XXIITHE SQUAW MAN
Captain Ranger overtook his train at a late hour, still nursing his towering wrath. His face was livid, and his breathing stertorous. Snatching the ox-whip from the hands of Jean and frightening the discouraged cattle into the semblance of an attempt at hurry by the cruel vehemence with which he belabored their lash-beflecked hides, he urged them forward, never once relaxing his attacks with the whip till he had rushedthem over the uneven road and rocks for six or seven miles.
“Daddie is in a terrible tantrum over something very unusual,” said Jean. “Do you know what is the matter?” she asked aside, addressing Sally O’Dowd.
“No, Jean; unless he had some hot words with that post-trader. I know he thought ten dollars a hundred for flour was robbery. And think of a dollar a pound for dried peaches!”
“Daddie’s not idiot enough to work himself into a fever over a trifle like that,” answered Jean. “But suppose he has been thrown into a passion by anybody, the poor half-sick and half-famished oxen ought not to be punished for it. He reminds me of an old Kentucky slave-owner who got so mad because one of his sons failed to pass his first exams at West Point that he went out, as soon as he heard about it, and cruelly whipped a nigger.” And falling back to the family team, beside which Hal was trudging, whip in hand, striving to keep the jaded cattle close behind his father’s oxen, she dropped hastily on one knee on the wagon-tongue and climbed nimbly to a seat.
“That trader is still sitting by the roadside,” she cried to Sally, who was trudging through the sand. “He’s digging the earth with a jack-knife or dirk, or some other sharp implement, and seems quite as savage and out of humor as daddie. Wonder what daddie said to him.”
One by one the wagons passed the solitary trader, who had climbed to a low ledge of rocks, where he sat as silent as the sun. His knife had fallen to the ground and lay glittering at his feet. His broad sombrero shaded his face.
The sudden rebound from the great happiness that had been his when first informed that he was not a murderer and an outlaw, to the abject position of a spurned and degraded “squaw man” seemed more than he could bear. “I am not a murderer, though, and that’s some comfort,”he moaned. “But I am still a Pariah,—an outcast from my own people. What will my dear mother think of me when John acquaints her with the facts? What will my father say or do?”
It is well that Mother Nature, in her wisdom and mercy, has provided a limit to human suffering, else everybody in this world would at times become insane.
Cicadas gave forth their rasping notes in the dry grass, and a colony of prairie dogs played hide-and-seek over the uneven streets above an underground settlement hard by. A badger peeped cautiously from the mouth of his sagebrush-guarded den, and a rattlesnake crawled unnoticed past his feet.
“I don’t blame John for being disappointed and angry,” he said aloud, “but I am amazed at his lack of charity. If he could have seen and known Wahnetta as I did, at the time of our marriage, he would have been pleased with my choice. But it is too late now. Her girlish grace and beauty are gone, and one could hardly distinguish her from any of the other pappoose-burdened, camas-digging squaws that abound in spots in the land of the Latter-Day Saints. I might send her back, with the children, to the remnant of her tribe among the Bad Lands, but the act would be infamous. No, Joseph Ranger; you must take your medicine.”
He thought of his joyous exultation at the time he had won the accomplished and graceful Indian princess, whom half-a-dozen distinguished braves and as many handsome white traders had sought in marriage; of her trusting preference for him; of their joyous honeymoon; and of the herd of beautiful horses with which he had purchased her for his chosen bride, thus making her a slave. He winced as he thought of the legal status of his wife and children.
He blushed with shame as he thought of her loyalty to him through all the years of her transformation from a lithe and pretty maiden of sixteen, whom every manadmired, to the shapeless and slovenly specimen of her people, of whom he was now ashamed. He thought bitterly yet lovingly of the numerous children she had borne him uncomplainingly, while wandering from place to place in quest of roots and berries to save them from starvation in their early married years, when game would be scarce and his fickle fortunes had vanished for months at a stretch.
He remembered with what loving pride he had named his first two children John and Annie, in honor of the brother and sister for whom his heart had so often hungered. “And the end is this!” he cried, noting with a start that the sun was down. “Why did I name them John and Annie? I might have known better. I was a fool. And yet why should they be spurned on account of their Indian blood? If, instead of marrying Wahnetta, I had refused to make her my lawful wife, would my white relations have spurned me now?”
His childhood days passed and repassed before his mental vision like a panorama.
His family had been proud of him. What sacrifices they had made to send him to college, and with what base ingratitude he had repaid their loyalty and love! He had worse than wasted his opportunities, he thought, as he gazed abroad over the mighty landscape, bounded on the one hand by the wide basin of the receded and still slowly receding waters of Great Salt Lake, and on the other by the Rocky Mountains,—so near that they obstructed his vision, though he well knew their extent and majesty. “This won’t do!” cried the wretched man, as he started homeward, reeling like a drunken man.
“Papa!” cried a childish voice. “Do hurry home! We are so hungry! Where have you been for so long?”
“All right, Johnnie; I’m coming. Papa forgot.”
In a large military tent, or annex, at the rear end of the trader’s tent sat Wahnetta, his wife. He shudderedat the thought. And yet why should he? Was she not as good as he? Had all her years of faithful servitude counted for nothing?
A meal of boiled buffalo meat and vegetables, with bread, coffee, butter, and eggs, was waiting on a table of rough boards resting on trestles, and covered with an oilcloth that had once been white.
In one corner, beside a big sheet-iron cook-stove, sat, or rather crouched, the woman whom he had made his wife. She was not yet thirty years of age, but all traces of her girlish youth and beauty of face and figure were gone. Her dress, a cheap and garish print, was open at the neck and arms, and hung in slovenly folds about her fat form and moccasined feet.
“Why in thunder don’t you keep yourself and the young ones clean and dressed up?” asked her husband, as he dropped into his seat at table. “You keep yourself like a Digger squaw!”
“I should belie the customs of my people if I aped the airs of white folks when I must live like an Indian, Joseph Addicks!” said the woman, in well-modulated English, as she arose and approached the table, coffee-pot in hand.
“I loathe and abhor the very sight of you!” he exclaimed with a savage glare.
“You didn’t talk like that when I was young and pretty, Joseph! If you had tried it once, you would not have had a chance to repeat it then. Perhaps,” she added bitterly, a moment later, as she filled his plate, “perhaps I could have retained my charms if you had taken me back to London and kept me within the pale of civilization in which I was educated. You said before you married me that you would take me back to Canada, where you said your people lived, who would be glad to welcome me. How well you have kept your promise let these surroundings answer. I married you believing that your people would be my people, and your God my God. And,” looking around her, “this is the result!”
The sleeves of her gaudy dress were rolled back above the elbows, exposing her fat yet muscular arms, not over-clean; and the dingy pipe she had been smoking protruded from the open bosom of her gown.
“Where have you been during all this busy afternoon, Joseph?” she asked, still standing.
“To hell!”
“Your missionaries have taught me that people only go to hell from choice, Joseph; that is, if there is any worse hell anywhere than we are in all the time,—which I love the Great Spirit too well to believe. It seems to me we are compelled to take the punishment we bring upon ourselves here and now.”
“You haven’t any right to think, you loathsome, disgusting—”
“Stop, Joseph Addicks! This is, you say, a white man’s country now. Will you prove it by behaving yourself like a gentleman? I didn’t live for four years in a white man’s country for nothing.”
He arose and left the table without a word. His wife had seen him in moods like this before.
“Come, John; come, Annie; take your seats at table. You must be half famished.”
Four or five smaller children as dusky as herself were playing on the earthen floor; and, leaning helplessly against a pyramid of flour sacks, lashed in Indian style to its birchen cradle, was a pappoose of three months, defencelessly enduring an attack of mosquitoes on its face and eyes.
“My father was a fool for sending me to college,” thought Joseph Ranger, who, like many others that go wrong, was ready to blame everything and everybody except himself. “The university should have stopped that hazing before it began, so I couldn’t have had that fracas.”
“Why didn’t you eat your dinner, Joseph?” asked his wife, after she had fed the children.
“Because I hate this accursed life too heartily to have any appetite for food.”
“Haven’t I always urged you to go with us back to civilization, Joseph?”
“With you for a wife? You don’t know what you are talking about.”
Then—but it was not the first time since Wahnetta had become his property by purchase—he fired himself up with the vile whiskey his company held in stock, and, taking advantage of the English common law, at that time an acknowledged authority in every State and Territory in the Union, he provided himself with a stick, no thicker than his thumb, and beat Wahnetta, his wife, long and brutally.
Captain Ranger had allowed his anger to cool before the sun went down. To his credit be it spoken, he was very much ashamed of himself. “I was like an enraged, unreasoning animal,” he exclaimed aloud. “I might at least have repulsed Joe with kindness. I will write to my father and mother and tell them that my brother who was lost is alive and is found. But I’ll say nothing about the domestic side of his history. It would only grieve them all, and they couldn’t help matters. It is none of my business, anyhow.”
But he could not sleep. The memory of his and Joseph’s boyhood days reproached him, and he thought lovingly, in spite of himself, of the younger brother of whom he had been so proud. Many incidents of their childhood, long forgotten, passed before him with startling vividness.
“Joe saved my life once,” he said, half audibly. “I would have been drowned as sure as fate, when I broke through the ice that day, if he hadn’t saved me at the risk of his own life. Dear boy! I’ll saddle Sukie and go back to see him in the morning.” With this resolution settled in his mind, he fell asleep; but his sleep wasfitful. Sometimes the sad, sweet face of his gentle Annie would bend over him, awakening him with a start. A conviction settled more and more strongly upon his mind that he had cruelly wronged his brother, and he would be allowed no rest till he should atone.
Once, long before morning, he saw himself face to face with a raging buffalo bull. It was without eyes, and gazed at him through sightless sockets, and shook its formidable head at him with as much certainty of aim as though its thick and darkened skull were ablaze with light. The beast held the only vantage-ground,—an open plain,—and at his back rose a sheer and inaccessible mountain, up which there was no chance of escape.