell out of Two Whistles' sight, and the earth returned.
They were in brush, with his horse standing and breathing, and a dead
horse on the ground with Cheschapah, and smoke and moving people
everywhere outside. He saw Cheschapah run from the dead horse and jump
on a gray pony and go. Somehow he was on the ground too, looking at a
red sword lying beside his face. He stared at it a long while, then
took it in his hand, still staring; all at once he rose and broke it
savagely, and fell again. His faith was shivered to pieces like glass.
But he got on his horse, and the horse moved away. He was looking at
the blood running on his body. The horse moved always, and Two
Whistles followed with his eye a little deeper gush of blood along a
crease in his painted skin, noticed the flannel, and remembering the
lie of his prophet, instantly began tearing the red rags from his
body, and flinging them to the ground with cries of scorn. Presently
he heard some voices, and soon one voice much nearer, and saw he had
come to a new place, where there were white soldiers looking at him
quietly. One was riding up and telling him to give up his pistol. Two
Whistles got off and stood behind his horse, looking at the pistol.
The white soldier came quite near, and at his voice Two Whistles moved
slowly out from behind the horse, and listened to the cool words as
the soldier repeated his command. The Indian was pointing his pistol
uncertainly, and he looked at the soldier's coat and buttons, and the
straps on the shoulders, and the bright steel sabre, and the white
man's blue eyes; then Two Whistles looked at his own naked, clotted
body, and, turning the pistol against himself, fired it into his
breast.
[Illustration: THE CHARGE]
Far away up the river, on the right of the line, a lieutenant with two
men was wading across after some hostiles that had been skirmishing with
his troop. The hostiles had fallen back after some hot shooting, and had
dispersed among the brush and tepees on the farther shore, picking up
their dead, as Indians do. It was interesting work, this splashing
breast-high through a river into a concealed hornets'-nest, and the
lieutenant thought a little on his unfinished plans and duties in life;
he noted one dead Indian left on the shore, and went steadfastly in
among the half-seen tepees, rummaging and beating in the thick brush to
be sure no hornets remained. Finding them gone, and their dead spirited
away, he came back on the bank to the one dead Indian, who had a fine
head-dress, and was still ribanded with gay red streamers of flannel,
and was worth all the rest of the dead put together, and much more. The
head lay in the water, and one hand held the rope of the gray pony, who
stood quiet and uninterested over his fallen rider. They began carrying
the prize across to the other bank, where many had now collected, among
others Kinney and the lieutenant's captain, who subsequently said, "I
found the body of Cheschapah;" and, indeed, it was a very good thing to
be able to say.
[Illustration: "THE HEAD LAY IN THE WATER"]
"This busts the war," said Kinney to the captain, as the body was
being lifted over the Little Horn. "They know he's killed, and they've
all quit. I was up by the tepees near the agency just now, and I
could see the hostiles jamming back home for dear life. They was
chucking their rifles to the squaws, and jumping in the river--ha!
ha!--to wash off their war-paint, and each ---- ---- would crawl out
and sit innercint in the family blanket his squaw had ready. If you
was to go there now, cap'n, you'd find just a lot of harmless Injuns
eatin' supper like all the year round. Let me help you, boys, with
that carcass."
Kinney gave a hand to the lieutenant and men of G troop, First United
States Cavalry, and they lifted Cheschapah up the bank. In the tilted
position of the body the cartridge-belt slid a little, and a lump of
newspaper fell into the stream. Kinney watched it open and float away
with a momentary effervescence. The dead medicine-man was laid between
the white and red camps, that all might see he could be killed like
other people; and this wholesome discovery brought the Crows to terms at
once. Pretty Eagle had displayed a flag of truce, and now he surrendered
the guilty chiefs whose hearts had been bad. Every one came where the
dead prophet lay to get a look at him. For a space of hours Pretty Eagle
and the many other Crows he had deceived rode by in single file,
striking him with their whips; after them came a young squaw, and she
also lashed the upturned face.
This night was untroubled at the agency, and both camps and the valley
lay quiet in the peaceful dark. Only Pounded Meat, alone on the top of a
hill, mourned for his son; and his wailing voice sounded through the
silence until the new day came. Then the general had him stopped and
brought in, for it might be that the old man's noise would unsettle the
Crows again.
SPECIMEN JONES
Ephraim, the proprietor of Twenty Mile, had wasted his day in burying a
man. He did not know the man. He had found him, or what the Apaches had
left of him, sprawled among some charred sticks just outside the Canon
del Oro. It was a useful discovery in its way, for otherwise Ephraim
might have gone on hunting his strayed horses near the canon, and ended
among charred sticks himself. Very likely the Indians were far away by
this time, but he returned to Twenty Mile with the man tied to his
saddle, and his pony nervously snorting. And now the day was done, and
the man lay in the earth, and they had even built a fence round him; for
the hole was pretty shallow, and coyotes have a way of smelling this
sort of thing a long way off when they are hungry, and the man was not
in a coffin. They were always short of coffins in Arizona.
Day was done at Twenty Mile, and the customary activity prevailed inside
that flat-roofed cube of mud. Sounds of singing, shooting, dancing, and
Mexican tunes on the concertina came out of the windows hand in hand, to
widen and die among the hills. A limber, pretty boy, who might be
nineteen, was dancing energetically, while a grave old gentleman, with
tobacco running down his beard, pointed a pistol at the boy's heels,
and shot a hole in the earth now and then to show that the weapon was
really loaded. Everybody was quite used to all of this--excepting the
boy. He was an Eastern new-comer, passing his first evening at a place
of entertainment.
Night in and night out every guest at Twenty Mile was either happy and
full of whiskey, or else his friends were making arrangements for his
funeral. There was water at Twenty Mile--the only water for twoscore of
miles. Consequently it was an important station on the road between the
southern country and Old Camp Grant, and the new mines north of the
Mescal Range. The stunt, liquor-perfumed adobe cabin lay on the gray
floor of the desert like an isolated slab of chocolate. A corral, two
desolate stable-sheds, and the slowly turning windmill were all else.
Here Ephraim and one or two helpers abode, armed against Indians, and
selling whiskey. Variety in their vocation of drinking and killing was
brought them by the travellers. These passed and passed through the
glaring vacant months--some days only one ragged fortune-hunter, riding
a pony; again by twos and threes, with high-loaded burros; and sometimes
they came in companies, walking beside their clanking freight-wagons.
Some were young, and some were old, and all drank whiskey, and wore
knives and guns to keep each other civil. Most of them were bound for
the mines, and some of them sometimes returned. No man trusted the next
man, and their names, when they had any, would be O'Rafferty, Angus,
Schwartzmeyer, Jose Maria, and Smith. All stopped for one night; some
longer, remaining drunk and profitable to Ephraim; now and then one
stayed permanently, and had a fence built round him. Whoever came, and
whatever befell them, Twenty Mile was chronically hilarious after
sundown--a dot of riot in the dumb Arizona night.
On this particular evening they had a tenderfoot. The boy, being new in
Arizona, still trusted his neighbor. Such people turned up occasionally.
This one had paid for everybody's drink several times, because he felt
friendly, and never noticed that nobody ever paid for his. They had
played cards with him, stolen his spurs, and now they were making him
dance. It was an ancient pastime; yet two or three were glad to stand
round and watch it, because it was some time since they had been to the
opera. Now the tenderfoot had misunderstood these friends at the
beginning, supposing himself to be among good fellows, and they
therefore naturally set him down as a fool. But even while dancing you
may learn much, and suddenly. The boy, besides being limber, had good
tough black hair, and it was not in fear, but with a cold blue eye, that
he looked at the old gentleman. The trouble had been that his own
revolver had somehow hitched, so he could not pull it from the holster
at the necessary moment.
"Tried to draw on me, did yer?" said the old gentleman. "Step higher!
Step, now, or I'll crack open yer kneepans, ye robin's egg."
"Thinks he's having a bad time," remarked Ephraim. "Wonder how he'd like
to have been that man the Injuns had sport with?"
"Weren't his ear funny?" said one who had helped bury the man.
"Ear?" said Ephraim. "You boys ought to been along when I found him,
and seen the way they'd fixed up his mouth." Ephraim explained the
details simply, and the listeners shivered. But Ephraim was a
humorist. "Wonder how it feels," he continued, "to have--"
[Illustration: AN APACHE]
Here the boy sickened at his comments and the loud laughter. Yet a few
hours earlier these same half-drunken jesters had laid the man to rest
with decent humanity. The boy was taking his first dose of Arizona. By
no means was everybody looking at his jig. They had seen tenderfeet so
often. There was a Mexican game of cards; there was the concertina; and
over in the corner sat Specimen Jones, with his back to the company,
singing to himself. Nothing had been said or done that entertained him
in the least. He had seen everything quite often.
"Higher! skip higher, you elegant calf," remarked the old gentleman to
the tenderfoot. "High-yer!" And he placidly fired a fourth shot that
scraped the boy's boot at the ankle and threw earth over the clock, so
that you could not tell the minute from the hour hand.
"'Drink to me only with thine eyes,'" sang Specimen Jones, softly. They
did not care much for his songs in Arizona. These lyrics were all, or
nearly all, that he retained of the days when he was twenty, although he
was but twenty-six now.
The boy was cutting pigeon-wings, the concertina played "Matamoras,"
Jones continued his lyric, when two Mexicans leaped at each other, and
the concertina stopped with a quack.
"Quit it!" said Ephraim from behind the bar, covering the two with his
weapon. "I don't want any greasers scrapping round here to-night. We've
just got cleaned up."
It had been cards, but the Mexicans made peace, to the regret of
Specimen Jones. He had looked round with some hopes of a crisis, and now
for the first time he noticed the boy.
"Blamed if he ain't neat," he said. But interest faded from his eye, and
he turned again to the wall. "'Lieb Vaterland magst ruhig sein,'" he
melodiously observed. His repertory was wide and refined. When he sang
he was always grammatical.
"Ye kin stop, kid," said the old gentleman, not unkindly, and he shoved
his pistol into his belt.
The boy ceased. He had been thinking matters over. Being lithe and
strong, he was not tired nor much out of breath, but he was trembling
with the plan and the prospect he had laid out for himself. "Set 'em
up," he said to Ephraim. "Set 'em up again all round."
His voice caused Specimen Jones to turn and look once more, while the
old gentleman, still benevolent, said, "Yer langwidge means pleasanter
than it sounds, kid." He glanced at the boy's holster, and knew he need
not keep a very sharp watch as to that. Its owner had bungled over it
once already. All the old gentleman did was to place himself next the
boy on the off side from the holster; any move the tenderfoot's hand
might make for it would be green and unskilful, and easily anticipated.
The company lined up along the bar, and the bottle slid from glass to
glass. The boy and his tormentor stood together in the middle of the
line, and the tormentor, always with half a thought for the holster,
handled his drink on the wet counter, waiting till all should be filled
and ready to swallow simultaneously, as befits good manners.
"Well, my regards," he said, seeing the boy raise his glass; and as the
old gentleman's arm lifted in unison, exposing his waist, the boy
reached down a lightning hand, caught the old gentleman's own pistol,
and jammed it in his face.
"Now you'll dance," said he.
"Whoop!" exclaimed Specimen Jones, delighted. "_Blamed_ if he ain't
neat!" And Jones's handsome face lighted keenly.
"Hold on!" the boy sang out, for the amazed old gentleman was
mechanically drinking his whiskey out of sheer fright. The rest had
forgotten their drinks. "Not one swallow," the boy continued. "No,
you'll not put it down either. You'll keep hold of it, and you'll dance
all round this place. Around and around. And don't you spill any. And
I'll be thinking what you'll do after that."
Specimen Jones eyed the boy with growing esteem. "Why, he ain't bigger
than a pint of cider," said he.
"Prance away!" commanded the tenderfoot, and fired a shot between the
old gentleman's not widely straddled legs.
"You hev the floor, Mr. Adams," Jones observed, respectfully, at the old
gentleman's agile leap. "I'll let no man here interrupt you." So the
capering began, and the company stood back to make room. "I've saw juicy
things in this Territory," continued Specimen Jones, aloud, to himself,
"but this combination fills my bill."
He shook his head sagely, following the black-haired boy with his eye.
That youth was steering Mr. Adams round the room with the pistol, proud
as a ring-master. Yet not altogether. He was only nineteen, and though
his heart beat stoutly, it was beating alone in a strange country. He
had come straight to this from hunting squirrels along the Susquehanna,
with his mother keeping supper warm for him in the stone farm-house
among the trees. He had read books in which hardy heroes saw life, and
always triumphed with precision on the last page, but he remembered no
receipt for this particular situation. Being good game American blood,
he did not think now about the Susquehanna, but he did long with all his
might to know what he ought to do next to prove himself a man. His
buoyant rage, being glutted with the old gentleman's fervent skipping,
had cooled, and a stress of reaction was falling hard on his brave young
nerves. He imagined everybody against him. He had no notion that there
was another American wanderer there, whose reserved and whimsical nature
he had touched to the heart.
The fickle audience was with him, of course, for the moment, since he
was upper dog and it was a good show; but one in that room was
distinctly against him. The old gentleman was dancing with an ugly eye;
he had glanced down to see just where his knife hung at his side, and he
had made some calculations. He had fired four shots; the boy had fired
one. "Four and one hez always made five," the old gentleman told himself
with much secret pleasure, and pretended that he was going to stop his
double-shuffle. It was an excellent trap, and the boy fell straight into
it. He squandered his last precious bullet on the spittoon near which
Mr. Adams happened to be at the moment, and the next moment Mr. Adams
had him by the throat. They swayed and gulped for breath, rutting the
earth with sharp heels; they rolled to the floor and floundered with
legs tight tangled, the boy blindly striking at Mr. Adams with the
pistol-butt, and the audience drawing closer to lose nothing, when the
bright knife flashed suddenly. It poised, and flew across the room,
harmless, for a foot had driven into Mr. Adams's arm, and he felt a
cold ring grooving his temple. It was the smooth, chilly muzzle of
Specimen Jones's six-shooter.
"That's enough," said Jones. "More than enough."
Mr. Adams, being mature in judgment, rose instantly, like a good old
sheep, and put his knife back obedient to orders. But in the brain of
the over-strained, bewildered boy universal destruction was whirling.
With a face stricken lean with ferocity, he staggered to his feet,
plucking at his obstinate holster, and glaring for a foe. His eye fell
first on his deliverer, leaning easily against the bar watching him,
while the more and more curious audience scattered, and held themselves
ready to murder the boy if he should point his pistol their way. He was
dragging at it clumsily, and at last it came. Specimen Jones sprang like
a cat, and held the barrel vertical and gripped the boy's wrist.
"Go easy, son," said he. "I know how you're feelin'."
The boy had been wrenching to get a shot at Jones, and now the quietness
of the man's voice reached his brain, and he looked at Specimen Jones.
He felt a potent brotherhood in the eyes that were considering him, and
he began to fear he had been a fool. There was his dwarf Eastern
revolver, slack in his inefficient fist, and the singular person still
holding its barrel and tapping one derisive finger over the end,
careless of the risk to his first joint.
"Why, you little ---- ----," said Specimen Jones, caressingly, to the
hypnotized youth, "if you was to pop that squirt off at me, I'd turn you
up and spank y'u. Set 'em up, Ephraim."
But the commercial Ephraim hesitated, and Jones remembered. His last
cent was gone. It was his third day at Ephraim's. He had stopped, having
a little money, on his way to Tucson, where a friend had a job for him,
and was waiting. He was far too experienced a character ever to sell his
horse or his saddle on these occasions, and go on drinking. He looked as
if he might, but he never did; and this was what disappointed business
men like Ephraim in Specimen Jones.
But now, here was this tenderfoot he had undertaken to see through, and
Ephraim reminding him that he had no more of the wherewithal. "Why, so I
haven't," he said, with a short laugh, and his face flushed. "I guess,"
he continued, hastily, "this is worth a dollar or two." He drew a chain
up from below his flannel shirt-collar and over his head. He drew it a
little slowly. It had not been taken off for a number of years--not,
indeed, since it had been placed there originally. "It ain't brass," he
added, lightly, and strewed it along the counter without looking at it.
Ephraim did look at it, and, being satisfied, began to uncork a new
bottle, while the punctual audience came up for its drink.
"Won't you please let me treat?" said the boy, unsteadily. "I ain't
likely to meet you again, sir." Reaction was giving him trouble inside.
"Where are you bound, kid?"
"Oh, just a ways up the country," answered the boy, keeping a grip on
his voice.
"Well, you _may_ get there. Where did you pick up that--that thing? Your
pistol, I mean."
"It's a present from a friend," replied the tenderfoot, with dignity.
"Farewell gift, wasn't it, kid? Yes; I thought so. Now I'd hate to get
an affair like that from a friend. It would start me wondering if he
liked me as well as I'd always thought he did. Put up that money, kid.
You're drinking with me. Say, what's yer name?"
"Cumnor--J. Cumnor."
"Well, J. Cumnor, I'm glad to know y'u. Ephraim, let me make you
acquainted with Mr. Cumnor. Mr. Adams, if you're rested from your
quadrille, you can shake hands with my friend. Step around, you Miguels
and Serapios and Cristobals, whatever y'u claim your names are. This is
Mr. J. Cumnor."
The Mexicans did not understand either the letter or the spirit of these
American words, but they drank their drink, and the concertina resumed
its acrid melody. The boy had taken himself off without being noticed.
"Say, Spec," said Ephraim to Jones, "I'm no hog. Here's yer chain.
You'll be along again."
"Keep it till I'm along again," said the owner.
"Just as you say, Spec," answered Ephraim, smoothly, and he hung the
pledge over an advertisement chromo of a nude cream-colored lady with
bright straw hair holding out a bottle of somebody's champagne. Specimen
Jones sang no more songs, but smoked, and leaned in silence on the bar.
The company were talking of bed, and Ephraim plunged his glasses into a
bucket to clean them for the morrow.
"Know anything about that kid?" inquired Jones, abruptly.
Ephraim shook his head as he washed.
"Travelling alone, ain't he?"
Ephraim nodded.
"Where did y'u say y'u found that fellow layin' the Injuns got?"
"Mile this side the canon. 'Mong them sand-humps."
"How long had he been there, do y'u figure?"
"Three days, anyway."
Jones watched Ephraim finish his cleansing. "Your clock needs wiping,"
he remarked. "A man might suppose it was nine, to see that thing the way
the dirt hides the hands. Look again in half an hour and it'll say
three. That's the kind of clock gives a man the jams. Sends him crazy."
"Well, that ain't a bad thing to be in this country," said Ephraim,
rubbing the glass case and restoring identity to the hands. "If that man
had been crazy he'd been livin' right now. Injuns'll never touch
lunatics."
"That band have passed here and gone north," Jones said. "I saw a smoke
among the foot-hills as I come along day before yesterday. I guess
they're aiming to cross the Santa Catalina. Most likely they're that
band from round the San Carlos that were reported as raiding down in
Sonora."
"I seen well enough," said Ephraim, "when I found him that they wasn't
going to trouble us any, or they'd have been around by then."
He was quite right, but Specimen Jones was thinking of something else.
He went out to the corral, feeling disturbed and doubtful. He saw the
tall white freight-wagon of the Mexicans, looming and silent, and a
little way off the new fence where the man lay. An odd sound startled
him, though he knew it was no Indians at this hour, and he looked down
into a little dry ditch. It was the boy, hidden away flat on his stomach
among the stones, sobbing.
"Oh, snakes!" whispered Specimen Jones, and stepped back. The Latin
races embrace and weep, and all goes well; but among Saxons tears are a
horrid event. Jones never knew what to do when it was a woman, but this
was truly disgusting. He was well seasoned by the frontier, had tried a
little of everything: town and country, ranches, saloons, stage-driving,
marriage occasionally, and latterly mines. He had sundry claims staked
out, and always carried pieces of stone in his pockets, discoursing upon
their mineral-bearing capacity, which was apt to be very slight. That is
why he was called Specimen Jones. He had exhausted all the important
sensations, and did not care much for anything any more. Perfect health
and strength kept him from discovering that he was a saddened, drifting
man. He wished to kick the boy for his baby performance, and yet he
stepped carefully away from the ditch so the boy should not suspect his
presence. He found himself standing still, looking at the dim, broken
desert.
"Why, hell," complained Specimen Jones, "he played the little man to
start with. He did so. He scared that old horse-thief, Adams, just about
dead. Then he went to kill me, that kep' him from bein' buried early
to-morrow. I've been wild that way myself, and wantin' to shoot up the
whole outfit." Jones looked at the place where his middle finger used to
be, before a certain evening in Tombstone. "But I never--" He glanced
towards the ditch, perplexed. "What's that mean? Why in the world does
he git to cryin' for _now_, do you suppose?" Jones took to singing
without knowing it. "'Ye shepherds, tell me, ha-ve you seen my Flora
pass this way?'" he murmured. Then a thought struck him. "Hello, kid!"
he called out. There was no answer. "Of course," said Jones. "Now he's
ashamed to hev me see him come out of there." He walked with elaborate
slowness round the corral and behind a shed. "Hello, you kid!" he called
again.
"I was thinking of going to sleep," said the boy, appearing quite
suddenly. "I--I'm not used to riding all day. I'll get used to it, you
know," he hastened to add.
"'Ha-ve you seen my Flo'--Say, kid, where y'u bound, anyway?"
"San Carlos."
"San Carlos? Oh. Ah. 'Flora pass this way?'"
"Is it far, sir?"
"Awful far, sometimes. It's always liable to be far through the Arivaypa
Canon."
"I didn't expect to make it between meals," remarked Cumnor.
"No. Sure. What made you come this route?"
"A man told me."
"A man? Oh. Well, it _is_ kind o' difficult, I admit, for an Arizonan
not to lie to a stranger. But I think I'd have told you to go by Tres
Alamos and Point of Mountain. It's the road the man that told you would
choose himself every time. Do you like Injuns, kid?"
Cumnor snapped eagerly.
"Of course y'u do. And you've never saw one in the whole
minute-and-a-half you've been alive. I know all about it."
"I'm not afraid," said the boy.
"Not afraid? Of course y'u ain't. What's your idea in going to Carlos?
Got town lots there?"
"No," said the literal youth, to the huge internal diversion of Jones.
"There's a man there I used to know back home. He's in the cavalry.
What sort of a town is it for sport?" asked Cumnor, in a gay Lothario
tone.
"_Town_?" Specimen Jones caught hold of the top rail of the corral.
"_Sport?_ Now I'll tell y'u what sort of a town it is. There ain't no
streets. There ain't no houses. There ain't any land and water in the
usual meaning of them words. There's Mount Turnbull. It's pretty near a
usual mountain, but y'u don't want to go there. The Creator didn't make
San Carlos. It's a heap older than Him. When He got around to it after
slickin' up Paradise and them fruit-trees, He just left it to be as He
found it, as a sample of the way they done business before He come
along. He 'ain't done any work around that spot at all, He 'ain't. Mix
up a barrel of sand and ashes and thorns, and jam scorpions and
rattlesnakes along in, and dump the outfit on stones, and heat yer
stones red-hot, and set the United States army loose over the place
chasin' Apaches, and you've got San Carlos."
Cumnor was silent for a moment. "I don't care," he said. "I want to
chase Apaches."
"Did you see that man Ephraim found by the canon?" Jones inquired.
"Didn't get here in time."
"Well, there was a hole in his chest made by an arrow. But there's no
harm in that if you die at wunst. That chap didn't, y'u see. You heard
Ephraim tell about it. They'd done a number of things to the man before
he could die. Roastin' was only one of 'em. Now your road takes you
through the mountains where these Injuns hev gone. Kid, come along to
Tucson with me," urged Jones, suddenly.
Again Cumnor was silent. "Is my road different from other people's?" he
said, finally.
"Not to Grant, it ain't. These Mexicans are hauling freight to Grant.
But what's the matter with your coming to Tucson with me?"
"I started to go to San Carlos, and I'm going," said Cumnor.
"You're a poor chuckle-headed fool!" burst out Jones, in a rage. "And
y'u can go, for all I care--you and your Christmas-tree pistol. Like as
not you won't find your cavalry friend at San Carlos. They've killed a
lot of them soldiers huntin' Injuns this season. Good-night."
Specimen Jones was gone. Cumnor walked to his blanket-roll, where his
saddle was slung under the shed. The various doings of the evening had
bruised his nerves. He spread his blankets among the dry cattle-dung,
and sat down, taking off a few clothes slowly. He lumped his coat and
overalls under his head for a pillow, and, putting the despised pistol
alongside, lay between the blankets. No object showed in the night but
the tall freight-wagon. The tenderfoot thought he had made altogether a
fool of himself upon the first trial trip of his manhood, alone on the
open sea of Arizona. No man, not even Jones now, was his friend. A
stranger, who could have had nothing against him but his inexperience,
had taken the trouble to direct him on the wrong road. He did not mind
definite enemies. He had punched the heads of those in Pennsylvania, and
would not object to shooting them here; but this impersonal, surrounding
hostility of the unknown was new and bitter: the cruel, assassinating,
cowardly Southwest, where prospered those jail-birds whom the vigilantes
had driven from California. He thought of the nameless human carcass
that lay near, buried that day, and of the jokes about its mutilations.
Cumnor was not an innocent boy, either in principles or in practice, but
this laughter about a dead body had burned into his young, unhardened
soul. He lay watching with hot, dogged eyes the brilliant stars. A
passing wind turned the windmill, which creaked a forlorn minute, and
ceased. He must have gone to sleep and slept soundly, for the next he
knew it was the cold air of dawn that made him open his eyes. A numb
silence lay over all things, and the tenderfoot had that moment of
curiosity as to where he was now which comes to those who have journeyed
for many days. The Mexicans had already departed with their
freight-wagon. It was not entirely light, and the embers where these
early starters had cooked their breakfast lay glowing in the sand across
the road. The boy remembered seeing a wagon where now he saw only chill,
distant peaks, and while he lay quiet and warm, shunning full
consciousness, there was a stir in the cabin, and at Ephraim's voice
reality broke upon his drowsiness, and he recollected Arizona and the
keen stress of shifting for himself. He noted the gray paling round the
grave. Indians? He would catch up with the Mexicans, and travel in their
company to Grant. Freighters made but fifteen miles in the day, and he
could start after breakfast and be with them before they stopped to
noon. Six men need not worry about Apaches, Cumnor thought. The voice of
Specimen Jones came from the cabin, and sounds of lighting the stove,
and the growling conversation of men getting up. Cumnor, lying in his
blankets, tried to overhear what Jones was saying, for no better reason
than that this was the only man he had met lately who had seemed to care
whether he were alive or dead. There was the clink of Ephraim's
whiskey-bottles, and the cheerful tones of old Mr. Adams, saying, "It's
better 'n brushin' yer teeth"; and then further clinking, and an inquiry
from Specimen Jones.
"Whose spurs?" said he.
"Mine." This from Mr. Adams.
"How long have they been yourn?"
"Since I got 'em, I guess."
"Well, you've enjoyed them spurs long enough." The voice of Specimen
Jones now altered in quality. "And you'll give 'em back to that kid."
Muttering followed that the boy could not catch. "You'll give 'em back,"
repeated Jones. "I seen y'u lift 'em from under that chair when I was in
the corner."
"That's straight, Mr. Adams," said Ephraim. "I noticed it myself, though
I had no objections, of course. But Mr. Jones has pointed out--"
"Since when have you growed so honest, Jones?" cackled Mr. Adams, seeing
that he must lose his little booty. "And why didn't you raise yer
objections when you seen me do it?"
"I didn't know the kid," Jones explained. "And if it don't strike you
that game blood deserves respect, why it does strike me."
[Illustration: CUMNOR'S AWAKENING]
Hearing this, the tenderfoot, outside in his shed, thought better of
mankind and life in general, arose from his nest, and began preening
himself. He had all the correct trappings for the frontier, and his
toilet in the shed gave him pleasure. The sun came up, and with a
stroke struck the world to crystal. The near sand-hills went into
rose, the crabbed yucca and the mesquite turned transparent, with
lances and pale films of green, like drapery graciously veiling the
desert's face, and distant violet peaks and edges framed the vast
enchantment beneath the liquid exhalations of the sky. The smell of
bacon and coffee from open windows filled the heart with bravery and
yearning, and Ephraim, putting his head round the corner, called to
Cumnor that he had better come in and eat. Jones, already at table,
gave him the briefest nod; but the spurs were there, replaced as
Cumnor had left them under a chair in the corner. In Arizona they do
not say much at any meal, and at breakfast nothing at all; and as
Cumnor swallowed and meditated, he noticed the cream-colored lady and
the chain, and he made up his mind he should assert his identity with
regard to that business, though how and when was not clear to him. He
was in no great haste to take up his journey. The society of the
Mexicans whom he must sooner or later overtake did not tempt him. When
breakfast was done he idled in the cabin, like the other guests, while
Ephraim and his assistant busied about the premises. But the morning
grew on, and the guests, after a season of smoking and tilted silence
against the wall, shook themselves and their effects together,
saddled, and were lost among the waste thorny hills. Twenty Mile
became hot and torpid. Jones lay on three consecutive chairs,
occasionally singing, and old Mr. Adams had not gone away either,
but watched him, with more tobacco running down his beard.
"Well," said Cumnor, "I'll be going."
"Nobody's stopping y'u," remarked Jones.
"You're going to Tucson?" the boy said, with the chain problem still
unsolved in his mind. "Good-bye, Mr. Jones. I hope I'll--we'll--"
"That'll do," said Jones; and the tenderfoot, thrown back by this
severity, went to get his saddle-horse and his burro.
Presently Jones remarked to Mr. Adams that he wondered what Ephraim was
doing, and went out. The old gentleman was left alone in the room, and
he swiftly noticed that the belt and pistol of Specimen Jones were left
alone with him. The accoutrement lay by the chair its owner had been
lounging in. It is an easy thing to remove cartridges from the chambers
of a revolver, and replace the weapon in its holster so that everything
looks quite natural. The old gentleman was entertained with the notion
that somewhere in Tucson Specimen Jones might have a surprise, and he
did not take a minute to prepare this, drop the belt as it lay before,
and saunter innocently out of the saloon. Ephraim and Jones were
criticising the tenderfoot's property as he packed his burro.
"Do y'u make it a rule to travel with ice-cream?" Jones was inquiring.
"They're for water," Cumnor said. "They told me at Tucson I'd need to
carry water for three days on some trails."
It was two good-sized milk-cans that he had, and they bounced about on
the little burro's pack, giving him as much amazement as a jackass can
feel. Jones and Ephraim were hilarious.
"Don't go without your spurs, Mr. Cumnor," said the voice of old Mr.
Adams, as he approached the group. His tone was particularly civil.
The tenderfoot had, indeed, forgotten his spurs, and he ran back to get
them. The cream-colored lady still had the chain hanging upon her, and
Cumnor's problem was suddenly solved. He put the chain in his pocket,
and laid the price of one round of drinks for last night's company on
the shelf below the chromo. He returned with his spurs on, and went to
his saddle that lay beside that of Specimen Jones under the shed. After
a moment he came with his saddle to where the men stood talking by his
pony, slung it on, and tightened the cinches; but the chain was now in
the saddle-bag of Specimen Jones, mixed up with some tobacco, stale
bread, a box of matches, and a hunk of fat bacon. The men at Twenty Mile
said good-day to the tenderfoot, with monosyllables and indifference,
and watched him depart into the heated desert. Wishing for a last look
at Jones, he turned once, and saw the three standing, and the chocolate
brick of the cabin, and the windmill white and idle in the sun.
"He'll be gutted by night," remarked Mr. Adams.
"I ain't buryin' him, then," said Ephraim.
"Nor I," said Specimen Jones. "Well, it's time I was getting to Tucson."
He went to the saloon, strapped on his pistol, saddled, and rode away.
Ephraim and Mr. Adams returned to the cabin; and here is the final
conclusion they came to after three hours of discussion as to who took
the chain and who had it just then:
_Ephraim._ Jones, he hadn't no cash.
_Mr. Adams._ The kid, he hadn't no sense.
_Ephraim._ The kid, he lent the cash to Jones.
_Mr. Adams._ Jones, he goes off with his chain.
_Both._ What damn fools everybody is, anyway!
And they went to dinner. But Mr. Adams did not mention his relations
with Jones's pistol. Let it be said, in extenuation of that
performance, that Mr. Adams supposed Jones was going to Tucson, where he
said he was going, and where a job and a salary were awaiting him. In
Tucson an unloaded pistol in the holster of so handy a man on the drop
as was Specimen would keep people civil, because they would not know,
any more than the owner, that it was unloaded; and the mere possession
of it would be sufficient in nine chances out of ten--though it was
undoubtedly for the tenth that Mr. Adams had a sneaking hope. But
Specimen Jones was not going to Tucson. A contention in his mind as to
whether he would do what was good for himself, or what was good for
another, had kept him sullen ever since he got up. Now it was settled,
and Jones in serene humor again. Of course he had started on the Tucson
road, for the benefit of Ephraim and Mr. Adams.
The tenderfoot rode along. The Arizona sun beat down upon the deadly
silence, and the world was no longer of crystal, but a mesa, dull and
gray and hot. The pony's hoofs grated in the gravel, and after a time
the road dived down and up among lumpy hills of stone and cactus, always
nearer the fierce glaring Sierra Santa Catalina. It dipped so abruptly
in and out of the shallow sudden ravines that, on coming up from one of
these into sight of the country again, the tenderfoot's heart jumped at
the close apparition of another rider quickly bearing in upon him from
gullies where he had been moving unseen. But it was only Specimen Jones.
"Hello!" said he, joining Cumnor. "Hot, ain't it?"
"Where are you going?" inquired Cumnor.
"Up here a ways." And Jones jerked his finger generally towards the
Sierra, where they were heading.
"Thought you had a job in Tucson."
"That's what I have."
Specimen Jones had no more to say, and they rode for a while, their
ponies' hoofs always grating in the gravel, and the milk-cans lightly
clanking on the burro's pack. The bunched blades of the yuccas bristled
steel-stiff, and as far as you could see it was a gray waste of mounds
and ridges sharp and blunt, up to the forbidding boundary walls of the
Tortilita one way and the Santa Catalina the other. Cumnor wondered if
Jones had found the chain. Jones was capable of not finding it for
several weeks, or of finding it at once and saying nothing.
"You'll excuse my meddling with your business?" the boy hazarded.
Jones looked inquiring.
"Something's wrong with your saddle-pocket."
Specimen saw nothing apparently wrong with it, but perceiving Cumnor was
grinning, unbuckled the pouch. He looked at the boy rapidly, and looked
away again, and as he rode, still in silence, he put the chain back
round his neck below the flannel shirt-collar.
"Say, kid," he remarked, after some time, "what does J stand for?"
"J? Oh, my name! Jock."
"Well, Jock, will y'u explain to me as a friend how y'u ever come to be
such a fool as to leave yer home--wherever and whatever it was--in
exchange for this here God-forsaken and iniquitous hole?"
"If you'll explain to me," said the boy, greatly heartened, "how you
come to be ridin' in the company of a fool, instead of goin' to your job
at Tucson."
The explanation was furnished before Specimen Jones had framed his
reply. A burning freight-wagon and five dismembered human stumps lay in
the road. This was what had happened to the Miguels and Serapios and the
concertina. Jones and Cumnor, in their dodging and struggles to exclude
all expressions of growing mutual esteem from their speech, had
forgotten their journey, and a sudden bend among the rocks where the
road had now brought them revealed the blood and fire staring them in
the face. The plundered wagon was three parts empty; its splintered,
blazing boards slid down as they burned into the fiery heap on the
ground; packages of soda and groceries and medicines slid with them,
bursting into chemical spots of green and crimson flame; a wheel crushed
in and sank, spilling more packages that flickered and hissed; the
garbage of combat and murder littered the earth, and in the air hung an
odor that Cumnor knew, though he had never smelled it before. Morsels of
dropped booty up among the rocks showed where the Indians had gone, and
one horse remained, groaning, with an accidental arrow in his belly.
"We'll just kill him," said Jones; and his pistol snapped idly, and
snapped again, as his eye caught a motion--a something--two hundred
yards up among the bowlders on the hill. He whirled round. The enemy was
behind them also. There was no retreat. "Yourn's no good!" yelled Jones,
fiercely, for Cumnor was getting out his little, foolish revolver. "Oh,
what a trick to play on a man! Drop off yer horse, kid; drop, and do
like me. Shootin's no good here, even if I was loaded. _They_ shot, and
look at them now. God bless them ice-cream freezers of yourn, kid! Did
y'u ever see a crazy man? If you 'ain't, _make it up as y'u go along_!"
More objects moved up among the bowlders. Specimen Jones ripped off
the burro's pack, and the milk-cans rolled on the ground. The burro
began grazing quietly, with now and then a step towards new patches of
grass. The horses stood where their riders had left them, their reins
over their heads, hanging and dragging. From two hundred yards on the
hill the ambushed Apaches showed, their dark, scattered figures
appearing cautiously one by one, watching with suspicion. Specimen
Jones seized up one milk-can, and Cumnor obediently did the same.
[Illustration: THE MEXICAN FREIGHT-WAGON]
"You kin dance, kid, and I kin sing, and we'll go to it," said Jones. He
rambled in a wavering loop, and diving eccentrically at Cumnor, clashed
the milk-cans together. "'Es schallt ein Ruf wie Donnerhall,'" he
bawled, beginning the song of "Die Wacht am Rhein." "Why don't you
dance?" he shouted, sternly. The boy saw the terrible earnestness of his
face, and, clashing his milk-cans in turn, he shuffled a sort of jig.
The two went over the sand in loops, toe and heel; the donkey continued
his quiet grazing, and the flames rose hot and yellow from the
freight-wagon. And all the while the stately German hymn pealed among
the rocks, and the Apaches crept down nearer the bowing, scraping men.
The sun shone bright, and their bodies poured with sweat. Jones flung
off his shirt; his damp, matted hair was half in ridges and half glued
to his forehead, and the delicate gold chain swung and struck his broad,
naked breast. The Apaches drew nearer again, their bows and arrows held
uncertainly. They came down the hill, fifteen or twenty, taking a long
time, and stopping every few yards. The milk-cans clashed, and Jones
thought he felt the boy's strokes weakening. "Die Wacht am Rhein" was
finished, and now it was "'Ha-ve you seen my Flora pass this way?'"
"Y'u mustn't play out, kid," said Jones, very gently. "Indeed y'u
mustn't;" and he at once resumed his song. The silent Apaches had now
reached the bottom of the hill. They stood some twenty yards away, and
Cumnor had a good chance to see his first Indians. He saw them move, and
the color and slim shape of their bodies, their thin arms, and their
long, black hair. It went through his mind that if he had no more
clothes on than that, dancing would come easier. His boots were growing
heavy to lift, and his overalls seemed to wrap his sinews in wet,
strangling thongs. He wondered how long he had been keeping this up. The
legs of the Apaches were free, with light moccasins only half-way to the
thigh, slenderly held up by strings from the waist. Cumnor envied their
unencumbered steps as he saw them again walk nearer to where he was
dancing. It was long since he had eaten, and he noticed a singing
dulness in his brain, and became frightened at his thoughts, which were
running and melting into one fixed idea. This idea was to take off his
boots, and offer to trade them for a pair of moccasins. It terrified
him--this endless, molten rush of thoughts; he could see them coming in
different shapes from different places in his head, but they all joined
immediately, and always formed the same fixed idea. He ground his teeth
to master this encroaching inebriation of his will and judgment. He
clashed his can more loudly to wake him to reality, which he still could
recognize and appreciate. For a time he found it a good plan to listen
to what Specimen Jones was singing, and tell himself the name of the
song, if he knew it. At present it was "Yankee Doodle," to which Jones
was fitting words of his own. These ran, "Now I'm going to try a bluff.
And mind you do what I do"; and then again, over and over. Cumnor waited
for the word "bluff"; for it was hard and heavy, and fell into his
thoughts, and stopped them for a moment. The dance was so long now he
had forgotten about that. A numbness had been spreading through his
legs, and he was glad to feel a sharp pain in the sole of his foot. It
was a piece of gravel that had somehow worked its way in, and was
rubbing through the skin into the flesh. "That's good," he said, aloud.
The pebble was eating the numbness away, and Cumnor drove it hard
against the raw spot, and relished the tonic of its burning friction.
The Apaches had drawn into a circle. Standing at some interval apart,
they entirely surrounded the arena. Shrewd, half convinced, and yet with
awe, they watched the dancers, who clashed their cans slowly now in
rhythm to Jones's hoarse, parched singing. He was quite master of
himself, and led the jig round the still blazing wreck of the wagon, and
circled in figures of eight between the corpses of the Mexicans,
clashing the milk-cans above each one. Then, knowing his strength was
coming to an end, he approached an Indian whose splendid fillet and
trappings denoted him of consequence; and Jones was near shouting with
relief when the Indian shrank backward. Suddenly he saw Cumnor let his
can drop, and without stopping to see why, he caught it up, and, slowly
rattling both, approached each Indian in turn with tortuous steps. The
circle that had never uttered a sound till now receded, chanting almost
in a whisper some exorcising song which the man with the fillet had
begun. They gathered round him, retreating always, and the strain, with
its rapid muttered words, rose and fell softly among them. Jones had
supposed the boy was overcome by faintness, and looked to see where he
lay. But it was not faintness. Cumnor, with his boots off, came by and
walked after the Indians in a trance. They saw him, and quickened their
pace, often turning to be sure he was not overtaking them. He called to
them unintelligibly, stumbling up the sharp hill, and pointing to the
boots. Finally he sat down. They continued ascending the mountain,
herding close round the man with the feathers, until the rocks and the
filmy tangles screened them from sight; and like a wind that hums
uncertainly in grass, their chanting died away.
The sun was half behind the western range when Jones next moved. He
called, and, getting no answer, he crawled painfully to where the boy
lay on the hill. Cumnor was sleeping heavily; his head was hot, and he
moaned. So Jones crawled down, and fetched blankets and the canteen of
water. He spread the blankets over the boy, wet a handkerchief and laid
it on his forehead; then he lay down himself.
The earth was again magically smitten to crystal. Again the sharp cactus
and the sand turned beautiful, and violet floated among the mountains,
and rose-colored orange in the sky above them.
"Jock," said Specimen at length.
The boy opened his eyes.
"Your foot is awful, Jock. Can y'u eat?"
"Not with my foot."
"Ah, God bless y'u, Jock! Y'u ain't turruble sick. But _can_ y'u eat?"
Cumnor shook his head.
"Eatin's what y'u need, though. Well, here." Specimen poured a judicious
mixture of whiskey and water down the boy's throat, and wrapped the
awful foot in his own flannel shirt. "They'll fix y'u over to Grant.
It's maybe twelve miles through the canon. It ain't a town any more than
Carlos is, but the soldiers'll be good to us. As soon as night comes you
and me must somehow git out of this."
Somehow they did, Jones walking and leading his horse and the
imperturbable little burro, and also holding Cumnor in the saddle. And
when Cumnor was getting well in the military hospital at Grant, he
listened to Jones recounting to all that chose to hear how useful a
weapon an ice-cream freezer can be, and how if you'll only chase Apaches
in your stocking feet they are sure to run away. And then Jones and
Cumnor both enlisted; and I suppose Jones's friend is still expecting
him in Tucson.
THE SERENADE AT SISKIYOU
Unskilled at murder and without training in running away, one of the two
Healy boys had been caught with ease soon after their crime. What they
had done may be best learned in the following extract from a certain
official report:
"The stage was within five miles of its destination when it
was confronted by the usual apparition of a masked man
levelling a double-barrelled shot-gun at the driver, and the
order to 'Pull up, and throw out the express box.' The driver
promptly complied. Meanwhile the guard, Buck Montgomery, who
occupied a seat inside, from which he caught a glimpse of
what was going on, opened fire at the robber, who dropped to
his knees at the first shot, but a moment later discharged
both barrels of his gun at the stage. The driver dropped from
his seat to the foot-board with five buckshot in his right
leg near the knee, and two in his left leg; a passenger by
his side also dropped with three or four buckshot in his
legs. Before the guard could reload, two shots came from
behind the bushes back of the exposed robber, and Buck fell
to the bottom of the stage mortally wounded--shot through the
back. The whole murderous sally occupied but a few seconds,
and the order came to 'Drive on.' Officers and citizens
quickly started in pursuit, and the next day one of the
robbers, a well-known young man of that vicinity, son of a
respectable farmer in Fresno County, was overtaken and
arrested."
Feeling had run high in the streets of Siskiyou when the prisoner was
brought into town, and the wretch's life had come near a violent end at
the hands of the mob, for Buck Montgomery had many friends. But the
steadier citizens preserved the peace, and the murderer was in the
prison awaiting his trial by formal law. It was now some weeks since the
tragedy, and Judge Campbell sat at breakfast reading his paper.
"Why, that is excellent!" he suddenly exclaimed.
"May I ask what is excellent, judge?" inquired his wife. She had a big
nose.
"They've caught the other one, Amanda. Got him last evening in a
restaurant at Woodland." The judge read the paragraph to Mrs. Campbell,
who listened severely. "And so," he concluded, "when to-night's train
gets up, we'll have them both safe in jail."
Mrs. Campbell dallied over her eggs, shaking her head. Presently she
sighed. But as Amanda often did this, her husband finished his own eggs
and took some more. "Poor boy!" said the lady, pensively. "Only
twenty-three last 12th of October. What a cruel fate!"
Now the judge supposed she referred to the murdered man. "Yes," he said.
"Vile. You've got him romantically young, my dear. I understood he was
thirty-five."
"I know his age perfectly, Judge Campbell. I made it my business to find
out. And to think his brother might actually have been lynched!"
"I never knew that either. You seem to have found out all about the
family, Amanda. What were they going to lynch the brother for?"
The ample lady folded her fat, middle-aged hands on the edge of the
table, and eyed her husband with bland displeasure. "Judge Campbell!"
she uttered, and her lips shut wide and firm. She would restrain
herself, if possible.
"Well, my dear?"
"You ask me that. You pretend ignorance of that disgraceful scene. Who
was it said to me right in the street that he disapproved of lynching? I
ask you, judge, who was it right there at the jail--"
"Oh!" said the enlightened judge.
"--Right at the left-hand side of the door of the jail in this town of
Siskiyou, who was it got that trembling boy safe inside from those
yelling fiends and talked to the crowd on a barrel of number ten nails,
and made those wicked men stop and go home?"
"Amanda, I believe I recognize myself."
"I should think you did, Judge Campbell. And now they've caught the
other one, and he'll be up with the sheriff on to-night's train, and I
suppose they'll lynch _him_ now!"
"There's not the slightest danger," said the judge. "The town wants them
to have a fair trial. It was natural that immediately after such an
atrocious act--"
"Those poor boys had never murdered anybody before in their lives,"
interrupted Amanda.
"But they did murder Montgomery, you will admit."
"Oh yes!" said Mrs. Campbell, with impatience. "I saw the hole in his
back. You needn't tell me all that again. If he'd thrown out the express
box quicker they wouldn't have hurt a hair of his head. Wells and
Fargo's messengers know that perfectly. It was his own fault. Those boys
had no employment, and they only wanted money. They did not seek human
blood, and you needn't tell me they did."
"They shed it, however, Amanda. Quite a lot of it. Stage-driver and a
passenger too."
"Yes, you keep going back to that as if they'd all been murdered instead
of only one, and you don't care about those two poor boys locked in a
dungeon, and their gray-haired father down in Fresno County who never
did anything wrong at all, and he sixty-one in December."
"The county isn't thinking of hanging the old gentleman," said the
judge.
"That will do, Judge Campbell," said his lady, rising. "I shall say no
more. Total silence for the present is best for you and best for me.
Much best. I will leave you to think of your speech, which was by no
means silver. Not even life with you for twenty-five years this coming
10th of July has inured me to insult. I am capable of understanding whom
they think of hanging, and your speaking to me as if I did not does you
little credit; for it was a mere refuge from a woman's just accusation
of heartlessness which you felt, and like a man would not acknowledge;
and therefore it is that I say no more but leave you to go down the
street to the Ladies' Lyceum where I shall find companions with some
spark of humanity in their bosoms and milk of human kindness for those
whose hasty youth has plunged them in misery and delivered them to the
hands of those who treat them as if they were stones and sticks full of
nothing but monstrosity instead of breathing men like themselves to be
shielded by brotherhood and hope and not dashed down by cruelty and
despair."
It had begun stately as a dome, with symmetry and punctuation, but the
climax was untrammelled by a single comma. The orator swept from the
room, put on her bonnet and shawl, and the judge, still sitting with his
eggs, heard the front door close behind her. She was president of the
Ladies' Reform and Literary Lyceum, and she now trod thitherward through
Siskiyou.
"I think Amanda will find companions there," mused the judge. "But her
notions of sympathy beat me." The judge had a small, wise blue eye, and
he liked his wife more than well. She was sincerely good, and had been
very courageous in their young days of poverty. She loved their son, and
she loved him. Only, when she took to talking, he turned up a mental
coat-collar and waited. But if the male sex did not appreciate her
powers of eloquence her sister citizens did; and Mrs. Campbell, besides
presiding at the Ladies' Reform and Literary Lyceum in Siskiyou, often
addressed female meetings in Ashland, Yreka, and even as far away as
Tehama and Redding. She found companions this morning.
"To think of it!" they exclaimed, at her news of the capture, for none
had read the paper. They had been too busy talking of the next debate,
which was upon the question, "Ought we to pray for rain?" But now they
instantly forgot the wide spiritual issues raised by this inquiry, and
plunged into the fascinations of crime, reciting once more to each other
the details of the recent tragedy. The room hired for the Lyceum was in
a second story above the apothecary and book shop--a combined enterprise
in Siskiyou--and was furnished with fourteen rocking-chairs. Pictures of
Mount Shasta and Lucretia Mott ornamented the wall, with a photograph
from an old master representing Leda and the Swan. This typified the
Lyceum's approval of Art, and had been presented by one of the husbands
upon returning from a three days' business trip to San Francisco.
"Dear! dear!" said Mrs. Parsons, after they had all shuddered anew over
the shooting and the blood. "With so much suffering in the world, how
fulsome seems that gay music!" She referred to the Siskiyou brass-band,
which was rehearsing the march from "Fatinitza" in an adjacent room in
the building. Mrs. Parsons had large, mournful eyes, a poetic
vocabulary, and wanted to be president of the Lyceum herself.
"Melody has its sphere, Gertrude," said Mrs. Campbell, in a wholesome
voice. "We must not be morbid. But this I say to you, one and all: Since
the men of Siskiyou refuse, it is for the women to vindicate the town's
humanity, and show some sympathy for the captive who arrives to-night."
They all thought so too.
"I do not criticise," continued their president, magnanimously, "nor do
I complain of any one. Each in this world has his or her mission, and
the most sacred is Woman's own--to console!"
"True, true!" murmured Mrs. Slocum.
"We must do something for the prisoner, to show him we do not desert him
in his hour of need," Mrs. Campbell continued.
"We'll go and meet the train!" Mrs. Slocum exclaimed, eagerly. "I've
never seen a real murderer."
"A bunch of flowers for him," said Mrs. Parsons, closing her mournful
eyes. "Roses." And she smiled faintly.
"Oh, lilies!" cried little Mrs. Day, with rapture. "Lilies would look
_real_ nice."
"Don't you think," said Miss Sissons, who had not spoken before, and sat
a little apart from the close-drawn clump of talkers, "that we might
send the widow some flowers too, some time?" Miss Sissons was a pretty
girl, with neat hair. She was engaged to the captain of Siskiyou's
baseball nine.
"The widow?" Mrs. Campbell looked vague.
"Mrs. Montgomery, I mean--the murdered man's wife. I--I went to see if I
could do anything, for she has some children; but she wouldn't see me,"
said Miss Sissons. "She said she couldn't talk to anybody."
"Poor thing!" said Mrs. Campbell. "I dare say it was a dreadful shock to
her. Yes, dear, we'll attend to her after a while. We'll have her with
us right along, you know, whereas these unhappy boys may--may be--may
soon meet a cruel death on the scaffold." Mrs. Campbell evaded the
phrase "may be hanged" rather skilfully. To her trained oratorical sense
it had seemed to lack dignity.
"So young!" said Mrs. Day.
"And both so full of promise, to be cut off!" said Mrs. Parsons.
"Why, they can't hang them both, I should think," said Miss Sissons. "I
thought only one killed Mr. Montgomery."
"My dear Louise," said Mrs. Campbell, "they can do anything they want,
and they will. Shall I ever forget those ruffians who wanted to lynch
the first one? They'll be on the jury!"
The clump returned to their discussion of the flowers, and Miss Sissons
presently mentioned she had some errands to do, and departed.
"Would that that girl had more soul!" said Mrs. Parsons.
"She has plenty of soul," replied Mrs. Campbell, "but she's under the
influence of a man. Well, as I was saying, roses and lilies are too
big."
"Oh, _why_?" said Mrs. Day. "They would _please_ him so."
"He couldn't carry them, Mrs. Day. I've thought it all out. He'll be
walked to the jail between strong men. We must have some small bokay to
pin on his coat, for his hands will be shackled."
"You don't say!" cried Mrs. Slocum. "How awful! I must get to that
train. I've never seen a man in shackles in my life."
So violets were selected; Mrs. Campbell brought some in the afternoon
from her own borders, and Mrs. Parsons furnished a large pin. She
claimed also the right to affix the decoration upon the prisoner's
breast because she had suggested the idea of flowers; but the other
ladies protested, and the president seemed to think that they all should
draw lots. It fell to Mrs. Day.
"Now I declare!" twittered the little matron. "I do believe I'll never
dare."
"You must say something to him," said Amanda; "something fitting and
choice."
"Oh dear no, Mrs. Campbell. Why, I never--my gracious! Why, if I'd known
I was expected--Really, I couldn't think--I'll let _you_ do it!"
"We can't hash up the ceremony that way, Mrs. Day," said Amanda,
severely. And as they all fell arguing, the whistle blew.
"There!" said Mrs. Slocum. "Now you've made me late, and I'll miss the
shackles and everything."
She flew down-stairs, and immediately the town of Siskiyou saw twelve
members of the Ladies' Reform and Literary Lyceum follow her in a hasty
phalanx across the square to the station. The train approached slowly up
the grade, and by the time the wide smoke-stack of the locomotive was
puffing its wood smoke in clouds along the platform, Amanda had
marshalled her company there.
"Where's the gals all goin', Bill?" inquired a large citizen in boots of
the ticket-agent.
"Nowheres, I guess, Abe," the agent replied. "Leastways, they 'ain't
bought any tickets off me."
"Maybe they're for stealin' a ride," said Abe.
The mail and baggage cars had passed, and the women watched the
smoking-car that drew up opposite them. Mrs. Campbell had informed her
friends that the sheriff always went in the smoker; but on this
occasion, for some reason, he had brought his prisoner in the Pullman
sleeper at the rear, some way down the track, and Amanda's vigilant eye
suddenly caught the group, already descended and walking away. The
platoon of sympathy set off, and rapidly came up with the sheriff, while
Bill, Abe, the train conductor, the Pullman conductor, the engineer, and
the fireman abandoned their duty, and stared, in company with the
brakemen and many passengers. There was perfect silence but for the
pumping of the air-brake on the engine. The sheriff, not understanding
what was coming, had half drawn his pistol; but now, surrounded by
universal petticoats, he pulled off his hat and grinned doubtfully. The
friend with him also stood bareheaded and grinning. He was young Jim
Hornbrook, the muscular betrothed of Miss Sissons. The prisoner could
not remove his hat, or he would have done so. Miss Sissons, who had come
to the train to meet her lover, was laughing extremely in the middle of
the road.
"Take these violets," faltered Mrs. Day, and held out the bunch, backing
away slightly at the same time.
"Nonsense," said Amanda, stepping forward and grasping the flowers. "The
women of Siskiyou are with you," she said, "as we are with all the
afflicted." Then she pinned the violets firmly to the prisoner's flannel
shirt. His face, at first amazed as the sheriff's and Hornbrook's,
smoothed into cunning and vanity, while Hornbrook's turned an angry red,
and the sheriff stopped grinning.
"Them flowers would look better on Buck Montgomery's grave, madam," said
the officer. "Maybe you'll let us pass now." They went on to the jail.
"Waal," said Abe, on the platform, "that's the most disgustin' fool
thing I ever did see."
"All aboa-rd!" said the conductor, and the long train continued its way
to Portland.
The platoon, well content, dispersed homeward to supper, and Jim
Hornbrook walked home with his girl.
"For Lord's sake, Louise," he said, "who started that move?"
She told him the history of the morning.
"Well," he said, "you tell Mrs. Campbell, with my respects, that she's
just playing with fire. A good woman like her ought to have more sense.
Those men are going to have a fair trial."
"She wouldn't listen to me, Jim, not a bit. And, do you know, she really
didn't seem to feel sorry--except just for a minute--about that poor
woman."
"Louise, why don't you quit her outfit?"
"Resign from the Lyceum? That's so silly of you, Jim. We're not all
crazy there; and that," said Miss Sissons, demurely, "is what makes a
girl like me so valuable!"
"Well, I'm not stuck on having you travel with that lot."
"They speak better English than you do, Jim dear. Don't! in the street!"
"Sho! It's dark now," said Jim. "And it's been three whole days since--"
But Miss Sissons escaped inside her gate and rang the bell. "Now see
here, Louise," he called after her, "when I say they're playing with
fire I mean it. That woman will make trouble in this town."
"She's not afraid," said Miss Sissons. "Don't you know enough about us
yet to know we can't be threatened?"
"You!" said the young man. "I wasn't thinking of you." And so they
separated.
Mrs. Campbell sat opposite the judge at supper, and he saw at once from
her complacent reticence that she had achieved some triumph against his
principles. She chatted about topics of the day in terms that were
ingeniously trite. Then a letter came from their son in Denver, and she
forgot her role somewhat, and read the letter aloud to the judge, and
wondered wistfully who in Denver attended to the boy's buttons and
socks; but she made no reference whatever to Siskiyou jail or those
inside it. Next morning, however, it was the judge's turn to be angry.
"Amanda," he said, over the paper again, "you had better stick to socks,
and leave criminals alone."
Amanda gazed at space with a calm smile.
"And I'll tell you one thing, my dear," her husband said, more
incisively, "it don't look well that I should represent the law while my
wife figures" (he shook the morning paper) "as a public nuisance. And
one thing more: _Look out!_ For if I know this community, and I think I
do, you may raise something you don't bargain for."
"I can take care of myself, judge," said Amanda, always smiling. These
two never were angry both at once, and to-day it was the judge that
sailed out of the house. Amanda pounced instantly upon the paper. The
article was headed "Sweet Violets." But the editorial satire only
spurred the lady to higher efforts. She proceeded to the Lyceum, and
found that "Sweet Violets" had been there before her. Every woman held a
copy, and the fourteen rocking-chairs were swooping up and down like
things in a factory. In the presence of this blizzard, Mount Shasta,
Lucretia Mott, and even Leda and the Swan looked singularly serene on
their wall, although on the other side of the wall the "Fatinitza" march
was booming brilliantly. But Amanda quieted the storm. It was her gift
to be calm when others were not, and soon the rocking-chairs were merely
rippling.
"The way my boys scolded me--" began Mrs. Day.
"For men I care not," said Mrs. Parsons. "But when my own sister
upbraids me in a public place--" The lady's voice ceased, and she raised
her mournful eyes. It seemed she had encountered her unnatural relative
at the post-office. Everybody had a tale similar. Siskiyou had denounced
their humane act.
"Let them act ugly," said Mrs. Slocum. "We will not swerve."
"I sent roses this morning," said Mrs. Parsons.
"_Did_ you, dear?" said Mrs. Day. "My lilies shall go this afternoon."
"Here is a letter from the prisoner," said Amanda, producing the
treasure; and they huddled to hear it. It was very affecting. It
mentioned the violets blooming beside the hard couch, and spoke of
prayer.
"He had lovely hair," said Mrs. Slocum.
"_So_ brown!" said Mrs. Day.
"Black, my dear, and curly."
"Light brown. I was a good deal closer, Susan--"
"Never mind about his hair," said Amanda. "We are here not to flinch. We
must act. Our course is chosen, and well chosen. The prison fare is a
sin, and a beefsteak goes to them both at noon from my house."
"Oh, why didn't we ever think of that before?" cried the ladies, in an
ecstasy, and fell to planning a series of lunches in spite of what
Siskiyou might say or do. Siskiyou did not say very much; but it looked;
and the ladies waxed more enthusiastic, luxuriating in a sense of
martyrdom because now the prisoners were stopped writing any more
letters to them. This was doubtless a high-handed step, and it set
certain pulpits preaching about love. The day set for the trial was
approaching; Amanda and her flock were going. Prayer-meetings were held,
food and flowers for the two in jail increased in volume, and every day
saw some of the Lyceum waiting below the prisoners' barred windows till
the men inside would thrust a hand through and wave to them; then they
would shake a handkerchief in reply, and go away thrilled to talk it
over at the Lyceum. And Siskiyou looked on all the while, darker and
darker.
Then finally Amanda had a great thought. Listening to "Fatinitza" one
morning, she suddenly arose and visited Herr Schwartz, the band-master.
Herr Schwartz was a wise and well-educated German. They had a lengthy
conference.
"I don't pelief dot vill be very goot," said the band-master.
But at that Amanda talked a good deal; and the worthy Teuton was soon
bewildered, and at last gave a dubious consent, "since it would blease
de ladies."
The president of the Lyceum arranged the coming event after her own
heart. The voice of Woman should speak in Siskiyou. The helpless victims
of male prejudice and the law of the land were to be flanked with
consolation and encouragement upon the eve of their ordeal in court. In
their lonely cell they were to feel that there were those outside whose
hearts beat with theirs. The floral tribute was to be sumptuous, and
Amanda had sent to San Francisco for pound-cake. The special quality she
desired could not be achieved by the Siskiyou confectioner.
Miss Sissons was not a party to this enterprise, and she told its
various details to Jim Hornbrook, half in anger, half in derision. He
listened without comment, and his face frightened her a little.
"Jim, what's the matter?" said she.
"Are you going to be at that circus?" he inquired.
"I thought I might just look on, you know," said Miss Sissons. "Mrs.
Campbell and a brass-band--"
"You'll stay in the house that night, Louise."
"Why, the ring isn't on my finger yet," laughed the girl, "the fatal
promise of obedience--" But she stopped, perceiving her joke was not a
good one. "Of course, Jim, if you feel that way," she finished. "Only
I'm grown up, and I like reasons."
"Well--that's all right too."
"Ho, ho! All right! Thank you, sir. Dear me!"
"Why, it ain't to please me, Louise; indeed it ain't. I can't swear
everything won't be nice and all right and what a woman could be mixed
up in, but--well, how should you know what men are, anyway, when they've
been a good long time getting mad, and are mad all through? That's what
this town is to-day, Louise."
"I don't know," said Miss Sissons, "and I'm sure I'd rather not know."
And so she gave her promise. "But I shouldn't suppose," she added, "that
the men of Siskiyou, mad or not, would forget that women are women."
Jim laughed. "Oh no," he said, "they ain't going to forget that."
The appointed day came; and the train came, several hours late, bearing
the box of confectionery, addressed to the Ladies' Reform and Literary
Lyceum. Bill, the ticket-agent, held his lantern over it on the
platform.
"That's the cake," said he.
"What cake?" Abe inquired.
Bill told him the rumor.
"Cake?" repeated Abe. "Fer them?" and he tilted his head towards the
jail. "Will you say that again, friend? I ain't clear about it. _Cake_,
did ye say?"
"Pound-cake," said Bill. "Ordered special from San Francisco."
Now pound-cake for adults is considered harmless. But it is curious how
unwholesome a harmless thing can be if administered at the wrong time.
The gaunt, savage-looking Californian went up to the box slowly. Then he
kicked it lightly with his big boot, seeming to listen to its
reverberation. Then he read the address. Then he sat down on the box to
take a think. After a time he began speaking aloud. "They hold up a
stage," he said, slowly. "They lay up a passenger fer a month. And they
lame Bob Griffiths fer life. And then they do up Buck. Shoot a hole
through his spine. And I helped bury him; fer I liked Buck." The speaker
paused, and looked at the box. Then he got up. "I hain't attended their
prayer-meetin's," said he, "and I hain't smelt their flowers. Such
perfume's liable to make me throw up. But I guess I'll hev a look at
their cake."
He went to the baggage-room and brought an axe. The axe descended, and a
splintered slat flew across the platform. "There's a lot of cake," said
Abe. The top of the packing-case crashed on the railroad track, and
three new men gathered to look on. "It's fresh cake too," remarked the
destroyer. The box now fell to pieces, and the tattered paper wrapping
was ripped away. "Step up, boys," said Abe, for a little crowd was there
now. "Soft, ain't it?" They slung the cake about and tramped it in the
grime and oil, and the boards of the box were torn apart and whirled
away. There was a singular and growing impulse about all this. No one
said anything; they were very quiet; yet the crowd grew quickly, as if
called together by something in the air. One voice said, "Don't forgit
we're all relyin' on yer serenade, Mark," and this raised a strange
united laugh that broke brief and loud, and stopped, leaving the silence
deeper than before. Mark and three more left, and walked towards the
Lyceum. They were members of the Siskiyou band, and as they went one
said that the town would see an interesting trial in the morning. Soon
after they had gone the crowd moved from the station, compact and swift.
Meanwhile the Lyceum had been having disappointments. When the train was
known to be late, Amanda had abandoned bestowing the cake until morning.
But now a horrid thing had happened: the Siskiyou band refused its
services! The rocking-chairs were plying strenuously; but Amanda strode
up and down in front of Mount Shasta and Lucretia Mott.
Herr Schwartz entered. "It's all right, madam," said he. "My trombone
haf come back, und--"
"You'll play?" demanded the president.
"We blay for de ladies."
The rocking-chairs were abandoned; the Lyceum put on its bonnet and
shawl, and marshalled down-stairs with the band.
"Ready," said Amanda.
"Ready," said Herr Schwartz to his musicians. "Go a leedle easy mit der
Allegro, or we bust 'Fatinitza.'"
The spirited strains were lifted in Siskiyou, and the procession was
soon at the jail in excellent order. They came round the corner with the
trombone going as well as possible. Two jerking bodies dangled at the
end of ropes, above the flare of torches. Amanda and her flock were
shrieking.
"So!" exclaimed Herr Schwartz. "Dot was dose Healy boys we haf come to
gif serenade." He signed to stop the music.
"No you don't," said two of the masked crowd, closing in with pistols.
"You'll play fer them fellers till you're told to quit."
"Cerdainly," said the philosophical Teuton. "Only dey gif brobably very
leedle attention to our Allegro."
So "Fatinitza" trumpeted on while the two on the ropes twisted, and grew
still by-and-by. Then the masked men let the band go home. The Lyceum
had scattered and fled long since, and many days passed before it
revived again to civic usefulness, nor did its members find comfort from
their men. Herr Schwartz gave a parting look at the bodies of the
lynched murderers. "My!" said he, "das Ewigweibliche haf draw them apove
sure enough."
Miss Sissons next day was walking and talking off her shock and
excitement with her lover. "And oh, Jim," she concluded, after they had
said a good many things, "you hadn't anything to do with it, had you?"
The young man did not reply, and catching a certain expression on his
face, she hastily exclaimed: "Never mind! I don't want to know--ever!"
So James Hornbrook kissed his sweetheart for saying that, and they
continued their walk among the pleasant hills.
THE GENERAL'S BLUFF
The troops this day had gone into winter-quarters, and sat down to kill
the idle time with pleasure until spring. After two hundred and forty
days it is a good thing to sit down. The season had been spent in
trailing, and sometimes catching, small bands of Indians. These had
taken the habit of relieving settlers of their cattle and the tops of
their heads. The weather-beaten troops had scouted over some two
thousand aimless, veering miles, for the savages were fleet and mostly
invisible, and knew the desert well. So, while the year turned, and the
heat came, held sway, and went, the ragged troopers on the frontier were
led an endless chase by the hostiles, who took them back and forth over
flats of lime and ridges of slate, occasionally picking off a packer or
a couple of privates, until now the sun was setting at 4.28 and it froze
at any time of day. Therefore the rest of the packers and privates were
glad to march into Boise Barracks this morning by eleven, and see a
stove.
They rolled for a moment on their bunks to get the feel of a bunk again
after two hundred and forty days; they ate their dinner at a table;
those who owned any further baggage than that which partially covered
their nakedness unpacked it, perhaps nailed up a photograph or two, and
found it grateful to sit and do nothing under a roof and listen to the
grated snow whip the windows of the gray sandstone quarters. Such
comfort, and the prospect of more ahead, of weeks of nothing but post
duty and staying in the same place, obliterated Dry Camp, Cow Creek
Lake, the blizzard on Meacham's Hill, the horse-killing in the John Day
Valley, Saw-Tooth stampede, and all the recent evils of the past; the
quarters hummed with cheerfulness. The nearest railroad was some four
hundred miles to the southeast, slowly constructing to meet the next
nearest, which was some nine hundred to the southeast; but Boise City
was only three-quarters of a mile away, the largest town in the
Territory, the capital, not a temperance town, a winter resort; and
several hundred people lived in it, men and women, few of whom ever died
in their beds. The coming days and nights were a luxury to think of.
"Blamed if there ain't a real tree!" exclaimed Private Jones.
"Thet eer ain't no tree, ye plum; thet's the flag-pole 'n' th' Merrickin
flag," observed a civilian. His name was Jack Long, and he was
pack-master.
Sergeant Keyser, listening, smiled. During the winter of '64-65 he had
been in command of the first battalion of his regiment, but, on a theory
of education, had enlisted after the war. This being known, held the men
more shy of him than was his desire.
Jones continued to pick his banjo, while a boyish trooper with tough
black hair sat near him and kept time with his heels. "It's a
cottonwood-tree I was speakin' of," observed Jones. There was one--a
little, shivering white stalk. It stood above the flat where the
barracks were, on a bench twenty or thirty feet higher, on which were
built the officers' quarters. The air was getting dim with the fine,
hard snow that slanted through it. The thermometer was ten above out
there. At the mere sight and thought Mr. Long produced a flat bottle,
warm from proximity to his flesh. Jones swallowed some drink, and looked
at the little tree. "Snakes! but it feels good," said he, "to get
something inside y'u and be inside yerself. What's the tax at Mike's
dance-house now?"
"Dance 'n' drinks fer two fer one dollar," responded Mr. Long,
accurately. He was sixty, but that made no difference.
"You and me'll take that in, Jock," said Jones to his friend, the
black-haired boy. "'Sigh no more, ladies,'" he continued, singing. "The
blamed banjo won't accompany that," he remarked, and looked out again at
the tree. "There's a chap riding into the post now. Shabby-lookin'.
Mebbe he's got stuff to sell."
Jack Long looked up on the bench at a rusty figure moving slowly through
the storm. "Th' ole man!" he said.
"He ain't specially old," Jones answered. "They're apt to be older, them
peddlers."
"Peddlers! Oh, ye-es." A seizure of very remarkable coughing took Jack
Long by the throat; but he really had a cough, and, on the fit's leaving
him, swallowed a drink, and offered his bottle in a manner so cold and
usual that Jones forgot to note anything but the excellence of the
whiskey. Mr. Long winked at Sergeant Keyser; he thought it a good plan
not to inform his young friends, not just yet at any rate, that their
peddler was General Crook. It would be pleasant to hear what else they
might have to say.
The General had reached Boise City that morning by the stage, quietly
and unknown, as was his way. He had come to hunt Indians in the district
of the Owyhee. Jack Long had discovered this, but only a few had been
told the news, for the General wished to ask questions and receive
answers, and to find out about all things; and he had noticed that this
is not easy when too many people know who you are. He had called upon a
friend or two in Boise, walked about unnoticed, learned a number of
facts, and now, true to his habit, entered the post wearing no uniform,
none being necessary under the circumstances, and unattended by a single
orderly. Jones and the black-haired Cumnor hoped he was a peddler, and
innocently sat looking out of the window at him riding along the bench
in front of the quarters, and occasionally slouching his wide, dark
hat-brim against the stinging of the hard flakes. Jack Long, old and
much experienced with the army, had scouted with Crook before, and knew
him and his ways well. He also looked out of the window, standing behind
Jones and Cumnor, with a huge hairy hand on a shoulder of each, and a
huge wink again at Keyser.
"Blamed if he 'ain't stopped in front of the commanding officer's," said
Jones.
"Lor'!" said Mr. Long, "there's jest nothin' them peddlers won't do."
"They ain't likely to buy anything off him in there," said Cumnor.
"Mwell, ef he's purvided with any _kind_ o' Injun cur'os'tees, the
missis she'll fly right on to 'em. Sh' 'ain't been merried out yere only
haff'n year, 'n' when she spies feathers 'n' bead truck 'n' buckskin fer
sale sh' hollers like a son of a gun. Enthoosiastic, ye know."
"He 'ain't got much of a pack," Jones commented, and at that moment
"stables" sounded, and the men ran out to form and march to their
grooming. Jack Long stood at the door and watched them file through the
snow.
Very few enlisted men of the small command that had come in this morning
from its campaign had ever seen General Crook. Jones, though not new to
the frontier, had not been long in the army. He and Cumnor had enlisted
in a happy-go-lucky manner together at Grant, in Arizona, when the
General was elsewhere. Discipline was galling to his vagrant spirit, and
after each pay-day he had generally slept off the effects in the
guard-house, going there for other offences between-whiles; but he was
not of the stuff that deserts; also, he was excellent tempered, and his
captain liked him for the way in which he could shoot Indians. Jack Long
liked him too; and getting always a harmless pleasure from the mistakes
of his friends, sincerely trusted there might be more about the peddler.
He was startled at hearing his name spoken in his ear.
"_Nah!_ Johnny, how you get on?"
"Hello, Sarah! Kla-how-ya, six?" said Long, greeting in Chinook the
squaw interpreter who had approached him so noiselessly. "Hy-as kloshe
o-coke sun" (It is a beautiful day).
The interpreter laughed--she had a broad, sweet, coarse face, and
laughed easily--and said in English, "You hear about E-egante?"
Long had heard nothing recently of this Pah-Ute chieftain.
"He heap bad," continued Sarah, laughing broadly. "Come round ranch up
here--"
"Anybody killed?" Long interrupted.
"No. All run away quick. Meester Dailey, he old man, he run all same
young one. His old woman she run all same man. Get horse. Run away
quick. Hu-hu!" and Sarah's rich mockery sounded again. No tragedy had
happened this time, and the squaw narrated her story greatly to the
relish of Mr. Long. This veteran of trails and mines had seen too much
of life's bleakness not to cherish whatever of mirth his days might
bring.
"Didn't burn the house?" he said.
"Not burn. Just make heap mess. Cut up feather-bed hy-as ten-as (very
small) and eat big dinner, hu-hu! Sugar, onions, meat, eat all. Then
they find litt' cats walkin' round there."
"Lor'!" said Mr. Long, deeply interested, "they didn't eat _them_?"
"No. Not eat litt' cats. Put 'em two--man-cat and woman-cat--in
molasses; put 'em in feather-bed; all same bird. Then they hunt for
whiskey, break everything, hunt all over, ha-lo whiskey!" Sarah shook
her head. "Meester Dailey he good man. Hy-iu temperance. Drink water.
They find his medicine; drink all up; make awful sick."
"I guess 'twar th' ole man's liniment," muttered Jack Long.
"Yas, milinut. They can't walk. Stay there long time, then Meester
Dailey come back with friends. They think Injuns all gone; make noise,
and E-egante he hear him come, and he not very sick. Run away. Some more
run. But two Injuns heap sick; can't run. Meester Dailey he come round
the corner; see awful mess everywhere; see two litt' cats sittin' in
door all same bird, sing very loud. Then he see two Injuns on ground.
They dead now."
"Mwell," said Long, "none of eer'll do. We'll hev to ketch E-egante."
"A--h!" drawled Sarah the squaw, in musical derision. "Maybe no catch
him. All same jack rabbit."
"Jest ye wait, Sarah; Gray Fox hez come."
"Gen'l Crook!" said the squaw. "He come! Ho! He heap savvy." She
stopped, and laughed again, like a pleased child. "Maybe no catch
E-egante," she added, rolling her pretty brown eyes at Jack Long.
"You know E-egante?" he demanded.
"Yas, one time. Long time now. I litt' girl then." But Sarah remembered
that long time, when she slept in a tent and had not been captured and
put to school. And she remembered the tall young boys whom she used to
watch shoot arrows, and the tallest, who shot most truly--at least, he
certainly did now in her imagination. He had never spoken to her or
looked at her. He was a boy of fourteen and she a girl of eight. Now she
was twenty-five. Also she was tame and domesticated, with a white
husband who was not bad to her, and children for each year of wedlock,
who would grow up to speak English better than she could, and her own
tongue not at all. And E-egante was not tame, and still lived in a tent.
Sarah regarded white people as her friends, but she was proud of being
an Indian, and she liked to think that her race could outwit the soldier
now and then. She laughed again when she thought of old Mrs. Dailey
running from E-egante.
"What's up with ye, Sarah?" said Jack Long, for the squaw's laughter had
come suddenly on a spell of silence.
"He!" said she. "All same jack-rabbit. No catch him." She stood shaking
her head at Long, and showing her white, regular teeth. Then abruptly
she went away to her tent without any word, not because she was in
ill-humor or had thought of something, but because she was an Indian and
had thought of nothing, and had no more to say. She met the men
returning from the stables; admired Jones and smiled at him, upon which
he murmured "Oh fie!" as he passed her. The troop broke ranks and
dispersed, to lounge and gossip until mess-call. Cumnor and Jones were
putting a little snow down each other's necks with friendly profanity,
when Jones saw the peddler standing close and watching them. A high
collar of some ragged fur was turned up round his neck, disguising the
character of the ancient army overcoat to which it was attached, and
spots and long stains extended down the legs of his corduroys to the
charred holes at the bottom, where the owner had scorched them warming
his heels and calves at many camp-fires.
"Hello, uncle," said Jones. "What y'u got in your pack?" He and Cumnor
left their gambols and eagerly approached, while Mr. Jack Long, seeing
the interview, came up also to hear it. "'Ain't y'u got something to
sell?" continued Jones. "Y'u haven't gone and dumped yer whole outfit at
the commanding officer's, have y'u now?"
"I'm afraid I have." The low voice shook ever so little, and if Jones
had looked he would have seen a twinkle come and go in the gray-blue
eyes.
"We've been out eight months, y'u know, fairly steady," pursued Jones,
"and haven't seen nothing; and we'd buy most anything that ain't too
damn bad," he concluded, plaintively.
Mr. Long, in the background, was whining to himself with joy, and he now
urgently beckoned Keyser to come and hear this.
"If you've got some cheap poker chips," suggested Cumnor.
"And say, uncle," said Jones, raising his voice, for the peddler was
moving away, "decks, and tobacco better than what they keep at the
commissary. Me and my friend'll take some off your hands. And if you're
comin' with new stock to-morrow, uncle" (Jones was now shouting after
him), "why, we're single men, and y'u might fetch along a couple of
squaws!"
"Holy smoke!" screeched Mr. Long, dancing on one leg.
"What's up with you, y'u ape?" inquired Specimen Jones. He looked at the
departing peddler and saw Sergeant Keyser meet him and salute with
stern, soldierly aspect. Then the peddler shook hands with the sergeant,
seemed to speak pleasantly, and again Keyser saluted as he passed on.
"What's that for?" Jones asked, uneasily. "Who is that hobo?"
But Mr. Long was talking to himself in a highly moralizing strain. "It
ain't every young enlisted man," he was saying, "ez hez th' privilege of
explainin' his wants at headquarters."
"Jones," said Sergeant Keyser, arriving, "I've a compliment for you.
General Crook said you were a fine-looking man."
"General?--What's that?--Where did y'u see--What? _Him?_" The
disgusting truth flashed clear on Jones. Uttering a single
disconcerted syllable of rage, he wheeled and went by himself into
the barracks, and lay down solitary on his bunk and read a newspaper
until mess-call without taking in a word of it. "If they go to put
me in the mill fer that," he said, sulkily, to many friends who brought
him their congratulations, "I'm going to give 'em what I think about
wearin' disguises."
[Illustration: "'AIN'T Y'U GOT SOMETHING TO SELL?'"]
"What do you think, Specimen?" said one.
"Give it to us now, Specimen," said another.
"Against the law, ain't it, Specimen?"
"Begosh!" said Jack Long, "ef thet's so, don't lose no time warnin' the
General, Specimen. Th' ole man'd hate to be arrested."
And Specimen Jones told them all to shut their heads.
But no thought was more distant from General Crook's busy mind than
putting poor Jones in the guard-house. The trooper's willingness, after
eight months hunting Indians, to buy almost anything brought a smile to
his lips, and a certain sympathy in his heart. He knew what those eight
months had been like; how monotonous, how well endured, how often
dangerous, how invariably plucky, how scant of even the necessities of
life, how barren of glory, and unrewarded by public recognition. The
American "statesman" does not care about our army until it becomes
necessary for his immediate personal protection. General Crook knew all
this well; and realizing that these soldiers, who had come into
winter-quarters this morning at eleven, had earned a holiday, he was
sorry to feel obliged to start them out again to-morrow morning at two;
for this was what he had decided upon.
He had received orders to drive on the reservation the various small
bands of Indians that were roving through the country of the Snake and
its tributaries, a danger to the miners in the Bannock Basin, and to
the various ranches in west Idaho and east Oregon. As usual, he had
been given an insufficient force to accomplish this, and, as always, he
had been instructed by the "statesmen" to do it without violence--that
is to say, he must never shoot the poor Indian until after the poor
Indian had shot him; he must make him do something he did not want to,
pleasantly, by the fascination of argument, in the way a "statesman"
would achieve it. The force at the General's disposal was the garrison
at Boise Barracks--one troop of cavalry and one company of infantry. The
latter was not adapted to the matter in hand--rapid marching and
surprises; all it could be used for was as a reinforcement, and,
moreover, somebody must be left at Boise Barracks. The cavalry had had
its full dose of scouting and skirmishing and long exposed marches, the
horses were poor, and nobody had any trousers to speak of. Also, the
troop was greatly depleted; it numbered forty men. Forty had deserted,
and three--a sergeant and three privates--had cooked and eaten a
vegetable they had been glad to dig up one day, and had spent the
ensuing forty-five minutes in attempting to make their ankles beat the
backs of their heads; after that the captain had read over them a
sentence beginning, "Man that is born of a woman hath but a short time
to live, and is full of misery"; and after that the camp was referred to
as Wild Carrot Camp, because the sergeant had said the vegetable was
wild carrot, whereas it had really been wild parsnip, which is quite
another thing.
General Crook shook his head over what he saw. The men were
ill-provided, the commissary and the quartermaster department were
ill-provided; but it would have to do; the "statesmen" said our army
was an extravagance. The Indians must be impressed and intimidated by
the unlimited resources which the General had--not. Having come to this
conclusion, he went up to the post commander's, and at supper astonished
that officer by casual remarks which revealed a knowledge of the
surrounding country, the small streams, the best camps for pasture,
spots to avoid on account of bad water, what mules had sore backs, and
many other things that the post commander would have liked dearly to ask
the General where and when he had learned, only he did not dare. He did
not even venture to ask him what he was going to do. Neither did Captain
Glynn, who had been asked to meet the General. The General soon told
them, however. "It may be a little cold," he concluded.
"To-morrow, sir?" This from Captain Glynn. He had come in with the forty
that morning. He had been enjoying his supper very much.
"I think so," said the General. "This E-egante is likely to make trouble
if he is not checked." Then, understanding the thoughts of Captain
Glynn, he added, with an invisible smile, "_You_ need no preparations.
You're in marching order. It's not as if your men had been here a long
time and had to get ready for a start."
"Oh no," said Glynn, "it isn't like that." He was silent. "I think, if
you'll excuse me, General," he said next, "I'll see my sergeant and give
some orders."
"Certainly. And, Captain Glynn, I took the liberty of giving a few
directions myself. We'll take an A tent, you know, for you and me. I see
Keyser is sergeant in F troop. Glad we have a non-commissioned officer
so competent. Haven't seen him since '64, at Winchester. Why, it's
cleared off, I declare!"
It had, and the General looked out of the open door as Captain Glynn,
departing, was pulling at his cigar. "How beautiful the planets are!"
exclaimed Crook. "Look at Jupiter--there, just to the left of that
little cottonwood-tree. Haven't you often noticed how much finer the
stars shine in this atmosphere than in the East? Oh, captain! I forgot
to speak of extra horseshoes. I want some brought along."
"I'll attend to it, General."
"They shouldn't be too large. These California fourteen-and-a-half
horses have smallish hoofs."
"I'll see the blacksmith myself, General."
"Thank you. Good-night. And just order fresh stuffing put into the
aparejos. I noticed three that had got lumpy." And the General shut the
door and went to wipe out the immaculate barrels of his shot-gun; for
besides Indians there were grouse among the hills where he expected to
go.
Captain Glynn, arriving at his own door, stuck his glowing cigar against
the thermometer hanging outside: twenty-three below zero. "Oh Lord!"
said the captain, briefly. He went in and told his striker to get
Sergeant Keyser. Then he sat down and waited. "'Look at Jupiter!'" he
muttered, angrily. "What an awful old man!"
It was rather awful. The captain had not supposed generals in the first
two hours of their arrival at a post to be in the habit of finding out
more about your aparejos than you knew yourself. But old the General was
not. At the present day many captains are older than Crook was then.
Down at the barracks there was the same curiosity about what the "Old
Man" was going to do as existed at the post commander's during the early
part of supper. It pleased the cavalry to tell the infantry that the
Old Man proposed to take the infantry to the Columbia River next week;
and the infantry replied to the cavalry that they were quite right as to
the river and the week, and it was hard luck the General needed only
mounted troops on this trip. Others had heard he had come to superintend
the building of a line of telegraph to Klamath, which would be a good
winter's job for somebody; but nobody supposed that anything would
happen yet awhile.
And then a man came in and told them the General had sent his boots to
the saddler to have nails hammered in the soles.
"That eer means business," said Jack Long, "'n' I guess I'll nail up mee
own cowhides."
"Jock," said Specimen Jones to Cumnor, "you and me 'ain't got any soles
to ourn because they're contract boots, y'u see. I'll nail up yer feet
if y'u say so. It's liable to be slippery."
Cumnor did not take in the situation at once. "What's your hurry?" he
inquired of Jack Long. Therefore it was explained to him that when
General Crook ordered his boots fixed you might expect to be on the road
shortly. Cumnor swore some resigned, unemphatic oaths, fondly supposing
that "shortly" meant some time or other; but hearing in the next five
minutes the definite fact that F troop would get up at two, he made use
of profound and thorough language, and compared the soldier with the
slave.
"Why, y'u talk almost like a man, Jock," said Specimen Jones. "Blamed if
y'u don't sound pretty near growed up."
Cumnor invited Jones to mind his business.
"Yer muss-tache has come since Arizona," continued Jones, admiringly,
"and yer blue eye is bad-lookin'--worse than when we shot at yer heels
and y'u danced fer us."
"I thought they were going to give us a rest," mumbled the youth,
flushing. "I thought we'd be let stay here a spell."
"I thought so too, Jock. A little monotony would be fine variety. But a
man must take his medicine, y'u know, and not squeal." Jones had lowered
his voice, and now spoke without satire to the boy whom he had in a
curious manner taken under his protection.
"Look at what they give us for a blanket to sleep in," said Cumnor. "A
fellow can see to read the newspaper through it."
"Look at my coat, Cumnor." It was Sergeant Keyser showing the article
furnished the soldier by the government. "You can spit through that." He
had overheard their talk, and stepped up to show that all were in the
same box. At his presence reticence fell upon the privates, and Cumnor
hauled his black felt hat down tight in embarrassment, which strain
split it open half-way round his head. It was another sample of
regulation clothing, and they laughed at it.
"We all know the way it is," said Keyser, "and I've seen it a big sight
worse. Cumnor, I've a cap I guess will keep your scalp warm till we get
back."
And so at two in the morning F troop left the bunks it had expected
to sleep in for some undisturbed weeks, and by four o'clock had eaten
its well-known breakfast of bacon and bad coffee, and was following
the "awful old man" down the north bank of the Boise, leaving the
silent, dead, wooden town of shanties on the other side half a mile
behind in the darkness. The mountains south stood distant, ignoble,
plain-featured heights, looming a clean-cut black beneath the piercing
stars and the slice of hard, sharp-edged moon, and the surrounding
plains of sage and dry-cracking weed slanted up and down to nowhere and
nothing with desolate perpetuity. The snowfall was light and dry as
sand, and the bare ground jutted through it at every sudden lump or
knoll. The column moved through the dead polar silence, scarcely
breaking it. Now and then a hoof rang on a stone, here and there a
bridle or a sabre clinked lightly; but it was too cold and early for
talking, and the only steady sound was the flat, can-like tankle of the
square bell that hung on the neck of the long-eared leader of the
pack-train. They passed the Dailey ranch, and saw the kittens and the
liniment-bottle, but could get no information as to what way E-egante
had gone. The General did not care for that, however; he had devised his
own route for the present, after a talk with the Indian guides. At the
second dismounting during march he had word sent back to the pack-train
not to fall behind, and the bell was to be taken off if the rest of the
mules would follow without the sound of its shallow music. No wind moved
the weeds or shook the stiff grass, and the rising sun glittered pink on
the patched and motley-shirted men as they blew on their red hands or
beat them against their legs. Some were lucky enough to have woollen or
fur gloves, but many had only the white cotton affairs furnished by the
government. Sarah the squaw laughed at them: the interpreter was warm as
she rode in her bright green shawl. While the dismounted troopers
stretched their limbs during the halt, she remained on her pony talking
to one and another.
"Gray Fox heap savvy," said she to Mr. Long. "He heap get up in the
mornin'."
"Thet's what he does, Sarah."
"Yas. No give soldier hy-as Sunday" (a holiday).
"No, no," assented Mr. Long. "Gray Fox go teh-teh" (trot).
"Maybe he catch E-egante, maybe put him in skookum-house (prison)?"
suggested Sarah.
"Oh no! Lor'! E-egante good Injun. White Father he feed him. Give him
heap clothes," said Mr. Long.
"A--h!" drawled Sarah, dubiously, and rode by herself.
"You'll need watchin'," muttered Jack Long.
The trumpet sounded, the troopers swung into their saddles, and the line
of march was taken up as before, Crook at the head of the column, his
ragged fur collar turned up, his corduroys stuffed inside a wrinkled
pair of boots, the shot-gun balanced across his saddle, and nothing to
reveal that he was any one in particular, unless you saw his face. As
the morning grew bright, and empty, silent Idaho glistened under the
clear blue, the General talked a little to Captain Glynn.
"E-egante will have crossed Snake River, I think," said he. "I shall try
to do that to-day; but we must be easy on those horses of yours. We
ought to be able to find these Indians in three days."
"If I were a lusty young chief," said Glynn, "I should think it pretty
tough to be put on a reservation for dipping a couple of kittens in the
molasses."
"So should I, captain. But next time he might dip Mrs. Dailey. And I'm
not sure he didn't have a hand in more serious work. Didn't you run
across his tracks anywhere this summer?"
"No, sir. He was over on the Des Chutes."
"Did you hear what he was doing?"
"Having rows about fish and game with those Warm Spring Indians on the
west side of the Des Chutes."
"They're always poaching on each other. There's bad blood between
E-egante and Uma-Pine."
"Uma-Pine's friendly, sir, isn't he?"
"Well, that's a question," said Crook. "But there's no question about
this E-egante and his Pah-Utes. We've got to catch him. I'm sorry for
him. He doesn't see why he shouldn't hunt anywhere as his fathers did. I
shouldn't see that either."
"How strong is this band reported, sir?"
"I've heard nothing I can set reliance upon," said Crook, instinctively
levelling his shot-gun at a big bird that rose; then he replaced the
piece across his saddle and was silent. Now Captain Glynn had heard
there were three hundred Indians with E-egante, which was a larger
number than he had been in the habit of attacking with forty men. But he
felt discreet about volunteering any information to the General after
last night's exhibition of what the General knew. Crook partly answered
what was in Glynn's mind. "This is the only available force I have,"
said he. "We must do what we can with it. You've found out by this time,
captain, that rapidity in following Indians up often works well. They
have made up their minds--that is, if I know them--that we're going to
loaf inside Boise Barracks until the hard weather lets up."
Captain Glynn had thought so too, but he did not mention this, and the
General continued. "I find that most people entertained this notion," he
said, "and I'm glad they did, for it will help my first operations very
materially."
The captain agreed that there was nothing like a false impression for
assisting the efficacy of military movements, and presently the General
asked him to command a halt. It was high noon, and the sun gleamed on
the brass trumpet as the long note blew. Again the musical strain
sounded on the cold, bright stillness, and the double line of twenty
legs swung in a simultaneous arc over the horses' backs as the men
dismounted.
"We'll noon here," said the General; and while the cook broke the ice on
Boise River to fill his kettles, Crook went back to the mules to see how
the sore backs were standing the march. "How d'ye do, Jack Long?" said
he. "Your stock is travelling pretty well, I see. They're loaded with
thirty days' rations, but I trust we're not going to need it all."
"Mwell, General, I don't specially kyeer meself 'bout eatin' the hull
outfit." Mr. Long showed his respect for the General by never swearing
in his presence.
"I see you haven't forgotten how to pack," Crook said to him. "Can we
make Snake River to-day, Jack?"
"That'll be forty miles, General. The days are pretty short."
"What are you feeding to the animals?" Crook inquired.
"Why, General, _you_ know jest 's well 's me," said Jack, grinning.
"I suppose I do if you say so, Jack. Ten pounds first ten days, five
pounds next ten, and you're out of grain for the next ten. Is that the
way still?"
"Thet's the way, General, on these yere thirty-day affairs."
Through all this small-talk Crook had been inspecting the mules and the
horses on picket-line, and silently forming his conclusion. He now
returned to Captain Glynn and shared his mess-box.
They made Snake River. Crook knew better than Long what the animals
could do. And next day they crossed, again by starlight, turned for a
little way up the Owyhee, decided that E-egante had not gone that road,
trailed up the bluffs and ledges from the Snake Valley on to the barren
height of land, and made for the Malheur River, finding the eight hoofs
of two deer lying in a melted place where a fire had been. Mr. Dailey
had insisted that at least fifty Indians had drunk his liniment and
trifled with his cats. Indeed, at times during his talk with General
Crook the old gentleman had been sure there were a hundred. If this were
their trail which the command had now struck, there may possibly have
been eight. It was quite evident that the chief had not taken any three
hundred warriors upon that visit, if he had that number anywhere. So the
column went up the Malheur main stream through the sage-brush and the
gray weather (it was still cold, but no sun any more these last two
days), and, coming to the North Fork, turned up towards a spur of the
mountains and Castle Rock. The water ran smooth black between its edging
of ice, thick, white, and crusted like slabs of cocoanut candy, and
there in the hollow of a bend they came suddenly upon what they sought.
Stems of smoke, faint and blue, spindled up from a blurred acre of
willow thicket, dense, tall as two men, a netted brown and yellow mesh
of twigs and stiff wintry rods. Out from the level of their close,
nature-woven tops rose at distances the straight, slight blue
smoke-lines, marking each the position of some invisible lodge. The
whole acre was a bottom ploughed at some former time by a wash-out, and
the troops looked down on it from the edge of the higher ground, silent
in the quiet, gray afternoon, the empty sage-brush territory stretching
a short way to fluted hills that were white below and blackened with
pines above.
The General, taking a rough chance as he often did, sent ground scouts
forward and ordered a charge instantly, to catch the savages unready;
and the stiff rods snapped and tangled between the beating hoofs. The
horses plunged at the elastic edges of this excellent fortress,
sometimes half lifted as a bent willow levered up against their bellies,
and the forward-tilting men fended their faces from the whipping twigs.
They could not wedge a man's length into that pliant labyrinth, and the
General called them out. They rallied among the sage-brush above,
Crook's cheeks and many others painted with purple lines of blood,
hardened already and cracking like enamel. The baffled troopers glared
at the thicket. Not a sign nor a sound came from in there. The willows,
with the gentle tints of winter veiling their misty twigs, looked serene
and even innocent, fitted to harbor birds--not birds of prey--and the
quiet smoke threaded upwards through the air. Of course the
liniment-drinkers must have heard the noise.
"What do you suppose they're doing?" inquired Glynn.
"Looking at us," said Crook.
"I wish we could return the compliment," said the captain.
Crook pointed. Had any wind been blowing, what the General saw would
have been less worth watching. Two willow branches shook, making a
vanishing ripple on the smooth surface of the tree-tops. The pack-train
was just coming in sight over the rise, and Crook immediately sent an
orderly with some message. More willow branches shivered an instant and
were still; then, while the General and the captain sat on their horses
and watched, the thicket gave up its secret to them; for, as little
light gusts coming abreast over a lake travel and touch the water, so in
different spots the level maze of twigs was stirred; and if the eye
fastened upon any one of these it could have been seen to come out from
the centre towards the edge, successive twigs moving, as the tops of
long grass tremble and mark the progress of a snake. During a short
while this increased greatly, the whole thicket moving with innumerable
tracks. Then everything ceased, with the blue wands of smoke rising
always into the quiet afternoon.
"Can you see 'em?" said Glynn.
"Not a bit. Did you happen to hear any one give an estimate of this
band?"
Glynn mentioned his tale of the three hundred.
It was not new to the General, but he remarked now that it must be
pretty nearly correct; and his eye turned a moment upon his forty
troopers waiting there, grim and humorous; for they knew that the
thicket was looking at them, and it amused their American minds to
wonder what the Old Man was going to do about it.
"It's his bet, and he holds poor cards," murmured Specimen Jones; and
the neighbors grinned.
And here the Old Man continued the play that he had begun when he sent
the orderly to the pack-train. That part of the command had halted in
consequence, disposed itself in an easy-going way, half in, half out of
sight on the ridge, and men and mules looked entirely careless. Glynn
wondered; but no one ever asked the General questions, in spite of his
amiable voice and countenance. He now sent for Sarah the squaw.
"You tell E-egante," he said, "that I am not going to fight with his
people unless his people make me. I am not going to do them any harm,
and I wish to be their friend. The White Father has sent me. Ask
E-egante if he has heard of Gray Fox. Tell him Gray Fox wishes E-egante
and all his people to be ready to go with him to-morrow at nine
o'clock."
And Sarah, standing on the frozen bank, pulled her green shawl closer,
and shouted her message faithfully to the willows. Nothing moved or
showed, and Crook, riding up to the squaw, held his hand up as a further
sign to the flag of peace that had been raised already. "Say that I am
Gray Fox," said he.
On that there was a moving in the bushes farther along, and, going
opposite that place with the squaw, Crook and Glynn saw a narrow
entrance across which some few branches reached that were now spread
aside for three figures to stand there.
"E-egante!" said Sarah, eagerly. "See him big man!" she added to Crook,
pointing. A tall and splendid buck, gleaming with colors, and rich with
fringe and buckskin, watched them. He seemed to look at Sarah, too. She,
being ordered, repeated what she had said; but the chief did not answer.
"He is counting our strength," said Glynn.
"He's done that some time ago," said Crook. "Tell E-egante," he
continued to the squaw, "that I will not send for more soldiers than he
sees here. I do not wish anything but peace unless he wishes
otherwise."
Sarah's musical voice sounded again from the bank, and E-egante watched
her intently till she was finished. This time he replied at some length.
He and his people had not done any harm. He had heard of Gray Fox often.
All his people knew Gray Fox was a good man and would not make trouble.
There were some flies that stung a man sitting in his house, when he had
not hurt them. Gray Fox would not hurt any one till their hand was
raised against him first. E-egante and his people had wondered why the
horses made so much noise just now. He and his people would come
to-morrow with Gray Fox.
And then he went inside the thicket again, and the willows looked as
innocent as ever. Crook and the captain rode away.
"My speech was just a little weak coming on top of a charge of cavalry,"
the General admitted. "And that fellow put his finger right on the
place. I'll give you my notion, captain. If I had said we had more
soldiers behind the hill, like as not this squaw of ours would have told
him I lied; she's an uncertain quantity, I find. But I told him the
exact truth--that I had no more--and he won't believe it, and that's
what I want."
So Glynn understood. The pack-train had been halted in a purposely
exposed position, which would look to the Indians as if another force
was certainly behind it, and every move was now made to give an
impression that the forty were only the advance of a large command.
Crook pitched his A tent close to the red men's village, and the troops
went into camp regardlessly near. The horses were turned out to graze
ostentatiously unprotected, so that the people in the thicket should
have every chance to notice how secure the white men felt. The mules
pastured comfortably over the shallow snow that crushed as they wandered
among the sage-bush, and the square bell hung once more from the neck of
the leader and tankled upon the hill. The shelter-tents littered the
flat above the wash-out, and besides the cook-fire others were built
irregularly far down the Malheur North Fork, shedding an extended
glimmer of deceit. It might have been the camp of many hundred. A little
blaze shone comfortably on the canvas of Crook's tent, and Sergeant
Keyser, being in charge of camp, had adopted the troop cook-fire for his
camp guard after the cooks had finished their work. The willow thicket
below grew black and mysterious, and quiet fell on the white camp. By
eight the troopers had gone to bed. Night had come pretty cold, and a
little occasional breeze, that passed like a chill hand laid a moment on
the face, and went down into the willows. Now and again the water
running through the ice would lap and gurgle at some air-hole. Sergeant
Keyser sat by his fire and listened to the lonely bell sounding from the
dark. He wished the men would feel more at home with him. With Jack
Long, satirical, old, and experienced, they were perfectly familiar,
because he was a civilian; but to Keyser, because he had been in command
of a battalion, they held the attitude of school-boys to a master--the
instinctive feeling of all privates towards all officers. Jones and
Cumnor were members of his camp guard. Being just now off post, they
stood at the fire, but away from him.
"How do you like this compared with barracks?" the sergeant asked,
conversationally.
"It's all right," said Jones.
"Did you think it was all right that first morning? I didn't enjoy it
much myself. Sit down and get warm, won't you?"
The men came and stood awkwardly. "I 'ain't never found any excitement
in getting up early," said Jones, and was silent. A burning log shifted,
and the bell sounded in a new place as the leader pastured along. Jones
kicked the log into better position. "But this affair's gettin'
inter-esting," he added.
"Don't you smoke?" Keyser inquired of Cumnor, and tossed him his
tobacco-pouch. Presently they were seated, and the conversation going
better. Arizona was compared with Idaho. Everybody had gone to bed.
"Arizona's the most outrageous outrage in the United States," declared
Jones.
"Why did you stay there six years, then?" said Cumnor.
"Guess I'd been there yet but for you comin' along and us both enlistin'
that crazy way. Idaho's better. Only," said Jones, thoughtfully, "coming
to an ice-box from a hundred thousand in the shade, it's a wonder a man
don't just split like a glass chimbly."
The willows crackled, and all laid hands on their pistols.
"How! how!" said a strange, propitiating voice.
It was a man on a horse, and directly they recognized E-egante himself.
They would have raised an alarm, but he was alone, and plainly not
running away. Nor had he weapons. He rode into the fire-light, and "How!
how!" he repeated, anxiously. He looked and nodded at the three, who
remained seated.
"Good-evening," said the sergeant.
"Christmas is coming," said Jones, amicably.
"How! how!" said E-egante. It was all the English he had. He sat on his
horse, looking at the men, the camp, the cook-fire, the A tent, and
beyond into the surrounding silence. He started when the bell suddenly
jangled near by. The wandering mule had only shifted in towards the camp
and shaken his head; but the Indian's nerves were evidently on the
sharpest strain.
"Sit down!" said Keyser, making signs, and at these E-egante started
suspiciously.
"Warm here!" Jones called to him, and Cumnor showed his pipe.
The chief edged a thought closer. His intent, brilliant eyes seemed
almost to listen as well as look, and though he sat his horse with
heedless grace and security, there was never a figure more ready for
vanishing upon the instant. He came a little nearer still, alert and
pretty as an inquisitive buck antelope, watching not the three soldiers
only, but everything else at once. He eyed their signs to dismount,
looked at their faces, considered, and with the greatest slowness got
off and came stalking to the fire. He was a fine tall man, and they
smiled and nodded at him, admiring his clean blankets and the
magnificence of his buckskin shirt and leggings.
"He's a jim-dandy," said Cumnor.
"You bet the girls think so," said Jones. "He gets his pick. For you're
a fighter too, ain't y'u?" he added, to E-egante.
"How! how!" said that personage, looking at them with grave affability
from the other side of the fire. Reassured presently, he accepted the
sergeant's pipe; but even while he smoked and responded to the gestures,
the alertness never left his eye, and his tall body gave no sense of
being relaxed. And so they all looked at each other across the waning
embers, while the old pack-mule moved about at the edge of camp,
crushing the crusted snow and pasturing along. After a time E-egante
gave a nod, handed the pipe back, and went into his thicket as he had
come. His visit had told him nothing; perhaps he had never supposed it
would, and came from curiosity. One person had watched this interview.
Sarah the squaw sat out in the night, afraid for her ancient hero; but
she was content to look upon his beauty, and go to sleep after he had
taken himself from her sight. The soldiers went to bed, and Keyser lay
wondering for a while before he took his nap between his surveillances.
The little breeze still passed at times, the running water and the ice
made sounds together, and he could hear the wandering bell, now distant
on the hill, irregularly punctuating the flight of the dark hours.
By nine next day there was the thicket sure enough, and the forty
waiting for the three hundred to come out of it. Then it became ten
o'clock, but that was the only difference, unless perhaps Sarah the
squaw grew more restless. The troopers stood ready to be told what to
do, joking together in low voices now and then; Crook sat watching Glynn
smoke; and through these stationary people walked Sarah, looking
wistfully at the thicket, and then at the faces of the adopted race she
served. She hardly knew what was in her own mind. Then it became eleven,
and Crook was tired of it, and made the capping move in his bluff. He
gave the orders himself.
"Sergeant."
Keyser saluted.
"You will detail eight men to go with you into the Indian camp. The men
are to carry pistols under their overcoats, and no other arms. You will
tell the Indians to come out. Repeat what I said to them last night.
Make it short. I'll give them ten minutes. If they don't come by then a
shot will be fired out here. At that signal you will remain in there and
blaze away at the Indians."
So Keyser picked his men.
The thirty-one remaining troopers stopped joking, and watched the squad
of nine and the interpreter file down the bank to visit the three
hundred. The dingy overcoats and the bright green shawl passed into the
thicket, and the General looked at his watch. Along the bend of the
stream clear noises tinkled from the water and the ice.
"What are they up to?" whispered a teamster to Jack Long. Long's face
was stern, but the teamster's was chalky and tight drawn. "Say," he
repeated, insistently, "what are we going to do?"
"We're to wait," Long whispered back, "till nothin' happens, and then
th' Ole Man'll fire a gun and signal them boys to shoot in there."
"Oh, it's to be waitin'?" said the teamster. He fastened his eyes on the
thicket, and his lips grew bloodless. The running river sounded more
plainly. "---- ---- it!" cried the man, desperately, "let's start the
fun, then." He whipped out his pistol, and Jack Long had just time to
seize him and stop a false signal.
"Why, you must be skeered," said Long. "I've a mind to beat yer skull
in."
"Waitin's so awful," whimpered the man. "I wisht I was along with them
in there."
Jack gave him back his revolver. "There," said he; "ye're not skeered, I
see. Waitin' ain't nice."
The eight troopers with Keyser were not having anything like so
distasteful a time. "Jock," said Specimen Jones to Cumnor, as they
followed the sergeant into the willows and began to come among the
lodges and striped savages, "you and me has saw Injuns before, Jock."
"And we'll do it again," said Cumnor.
Keyser looked at his watch: Four minutes gone. "Jones," said he, "you
patrol this path to the right so you can cover that gang there. There
must be four or five lodges down that way. Cumnor, see that dugout with
side-thatch and roofing of tule? You attend to that family. It's a big
one--all brothers." Thus the sergeant disposed his men quietly and quick
through the labyrinth till they became invisible to each other; and all
the while flights of Indians passed, half seen, among the tangle,
fleeting visions of yellow and red through the quiet-colored twigs.
Others squatted stoically, doing nothing. A few had guns, but most used
arrows, and had these stacked beside them where they squatted. Keyser
singled out a somewhat central figure--Fur Cap was his name--as his
starting-point if the signal should sound. It must sound now in a second
or two. He would not look at his watch lest it should hamper him. Fur
Cap sat by a pile of arrows, with a gun across his knees besides. Keyser
calculated that by standing close to him as he was, his boot would catch
the Indian under the chin just right, and save one cartridge. Not a red
man spoke, but Sarah the squaw dutifully speechified in a central place
where paths met near Keyser and Fur Cap. Her voice was persuasive and
warning. Some of the savages moved up and felt Keyser's overcoat. They
fingered the hard bulge of the pistol underneath, and passed on,
laughing, to the next soldier's coat, while Sarah did not cease to
harangue. The tall, stately man of last night appeared. His full dark
eye met Sarah's, and the woman's voice faltered and her breathing grew
troubled as she gazed at him. Once more Keyser looked at his watch:
Seven minutes. E-egante noticed Sarah's emotion, and his face showed
that her face pleased him. He spoke in a deep voice to Fur Cap,
stretching a fringed arm out towards the hill with a royal gesture, at
which Fur Cap rose.
"He will come, he will come!" said the squaw, running to Keyser. "They
all come now. Do not shoot."
"Let them show outside, then," thundered Keyser, "or it's too late. If
that gun goes before I can tell my men--"
He broke off and rushed to the entrance. There were skirmishers
deploying from three points, and Crook was raising his hand slowly.
There was a pistol in it. "General! General!" Keyser shouted, waving
both hands, "No!" Behind him came E-egante, with Sarah, talking in low
tones, and Fur Cap came too.
[Illustration: "HE HESITATED TO KILL THE WOMAN"]
The General saw, and did not give the signal. The sight of the
skirmishers hastened E-egante's mind. He spoke in a loud voice, and at
once his warriors began to emerge from the willows obediently. Crook's
bluff was succeeding. The Indians in waiting after nine were
attempting a little bluff of their own; but the unprecedented visit of
nine men appeared to them so dauntless that all notion of resistance
left them. They were sure Gray Fox had a large army. And they came,
and kept coming, and the place became full of them. The troopers had
all they could do to form an escort and keep up the delusion, but by
degrees order began, and the column was forming. Riding along the edge
of the willows came E-egante, gay in his blankets, and saying, "How!
how!" to Keyser, the only man at all near him. The pony ambled, and
sidled, paused, trotted a little, and Keyser was beginning to wonder,
when all at once a woman in a green shawl sprang from the thicket,
leaped behind the chief, and the pony flashed by and away, round the
curve. Keyser had lifted his carbine, but forbore; for he hesitated to
kill the woman. Once more the two appeared, diminutive and scurrying,
the green shawl bright against the hill-side they climbed. Sarah had
been willing to take her chances of death with her hero, and now she
vanished with him among his mountains, returning to her kind, and
leaving her wedded white man and half-breeds forever.
"I don't feel so mad as I ought," said Specimen Jones.
Crook laughed to Glynn about it. "We've got a big balance of 'em," he
said, "if we can get 'em all to Boise. They'll probably roast me in the
East." And they did. Hearing how forty took three hundred, but let one
escape (and a few more on the march home), the superannuated cattle of
the War Department sat sipping their drink at the club in Washington,
and explained to each other how they would have done it.
And so the General's bluff partly failed. E-egante kept his freedom,
"all along o' thet yere pizen squaw," as Mr. Long judiciously remarked.
It was not until many years after that the chief's destiny overtook
him; and concerning that, things both curious and sad could be told.[A]
[Footnote A: Let me no longer pervert General Crook's military tactics.
It was a dismounted charge that he ordered on this occasion, as a friend
who was present has written me since the first publication of this
story.
_Mr. Remington's illustration was made to suit the text in its original
form._--Publisher's Note.]
SALVATION GAP
After cutting the Gazelle's throat, Drylyn had gone out of her tent,
secure and happy in choosing the skilful moment. They would think it was
the other man--the unknown one. There were his boot-prints this fine
morning, marking his way from the tent down the hill into the trees. He
was not an inhabitant of the camp. This was his first visit, cautiously
made, and nobody had seen him come or go except Drylyn.
The woman was proprietor of the dance-hall at Salvation Gap, and on
account of her beauty and habits had been named the American Beer
Gazelle by a travelling naturalist who had education, and was interested
in the wild animals of all countries. Drylyn's relations with the
Gazelle were colored with sentiment. The sentiment on his part was
genuine; so genuine that the shrewd noticing camp joked Drylyn, telling
him he had grown to look young again under the elixir of romance. One of
the prospectors had remarked fancifully that Drylyn's "rusted mustache
had livened up; same ez flow'rs ye've kerried a long ways when yer girl
puts 'em in a pitcher o' water." Being the sentiment of a placer miner,
the lover's feeling took no offence or wound at any conduct of the
Gazelle's that was purely official; it was for him that she personally
cared. He never thought of suspecting anything when, after one of her
trips to Folsom, she began to send away some of the profits--gold,
coined sometimes, sometimes raw dust--that her hall of entertainment
earned for her. She mentioned to him that her mother in San Anton'
needed it, and simple-minded Drylyn believed. It did not occur to him to
ask, or even wonder, how it came that this mother had never needed money
until so lately, or why the trips to Folsom became so constant. Counting
her middle-aged adorer a fool, the humorous Gazelle had actually once,
on being prevented from taking the journey herself, asked him to carry
the package to Folsom for her, and deliver it there to a certain
shot-gun messenger of the express company, who would see that it went to
the right place. A woman's name and an address at San Antonio were
certainly scrawled on the parcel. The faithful Drylyn waited till the
stage came in, and handed over his treasure to the messenger, who gave
him one amazed look that he did not notice. He ought to have seen that
young man awhile afterwards, the package torn open, a bag of dust on his
knee, laughing almost to tears over a letter he had found with the gold
inside the wrapping. But Drylyn was on the road up to Salvation Gap at
that time. The shot-gun messenger was twenty-three; Drylyn was
forty-five. Gazelles are apt to do this sort of thing. After all,
though, it was silly, just for the sake of a laugh, to let the old lover
learn the face of his secret rival. It was one of those early unimagined
nails people sometimes drive in their own coffins. An ancient series of
events followed: continued abject faith and passion on the miner's part;
continued presents of dust from him to the lady; on her part continued
trips to Folsom, a lessened caution, and a brag of manner based upon her
very just popularity at the Gap; next, Drylyn's first sickening dawn of
doubt, jealousy equipping him with a new and alien slyness; the final
accident of his seeing the shot-gun messenger on his very first visit to
the Gap come out of the Gazelle's tent so early in the morning; the
instant blaze of truth and fury that turned Drylyn to a clever,
calculating wild beast. So now her throat was cut, and she was good and
dead. He had managed well. The whole game had shown instantly like a
picture on his brain, complete at a stroke, with every move clear. He
had let the man go down the hill--just for the present. The camp had got
up, eaten its breakfast, and gone out to the ditches, Drylyn along with
the rest. Owing to its situation, neighbors could not see him presently
leave his claim and walk back quickly to the Gap at an hour when the
dance-hall was likely to be lonely. He had ready what to say if the
other women should be there; but they were away at the creek below,
washing, and the luxurious, unsuspecting Gazelle was in bed in her own
tent, not yet disturbed. The quiet wild beast walked through the
deserted front entrance of the hall in the most natural manner, and so
behind among the empty bottles, and along the plank into the tent; then,
after a while, out again. She would never be disturbed now, and the wild
beast was back at his claim, knee-deep, and busy among the digging and
the wetness, in another pair of overalls just like the ones that were
now under some stones at the bottom of a mud-puddle. And then one very
bad long scream came up to the ditches, and Drylyn knew the women had
returned from their washing.
He raised his head mechanically to listen. He had never been a bad man;
had never wished to hurt anybody in his life before that he could
remember; but as he pondered upon it in his slow, sure brain, he knew
that he was glad he had done this, and was going to do more. He was
going to follow those tracks pretty soon, and finish the whole job with
his own hand. They had fooled him, and had taken trouble to do it; gone
out of their way, made game of him to the quick; and when he remembered,
for the twentieth time this morning, that day he had carried the package
of gold-dust--some of it very likely his own--to the smooth-faced
messenger at Folsom, Drylyn's stolid body trembled from head to foot,
and he spoke blind, inarticulate words.
But down below there the screams were sounding. A brother miner came
running by. Drylyn realized that he ought to be running too, of course,
and so he ran. All the men were running from their various scattered
claims, and Salvation Gap grew noisy and full of people at once. There
was the sheriff also, come up last evening on the track of some
stage-robbers, and quite opportune for this, he thought. He liked things
to be done legally. The turmoil of execration and fierce curiosity
thrashed about for the right man to pitch on for this crime. The
murdered woman had been so good company, so hearty a wit, such a robust
songstress, so tireless a dancer, so thoroughly everybody's friend, that
it was inconceivable to the mind of Salvation Gap that anybody there had
done it. The women were crying and wringing their hands--the Gazelle had
been good to them too; the men were talking and cursing, all but Drylyn
there among them, serious and strange-looking; so silent that the
sheriff eyed him once or twice, though he knew nothing of the miner's
infatuation. And then some woman shrieked out the name of Drylyn, and
the crowd had him gripped in a second, to let him go the next, laughing
at the preposterous idea. Saying nothing? Of course he didn't feel like
talking. To be sure he looked dazed. It was hard luck on him. They told
the sheriff about him and the Gazelle. They explained that Drylyn was
"sort of loony, anyway," and the sheriff said, "Oh!" and began to wonder
and surmise in this half-minute they had been now gathered, when
suddenly the inevitable boot-prints behind the tent down the hill were
found. The shout of discovery startled Drylyn as genuinely as if he had
never known, and he joined the wild rush of people to the hill. Nor was
this acting. The violence he had set going, and in which he swam like a
straw, made him forget, or for the moment drift away from, his arranged
thoughts, and the tracks on the hill had gone clean out of his head. He
was become a mere blank spectator in the storm, incapable of
calculation. His own handiwork had stunned him, for he had not foreseen
that consequences were going to rise and burst like this. The next thing
he knew he was in a pursuit, with pine-trees passing, and the hurrying
sheriff remarking to the band that he proposed to maintain order. Drylyn
heard his neighbor, a true Californian, whose words were lightest when
his purpose was most serious, telling the sheriff that order was
certainly Heaven's first law, and an elegant thing anywhere. But the
anxious officer made no retort in kind, and only said that
irregularities were damaging to the county's good name, and would keep
settlers from moving in. So the neighbor turned to Drylyn and asked him
when he was intending to wake up, as sleep-walking was considered to be
unhealthy. Drylyn gave a queer, almost wistful, smile, and so they went
along; the chatty neighbor spoke low to another man, and said he had
never sized up the true state of Drylyn's feeling for the Gazelle, and
that the sheriff might persuade some people to keep regular, when they
found the man they were hunting, but he doubted if the sheriff would be
persuading enough for Drylyn. They came out on a road, and the
sleep-walker recognized a rock and knew how far they had gone, and that
this was the stage-road between Folsom and Surprise Springs. They
followed the road, and round a bend came on the man. He had been taking
it easily, being in no hurry. He had come to this point by the stage the
night before, and now he was waiting for its return to take him back to
Folsom. He had been lunching, and was seated on a stone by a small
creek. He looked up and saw them, and their gait, and ominous
compactness. What he did was not the thing for him to do. He leaped into
cover and drew his revolver. This attempt at defence and escape was
really for the sake of the gold-dust he had in his pocket. But when he
recognized the sheriff's voice, telling him it would go better with him
if he did not try to kill any more people, he was greatly relieved that
it was not highwaymen after him and his little gold, and he put up his
pistol and waited for them, smiling, secure in his identity; and when
they drew nearer he asked them how many people he had killed already.
They came up and caught him and found the gold in a moment, ripping it
from his pocket; and the yell they gave at that stopped his smiling
entirely. When he found himself in irons and hurried along, he began to
explain that there was some mistake, and was told by the chatty neighbor
that maybe killing a woman was always a mistake, certainly one this
time. As they walked him among them they gave small notice to his
growing fright and bewilderment, but when he appealed to the sheriff on
the score of old acquaintanceship, and pitifully begged to know what
they supposed he had done, the miners laughed curiously. That brought
his entreating back to them, and he assured them, looking in their
faces, that he truly did need to be told why they wanted him. So they
held up the gold and asked him whose that had been, and he made a
wretched hesitation in answering. If anything was needed to clinch their
certainty, that did. They could not know that the young successful lover
had recognized Drylyn's strange face, and did not want to tell the truth
before him, and hence was telling an unskilful lie instead. A rattle of
wheels sounded among the pines ahead, and the stage came up and stopped.
Only the driver and a friend were on it, and both of them knew the
shot-gun messenger and the sheriff, and they asked in some astonishment
what the trouble was. It had been stage-robbers the sheriff had started
after, the driver thought. And--as he commented in friendly tones--to
turn up with Wells and Fargo's messenger was the neatest practical joke
that had occurred in the county for some time. The always serious and
anxious sheriff told the driver the accusation, and it was a genuine cry
of horror that the young lover gave at hearing the truth at last, and at
feeling the ghastly chain of probability that had wound itself about
him.
The sheriff wondered if there were a true ring in the man's voice. It
certainly sounded so. He was talking with rapid agony, and it was the
whole true story that was coming out now. But the chatty neighbor nudged
another neighbor at the new explanation about the gold-dust. That there
was no great quantity of it, after all, weighed little against this
double accounting for one simple fact; moreover, the new version did not
do the messenger credit in the estimation of the miners, but gave them a
still worse opinion of him. It is scarcely fair to disbelieve what a man
says he did, and at the same time despise him for having done it.
Miners, however, are rational rather than logical; while the listening
sheriff grew more determined there should be a proper trial, the
deputation from the Gap made up its mind more inexorably the other way.
It had even been in the miners' heads to finish the business here on the
Folsom road, and get home for supper; pine-trees were handy, and there
was rope in the stage. They were not much moved by the sheriff's plea
that something further might have turned up at the Gap; but at the
driver's more forcible suggestion that the Gap would feel disappointed
at being left out, they consented to take the man back there. Drylyn
never offered any opinion, or spoke at all. It was not necessary that he
should, and they forgot about him. It was time to be getting along, they
said. What was the good in standing in the road here? They nodded
good-day to the stage-driver, and took themselves and the prisoner into
the pines. Once the sheriff had looked at the driver and his friend
perched on the halted stage, but he immediately saw too much risk in his
half-formed notion of an alliance with them to gallop off with the
prisoner; his part must come later, if at all.
But the driver had perfectly understood the sheriff's glance, and
he was on the sheriff's side, though
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