"This is Tubby, our brevet acting deputy vice-cook. Allow me to make known Detective-Sergeant Ithuriel Fat McBugjuice, bai bingah, yaas. The grin with a face attached belongs to Mutiny. Rich Mixed makes his bark and wags his compliments. Here's Sergeant Snuffleton, all present, and correct waist measurement fifty-nine, my dear, and bustle a number twelve. Calamity makes his bow. And this is Tribulation, with a bad cold from oversleeping on sentry."
I went to the lines, where Buckie and Brat were loading my pack-horse, and would not let me interfere with that, or with the saddling. Restless, I wandered among the tents, where the boys were preparing for a morrow in which I should have no share. "Sweat, you poor workers," I told them. "Lick, spit and polish, for every day has its dog; but I'm a free civilian. No more parades, no more pack drill, no guards, no cells, no more fatigues except good bed fatigue.
"Go it, you pigeon-breasted shave-tails, clean harness, you poor-souled rookies, you pemmican eaters, you pie-biters, you ring-tailed snorters!
"The Blackguard was taken young and raised on alkali—everybody's dog on government beans and sow-belly, rode sweating hell-for-leather after horse thieves, rebels and coyotes, wore government socks, and didn't believe in the gawspel—
"Sweat, you slaves, rustle, you gophers, till the civvies send kids to camp for a convent training, you sons of sin—but I'm for the open range, and you'll hear my long wolf-howls by starlight."
Then I was back with Black Prince to say good-by, and when Brat came to fetch me, I turned on him with a snarl, blaspheming horribly.
So I got the señora astride on a man saddle, and mounted my own plug, taking the lead-rope from Buckie to tow the pack-horse, and gave Sergeant-Major Samlet an episcopal benediction. The whole troop had gathered round us to shake hands at parting, and fire a volley of old boots and rice as our bridal procession moved out into the darkness, into the wilderness. Three rousing cheers drowned the music of last post, the funeral music which is played over open graves.
Buckie and Brat came down to the ford of Wild Horse Creek, and there, while Rich Mixed barked all round us, I had to say good-by. Brat was laughing still over the sergeant-major's pleasure at my Latin compliments: "Maledico! Maledicite!" Then our horses went splashing into the ford, and I saw my dog break back to his home in camp, for the bugle was calling "Lights out" to the very stars. God who mends breaking hearts may have heard me laugh when my dog deserted me.
The news of my marriage with Mrs. Sarde swept through the regiment like flames through grass. All men knew now that either Sarde had made a bogus marriage, or else the Blackguard had committed bigamy. Then Sarde's position become impossible, for his brother officers demanded of him that he clear himself of scandal or send in his papers. He produced counsel's opinion that a marriage made in good faith before any genuine minister of religion would hold in law. He obtained a warrant for my arrest and extradition on charges of abduction and bigamy. If I came to trial, my very innocence involved a year's imprisonment for desertion from the force.
To allay the danger of my being arrested, the Brat and Buckie put about the news of my death, killed by the fall of a horse down somewhere in Montana. Then Sarde felt safe, and slandered my memory.
When God made everything that creepeth, He saw it was good. So Sarde was good, but I do not think that he improved with keeping.
The story of my death grew from a rumor into a belief, and the old hands remembered that Brat once had a brother—killed, poor chap, by the fall of a horse down somewhere in Montana.
We who once served in the great regiment have often come together by accident in the later years, meeting old comrades in the Klondike gold rush, or the South African field force, or the national reserve of British veterans. We make new partnerships for auld lang syne in Sikkim or Patagonia, Damaraland or Samoa, or, dressed up like ridiculous waiters, dining at some white table in town. We parted as troopers to meet as officers, our scalawags are squires, our wasters wealthy men, but our meetings are grave with memories of Toby who died a tramp, of Jumbo who shot himself, of Monte who was rolled on by a horse. Spirits are calling to us across the deep from every continent, and all the oceans. The glass that was lifted for a toast of the good old times falls broken, because some remembered voice comes from among the candles: "Well, here's luck!"
I have been present when men, who did not suspect my membership, spoke of the tribal memories, and one of them, I remember, mentioned the Blackguard kindly, as numbered among our dead.
I
The husband who shows suspicions of his wife gives everybody to hope that she is dissolute. I never showed or felt suspicion concerning the Señora de la Mancha. While a ship's pump runs foul there may be suspicion, but when the stream clears all doubts are at an end, and it is best to run her aground out of temptation. At Lonely Valley, the señora was free from temptation.
In summer, I earned my living as a riding man, in winter as a wolfer and trapper on the Montana ranges; but all the year round my earnings went to the land and fencing, the stock and implements, for our homestead in Lonely Valley.
I could not become an American citizen without perjuring my oath of allegiance to Her Brittanic Majesty, so my señora was sole owner of that homestead.
Until I could get a livelihood out of the ranch, she had to face the tragic loneliness of all pioneer women out on the frontier. And that was her probation, test of her womanhood, measure of her reality, if she would be my wife. I hoped that, with the advent of our son Ernesto, the woman would find her soul. For the soul has no life in itself, can not be born except in love for others, or can not live save in self-sacrifice.
For the first two years, I think, I was half-dead with pain, for I could not see the wilderness in which I rode, or feel the glamour of the sky-line, or taste the freshness of the air, or scent the perfume of the plains or mountains. Then came a third year, when poignant memories dulled down to bearing point, and I began to live.
All of us, I suppose, have known some usual hazards of battle, thirst, famine, cold, pestilence, fire, flood, storm or sickness, perils of the body appealing to our courage and leaving quite pleasant memories. I, for one, have found these things good for me, yet look back only with dread, with horror, to perils of the mind. There are sorrows of which even remembrance is screaming agony, and of that kind was my default from the mounted police. To forget or go mad, to fight devils and drive them out, to be reminded and have to fight again, to beat aside expedients of drugs, of drinking, of suicide, and face naked the terrors of memory—all that was part of my training, the best part, the ordeal by torture.
I had no hope. Unless the señora went blind, unable to see my faults, or I went deaf, unable to hear her tongue, the future had become impossible for both. Yet desperation is mistress of the impossible, and there was one way to make the señora's life an easier burden. I had found out what dollars were worth when I tried to borrow some. But I need not borrow. I was twenty-five, so it was time for my swindling trustees to render the Brat's estate and mine into my keeping. So at the end of my third year as a cowboy, after the beef round-up, I let the señora suppose I had gone to the hills with my traps, but spent every dollar on a passage by rail to New York. I lived on crackers. From Philadelphia, I earned my passage as a stiff on a cattle boat to Liverpool, thence tramped to Cardiff, and signed on as deck hand with the Bilbao tramp. Spain I crossed afoot, but at Madrid made myself known to friends of my house, who lent me clothes, and obtained my presentation to the Queen Regent. By Her Majesty's aid, I recovered all that was left of my stolen inheritance, a thousand dollars a year, with some small arrears. Then it was difficult to get away, but my return to Montana was made in comfort. At Fort Benton, I opened bank-accounts for my brother's share and my own, letting him know by letter of his succession. Brat used to address me by mail as Mr. Crucible.
So I put on the good old cowboy kit once more, saddled my horse and rode for Lonely Valley in the first of the winter storms.
II
Under a low gray sky lay patches of autumn snow on dun grass withered brown.
I looked up to the red sun setting above the snowy clouded flanks of the Rocky Mountains, and Lonely Valley opened at my feet where shadows of evening groped from hill to hill.
There had been a snow-storm all last night, a thaw all day. Only a few streaks of snow lay on the turf-roofed cabin, the barn and stack, and the plowed fire-guard. The door of the cabin creaked, swinging on its hinge straps, and in the yard a little wolf sat watching that, afraid to venture nearer.
I found the stable empty, as well as the cabin. Shoved in a corner by the cabin stove was Don Ernesto's cradle, which I had made of a soap-box with barrel staves for its rockers. That cradle was covered with dust. Out in the yard I found a tiny grave-mound, and at its head a cross made of two lathes bound with a bit of tape. Pinned to the head of the cross there was an envelope scrawled with the words, "My hart, 21 Sept. 1890."
When I sat down beside that cradle, I heard from the sodden eaves outside the cabin a steady drip and splash of water beating out the time. Great swinging stars across the dial of night can measure all eternity without a sound, but these drops of water, thudding, splashing, insistent, peevishly beating time, endlessly beating time, remorselessly, horribly beating time, had driven a woman mad.
Yes, even when I crushed my ears with both hands, still I could feel these splashes throbbing out the time, measuring out the punishment of time, remorseless, passionless discipline of time, allaying medicine of time, whereby the Great Physician cures ailing, restive, quivering but eternal souls. For time is only force, vibrant like sea-waves on a coast, beating against the feet of the eternal. Why should the woman, made for eternity, be so rebuked, so maddened by mere time as to dash her fists against the logs of the wall until they were stained with blood. The pain of her bleeding fists had eased the mind's revolving agony.
Unable to endure the feel of the room, I went out, and on the sodden ground saw tracks, an hour old, perhaps more. A horse, prosperous, fresh and well shod, had come by the trail from Canada. A man with the chain spur straps worn only by the police had walked across from the stable to the cabin, had seen the dusty cradle, had visited the grave.
And how the woman would play up with such a part as that! She would be discovered kneeling beside the cradle—and make a fine pretense of finding gum-sticks to kindle the stove. There would be ostentatious concealment of bleeding hands under her apron, the mourner's covered hands to be found, to drive my comrade crazy, storming about the Blackguard's villainy while he took charge of her affairs, appointing himself a woman's champion. Then she would prate about marriage oaths, and put up arguments for him to contradict, excuses for me which he would trample on, and hesitation provoking him to use force, most violently tearing her away—all his own fault, of course, and quite against her wishes.
And then the supper, with Mistress Violet waiting on the man, unable to touch a bite of food herself except on the sly, while she was getting his coffee or cooking another batch of her slapjacks.
While she did stage business, taking off the wedding-ring to lay it on the dresser, her eyes would devour the scarlet of his coat, the tan of his neck, her ears would wait for the clink of a spur when he moved, the creak of his great belt. How women undervalue what is given, and die for the things denied them! When her time came, that woman would stage-manage her own death, and neglect her own funeral to carry on a flirtation with the devil.
Oh, yes, my lady was too desperate with grief to pass another night within the haunted scene of her calamities. She would be abducted at once before the man had time to change his mind. She would interrupt her packing with floods of tears, while she stowed her own goods and everything of mine which might be saleable—my best riata, my breaking curb, spare gun, and buffalo coat, even my father's watch, and my mother's ring which I had trusted to her especial care.
The man took her mare and the pack-horse out of the pasture, and close by the house door he loaded her baggage with a squaw hitch, unhandily, with such a trampling about as would suffice for a pack-train. Then across his blunderings came her dainty tracks out from the doorway to where he helped her mount. And they two had ridden southward, to camp on wet ground within five miles or so, where I could see a faint, reflected light against Skull Rock.
It is curious to remember how all my thoughts were evil as long as I stayed in my cabin, or tracked about the yard where the very air was fouled by a taint of misery, of morbid brooding, of outrageous wrong. Yet in the stable, where I passed that night, my thoughts were innocent, my prayers went straight up like smoke on windless air, and I was comforted.
In quite the best of tempers, I woke up from my sleep in the hay, bathed, breakfasted, brought in a horse from pasture, saddled and rode out.
Where I had seen the glow from their supper fire, my señora was in camp with her deliverer, beside the hollowed flank of old Skull Rock, which towered three hundred feet above their bed place. They were at breakfast, taken by surprise, with no chance of catching their horses to escape.
It made me catch my breath to see the dear, familiar scarlet serge, the morning sun aflame on his belt, as the man rose to face me: my friend, Red Saunders—that Cockney sailor-tramp who, ever so long ago, brought news of the Burrows girl in Winnipeg when he came to engage for the service. I bore no malice toward him for rescuing a woman in distress, no ill-will toward the señora for thinking my long absence meant desertion. I took off my hat, as one always must to a woman, dismounted, because one does not ride on ground where people are encamped, then turned to my friend with outstretched hand.
"Am I excused?" I asked.
But Red stood back with his hand to his holster.
"Violet," he said hoarsely, "get abaft thish yer rock."
"Die first," she answered, with a laugh of defiance, "it's you that's scairt, not me."
So they betrayed guilt I had not suspected.
I sat down cross-legged before their sage-brush fire, and took a branch to light me a cigarette, while they stood watching, ill at ease, afraid, the woman making hysterical talk of the weather, the man judging distance to where the old Flukes mare grazed, jangling her bronze bell.
"Sit down,compadre," said I to the man. "We've got to talk this over. Won't you ask the señora to take a seat? Oh, pray be seated. Believe me, I admire your good taste in selecting so lovely a woman to run away with—your friend's wife, too."
It is when the tone is soft that words come to an edge.
Covering the woman with his body, Red fumbled his holster open.
"The service side-arms," said I, "are badly hung, and take too long to draw," and my Colt beckoned him gently to a seat.
The man's face was deathly now, beaded with sweat.
"The señora will realize," said I, "that the woman is never to blame, whatever happens. When love is dead, vows break of their own accord, and lovers part; the woman to seek such solace as she can find, the man—believe me, an imperfect brute—to wish her every kind of happiness. Is this understood?"
"'Ere, cut that out!" said Saunders. "It's fight I want, not talk!"
"Last night," said I, "yonder in Lonely Valley, I read the tracks, the sign, and wished—believe me—that I might be a better husband. Yes, I put up my little sad prayer to that effect. I fear I bore you."
The señora was crying.
"This lady," said I, "was quite right in leaving Lonely Valley."
Saunders hurled curses at me, insulting, defiant, challenging, goading.
"Quite so," said I. "Quite so. As you remark, there are three of us here, with only room for two. Your gun is loaded? You should be sure of that. The light is good, the distance—ten feet—quite ample. If you get up and lean against the rock behind you, it will steady the aim, for your hand is shaking, Red. Brace yourself up, man. For the honor of the force, don't funk now that you're caught."
The señora howled.
"The lady," said I, "was prepared for this, or she would not have brought you here. She will oblige us by dropping her handkerchief as a signal for us to fire."
Now Red was blind and deaf with passion, screaming at me to stand up. But to reply to an evil word with another taunt is to clean off dirt with mud.
"Alas," I said, "I'm timid. I prefer to sit, so I won't tumble down. The señora is requested to stand out of the line of fire." I watched her swaying upon her feet, rocking as though she would fall, as she stared at me, horror-struck.
"As the señora wishes," I said, "to take no part in this little disagreement, you, Mr. Saunders, will count three slowly, firing at the word, 'Three.'"
Red braced straight upright, silent, and as I looked up his gun sights into his eyes, I knew that the kick of the gun would throw the shot clear above me. "One!" he gasped. "Two!" and with a scream, the woman flung herself into his arms, guarding him with her body, destroying his aim.
I shouted, "Don't fire!" and lowered my gun.
"You bleedin' cur!" Red yelled. "I'm goin' to kill you!" And he wrestled with the woman to throw her clear.
I jumped to my feet, and showed Red my Colt, spinning the empty cylinder. "Not loaded, Red. You see? I didn't expect a fight."
I sheathed my Colt, then snatched Red's Enfield. "This one, you see, is loaded," and I spilled the cartridges, then battered his gun against the rock until the trigger smashed.
"You didn't understand me," I explained. "You betrayed your friend, you betrayed this unhappy woman in her trouble. How should you understand? I am fastidious, and do not grant to curs the honor of engaging me. There, you may have your gun. Catch!"
I walked to my horse and mounted. "You may understand," I said, "that this lady was my wife, but it seemed that love was buried, with a little cross on the grave. So the Señora la Mancha was free. But I was not free. She might have intended only a brief absence on business of her own, or perhaps a holiday. She might have been taken by force or lured away by fraud. She might still care for me, and she might return.
"I came here to get proof, to find out for certain which of us two she loves. It was into your arms, not mine, she threw herself. Is it not proved? The honor of guarding this lady is yours, not mine."
Then Red's eyes fell before mine, and he understood.
"Señora," I lifted my hat, and bowed to her for the last time on earth. "When Beauty murdered her sister Chastity, she was turned into a vulture.
"You may remember that Joe Chambers died for you, and Sarde lost his career, and I was ruined, as this poor man will be ruined, and others after him.
"You are too wondrous fair to be all one man's own, but God aids her who changes, as you will change.
"So I commend you—may you ride with God.Adios."
Swinging my horse, I spurred homeward, and once again was young.
I
Our souls are like the musical instruments, which do not emit their melody unless they are beaten, plucked, blown or scraped.
And on this text, I pray you hear my sermon.
The European has goods to add up, neighbors from whom he subtracts, estates to multiply, and fortune to divide. For this arithmetic he needs machinery of the brain which widens out the forehead. To him are given all knowledge, glory, pride, magnificence, the dominion of the earth, the mastery of the sea, the command of the air.
But from the red Indian who hath not, and whose forehead is pinched for lack of exercise, all things are taken away.
And yet it is my comfort to remember that ancestors of mine, who conquered the new world, married with Indian women. From that blood in my veins I have the pinched forehead of an Indian, the happy poverty, the shiftless lassitude, which mocks at the laboring white man.
Do you suppose the Indian venerates a religion worn on Sundays only?
Do you imagine he respects the laws—a spider's web to catch the flies and let the hawk go free?
The white man's only ambition is to have; his years are spent in a fussy aimless selfishness, for which he forsakes the dignity of manhood, and being too busy, he has no time to live.
The Indian's holy ideal is to be, to learn from nature the upward way toward God.
The Indian sees the white man self-made, self-conscious, self-centered, self-sufficient, self-opinionated—all and entirely self. For this poor prisoner within the bars of self the windows of the soul have all been darkened, so that he can not see, or hear, or scent, or taste, or feel the world he lives in, Heaven's fairest province. Blinded and deafened, dulled, a groping creature, he is a specter haunting Paradise, waiting for death to reveal the glories which life has offered.
Just at the last, before I said "Adios" to the world, I saw a little of the United States, something of England, and of my native Spain. I saw Spain, the land of the past, England, the land of the present, America, the land of the future. In America, I witnessed the rise of nations, in England, the poise at the zenith, in Spain, the fall. It was like a coast, the very coast of time, with the rushing onset, the tumultuous crash, and piteous dragging ebb of rising, breaking, dying empires. They come, they have, they fall, passing away, and are not.
From all that I rode away, leaving the storm of nations to rage and break on pitiless coasts of time.
"Leave all that you have, and rise, and follow me."
Having is only a shadow which flies away at sundown.
Do you remember that our Lord was forty days away in the spirit teaching souls in prison? He may not have mentioned His Jewish name to them. They may have called Him Love, for that is the real name of the Only Son.
And if He came again, do you think it would be to the stupendous temples, which the white men need as trumpets to make their prayers heard above the deafening clamor of the cities? Would not the Indians be swifter to give Him welcome?
The world-storm died away in the far distance.
Give me the weal of being, which is no shadow flying away at sunset, for when my sun goes down, I shall pass into star-clad night, to be immortal in eternal heavens.
II
The homestead in Lonely Valley belonged to the señora, not to me. For any larger career than that of pioneer farmer my penmanship was childish, my spelling gaudy, while as to sums, well—if I added two and two, it made one blot, which I had to wipe up with my tongue. And as to being a threadbare marquis in old Spain, I think I am still too much alive for that.
Very high and pompous with my dreams, I put on my buckskin war-dress as Charging Buffalo, the Piegan Chief, loaded a couple of pack-ponies and set out from Lonely Valley riding my lop-eared, wall-eyed pinto cow-horse. That night in camp, I boiled a tea of herbs, which gave me the Indian color.
Next day, a pack-horse had my saddle in his load, for I was riding once again bareback, as Indians ride, rejoicing in the natural and perfect savage grace of a horsemanship whose rhythm is like the easy flight of birds. The half-forgotten language came back phrase by phrase, until I could think in Blackfoot as a poet might think in verse. The Indian life was coming back to me, the hardy, resourceful, abstemious habit of the war trails. Mount Rising Wolf lifted his head above the northern skyline, and on the fourth evening, I trailed across the meadows beside Two Medicine Lake where once—
The mile-wide ring of the tribal camp was gone like any snowdrift, empty was the field where I had killed Tail-Feathers in the ordeal of battle. Now, as then, the low sun filled the valley with a dust of gold, and out of that my enemy had come in a whirling cloud. Standing behind my horse I had sighted—waiting—and clenched my hand on the gun as that thundering charge swept home. There his horse leaped and crashed to the ground in death. Here, the man's smashing fall, and he lay, twitching horribly—
Out of the golden haze came a cluster of mounted people, men and women, not the fierce warriors, Blackfeet of six years ago, but the poor blanket Indians of the reservation, cowed broken paupers on their way to draw their weekly rations at the agency.
And these, as in a dream, saw the red sunlight kindle a buckskin war-shirt, the blithe wind streaming with a warrior's eagle plumes, a chief out of their great past, riding down from Dreamland.
Men sighed and women whimpered as they saw that.
But now the warrior from Dreamland reined his horse, dismounted, took cover, and with a little glittering revolver—
Then they remembered! At this very place had Charging Buffalo killed the champion rifle-shot of the Blackfoot nation, and saved Rain the sacred woman from being murdered!
At their shout of welcome I swung astride my horse to give them the signs of peace, of greeting.
Then, from their midst, bidding them halt, a woman rode forward alone, dropping the blanket from her shoulders, tidying her hair with little pats and strokes, greeting me in her shy sweet English, and with mocking, derisive eyes.
"So," she said, "you come!"
"Rain!"
"My dream—he say you come."
"Rain! Rain!"
"Yes," she chuckled, "um—Boy-drunk-in-the-morning!"
"Nay. Charging Buffalo!"
"How many horses you bring to buy Rain?"
Squinting delightfully in his efforts at Indian gravity came Rain's big brother, Many Horses, ambling beside me to reach out a bashful hand.
"Brother," he said, in Blackfoot, "I knew you must come back."
Now my Indian blood-brother had no ideas of his own, but his mind was like a lending library to take and issue the ideas of others. And what Rain thought, he said. So she had known for all these years I would come back to her.
It went without any saying that I came back to marry Rain. All her people knew as much, for when they had given me their gracious welcome, they went on, as they must, to draw their rations, telling Many Horses to hurry up and join them. Not that a hint could penetrate his hide. But, then, there was no need for Rain and myself to be alone, for she and I were one, and nobody else existed as we rode side by side through a haze of glory. Out of that, we came to a little cluster of teepees by the lake-side.
Rain's only son, young Two Bears, had gone away to the Sand Hills, but her brother had a bunch of brown babies—three of them in his lodge—who were trying with grubby hands to mend her heart. Rain was a very great lady among the Blackfeet, daughter of Brings-down-the-Sun, widow of Tail-Feathers, and a sacred woman, but in her brother's lodge only a nurse, the down-trodden victim of that triumphant sits-beside-him wife, Owl-Calling-"Coming," mother of real brown babies. Children were scarce as angels in the Blackfoot camps, and Owl had full right to make merry.
All in a bustle, she prepared a feast for me. There was pathetic borrowing from the neighbors to make that slender supper, at which we all pretended to have no appetite. Only when it was over could I unload my horses, and for once in my life play at being millionaire. I had never dreamed I was so fabulously rich, but there were presents for everybody hidden away in my cargo, besides provisions enough for a great banquet, which kept the tribe feasting till sunrise.
The gods of the Blackfeet had deserted them. Within a generation their forty thousand mounted warriors had become a remnant of five hundred paupers, sick with tuberculosis, brutalized with liquor. They had lost their faith, their self-respect, their native cleanliness, their arts, games, festivals, and now, in sullen apathy, awaited death.
Yet in one camp at least the dying fires flickered up at my coming. Old Medicine Robe called his priests and sacred women to the sweet and solemn ritual, with which I was formally adopted as a Blackfoot, as a chief and as his son. The young men roused themselves for a hunting and killed deer, so that the women might dress the skins, and make clothes for Rain and for me. The poles were cut, the cover sewn for my lodge, in which I had to sit in lonely state while Rain attended me with meals, which she brought from her hearth. The lodge was furnished for me with robes, blankets, panther skins, back-rests and parfleche trunks.
Then I must take my ponies and tie them at the lodge door of my brother, Many Horses. But Many Horses, not to be outdone, tethered every pony he had left at the door of my new teepee. That was Rain's dowry.
And lastly, the wedding moccasins were made, beautifully embroidered with porcupine quills, dyed in wild herbs. These, with a fine dinner, were brought to my lodge by Rain and Owl. But Owl stayed outside, while Rain came in, and by that happy action became my woman.
I kneel at my table here, to pay my reverent tribute to this adorable woman, and her commanding loveliness. Rain was a lady to her finger-tips, and in any society would have had the men at her feet. Shy, dainty, with a quaint delicate humor all her own, she mothered and owned me with perfect tact and rare intelligence, for the woman who obeys her husband rules him. If my lady had faults, I loved her for them. And where every dog, baby and kitten saw her excellence, how could I be blind?
It was my right and privilege to serve my lady, but her heart was like a sanctuary too holy for me to enter. To her came men in trouble, confessing their sins; and all their secrets, with many of her own, she kept to herself. She told me only what it was good for me to know, and if she told me secrets, I can keep them. I have nothing else to keep.
For seven years I was not the Blackguard at all, but something quite different, so the chronicle of that time hardly belongs to this writing. And yet writing is a sixth sense for the absent, a consolation for those who are alone, for those who are lonely.
By all the codes, the sanctions of conduct and standards of judgment which make the world's opinion, I was the husband of a prostitute and kept a squaw for mistress.
But by the pity of Christ, I had tried to save a falling soul from ruin before I married an honorable woman.
Our codes, our sanction, standards, opinions, views, like our bilious attacks, our selfishness and our debts, are matters demanding attention without adding to our welfare. Will you accept my opinions as a gift? Shall I adopt your views?
These are infirmities of the mind or body which we can not sell or give away or thrust upon our neighbors. Our bodies are fouled by the world, our minds are fogged until the blazing truth of God burns our impurities. It is conceivable that from such a world as ours only as pariahs can we advance in manhood, in moral worth, in spiritual growth. I have climbed mountains from whose summits all the ways of the world looked small as spider-threads, leading to nowhere in particular; and if we descried from the heavens these beaten paths of men, they would not seem, I think, to be the only trails through the star-fields.
Since public opinion hanged the Saviour of mankind, it seems to need a guide.
III
The fox who had lost his tail attempted to set a fashion in docked foxes.
So I, who could not ask for rations as an Indian, persuaded my friends to have no further dealings with the white man. His agent was a thief, his missionary, schoolmaster and farm instructor were a pack of fools, his regulations were fences to be jumped, his rations poison to their self-respect, his clothes were sinful forms of ugliness, his stuffy buildings killed them with consumption, his manners and customs ruined Indian women.
Our head chief gave me leave to form a band of hunters and trappers, men, women and children sworn to earn their living, and avoid the whites, to eat wild meat, to wear skin clothes, and be real Indians, not imitation whites.
And so we took to the woods.
Through our separation, Rain had played the woman, but from the time of our marriage was a child again, for life was one long game at which she played with happy gravity. When I confessed my trouble in keeping clear of Sarde, my enemy, because I wanted always to take his life, Rain went to work playing at magic, with all the simple earnestness she gave to cooking eggs. To her mind eggs, casting out devils and making poultices were parts of housekeeping, and she must have my soul cleaned or my socks patched, because she insisted on a tidy husband. She banished Sarde from my thoughts, she exorcised Red Saunders. She made me pray to the fairy animals, and threatened to sacrifice all my hair to the sun unless I behaved myself and spoke respectfully about my mother-in-law. This mother-in-law, if you please, was the beaver woman spirit who helped Rain in her dreams. It was not etiquette that I should meet the lady.
Among the Blackfeet, as with the whites and other barbarians, the women rule all they love. It was part of Rain's game to rule our wandering tribe, so we poor tribes-folk obeyed her when we had to.
Her religion forbade us to eat fish or ground game, but we needed a few sins just to keep us in practise, so when she had duly forbidden unholy food, she used to do the cooking. Her faith denied us the shooting of wolves because they were hunting comrades, but I must own that the government bounty on their scalps appealed to me more powerfully than religion—and then she gave my earnings to the poor.
In the matter of bears, however, Rain's piety was rather quarrelsome.
She would not let me mention any bear except in terms of compliment, as "The gentleman with the fur coat," or "The Inspector General of Berries." Once, when I used the words, "Damned Greedy Brute," a grizzly overheard me, and ate our camp that night. "I told you so," said Rain.
As to shooting a grizzly: "He is always annoyed," quoth Rain. "And sometimes more so." I shot that robber, all the same, and my wife needs hang up her best frock as a sacrifice to the sun before she dared touch the skin. She moistened its brain with her tears while she dressed the pelt, and when the work was finished refused to sleep in the lodge with it for company. Indeed, she made such a fuss that I gave up hunting bears and they could cock snooks at me whenever we happened to meet. The fact is, Rain tamed me until I had not so much as a vice to call my own.
They do say that when the lion is dead, even the very hares will pull its mane.
We had our little troubles. There was, for example, a good deal of starving to do. But God is omnipotent: and money is His lieutenant. My pay for being a marquis, five hundred dollars a year, went a long way toward putting off inevitable famines. Each year, too, we brought our pelts to the traders, who were surprised at the prices they had to pay in guns and ammunition, traps, tobacco and comforts. They said I was aptly named as Charging Buffalo.
Under our chief's direction, we turned weavers, making our scratchy blankets of mountain goat hair. They fetched a deal of money; but with the pottery we were not successful. My Indian brother, Many Horses, had only to give one squint, and our best pots fell all to pieces.
Sometimes in spring we would plant corn, pumpkins and tobacco, and if we happened to pass that way in the fall, would gather such a crop as the wild things had spared to us. Great were our harvests, too, of camass and wild fruit dried and stored up for winter. If ever we happened to kill a maverick cow, we tanned the skin, dried the meat and buried the bones, leaving no trace of our crime against the white men's buffalo. Very particular, too, was Rain with our young men, forbidding them to steal chickens or even to scalp settlers.
That was not, she said, the way to ignore the white men. So, barring the needs of trade, we left them severely alone, and played at ghosts on our moonlight flittings through any outlying settlements.
Sometimes we rescued lost and starving travelers, who would spread the news of an unknown Indian tribe at large in the wilderness. Once, an official came to herd us back to our reservation, but unfortunately his interpreter could not speak our language and, as none of us understood a single word of English, we could not make out what was the matter with him. We fed this person and his interpreter, we gave them tobacco, we tucked them up in bed and sang a lullaby; but when they fell asleep, we broke our camp and vanished, leaving no tracks on land because we went by water, a long night's march along a river bed. The white men reported us drowned, but Rain explained to me that this was not so.
We wandered along the ranges wherever we found food, southward to Mexico and northward into the Alps of St. Elias, wintering in alpine pastures, traveling in summer through the upper forests and the nether deserts. But where we went during those happy years, I have not the slightest notion, for, after all, heart's ease and life's delight are poor geographers. We were not careful of maps, considerate of the way, or very much concerned as to our destination.
Once we were in a valley of the Canadian Rockies, a gorge so fouled with deadfall, with beaver swamps and snow-slides, that, high as the water ran, we were forced to seek our passage along the river bed. Then came a cut bank strewn with fallen trees, which reached out into the middle of the current. At that, the rock floor on which our horses waded came to an end, and down we went into deep water, compelled to swim across to the farther bank. The ponies rolled in the swell of that white-manned rapid like boats in a storm at sea. I turned and saw Rain laughing. Then my horse went under altogether, rolling over three times without touching bottom, and both of us were very nearly drowned.
Afterward, I asked my wife if she had been frightened.
"When I saw my big baby," she said, "getting its inside wet, I told my secret helper to swim quick. And the woman-beaver dived."
"So you were frightened?"
"If you died, Big Baby, you'd have to come back to me to be comforted. And when I die I shall look after you. And when we're both dead, we shall ride the Wolf Trail together, because you are me and I am you for always. Nothing else matters, and there isn't anything left to frighten us."
Rain would be teaching me quaint dances, or setting our household in a roar with imitations of my face as I played the flute. She mocked, flouted, caressed all in a breath, and chaffed me with make-believe flirtations, pretending to fall in love with Left Hand or Bearpaw, our young warriors. Yet while she crooned and twittered over her household work, for all the world like some fussy bird at nesting time, I began, vaguely at first, then with a growing sureness, to feel that the play was forced, that my fairy woman was in pain, trying to hide some illness which sapped her strength. Then once, by accident, I saw, when she thought herself to be alone, agony in the poise of her body, desperate fear in her eyes.
That summer, a certain attentiveness of the traders, a disposition to ask needless questions, gave us a sense of being watched by the authorities. Traveling with horses, and leaving tracks, we were liable to be followed and interfered with. For that reason, we built birch-bark canoes which, swimming upside down as a rule, gave us more bathing than we really needed. At least, we left no tracks.
Our river, without disclosing its name, went bubbling affably, capsizing us at rapids through hundreds of miles of alpine wonderland, northward at first, then west, then southward—in black pine jungles now, which yielded us no food. Beyond that, the river took to evil courses, plunging as one long riffle, broken by cascades into an ever deepening abyss whose walls were mountains. Our web-foot-tribe—for so Rain called us—began to be afraid.
From our next camp, I climbed a hill to see what became of the river; and on my return found a white man seated beside Rain's fire. He was a great gaunt frontiersman, whose mouth had been large for a dog, and in his eyes the smile of heaven's own sunlight. Owl's two little girls were climbing all over him, the dogs were adoring him, and Rain had given him the very last of our coffee.
At shrewd sight, this visitor addressed me in English, with a soft Texan drawl.
"How much do you want for the bunch of babies?"
"More than you've got," said I.
"I aim to cheapen them babies—or get them wings."
"Wings?"
"They'll need 'em."
"You mean, there's bad water down yonder?"
"Yes, sir. Bad for brown babies. Thar's thousands of millions in Heaven, but they're scarce to be spared down heah, so I'll trade for this lot rather than see 'em wasted."
"Where does the river go?"
"To Heaven. Jest keep right on. You cayn't miss it."
"Is the canyon long?"
"Ef the first mile ain't enough, thar's two hundred comin'."
"We're looking for the sea."
"So's Fraser River."
"Then it's the Fraser!"
"I wouldn't call a man plumb lost who'd eyes like your'n, so maybe the country hereaways has gawn strayed."
"Or perhaps our planet has wandered out of the way?"
"Out of which way?"
"God's way."
"Say. I like you a whole lot. My name's Smith, 'cept that my friends call me Jesse, Sailor Jesse."
"My name is—call me Squaw-man."
"Put her thar," said Jesse.
I have been easy of acquaintance, but of my few friendships that with Sailor Jesse of Caribou was perhaps most intimate.
We sat together on the river bank under the golden mountains, where groves of yellow pines, like throngs of angels, swayed to the organ peal of a triumphant wind. We watched the brave river go merrily to her drowning. So merrily went my wife, full conscious of great death.
I told Jesse about that red imp of pain, which danced and glowed like fire within her shoulder. To consult a doctor, I must risk a visit to settlements, where the authorities would arrest my tribe, herding them to imprisonment on their reservation. And that involved my own fate as a deserter from the mounted police, accused of bigamy with Sarde's wife.
Most wonderfully my friend's words flattened the rough difficulties, made my journey short and eased the way. On the coast, he told me, Indians went free and unquestioned like the white men. Food was abundant both by land and water. He would show me where I could make a base camp for my tribe within one day's journey of a cottage hospital.
So Jesse led us by a portage across the coast range, and through the abysmal chasm of Bute Inlet to a cove in Valdez Island. There the Douglas pines towered three hundred feet into the sunshine, and through their cathedral aisles ranged herds of elk. Sheer from the feet of the trees went the fathomless blue of a deep channel, and, far beneath, the waving swaying groves of a seaweed forest faded away into the nether darkness.
My wife would not allow me to take her to the cottage hospital, lest seeing her untidiness in blood and pain, I cease to love. "If Iesse sees me," she said, "it doesn't matter, and if I die it will be so easy to find this camp. I shall think of your waiting, guarded by spirit trees."
She went with Jesse, trusting him, and contented, and when my friend returned alone, on his way homeward, all the news looked good. There had been an operation for cancer, but Rain was doing well, and would be ready to leave the hospital in a month. For Jesse, a month had thirty days or so, but for me it numbered thirty years. I set my tribe to work praying by watch and watch for Rain's recovery, then fearing senile decay if I remained, I prepared a one-man outfit with thirty days' provisions, and set off in my loaded canoe to be near my wife at Comox.
Although I doubt if God believes in churches, the Catholic faith in which I had been reared provides good medicine. So I made confession to a priest, and having received his medicine, which was good, secured his help as an interpreter. He arranged with the hospital that I should have news of my wife, and he wired for me to Staff-Sergeant Buckie, N.W.M.P., bidding my friend come because I was in trouble. When Buckie answered that he had applied for furlough, I was content at my camp outside the village with fasting and prayer and the daily bulletins. My hair changed from black to silver-gray, clear proof that God's hand was upon me. And then, one morning, as I came up from bathing, I found Rain waiting, seated by the fire.
There had been a shower, but now, as the sunshine swept great fields of color across the Gulf of Georgia at our feet, God's birds, like little angels, rocked the woods with song.
My wife sat by the embers putting on little twigs. "Your fire," she whispered to me, "was almost out."
Yes, almost dead. Of late, it had been hard to keep the fire alive.
Faith is like that. One hardly sees it while the sun is shining, but it glows bravely in the night, a comfort in the darkness, a mercy in times of hunger, pain or loneliness. The world-thought comes like rain to damp the fires of faith, which feed on winds of trouble, blow high on gales of persecution, set the whole world alight just when our need is greatest.
"See," said my wife, "the little flames have come. We'll make a fine blaze now."
So a good woman makes our faith burn strongly.
"There's no smoke now," she said.
Prayer is the smoke which comes from the fire of faith, and when the air is calm it goes straight up. Mine had been blown about during the time of waiting, but now my faith blazed clear in great thanksgiving.
A few days later, when Rain was quite recovered and fixed in camp again, a telegram from Buckie told me to expect him. So I went to the railroad station and watched the day's train arrive.
I was looking for a non-commissioned officer of mounted police, whose gold and scarlet made him the most brilliantly conspicuous personage in North America.
Buckie was looking for some sort of cowboy.
So it happened that a well-dressed civilian in tweeds, with a portmanteau, a rod and a shotgun, came along the platform, and was hailed in stage whispers by an Indian loafer. "Oh, Buckie, how could you? Trousers turned down—umbrella rolled up—what awful side!"
"Liar!" he answered. "I wouldn't be seen dead with an umbrella."
"Oh, what a dog! wouldn't be seen dead with an umbrella! Don't let the crowd see us together. Follow where I lead. Drown your false teeth, Buckie, change clothes, take a bath—and God won't know you."
Outside the village, I let him walk beside me,
"But," he gasped, "you're an Indian!"
"Aye, Buckie. The troop jester is dead. Wasn't he killed nine years ago by the fall of a horse in Montana?"
"But—Blackguard!"
"He's dead, too."
A comedian's fun is the echo of pain, the motley worn by sorrow. But when sorrow and pain have fled away, you miss them, for we only know the light because it casts a shadow.
"How you've changed!" sighed Buckie.
Once upon a time there was an inventive fish, who discovered water.
Some day, perhaps, an inventive man may discover love, the atmosphere our souls breathe. And other men will tell him, "How you've changed!"
When we had gained the secrecy of the woods, and Buckie put down his load to sit on a wayside log among the fern, he told me wonderful gossip.
My telegram had found him acting regimental sergeant-major at headquarters, and when he applied for a furlough on urgent private affairs, the commissioner gave him a parchment signed and sealed by the viceroy, Her Majesty's commission. He was Inspector Buckie posted to his old Troop D at Fort French, by special request of Sam, the officer commanding. The senior inspector there was Mr. Sarde. The orderly-room clerk was Staff-Sergeant la Mancha, my Brat. The rest of the fellows were new, and total strangers. Nine years. Of course.
"Your wife—" he asked.
"Oh, yes." I remembered. "How's my señora?"
"Dead."
"Can you prove that?"
With all his old, quaint official delight in documents, Buckie showed me a letter from the sheriff at Helena. It seemed that the señora had become a woman of the town, and died quite naturally of drink. Only the sudden flight of her kept man, Red Saunders, had given rise to a certain amount of suspicion, perhaps ill-founded. At least, the señora's death had set me free.
So far, Buckie knew nothing of my alliance under the Indian law with my dear lady, and when we came to her camp, he was shocked to his official soul at being presented. Yet during the long years, he had learned to speak Blackfoot with a strong Canadian accent, and shy as my lady always was of strangers, she seemed to like my friend. After all, the chap was a gentleman, delicately tactful, reverencing women, and presently surrendered to her charm. Moreover, the pain and danger of her illness had partly unsheathed the sweet and radiant spirit of the sacred woman, so that her beauty had taken on an unearthly glamour. To that, my friend proved sensitive.
After dinner, I told Rain of my new freedom, and begged her to accept the white men's rite of marriage. To her, that observance seemed a very trivial matter, and quite ridiculous was the rank it would give to my consort as Marchioness of the Alpuxarras. And yet, as we hoped for children, she consented to legalize our marriage, and that afternoon we waited upon the priest to whom I had made confession.
So far, my lady had been amused, but when Buckie unpacked his baggage, he gave her a wedding present, an old Spanish poignard, its Toledo blade mounted in ivory and tarnished silver. I thought the toy a most unlucky gift, but to Rain it was a perfect revelation, the first entirely useless thing she had ever owned, a possession for pleasure only, and therefore priceless. We spent the rest of our wedding-day hunting the village stores for objects of perfect uselessness.
It was mid-afternoon next day before my lady, Buckie and I left, our canoe loaded to the gunwale with treasures. Till dusk, we paddled gently along shore, then on to midnight in glassy starlit waters. An hour's nap refreshed us for a pull against the tide, then dawn broke above the splintered ice of the coast range, day kindled the Vancouver Alps until they glowed like flame, and the sun melted the hills into the cloudy air. Then mighty whirlpools spun our canoe like a top between a tide of eleven knots and a backwater running eight. Dark forest closed in on either side of the tide-race, and we spurted across the back-sluice into our tiny bay.
A bevy of children were skirting like gulls as we landed, a cluster of laughing women hauled the canoe aground. We were hailed by our one-legged Japanese cook, our three-legged dog, our lame wild goose, an old blind siwash crone, and all the mixed assemblage of our tribal pets. Many Horses, Owl-calling-"Coming" and their young son, Bears, Left Hand and Bear Paw, the hunters, two darling old scare-crows, who called themselves my wives because they were Rain's attendants; yes, the whole Blackfoot tribe came clown to greet our chief and make her welcome home out of the Valley of Death. Then all together we attended Rain through the dim naves of that stupendous forest, until we came to a fire of cedar-wood, with its blue film of incense. There the clamor ceased, while our chief, as priestess, burned sweet grass upon the altar fire, and offered thanks for her recovery. Then came hymns and sacred dances, prayer and reading of the Bible in our own Blackfoot language. Buckie went fast asleep standing, and Bears gave an imitation of that performance, which broke up our service into roars of laughter.
During the weeks of his furlough, Buckie, with grave enjoyment, shared our hunting in the forest, our fishing by torchlight in channels phosphorescent as liquid starlight, the bathing, the feasts, the dances, the matins at the dawn, the evensong at dusk. But most of all, he liked to sit with me within the portico of our forest temple, whence one looked out between colossal pine trunks to the sea channel, the far white Alps and the great pageantry forever marching across the summer sky. The humming-birds, the bees, the woodland perfume, sunbeams athwart vast shadows and the strong music of the winds and seas, made that place sacred in its loveliness.
At times we were driven into our teepees by riots of the weather, when the women dressed skins and made clothing, while Many Horses kept an eye on the fire, and his other eye on the children.
But into that great peace there came foreboding. Buckie and I knew well that cancer is incurable, that soon or late the inevitable pain would warn my wife of death which science could only delay, which prayer could only ease, and which no power on earth could possibly avert. She seemed to sense death, and at times would jest with Buckie, telling him that he must take her to the plains, or muttering in her sleep she would speak of the Blackfoot camps, or during matins would pray looking toward the East. She wanted to go home, and I must take her back. God would preserve me from my enemies.
I think it was in that camp I first began to notice how often the dogs howled, as they do when they sense ghosts. I have seen Rain frequently stop on her way through camp to speak to her father, to her mother or to friends long dead. She saw them plainly, she said, and spoke to them familiarly, as we do to living people, without the slightest sense of fear. And her own spirit-power seemed daily to gain in strength. It was her custom to make magic for our amusement. On the last evening of Buckie's visit, a steady drizzle had driven us to make our fire inside the teepee, and half the tribe had gathered for a feast of berries. Then the children asked Rain to call Wind-maker.
"Come, Wind-maker," she whispered into the hearth-smoke, and as she threw some sweet grass into the fire, we heard a sigh in the air far off. Bears gathered the younger children about him, snuggling for protection, and all their eyes glowed in the firelight, as though they were a wolf-pack besetting our winter camp in the Moon of Famine. "Wind-maker hears!" they whispered. "Wind-maker comes! Oh, Rain, don't let him come too near us!"
For answer, we heard a distant muttering of thunder.
A gust shook the rain-drops out of the trees above us, a seething of fine rain swept along the tent wall, and sudden little breakers lashing on the beach sent us a splash of spray. The smoke hole let in a swirling down-draft filling the lodge with smoke, while the wind sighed through the timber like hands upon a harp. Then the deep storm notes volleyed, thundered with blaze after blaze of lightning, crash upon rending crash, and wailing flute-notes lifted to a hurricane-screaming blast, thrashing three-hundred-foot timber like a whipping reed-bed, rocking the teepee until the children skirled and the women huddled together in their fright. I saw Many Horses revealed in a livid blaze of lightning, his iron hard face set rigid, his teeth clenched, his crossed eyes glittering as though he rode into battle.
His son, Bears, was standing exultant, shouting with triumph. And all about my wife arose a mist of human spirits and vague animals, while the rain roared, the cyclone yelled, the thunder crashed and volleyed. Then my wife's hands swept slowly downward, while in obedience, the hurricane rolled away, and the rain eased and steadied, until a last throbbing of thunder like ruffled drums muttered among the echoes of the coast range.
Our lives are such illusions as that. Our lives are God's dreams in which we drive, like storm-swept ships, upon a sea of terror. We suffer and go to wreck, supposing our tragic miseries all real, while God is dreaming the world-storm in which He trains our courage.
I
I am the Inspector Buckie mentioned in the foregoing text, and to me is entrusted the editing and completion of this biography. I feel that in this conventional world so very unconventional a man as Don José needed a friend in his biographer. A hostile witness, for example, might bias the gentlest reader by setting forth bare facts of bigamy and homicide which, taken without their context, would seem offensive and unpardonable. So facts may be told as lies.
To strangers, my friend may have seemed an incredibly complex personality. One saw him by turns as the grave courtly Hidalgo of old Spain, as the rollicking Irish trooper, as the red Indian saint, and at the end as a very dangerous outlaw. Yet these were only the moods of a sincere and simple gentleman, unusual only in his terrific strength of character, which lacked the guidance of strong intellect.
I who was his comrade saw, in my dim official way, only the humdrum duties of the police, and the squalor of Indian decadence. But here in his memoirs, I realize for the first time the breadth and splendor of the regimental service, the spirituality of the Indian character, and the tremendous majesty of our wilderness. Don José had eyes to see that we were living an epic life in the homeric age of Canada. While I went blind, he saw with heroic vision.
So having tamed his spelling, cleared his grammar, and composed his chaotic chapters into narrative, I leave my humble task as editor, to take up the duties of biographer.
From his camp on Valdez, La Mancha took me back by canoe to Comox, the terminal of the Vancouver Island Railroad. During this thirty-six-mile passage, I found occasion to warn my friend against an act of folly on which he had set his heart. However unselfish he might be in taking Rain home to die among her people, he had no business to risk a visit to the Canadian plains. There, at any moment, he might be recognized by people who had known him in times past, even by Inspector Sarde or Red Saunders, his mortal enemies. The sequel would be his arrest.
"Risk," said he, "is the only measure of value. Unless I risk my money, my liberty or my life, how can I feel my pleasure in such wealth?"
I told him I saw no gain in being such a damned fool.
"You should learn to suffer me gladly. Rain and I must go to the Piegan camp. You see, old chap, the Wolf Trail starts from there, and I don't want my wife to take that trail alone."
"You want to die with her?"
"If I may. At least, to see her off on her way to the Sand Hills."
"Where is that?" I asked, for I had heard of the Sand Hills as the place of the Blackfoot dead.
"I don't know where," he answered, "but if you think, you'll know that there must be a place of waiting where those who rest are watching for those who suffer."
"Are you sure," I asked him, "that we outlive death?"
"It stands to reason, Buckie. Love is God. Therefore, love is eternal. Therefore, the love in us is our portion of the eternal. We are like lamps, and love is the light we carry through the darkness."
"But lamps go out."
"Some do, and some burn low, but Rain will carry light enough to see by while she waits for me. Of course, I must go as far as I can with her."
"Think of the risk."
"The hope."
I knew then that nothing could deter him.
"Is it nothing to you," he asked, "that you are one of the lamps which light the universe?"
And so we parted.
II
In great content I reported to the superintendent commanding for duty at Fort French, and made the best I could of Mr. Sarde as a brother officer with whom I had little in common. The orderly-room sergeant was my own friend, Brat la Mancha, now well healed of his wound and free from lameness, except when he had to limp in winter moccasins. Narrowly he had escaped being invalided, and being a cripple, could never be allowed to take rough duty, but must content himself with office work. Thanks to José, who yearly sent him half the income from Spain, the Brat was passing rich, with a fine, prosperous and growing ranch of his own, to which he would retire when it pleased him to quit the force.
At the post we were agreed never to mention José even in whispers, lest the gossips begin to suspect that we had a secret. Sam, Mr. Sarde and one or two very old hands in the division, who had known Don José, believed him to be dead. Brat and I were silent, except when we stole off together after mountain trout.
The well-oiled machinery of our routine found more or less truthful chronicle in the year's report. A mild winter was making way for an early spring when, one morning, as orderly officer for the week, I sat working with Brat la Mancha in the office. There were papers to sign, applications for passes, or some such trifles. Through the window I could see a man ride in, the sergeant in charge at Stand-off, our outpost with the Blood tribe, of the Blackfoot confederation. Sergeant Millard seemed in a hurry, and that was quite unusual, for in the many years he had been father confessor to the Bloods, the smooth perfection of his work made life monotonous. Now he spoke rapidly to the sergeant of the guard, then with the sergeant-major, who showed concern, and brought him direct to the office. There must be events afoot, so, when they entered, I asked the sergeant-major to see if the superintendent commanding was at home.
Millard saluted. "I thought it best to report in person, sir,—a case of murder and suicide. Mr. de Hamel is wounded."
"The Indian agent?"
"Yes, sir. Yesterday, that's Sunday the fifth instant, Mr. de Hamel came over and dined at the detachment. He mentioned a Piegan family which had come in on Saturday from the Blackfoot reservation in Montana. The Indian seemed a total stranger, by all accounts well fixed, with a first-rate outfit, three women, and a nephew aged about fourteen. They had no pass, but unless they asked for rations Mr. de Hamel felt that no action was necessary. The Indian and his nephew had gone off at daybreak, mounted. The three women remained in camp."
"Names?" asked the Brat.
"I've got a memorandum here, sir, with names and descriptions."
"All right, Sergeant."
"Mr. de Hamel mentioned that the wife was Rain, a well-known sacred woman. Her medicine was said to be so strong that some of the people brought presents, but she lay sick in the teepee, and the two older women said she must not be disturbed."
Murder and suicide! I glanced at the Brat, whose face was white as chalk, and envied him the writing which kept him occupied through that long suspense.
"You may remember, sir," said Millard, "and Sergeant la Mancha here must remember, Saunders, Red Saunders, in the force."
"Yes. Go on." I wondered if my voice was all right.
"Well, sir, there's been a red-haired hobo hanging around, doing odd jobs, for some time past. Called himself Redmond. Drunken waster, by all accounts. Mr. de Hamel mentioned that this man was a deserter—Red Saunders."
"Did you arrest him?" I asked.
"I told De Hamel I would, sir."
Deserters are useless, and our fellows prefer not to catch them.
"Well, sir, from later information, I find that Redmond, alias Saunders, was seen by several witnesses loafing around the neighborhood of that teepee, until just before dark, when the old women were away for fire-wood or water. Then he went in."
Brat coughed, and still, through all the years, I hear that sound. His notes were a mere pretense. Afterward I found he had been drawing little owls. "According to the boy, Bears, he went with his uncle, Charging Buffalo, to visit Many Horses, his own father, camped at Bullhorn Coulee. On their return at dusk, Charging Buffalo handed the boy his head-rope to take the horses to pasture. As the boy rode off, he saw his uncle in the open door of the teepee, picking up an ax. He heard no sounds.
"From the boy's evidence, and from the signs, this Indian must have found the white man assaulting his woman. He came behind, and with a single stroke of the ax sliced Saunders' head in halves, leaving the blade where it stuck. Then he dragged the body off his woman, and found her with both hands clutching the haft of a knife. The blade was hilt-deep, and must have entered her heart, for she was already dead."
Brat was not likely to stand much more of this. I sent him to fetch Sam.
It was well we waited until Brat left the room, for Sergeant Millard gave particulars which even a hardened sinner prefers to forget.
"The knife, sir."
So Millard laid on the desk before me the Spanish poignard which long ago I had bought as a curiosity in Winnipeg, used for many years as a paper-cutter while stationed at Prince Albert, and finally given to Rain last summer as a wedding present. Now it was black with her blood, but it had saved her honor. I picked it up, forcing myself to indifference.
"An Italian stiletto, eh? How should an Indian woman come by that?"
"Italian, sir?" asked Millard.
"Venetian," said I, examining the hilt. "Looks like seventeenth century work. People wore the knives they used at table."
"The Indians," was Millard's comment, "have lots of curios picked up in their wars."
I put the weapon down, and lighted a cigarette, proud that no tremor of the hands betrayed my agitation. An Indian had murdered a white man—that was all—and a squaw had killed herself. There was nothing to identify Don José.
The sergeant was gray with fatigue, and I bade him sit down.
"I think," he said, "that Indian had gone mad. They do sometimes. The old woman came back as he left the teepee carrying his rifle, a Winchester. He was loading as he crossed to the agent's house.
"Mr. de Hamel says he was smoking his after-supper cigar in the veranda when he saw the Indian coming, stark staring mad. He tried to get into the house for his gun, but a bullet dropped him in the doorway. The left femur was broken six inches above the knee, but Mr. de Hamel managed to drag himself into the house and behind the front door. It opens inward. Charging Buffalo went in and looked round, but couldn't find the agent. It was after dark then. After a minute or two, he went out, running toward the pasture for his horse."
"What grudge could he have against Mr. de Hamel?"
"The man who had sheltered Red Saunders?"
An Indian, a bear, or a white man, will defend his mate from outrage, and kill without scruple, justly. That is unwritten law which needs no writing. Red Saunders had to be killed, and the man who harbored such vermin must take the consequences. But what of the law which was bound to avenge De Hamel?