Vanguards of the Plains Part 22

On the side porch, a little affair made to shelter the doorway, I saw Beverly Clarenden and Little Blue Flower. He was speaking gently, but with his blunt frankness, as he patted the two brown hands clinging to his arm. The Indian girl's white draperies were picturesque anywhere. In this dramatic setting they were startlingly beautiful, and her face, outlined in the dim light, was a thing rare to see. I could not hear her words, but her soft Hopi voice had a tender tone.

I was waiting to let them pa.s.s in when I heard Beverly's voice, and I saw him bend over the little maiden, and, putting one arm around her, he drew her close to him and kissed her forehead. I knew it was a brother's sympathetic act--and all men know how dangerous a thing that is; that there are no ties binding brother to sister except the bonds of kindred blood. The girl slipped inside the dining-room door, and a minute later a candle flickered behind her bedroom window-blind in the gable of the house. I waited for Beverly to go, determined never to mention what I had seen, when I caught the clear low voice whose tones could make my pulse thresh in its walls.

"Beverly, Beverly, it breaks my heart--" I lost the remainder of the sentence, but Beverly's words were clear and direct and full of a frank surprise.

"Eloise, do you really care?"

I turned away quickly that I might not hear any more. The rest of that night I sat wide awake and staring at the misty valley of the Kaw, where silvery ripples flashed up here and there against the shadowy sand-bars.

The steamboat for St. Louis left the Westport Landing wharf at six o'clock in the morning, before the mists had lifted over the big yellow Missouri. From our bluff I saw the smoke belch from its stacks as it pulled away and started down-stream; but only Uncle Esmond and Jondo waited to wave good-by to the sweet-faced girl looking back at them from its deck. Beverly had overslept, and Little Blue Flower had left an hour earlier with a wagon-train starting west toward Council Grove. In her room lay the white Grecian robe and the headband of wrought silver with coral pendants. On the little white pin-cus.h.i.+on on the dressing-table the bright pin-heads spelled out one Hopi word that carries all good will and blessing,

LOLOMI.

Twenty-four hours later Rex Krane left his bride, and he and Bill Banney and Beverly and I, under command of Jondo, started on our long trip overland to Santa Fe. And two of us carried some memories we hoped to lose when new scenes and certain perils should surround us.

XI

"OUR FRIENDS--THE ENEMY"

And you all know security Is mortal's chiefest enemy.

SHAKESPEARE.

In St. Louis and Kansas City men of Esmond Clarenden's type were sending out great caravans of goods and receiving return cargoes across the plains--pioneer trade-builders, uncrowned sovereigns of national expansion--against whose enduring power wars for conquest are as flashlight to daylight. And Beverly Clarenden and I, with the whole battalion of plainsmen--"bull-whackers," in the common parlance of the Santa Fe Trail--who drove those caravans to and fro, may also have been State-builders, as Uncle Esmond had declared we would be. Yet we hardly looked like makers of empire in those summer days when we followed the great wagon-trains along the prairies and over the mountain pa.s.ses.

Two of us had come home from school hilariously eager for the trail service. But the silent plains made men thoughtful and introspective.

Days of endless level landscapes under wide-arching skies, and nights in the open beneath the everlasting silent stars, give a man time to get close to himself, to relive his childhood, to measure human values, to hear the voice in the storm-cloud and the song of low-purring winds, to harden against the monotonous glare of sunlight, to defy the burning heat, and to feel--aye, to feel the spell of crystal day-dawns and the sweetness of velvet-shadowed twilights. Beverly and I were typical plainsmen in that we never spoke of these things to each other--that is not the way of the plainsman.

Our company had been organized at Council Grove--three trains of twenty-six wagons each, drawn by three or four spans of mules or yoke of oxen, guarded by eightscore of "bull-whackers." And there were a dozen or more ponies trained for swift riding in cases of emergency. There were also half a dozen private outfits under protection of the large body.

The usual election before starting had made Jondo captain of the whole company. His was the controlling type of spirit that could have bent a battalion or swayed a Congress. For all the commanders and lawmakers of that day were not confined to the army and to Congress. Some of them escaped to the West and became sovereigns of service there. And Jondo had need for an intrepid spirit to rule that group of men, as that journey across the plains proved.

On the day before we left Council Grove he was sitting with the heads of the other wagon-trains under a big oak-tree, perfecting final plans for the journey.

"Gail, I want you to sign some papers here," he said. "It is the agreement for the trip among the three companies owning the trains."

I read aloud the contract setting forth how one Jean Deau, representing Esmond Clarenden, of Kansas City, with Smith and Davis, representing two other companies from St. Louis, together agreed to certain conditions regarding the journey.

Smith and Davis had already signed, and as I took the pen, a white-haired old trapper who was sitting near by burst out:

"Jean Deau! Jean Deau! Who the devil is Jean Deau?"

Jondo did not look up, but the lines hardened about his mouth.

"It's a sound. Don't get in the way, old man. Go ahead, Clarenden,"

Smith commanded.

Few questions were asked in those days, for most men on the plains had a history, and it was what a man could do here, not what he had done somewhere else, that counted.

So I, representing Esmond Clarenden, signed the paper and the two managers hurried away. But the old trapper sat staring at Jondo.

"Say, I'm gittin' close to the end of the trail, and the divide ain't fur off for me. D'ye mind if I say somethin'?" he asked at last.

Jondo looked up with that smile that could warm any man's heart.

"Say on," he commanded, kindly.

"You aint never signin' your own name nowhere, it sorter seems."

Jondo shook his head.

"Didn't you and this Clarenden outfit go through here 'bout ten years ago one night? Some Mexican greasers was raisin' h.e.l.l and proppin' it up with a whisky-bottle that night, layin' fur you vicious."

Jondo smiled and nodded a.s.sent.

"Well, them fellers comin' in had a bargain with a pa.s.sel of Kioways to git you plenty if they missed you themselves; to clinch their bargain they give 'em a pore little Hopi Injun girl they'd brung along with a lot of other Mexicans and squaws."

"I had that figured out pretty well at the time," Jondo said, with a smile.

"But, Jean Deau--" the old man began.

"No, Jondo. Go on. I'm busy," Jondo interrupted.

The old man's watery eyes gleamed.

"I just want to say friendly-like, that them Kioways never forgot the trick you worked on 'em, an' the _tornydo_ that busted 'em at p.a.w.nee Rock they laid to your bad medicine. They went clare back to Bent's Fort to fix you. Them and that rovin' bunch of Mexicans that scattered along the trail with 'em in time of the Mexican War. They'd 'a' lost you but fur a little Apache cuss they struck out there who showed 'em to you."

Jondo looked up quickly now. Santan, Beverly's "Satan," whom our captain had defended, flashed to my mind, but I knew by Jondo's face that he did not believe the old trapper's story.

"Them Kioways is still layin' fur you ever' year, I tell you, an'

they're bound to git you sooner or later. I'm tellin' ye in kindness."

The old man's voice weakened a little.

"And I'm taking you in kindness," Jondo said. "You may be doing me a great service."

"I sh.o.r.e am. Take my word an' keep awake. Keep awake!"

In spite of his drink-bleared eyes and weakened frame, there was a hint of the commander in him, a mere shadow of the energy that had gone years ago into the wild, solitary life of the trapper who foreran the trail days here.

"One more trip to the ha'nts of the fur-bearin' and it's good-by to the mountain trails and the river courses fur me," he said, as he rose and stalked unsteadily away, and--I never saw him again.