 | Mrs. Skaggs's husbands, and other sketches |  |
THE PRINCESS BOB AND HER FRIENDS.
SHE was a Klamath Indian. Her title was, I
think, a compromise between her claim as
daughter of a chief, and gratitude to her earliest
white protector, whose name, after the Indian fashion,
she had adopted. “Bob” Walker had taken
her from the breast of her dead mother at a time
when the sincere volunteer soldiery of the California
frontier were impressed with the belief that
extermination was the manifest destiny of the Indian
race. He had with difficulty restrained the
noble zeal of his compatriots long enough to convince
them that the exemption of one Indian baby
would not invalidate this theory. And he took
her to his home, — a pastoral clearing on the banks
of the Salmon River, — where she was cared for
after a frontier fashion.
Before she was nine years old, she had exhausted
the scant kindliness of the thin, overworked Mrs.
Walker. As a playfellow of the young Walkers
she was unreliable; as a nurse for the baby she
was inefficient. She lost the former in the trackless
depths of a redwood forest; she basely abandoned
the latter in an extemporized cradle, hanging
lied and she stole, — two unpardonable sins in a
frontier community, where truth was a necessity
and provisions were the only property. Worse
than this, the outskirts of the clearing were sometimes
haunted by blanketed tatterdemalions with
whom she had mysterious confidences. Mr.
Walker more than once regretted his indiscreet
humanity; but she presently relieved him of responsibility,
and possibly of bloodguiltiness, by
disappearing entirely.
When she reappeared, it was at the adjacent
village of Logport, in the capacity of housemaid to
a trader's wife, who, joining some little culture to
considerable conscientiousness, attempted to instruct
her charge. But the Princess proved an unsatisfactory
pupil to even so liberal a teacher. She
accepted the alphabet with great good-humor, but
always as a pleasing and recurring novelty, in
which all interest expired at the completion of
each lesson. She found a thousand uses for her
books and writing materials other than those
known to civilized children. She made a curious
necklace of bits of slate-pencil, she constructed a
miniature canoe from the pasteboard covers of her
primer, she bent her pens into fish-hooks, and tattooed
the faces of her younger companions with
blue ink. Religious instruction she received as
good-humoredly, and learned to pronounce the
shocked her preceptress. Nor could her reverence
be reached through analogy; she knew nothing of
the Great Spirit, and professed entire ignorance of
the Happy Hunting-Grounds. Yet she attended
divine service regularly, and as regularly asked
for a hymn-book; and it was only through the
discovery that she had collected twenty-five of
these volumes and had hidden them behind the
woodpile, that her connection with the First Baptist
Church of Logport ceased. She would occasionally
abandon these civilized and Christian
privileges, and disappear from her home, returning
after several days of absence with an odor of bark
and fish, and a peace-offering to her mistress in
the shape of venison or game.
To add to her troubles, she was now fourteen,
and, according to the laws of her race, a woman.
I do not think the most romantic fancy would
have called her pretty. Her complexion defied
most of those ambiguous similes through which
poets unconsciously apologize for any deviation
from the Caucasian standard. It was not wine
nor amber colored; if anything, it was smoky.
Her face was tattooed with red and white lines on
one cheek, as if a fine-toothed comb had been
drawn from cheek-bone to jaw, and, but for the
good-humor that beamed from her small berry-like
eyes and shone in her white teeth, would have
her scant drapery and unrestrained freedom she
was hardly statuesque, and her more unstudied
attitudes were marred by a simian habit of softly
scratching her left ankle with the toes of her right
foot, in moments of contemplation.
I think I have already shown enough to indicate
the incongruity of her existence with even
the low standard of civilization that obtained at
Logport in the year 1860. It needed but one
more fact to prove the far-sighted political sagacity
and prophetic ethics of those sincere advocates of
extermination, to whose virtues I have done but
scant justice in the beginning of this article. This
fact was presently furnished by the Princess.
After one of her periodical disappearances, — this
time unusually prolonged, — she astonished Logport
by returning with a half-breed baby of a week
old in her arms. That night a meeting of the
hard-featured serious matrons of Logport was held
at Mrs. Brown's. The immediate banishment of
the Princess was demanded. Soft-hearted Mrs.
Brown endeavored vainly to get a mitigation or
suspension of the sentence. But, as on a former
occasion, the Princess took matters into her own
hands. A few mornings afterwards, a wicker
cradle containing an Indian baby was found hanging
on the handle of the door of the First Baptist
Church. It was the Parthian arrow of the flying
more.
It had been a bright clear day on the upland, so
clear that the ramparts of Fort Jackson and the
flagstaff were plainly visible twelve miles away
from the long curving peninsula that stretched a
bared white arm around the peaceful waters of
Logport Bay. It had been a clear day upon the
sea-shore, albeit the air was filled with the flying
spume and shifting sand of a straggling beach
whose low dunes were dragged down by the long
surges of the Pacific and thrown up again by the
tumultuous trade-winds. But the sun had gone
down in a bank of fleecy fog that was beginning
to roll in upon the beach. Gradually the headland
at the entrance of the harbor and the lighthouse
disappeared, then the willow fringe that
marked the line of Salmon River vanished, and
the ocean was gone. A few sails still gleamed on
the waters of the bay; but the advancing fog
wiped them out one by one, crept across the steel-blue
expanse, swallowed up the white mills and
single spire of Logport, and, joining with reinforcements
from the marshes, moved solemnly upon
the hills. Ten minutes more and the landscape
was utterly blotted out; simultaneously the wind
died away, and a death-like silence stole over sea
and shore. The faint clang, high overhead, of unseen
lap and wash of undistinguishable waters, and the
monotonous roll of the vanished ocean, were the
only sounds. As night deepened, the far-off
booming of the fog-bell on the headland at intervals
stirred the thick air.
Hard by the shore of the bay, and half hidden
by a drifting sand-hill, stood a low nondescript
structure, to whose composition sea and shore had
equally contributed. It was built partly of logs
and partly of driftwood and tarred canvas. Joined
to one end of the main building — the ordinary
log-cabin of the settler — was the half-round pilot-house
of some wrecked steamer, while the other
gable terminated in half of a broken whale-boat.
Nailed against the boat were the dried skins of
wild animals, and scattered about lay the flotsam
and jetsam of many years' gathering, — bamboo
crates, casks, hatches, blocks, oars, boxes, part of a
whale's vertebræ, and the blades of sword-fish.
Drawn up on the beach of a little cove before the
house lay a canoe. As the night thickened and
the fog grew more dense, these details grew imperceptible,
and only the windows of the pilot-house,
lit up by a roaring fire within the hut, gleamed
redly through the mist.
By this fire, beneath a ship's lamp that swung
from the roof, two figures were seated, a man and
a woman. The man, broad-shouldered and heavily
beyond a broken bamboo chair, with his eyes fixed
on the fire. The woman crouched cross-legged
upon the broad earthen hearth, with her eyes
blinkingly fixed on her companion. They were
small, black, round, berry-like eyes, and as the
firelight shone upon her smoky face, with its
one striped cheek of gorgeous brilliancy, it was
plainly the Princess Bob and no other.
Not a word was spoken. They had been sitting
thus for more than an hour, and there was about
their attitude a suggestion that silence was habitual.
Once or twice the man rose and walked up
and down the narrow room, or gazed absently
from the windows of the pilot-house, but never
by look or sign betrayed the slightest consciousness
of his companion. At such times the Princess
from her nest by the fire followed him with
eyes of canine expectancy and wistfulness. But
he would as inevitably return to his contemplation
of the fire, and the Princess to her blinking watchfulness
of his face.
They had sat there silent and undisturbed for
many an evening in fair weather and foul. They
had spent many a day in sunshine and storm,
gathering the unclaimed spoil of sea and shore.
They had kept these mute relations, varied only
by the incidents of the hunt or meagre household
duties, for three years, ever since the man, wandering
upon the half-starved woman lying in the little
hollow where she had crawled to die. It had
seemed as if they would never be disturbed,
until now, when the Princess started, and, with
the instinct of her race, bent her ear to the
ground.
The wind had risen and was rattling the tarred
canvas. But in another moment there plainly
came from without the hut the sound of voices.
Then followed a rap at the door; then another rap;
and then, before they could rise to their feet, the
door was flung briskly open.
“I beg your pardon,” said a pleasant but somewhat
decided contralto voice, “but I don't think
you heard me knock. Ah, I see you did not.
May I come in?”
There was no reply. Had the battered figurehead
of the Goddess of Liberty, which lay deeply
embedded in the sand on the beach, suddenly
appeared at the door demanding admittance, the
occupants of the cabin could not have been more
speechlessly and hopelessly astonished than at the
form which stood in the open doorway.
It was that of a slim, shapely, elegantly dressed
young woman. A scarlet-lined silken hood was
half thrown back from the shining mass of the
black hair that covered her small head; from her
pretty shoulders dropped a fur cloak, only restrained
hand. Around her full throat was a double necklace
of large white beads, that by some cunning
feminine trick relieved with its infantile suggestion
the strong decision of her lower face.
“Did you say yes? Ah, thank you. We may
come in, Barker.” (Here a shadow in a blue
army overcoat followed her into the cabin, touched
its cap respectfully, and then stood silent and
erect against the wall.) “Don't disturb yourself
in the least, I beg. What a distressingly unpleasant
night! Is this your usual climate?”
Half graciously, half absently overlooking the
still embarrassed silence of the group, she went
on: “We started from the fort over three hours
ago, — three hours ago, was n't it, Barker?” (the
erect Barker touched his cap,) — “to go to Captain
Emmons's quarters on Indian Island, — I
think you call it Indian Island, don't you?” (she
was appealing to the awe-stricken Princess,) —
“and we got into the fog and lost our way; that
is, Barker lost his way,” (Barker touched his cap
deprecatingly,) “and goodness knows where we
did n't wander to until we mistook your light for
the lighthouse and pulled up here. No, no, pray
keep your seat, do! Really I must insist.”
Nothing could exceed the languid grace of the
latter part of this speech, — nothing except the
easy unconsciousness with which she glided by
host and stood beside the open hearth.
“Barker will tell you,” she continued, warming
her feet by the fire, “that I am Miss Portfire,
daughter of Major Portfire, commanding the post.
Ah, excuse me, child!” (She had accidentally trodden
upon the bare yellow toes of the Princess.)
“Really, I did not know you were there. I am
very near-sighted.” (In confirmation of her statement,
she put to her eyes a dainty double eye-glass
that dangled from her neck.) “It 's a shocking
thing to be near-sighted, is n't it?”
If the shamefaced uneasy man to whom this remark
was addressed could have found words to
utter the thought that even in his confusion struggled
uppermost in his mind, he would, looking at
the bold, dark eyes that questioned him, have
denied the fact. But he only stammered, “Yes.”
The next moment, however, Miss Portfire had apparently
forgotten him and was examining the
Princess through her glass.
“And what is your name, child?”
The Princess, beatified by the eyes and eye-glass,
showed all her white teeth at once, and softly
scratched her leg.
“Bob.”
“Bob? What a singular name!”
Miss Portfire's host here hastened to explain the
origin of the Princess's title.
“Then you are Bob.” (Eye-glass.)
“No, my name is Grey, — John Grey.” And
he actually achieved a bow where awkwardness
was rather the air of imperfectly recalling a forgotten
habit.
“Grey? — ah, let me see. Yes, certainly. You
are Mr. Grey the recluse, the hermit, the philosopher,
and all that sort of thing. Why, certainly;
Dr. Jones, our surgeon, has told me all about you.
Dear me, how interesting a rencontre! Lived all
alone here for seven — was it seven years? — yes,
I remember now. Existed quite au naturel, one
might say. How odd! Not that I know anything
about that sort of thing, you know. I 've
lived always among people, and am really quite
a stranger, I assure you. But honestly, Mr.
— I beg your pardon — Mr. Grey, how do you
like it?”
She had quietly taken his chair and thrown her
cloak and hood over its back, and was now thoughtfully
removing her gloves. Whatever were the
arguments, — and they were doubtless many and
profound, — whatever the experience, — and it
was doubtless hard and satisfying enough, — by
which this unfortunate man had justified his life
for the last seven years, somehow they suddenly
became trivial and terribly ridiculous before this
simple but practical question.
“Well, you shall tell me all about it after you
time enough; Barker cannot find his way back
in this fog to-night. Now don't put yourselves
to any trouble on my account. Barker will assist.”
Barker came forward. Glad to escape the scrutiny
of his guest, the hermit gave a few rapid
directions to the Princess in her native tongue,
and disappeared in the shed. Left a moment
alone, Miss Portfire took a quick, half-audible,
feminine inventory of the cabin. “Books, guns,
skins, one chair, one bed, no pictures, and no looking-glass!”
She took a book from the swinging
shelf and resumed her seat by the fire as the Princess
re-entered with fresh fuel. But while kneeling
on the hearth the Princess chanced to look up
and met Miss Portfire's dark eyes over the edge
of her book.
“Bob!”
The Princess showed her teeth.
“Listen. Would you like to have fine clothes,
rings, and beads like these, to have your hair nicely
combed and put up so? Would you?”
The Princess nodded violently.
“Would you like to live with me and have
them? Answer quickly. Don't look round for
him. Speak for yourself. Would you? Hush;
never mind now.”
The hermit re-entered, and the Princess, blinking,
shed, from which she did not emerge even when
the homely repast of cold venison, ship biscuit,
and tea was served. Miss Portfire noticed her absence:
“You really must not let me interfere with
your usual simple ways. Do you know this is
exceedingly interesting to me, so pastoral and
patriarchal and all that sort of thing. I must
insist upon the Princess coming back; really, I
must.”
But the Princess was not to be found in the
shed, and Miss Portfire, who the next minute
seemed to have forgotten all about her, took her
place in the single chair before an extemporized
table. Barker stood behind her, and the hermit
leaned against the fireplace. Miss Portfire's appetite
did not come up to her protestations. For
the first time in seven years it occurred to the
hermit that his ordinary victual might be improved.
He stammered out something to that
effect.
“I have eaten better, and worse,” said Miss Portfire,
quietly.
“But I thought you — that is, you said — ”
“I spent a year in the hospitals, when father
was on the Potomac,” returned Miss Portfire, composedly.
After a pause she continued: “You remember
after the second Bull Run — But, dear
me! I beg your pardon; of course, you know
and don't care.” (She put up her eye-glass and
quietly surveyed his broad muscular figure against
the chimney.) “Or, perhaps, your prejudices —
But then, as a hermit you know you have no
politics, of course. Please don't let me bore you.”
To have been strictly consistent, the hermit
should have exhibited no interest in this topic.
Perhaps it was owing to some quality in the narrator,
but he was constrained to beg her to continue
in such phrases as his unfamiliar lips could
command. So that, little by little, Miss Portfire
yielded up incident and personal observation of the
contest then raging; with the same half-abstracted,
half-unconcerned air that seemed habitual to her,
she told the stories of privation, of suffering, of endurance,
and of sacrifice. With the same assumption
of timid deference that concealed her great
self-control, she talked of principles and rights.
Apparently without enthusiasm and without effort,
of which his morbid nature would have been suspicious,
she sang the great American Iliad in a
way that stirred the depths of her solitary auditor
to its massive foundations. Then she stopped and
asked quietly, “Where is Bob?”
The hermit started. He would look for her.
But Bob, for some reason, was not forthcoming.
Search was made within and without the hut, but
in vain. For the first time that evening Miss
Barker, “and find her. She must be found; stay,
give me your overcoat, I 'll go myself.” She threw
the overcoat over her shoulders and stepped out
into the night. In the thick veil of fog that
seemed suddenly to inwrap her, she stood for a
moment irresolute, and then walked toward the
beach, guided by the low wash of waters on the
sand. She had not taken many steps before she
stumbled over some dark crouching object. Reaching
down her hand she felt the coarse wiry mane
of the Princess.
“Bob!”
There was no reply.
“Bob. I 've been looking for you, come.”
“Go 'way.”
“Nonsense, Bob. I want you to stay with me
to-night, come.”
“Injin squaw no good for waugee woman. Go
'way.”
“Listen, Bob. You are daughter of a chief: so
am I. Your father had many warriors: so has
mine. It is good that you stay with me. Come.”
The Princess chuckled and suffered herself to
be lifted up. A few moments later and they re-entered
the hut, hand in hand.
With the first red streaks of dawn the next day
the erect Barker touched his cap at the door of
the hut. Beside him stood the hermit, also just
from the hut, fresh as the morning air, stepped
Miss Portfire, leading the Princess by the hand.
Hand in hand also they walked to the shore, and
when the Princess had been safely bestowed in
the stern sheets, Miss Portfire turned and held out
her own to her late host.
“I shall take the best of care of her, of course.
You will come and see her often. I should ask
you to come and see me, but you are a hermit,
you know, and all that sort of thing. But if it 's
the correct anchorite thing, and can be done, my
father will be glad to requite you for this night's
hospitality. But don't do anything on my account
that interferes with your simple habits. Good
by.”
She handed him a card, which he took mechanically.
“Good by.”
The sail was hoisted, and the boat shoved off.
As the fresh morning breeze caught the white canvas
it seemed to bow a parting salutation. There
was a rosy flush of promise on the water, and as
the light craft darted forward toward the ascending
sun, it seemed for a moment uplifted in its
glory.
Miss Portfire kept her word. If thoughtful
care and intelligent kindness could regenerate the
seemed as if she were for the first time inclined to
heed the lessons of civilization and profit by her
new condition. An agreeable change was first
noticed in her appearance. Her lawless hair was
caught in a net, and no longer strayed over her
low forehead. Her unstable bust was stayed and
upheld by French corsets; her plantigrade shuffle
was limited by heeled boots. Her dresses were
neat and clean, and she wore a double necklace of
glass beads. With this physical improvement
there also seemed some moral awakening. She no
longer stole nor lied. With the possession of personal
property came a respect for that of others.
With increased dependence on the word of those
about her came a thoughtful consideration of her
own. Intellectually she was still feeble, although
she grappled sturdily with the simple lessons
which Miss Portfire set before her. But her zeal
and simple vanity outran her discretion, and she
would often sit for hours with an open book before
her, which she could not read. She was a
favorite with the officers at the fort, from the Major,
who shared his daughter's prejudices and often
yielded to her powerful self-will, to the subalterns,
who liked her none the less that their natural
enemies, the frontier volunteers, had declared war
against her helpless sisterhood. The only restraint
put upon her was the limitation of her liberty
only once did she break this parole, and was
stopped by the sentry as she stepped into a boat
at the landing.
The recluse did not avail himself of Miss Portfire's
invitation. But after the departure of the
Princess he spent less of his time in the hut, and
was more frequently seen in the distant marshes
of Eel River and on the upland hills. A feverish
restlessness, quite opposed to his usual phlegm,
led him into singular freaks strangely inconsistent
with his usual habits and reputation. The
purser of the occasional steamer which stopped
at Logport with the mails reported to have been
boarded, just inside the bar, by a strange bearded
man, who asked for a newspaper containing the
last war telegrams. He tore his red shirt into
narrow strips, and spent two days with his needle
over the pieces and the tattered remnant of his
only white garment; and a few days afterward
the fishermen on the bay were surprised to see
what, on nearer approach, proved to be a rude imitation
of the national flag floating from a spar
above the hut.
One evening, as the fog began to drift over the
sand-hills, the recluse sat alone in his hut. The
fire was dying unheeded on the hearth, for he had
been sitting there for a long time, completely absorbed
in the blurred pages of an old newspaper.
of great care and delicacy in its tattered condition,
— placed it under the blankets of his bed.
He resumed his seat by the fire, but soon began
drumming with his fingers on the arm of his chair.
Eventually this assumed the time and accent of
some air. Then he began to whistle softly and
hesitatingly, as if trying to recall a forgotten tune.
Finally this took shape in a rude resemblance,
not unlike that which his flag bore to the national
standard, to Yankee Doodle. Suddenly he
stopped.
There was an unmistakable rapping at the door.
The blood which had at first rushed to his face now
forsook it and settled slowly around his heart. He
tried to rise, but could not. Then the door was
flung open, and a figure with a scarlet-lined hood
and fur mantle stood on the threshold. With a
mighty effort he took one stride to the door. The
next moment he saw the wide mouth and white
teeth of the Princess, and was greeted by a kiss
that felt like a baptism.
To tear the hood and mantle from her figure in
the sudden fury that seized him, and to fiercely
demand the reason of this masquerade, was his
only return to her greeting. “Why are you here?
did you steal these garments?” he again demanded
in her guttural language, as he shook her roughly
by the arm. The Princess hung her head. “Did
rifle.
“I did.”
His hold relaxed, and he staggered back against
the wall. The Princess began to whimper. Between
her sobs, she was trying to explain that the
Major and his daughter were going away, and that
they wanted to send her to the Reservation; but
he cut her short. “Take off those things!” The
Princess tremblingly obeyed. He rolled them up,
placed them in the canoe she had just left, and
then leaped into the frail craft. She would have
followed, but with a great oath he threw her from
him, and with one stroke of his paddle swept out
into the fog, and was gone.
“Jessamy,” said the Major, a few days after, as
he sat at dinner with his daughter, “I think I can
tell you something to match the mysterious disappearance
and return of your wardrobe. Your
crazy friend, the recluse, has enlisted this morning
in the Fourth Artillery. He 's a splendid-looking
animal, and there 's the right stuff for a soldier in
him, if I 'm not mistaken. He 's in earnest too,
for he enlists in the regiment ordered back to
Washington. Bless me, child, another goblet broken;
you 'll ruin the mess in glassware, at this
rate!”
“Have you heard anything more of the Princess,
papa?”
“Nothing, but perhaps it 's as well that she has
gone. These cursed settlers are at their old
complaints again about what they call `Indian
depredations,' and I have just received orders from
head-quarters to keep the settlement clear of all
vagabond aborigines. I am afraid, my dear, that
a strict construction of the term would include
your protégée.”
The time for the departure of the Fourth Artillery
had come. The night before was thick and
foggy. At one o'clock, a shot on the ramparts
called out the guard and roused the sleeping garrison.
The new sentry, Private Grey, had challenged
a dusky figure creeping on the glacis, and,
receiving no answer, had fired. The guard sent
out presently returned, bearing a lifeless figure in
their arms. The new sentry's zeal, joined with an
ex-frontiersman's aim, was fatal.
They laid the helpless, ragged form before the
guard-house door, and then saw for the first time
that it was the Princess. Presently she opened
her eyes. They fell upon the agonized face of her
innocent slayer, but haply without intelligence or
reproach.
“Georgy!” she whispered.
“Bob!”
“All 's same now. Me get plenty well soon.
Me make no more fuss. Me go to Reservation.”
Then she stopped, a tremor ran through her
limbs, and she lay still. She had gone to the
Reservation. Not that devised by the wisdom of
man, but that one set apart from the foundation
of the world for the wisest as well as the meanest
of His creatures.
| Mrs. Skaggs's husbands, and other sketches | |