The Westerners Part 38

"Nothing," said he briefly.

It was evident that the naturalist was trying to trap him.

"Where have you seen her before?" asked the latter, returning to the portrait. "She is old-fas.h.i.+oned--must have had that painted fifteen or twenty years ago--and yet I've seen her recently."

Lafond stiffly descended from the vehicle, both hands thrust deep into the pockets of his canvas coat, and peered over the old man's shoulder.

"Here, Lafond," the latter was saying, "you know more about this than I do----" He meant that the half-breed possessed a wider circle of acquaintances. At his words Lafond drew an ivory-handled clasp-knife from the pocket of his canvas coat, opened it in two lightning motions and stabbed the old man deeply in the back. The latter stumbled forward, half turning as he fell. Lafond plunged his blade wickedly into Durand's throat, where it stuck, twisting out of the murderer's hands. The victim writhed twice, gasped, and died.

Black Mike stood over the body for a moment, panting. He stooped to recover the knife. On its ivory handle he read the words "William Knapp," on which he remembered, and left it where it was. Then he climbed into his wagon and insanely lashed his horses into a frantic run.

The little furry 'c.o.o.n approached its master bristling. It dabbled its black paws, almost human, in the blood that stood on the threshold, and then, frothing at the muzzle, it scrambled into the house and up a high bookshelf, where it crouched, its eyes like coals of green fire.

On the hillside opposite a white-faced little boy rose from behind a mesquite clasping the neck of a homely dog. He ran at once to town, where he burst in on Moroney, crying, "Pop, pop, Black Mike's gone and killed old Bugchaser with a knife," after which he began to cry hysterically. It took time for the camp to arouse, to dress, to hear the tale, to believe, to visit the scene of the deed, to believe again after finding Billy's knife, to discuss, to decide, and finally to saddle horses and depart, puzzled, on the trail of Lafond. It had a rope. But it also wanted to hear more about it. Therefore its speed was not as rapid as it might have been, had a horse thief, for instance, been the object of pursuit.

So Lafond, after his first impulse to get away from the scene of his deed had spent itself, jogged along unmolested toward Rapid. His brain was working like lightning, but always on one line. He saw himself alone, standing opposed to this huge black Bad-luck. Everything was against him. But they couldn't get him down. He was Man-who-speaks-Medicine, the Sioux; he was Lafond, the half-breed; he was Black Mike, the pioneer. Let them come on! They thought they could corner him. He would show them. One was gone. There remained the other two. Lafond's mind saw red; he was set on murder. No consideration of reason, probability, or common sense obtruded itself athwart his plan. He could perceive one fact--that three men knew his secret, of whom one was dead and the other two were living. Why Knapp and Buckley should have told Durand; what they expected to gain by going to Rapid; or what benefit the naturalist imagined could accrue to him from his insinuating the state of affairs to the half-breed, the latter did not inquire. He only knew that he wanted to catch Knapp's buckboard before it had left the pine belt. Ambush would then be easier. He lashed his horses unmercifully.

Rockerville told him the two men had pa.s.sed through not half an hour before, and wondered at the wildness of his eye.

That was well. They could not escape him now, for their wagon was heavily loaded, and they were travelling leisurely, having no reason for haste. Remembering appearances, he told Rockerville that it did not much matter, he would not try to catch up; and then drove back toward Copper Creek, only to make a detour by a wood road into the Rapid trail again. As he approached the foothills, he could hear occasionally the creak of a brake below him, by which he knew that he was drawing near. He slowed up at once, for he knew of a short cut a mile or so ahead, which the prospectors would not attempt because of their heavy load, but by which he could come out ahead of his victims.

Then he would lie in wait. The short cut in question dipped steeply down into the bed of a creek, and as steeply up on the other side; while the main stage-road made a long horseshoe curve around the head of the canon. Lafond decided to drive rapidly down, to leave his team in the creek bottom, and to climb on foot to the level of the main road on the other side. In the meantime he drew as near to the other wagon as he could without being seen. The minutes seemed to drag.

At last he discerned the dimly blazed trail, rocky and dangerous enough, which dropped sheer away into the underbrush below. He locked the brakes and turned sharply down to the right. The descent was hazardous, b.u.mpy, exceedingly noisy. For this reason, it was not until he had reached the level ground at the bottom of the canon and the clash of iron tire against stone had ceased, that he became aware the ravine was already occupied. A sound of voices and laughter floated up through the thin screen of leaves. As the half-breed's vehicle pushed out toward the creek itself, he saw that he had unwittingly stumbled on a camp of Indians up in the Hills on one of their annual jaunts after teepee poles.

Once a year they make these excursions. The whole band--men, women, children, ponies, dogs, and household goods--goes along. It is an outing. The women fell and strip the long slender saplings. The men loaf lazily in front of their temporary shelters or ride about the Hills to the various camps, giving war dances for nickels and silver pieces. The occasion is eminently peaceful.

Of such a nature was the gathering which Michal Lafond came upon in the level of the little canon. The wigwams had been pitched either side of the old overgrown road. Children had cut away the slight underbrush to clear a round smooth park of perhaps thirty yards diameter, in the circ.u.mference of which were crowded the persons and household belongings of four score people. Near the centre stood the chief's lodge distinguished by a s.h.i.+eld and spear. The whole was a facsimile of a plains camp, except that here the whole affair was in miniature--little wigwams, little kettle-tripods, little s.p.a.ce--for the camp was but temporary. Perhaps a score of men were idling about, dressed in blue overalls and old flannel s.h.i.+rts. Moccasins and no hats left still a slight flavor of savagery. The women were clothed for the most part in dirty calico prints. The children had on just nothing at all.

Lafond cursed a little excitedly as he became aware of this not unpicturesque gathering. It was plainly out of the question to leave his horses and wagon in the creek bottom as he had intended; and it was now equally impossible to waylay the prospectors at the top of the grade. A shot would bring out the entire band. The situation was much complicated, for just beyond lay the rolling treeless foothills. More bad luck!

Still the half-breed remembered it was yet many miles to Rapid; and an ambush would not be impossible in some one of the numerous gullies that seamed the foothills. He must hurry his tired horses up the steep slope in order to emerge on the main road ahead of Knapp and Buckley.

"How!" said the nearest warrior, raising his hand palm outward.

"How!" replied Lafond gravely.

He drove on through the half-obliterated road, responding to the conventional salutations of those on the right and on the left. Near the further side of the little clearing, a tiny copper-colored boy rose from the gra.s.s and scurried across in front of the horses, so near that Lafond had to pull up sharply to keep from running over him. An old woman, evidently its nurse, hurried to catch him. When she came to the road, however, she stopped short, and stared at Black Mike wildly, and began to scream out in the language of the Brule Sioux.

"'Tis he, the Defiler! 'Tis he!"

She was an unkempt, wild old hag, and Lafond thought her mad. Her face was lined deeply, as only an Indian's face ever is; a few ragged wisps of gray hair fell over her eyes; and her skinny arm showed that she was thin almost to emaciation.

At her scream a warrior arose before the chief's lodge and approached.

From all directions the other warriors gathered. Two of the younger men had already taken the horses by the bits. Lafond did not understand it, and was about to expostulate vigorously against what he thought was intended robbery until he saw the face of the chieftain, who now drew near. Then he turned cold to the marrow.

The chief looked him in the face for almost a minute.

"It is not so," he said quietly.

The hag had ceased her cries when the two young men had grasped the horses' bits.

"It is so, O Lone Wolf," she replied with respect. "The form is changed by the hand of Manitou, but the spirit is the same, and I know it in his eyes. It is the Defiler."

"Let Rippling Water be sought," responded the savage, still without excitement.

About him the old-time dignity clung as a mantle. To any one in a less desperate situation than Michal Lafond there would have been something strangely incongruous and a little pathetic in this contrast between the manner of the old wild plains savage and the habit of the modern ward of the government. Even he was cool enough to see that the once powerful tribe had sadly shrunk in numbers and in wealth.

After a moment the woman called by the name of Rippling Water appeared from a distance, where she had been cutting birch bark. In the syllables of the beautiful name Lafond had recognized that of the second of his Indian wives; in the prematurely aged withered squaw who now approached he recognized nothing.

"My daughter," said Lone Wolf, "look upon this man. Have you seen him ever?"

She peered at him a moment through short-sighted eyes.

"I have lain on his bosom," she answered simply.

"It is----?"

"It is the Defiler," she replied.

x.x.xVI

UNDER THE ETERNAL STARS

After the ma.s.sacre at the battle of the Little Big Horn, a vast number of Indian refugees fled over the borders into Canada. There they dwelt, drawing three pounds of beef a day from arbitrary uniformed individuals, who were strangely lacking in sympathy, and very observant of the few rules and regulations which a mysterious White Mother over the sea had seen fit to impose. Three pounds of meat a day is not much. Still it is enough to get along on, and with the necessity, and indeed, the opportunity of the chase gone, the bucks were able to wax lazy, drunken, and generally s.h.i.+ftless to their hearts' content. All this was frowned on by the uniformed individuals, but opportunities were not far to seek.

There has never been a nation more warlike, brave, and hardy than the Sioux in its native environment of war and hunting. These two furnished every point of leverage--physical, moral, intellectual--which the savage required to lift him to the level of his greatest efficiency. From the buffalo itself the Sioux family obtained its supply of wigwams, robes, food, fuel, light, harness, bow-strings, instruments of industry--in fact almost every article of necessity or luxury appertaining to its everyday life. From the chase of the animal the young Dacotah learned to ride, to shoot, to risk his life. And then in his constant strife with his neighbors, the Blackfeet or the Crows or the p.a.w.nees, he was forced, if he would survive, to develop to the last degree his cunning, his observation, his strategy, his resourcefulness, his patience, his power to endure, his personal courage. Habituated to these two, the chase and war, from his early youth, he came at last to be the coolest, most dangerous warrior of the plains. He could ride anything, bareback, in any position. With his short, powerful bow he could launch a half-dozen arrows into the air before the first reached the ground, or could drive one of his shafts quite through the body of a buffalo. When necessity required, he was brave to the point of recklessness; but again, when expediency advised, he could worm his way for miles through the scantiest cover, flat on his face, by the laborious use alone of his elbows and toes. He could read a whole history in a trail which another might not even distinguish. He could sit absolutely motionless for hours in the hottest sun or the bitterest cold. And he could bear, as he was often called upon to do, the severest physical pain without a quiver of the eyelid.

But when the buffalo vanished, the Sioux pa.s.sed the meridian of his powers. No other means of subsistence offered. He was forced to plunder, or go to the reservation for Government beef. Thence came much whisky and much loafing. The new young man had not the training of his father. So, in a little, the Teton nation was subdued and brought to reservations, and herded in an overall-plug-hat-blanket-wearing mult.i.tude, even now but half-tamed, and fiercely instinct with hereditary ferocity and resourcefulness.

Other Indians go to Carlisle, learn to plough, and become at least partially civilized. The Sioux, fierce, hawk-eyed, wide-nostrilled, sits in solitary dignity before his lodge, brooding. Occasionally he has to be rounded up with a Gatling, as witness Wounded Knee. I have never been able to envy the agents of Dakota reservations.

When the statute of limitations ran out, or whatever mysterious time-limit the Government puts on its displeasure against Indian murderers, Sitting Bull and a horde of his fellow-warriors came back.

Sitting Bull joined Buffalo Bill's show, where he had a good time until he began ghost-dancing and was killed in the Wounded Knee campaign.

But some, Lone Wolf's band among them, remained in Canada. They had various reasons for doing so.

Lone Wolf stayed because he was in hard luck. He had barely settled down in his new home before the great Manitou had seen fit to strike his children with the Spotted Sickness. When finally the last case had been buried hastily, and its clothes and belongings burned under the distant eye of the uniformed man, the formerly powerful band found itself reduced by almost half. By dint of sitting innumerable days naked in a circle on the prairie and beating a tom-tom until the agent prayed for rain, the survivors managed to secure for themselves immunity from the Spotted Sickness at least. Then some of the ponies were stolen. Then a schism occurred in the community; and Three Knives took with him a dozen families and established a new clan within plain sight of the old. Lone Wolf was powerless because of the uniformed individual, who frowned on the Indian idea of patriarchal chastis.e.m.e.nt.

A very young man of the band killed the agent, hoping thus to earn praise, but almost before the embers were cold and before the scalp of Three Knives had clotted dry, there appeared an astounding number of uniforms, who promptly decimated Lone Wolf's warriors and took away all their arms. Lone Wolf discovered that these uniformed men were in reality nothing but soldiers--a disgusting fact which he had not before suspected. They hung six of his young men, and that night a number of things happened, such as the unprovoked fall of Lone Wolf's standard from over his lodge, which showed plainly that Gitche Manitou was still angry.

Lone Wolf gathered his remnants about him and journeyed south to Spotted Tail.

There he enjoyed the discontented tranquillity of a United States reservation, with occasional privileges if he was good.

Lone Wolf had gone into the north country at the head of three hundred efficient fighting men, well armed with rifles, rich in ammunition, ponies, and the luxuries of daily existence. He came back as the nominal chief of thirty-five warriors, with few firearms, and less wealth. Counting in the women, children, and old men, his original band had numbered nearly a thousand souls--a large camp even for the old days. Now there remained barely a tenth of that number.

Misfortunes such as these must have a reason. Gitche Manitou is stern, but he is not unjust. Everybody knows that. And the reason Lone Wolf's band was so afflicted, Big Thunder, the medicine man, had discovered, lay in the fact that the defiling of the tribe's token, after the Little Big Horn, had been done by a member of the tribe itself. Until the culprit should be brought to justice the wrath of Gitche Manitou would continue to be visited impartially on the entire band.

The recognition of Rippling Water made a profound impression on those standing about. There flashed into Lone Wolf's eagle face a gleam of satisfaction so intense that Black Mike started. He had not the remotest notion that he was in any actual danger, for his dealings with the tribe in those old times when he had been a member of it had always been rather to its advantage than to his own. That it was unfriendly to him because of his unceremonious desertion of it, he did not doubt.