 | Mahala Joe |  |
II
When Walter was fifteen his father gave him a rifle, as he had promised, and a word of advice with it.
"Learn to shoot quickly and well," he said, "and never ride out from home without it. No one can tell what this trouble with the Indians may come to in the end."
Walter rode straight to the campoodie. He was never happy in any of his gifts until he had showed them to Joe. There was a group of older men at the camp, quartering a deer which they had brought in. One of them, called Scar-Face, looked at Walter with a leering frown.
"See," he said, "they're arming the very children with guns."
"My father promised it to me many years ago," said Walter. "It is my birthday gift."
He could not explain why, and he grew angry at the man's accusing tone, but after it he did not like showing his presents to the Indians.
He called Joe, and they went over to a cave in the black rock where they had kept their boyish treasures, and planned their plays since they were children. Joe thought the rifle a beauty, and turned it over admiringly in the shadow of the cave. They tried shooting at a mark, and then decided to go up Oak Creek for a
"You may have my rifle to use as often as you like," said Walter, "but you must not lend it to any one in the campoodie, especially to Scar-Face. My father says he is the one who is stirring up all this trouble with the whites."
"The white men do not need any one to help them get into trouble," said Joe. "They can do that for themselves."
"It is the fault of the Indians," said Walter. "If they did not shoot the cattle the white men would leave them alone."
"But if the white men come first to our lands with noise and trampling and scare away the game, what then will they shoot?" asked the Paiute.
Walter did not make any answer to that. He had often gone hunting with Joe and his father, and he knew what it meant to walk far, and fasting, after game made shy by the rifles of cattlemen, and at last to return empty to the campoodie, where there were women and children with hungry eyes.
"Is it true," he said after a while, "that Scar-Face is stirring up all the Indians in the valley?"
"How should I know," said Joe; "I am only a boy, and have not killed big game. I am not admitted to the counsels of the old men. What does it matter to us whether of old feuds or new? Are we not brothers sworn?"
Then, as the dinner was done, they ate each of the other's kill, for it was the custom of the Paiutes at that time that no youth should eat game of his own killing until he was fully grown. As they walked homeward the boys planned to get permission to go up on Waban, for a week, after mountain sheep, before the snows began.
Mr. Baker looked grave when Walter spoke to him.
"My boy," he said, "I wish you would not plan long trips like this without first speaking to me. It is hardly safe in the present state of feeling among the Indians to let you go with them in this fashion. A whole week, too. But as you have already spoken of it, and it has probably been talked over in the campoodie, for me to refuse now would look as if I suspected something, and might bring about the thing I most fear."
"You should not be afraid for me with Joe, father, for we are brothers sworn," said Walter, and he told his father how they had mixed the blood of their arms in the arrow-maker's hut after they had come back from their first journey on Waban.
"Well," said Mr. Baker, who had not heard of this before, "I know that they set a great store by these superstitious customs, but I have not much faith in the word of a Paiute when he is dealing with a white man. However, you had better go on with this hunting trip. Take Hank with you and Joe's father, and do not be gone more than five days at the outside."
Hank was one of Mr. Baker's vaqueros, and very glad to get off for a few days hunting on the blunt top of Waban. On the Monday following they left the Baker ranch for the mountain. As the two boys rode up the boulder-strewn slope it set them talking of the first time they had gone that way on their fruitless hunt for arrow points about the foot of Winnedumah, and of all that happened to them at that time. The valley lay below them full of purple mist, and away by the creek of Tres Pinos the brown, wattled huts of the campoodie like great wasps' nests stuck in the sage. Hank and Joe's father, with the pack horses, were ahead of them far up the trail; Joe and Walter let their own ponies lag, and the nose of one touched the flank of the other, as they climbed slowly up the steep, and the boys turned their faces to each other, as if they had some vague warning that they would
"Joe," said Walter, "my father says if it came to a fight between the white settlers and the Paiutes, that you would not hold by the word we have passed."
"That is the speech of a white man," said Joe.
"But would you?" the other insisted.
"I am a Paiute," said Joe; "I will hold by my people, also by my word; I will not fight against you."
"Nor I against you, but I would not like to have my father think you had broken your word."
"Have no care," said the Indian, "I will not break it."
Mr. Baker looked anxiously after his son as he rode to the hunting on Waban; he looked anxiously up that trail every hour until the boy came again, and that, as it turned out, was at the end of three days. For the trouble among the Indians had come to something at last,—the wasps were all out of nest by the brown creeks, and with them a flight of stinging arrows. The trouble began at Cottonwood, and the hunting party on Waban the second day out saw a tall, pale column of smoke that rose up from the notch of the hill behind the settlement, and fanned out slowly into the pale blueness of the sky.
It went on evenly, neither more nor less, thick smoke from a fire of green wood steadily tended. Before noon another rose from the mouth of Oak Creek, and a third from Tunawai. They waved and beckoned to one another, calling to counsel.
"Signal fires," said Hank; "that means mischief."
And from that on he went with his rifle half cocked, and walked always so that he might keep Joe's father in full view. By night that same day there were seven smoke trees growing up in the long valley, and spreading thin, pale branches to the sky. Then was no zest left in the hunt, and on the morning they owned it. Walter was worried by what he knew his father's anxiety must be. Then the party began to ride down again, and always Hank made the Indian go before. Away by the foot of Oppapago rose a black volume of smoke, thick, and lighted underneath by flames. It might be the reek of a burning ranch-house. The boys were excited and afraid. They talked softly and crowded their ponies together on the trail.
"Joe," said Walter whisperingly, "if there is battle you will have to go to it."
"Yes," said Joe."
"And you will fight; otherwise they will call you a coward, and if you run away they will kill you."
"So I suppose," said Joe.
"Or they will make you wear a woman's dress like To-go-na-tee, the man who got up too late." This was a reminder from one of the arrow-maker's tales. "But you have promised not to fight."
"Look you," said the Indian boy; "if a white man came to kill me I would kill him. That is right. But I will not fight you nor your father's house. That is my vow."
The white boy put out his hand, and laid it on the flank of the foremost pony. The Indian boy's fingers came behind him, and crept along the pony's back until they reached the other hand. They rode forward without talking.
Toward noon they made out horsemen riding on the trail below them. As it wound in and out around the blind gullies they saw and lost sight of them a dozen times. At last, where the fringe of the tall trees began, they came face to face. It was Mr. Baker and a party of five men; they carried rifles and had set and anxious looks.
"What will you have?" said Indian Joe's father as they drew up before him under a tamarack pine.
"My son," said the cattleman.
"Is there war?" said the Indian.
"There is war. Come, Walter."
The boys were still and scared. Slowly
"Do them no harm," said Joe Baker to those that were with him.
"Good-by, Joe," said Walter half aloud.
The other did not turn his head, but as he went they noticed that he had bared his right arm from the hunting shirt, and an inch above the elbow showed a thin, white scar. Walter had the twin of that mark under his flannels.
Mr. Baker did not mind fighting Indians; he thought it a good thing to have their troubles settled all at once in this way, but he did not want his son mixed up in it. The first thing he did when he got home was to send him off secretly by night to the fort, and from there he passed over the mountains with other of the settlers' families under strong escort, and finally went to his mother's people in the East, and was put to school. As it turned out he never came back to Tres Pinos; he does not come into this story any more.
When the first smoke rose up that showed where the fierce hate of the Paiutes had broken into flame, the Indians took their women and children away from the pleasant open slopes, and hid them in deep canons in secret places of the rocks. There they feathered arrows, and twisted bowstrings of the sinew of deer. And because there were so many grave things done, and it was not the custom for boys to question their elders, Joe never heard how Walter had been sent away. He thought him still at the ranch with his father, and it is because of this mistake that there is any more story at all.
You may be sure that, of those two boys, Joe's was the deeper loving for, besides having grown up together, Walter was white, therefore thinking himself, and making the other believe it, the better of the two. But for this Walter made no difference in his behavior; had Joe to eat at his table, and would have him sleep in his bed, but Joe laughed, and lay on the floor. All this was counted a kindness and a great honor in the campoodie. Walter could find out things by looking in a book, which was sheer magic, and had taught Joe to write a little, so that he could send word by means of a piece of paper, which was cleverer than the tricks Joe had taught him, of reading the signs of antelope and elk and deer. The white boy was to the Indian a little of all the heroes and bright ones of the arrow-maker's tales come alive again. Therefore he quaked in his heart when he heard the rumors that ran about the camp.
The war began about Cottonwood, and ran like wildfire that licked up all the ranches in its course. Then the whites came strongly against the Paiutes at the Stone Corral, and made an end of the best of their fighting men. Then the Indians broke out in the north, and at last it came to such a pass that the very boys must do fighting, and the women make bowstrings. The cattlemen turned in to Baker's ranch as a centre, and all the northern campoodies gathered together to attack them. They had not much to hope for, only to do as much killing as possible before the winter set in with the hunger and the deep snows.
By this time Joe's father was dead; and his mother had brought the boy a quiver full of arrows and a new bowstring, and sent him down to the battle.
And Joe went hotly enough to join the men of the other village, nursing his bow with great care, remembering his father, but when he came to counsel and found where the fight must be, his heart turned again, for he remembered his friend. The braves camped by Little Round Valley, and he thought of the talk he and Walter had there; the war party went over the tongue of hills, and Joe saw Winnedumah shining whitely on Waban, and remembered his boyish errand, the mystery of the tall, strange warrior that came upon them in the night, their talk in the hut of the arrow-maker, and the vow that came afterward.
The Indians came down a ravine to-
The war party stayed in the ravine until it grew dark, and Joe watched how Winnedumah swam in a mist above the hills long after the sun had gone quite down, as if in his faithfulness he would outwatch the dark; and then the boy's heart was lifted up to the great chief standing still by Tinnemaha. "I will not forget," he said. "I, too, will be faithful." Perhaps at this moment he expected a miracle to help him in his vow as it had helped Winnedumah.
In the dusk the mounted Indians rode down by the Creek of Tres Pinos. When they came by the ruined hut where his father had lived, Joe's heart grew hot again, and when he passed the arrow-maker's he remembered his vow. Suddenly he wheeled his pony in the trail, hardly knowing what he would do. The man next to him laid an arrow across his bow and pointed it at the boy's breast.
"Coward," he whispered, but an older Indian laid his hand on the man's arm.
"Save your arrows," he said. Then the ponies swept forward in the charge, but Joe knew in an instant how it would be with him. He would be called false and a coward, killed for it, driven from the tribe, but he would not fight against his sworn brother. He would keep his vow.
A sudden rain of arrows flew from the advancing Paiutes; Joe fumbled his and dropped it on the ground. He was wondering if one of the many aimed would find his brother. Bullets answered the arrow flight. He saw the braves pitch forward, and heard the scream of wounded ponies.
He hoped he would be shot; he would not have minded that; it would be better than being called a coward. And then it occurred to him, if Walter and his father came out and found him when the fight was done, they would think that he had broken his word. The Paiutes began to seek cover, but Joe drove out wildly from them, and rode back in the friendly dark, and past the ruined campoodie, to the black rocks. There he crept into the cave which only he and Walter knew, and lay on his face and cried, for though he was an Indian he was only a boy, and he had seen his first fight. He was sick with the thoughts of his vow. He lay in the black rocks all the night and the day, and watched the cattlemen and the soldiers ranging all that county for the stragglers of his people, and guessed that the Paiute had made the last stand. Then in the second night he began to work back by secret paths to the mountain camp. It never occurred to him not to go. He had the courage to meet what waited for him there, but he had not the heart to go to it in the full light of day. He came in by his mother's place, and she spat upon him, for she had heard how he had carried himself in the fight.
"No son of mine," said she.
He went by the women and children and heard their jeers. His heart was very sick. He went apart and sat down and waited what the men would say. There were few of them left about the dying fire. They had washed off their war paint, and their bows were broken. When they spoke at last it was with mocking and sad scorn.
"We have enough of killing," said the one called Scar-Face. "Let him have a woman's dress and stay to mend the fire."
So it was done in the presence of all the camp; and because he was a boy, and because he was an Indian, he said nothing of his vow, nor opened his mouth in his defense, though his heart quaked and his knees shook. He had the courage to wear the badge of being afraid all his life. They brought him a woman's dress, though they were all too sad for much laughter, and in the morning he set to bringing the wood for the fire.
Afterward there was a treaty made be-
| Mahala Joe | |