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James Fenimore Coopoer - "Autobiography of a Pocket Handkerchief"

G. K. Chesterton - "The Man Who Was Thursday"

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Kate Douglas Wiggin - "Penelope's English Experiences"

The Heritage of the Sioux

B >> B.M. Bower >> The Heritage of the Sioux




Whereupon Weary, who sprawled next to him, reached out a languid foot and gave
him a poke. "Aw, lay down," he advised. "They're all right out there for
another hour. Don't yuh hear the bell?"

They all listened for a minute. The intermittent tinkle of the cheap little
sheep bell came plainly to them from farther down the draw as though Johnny
was eating contentedly with his mates, thankful for the leisure and the short,
sweet grass that was better than hay. Pink lay back with a sigh of relief, and
Luck told him to sleep a little if he wanted to, because everything was all
right and he would call him if the horses got to straying too far off.

Down the draw--where there were no horses feeding--an Indian in dirty overalls
and gingham shirt and moccasins, and with his hair bobbed to his collar, stood
up and peered toward the vague figures grouped in the fire-glow. He lifted his
hand and moved it slightly, so that the bell he was holding tinkled exactly as
it had done when it was strapped around Johnny's neck; Johnny, who was at that
moment trailing disgustedly over a ridge half a mile away with his mates,
driven by two horsemen who rode very carefully, so as to make no noise.

The figures settled back reassured, and the Indian grinned sourly and tinkled
the little bell painstakingly, with the matchless patience of the Indian. It
was an hour before he dimly saw Pink get up from the dying coals and mount his
horse. Then, still tinkling the bell as a feeding horse would have made it
ring, he moved slowly down the draw; slowly, so that Pink did not at first
suspect that the bell sounded farther off than before; slowly yet surely,
leading Pink farther and farther in the hope of speedily overtaking the horses
that he cursed for their wandering.

Pink wondered, after a little, what was the matter with the darned things,
wandering off like that by themselves, and with no possible excuse that he
could see. For some time he was not uneasy; he expected to overtake them
within the next five or ten minutes. They would stop to feed, surely, or to
look back and listen--in a strange country like this it was against
horse-nature that they should wander far away at night unless they were
thirsty and on the scent of water. These horses had drunk their fill at the
little pool below the spring. They should be feeding now, or they should lie
down and sleep, or stand up and sleep--anything but travel like this,
deliberately away from camp.

Pink tried loping, but the ground was too treacherous and his horse too
leg-weary to handle its feet properly in the dark. It stumbled several times,
so he pulled down again to a fast walk. For a few minutes he did not hear the
bell at all, and when be did it was not where he had expected to hear it, but
away off to one side. So he had gained nothing save in anger and uneasiness.

There was no use going back to camp and rousing the boys, for he was now a
mile or so away; and they would be afoot, since their custom was to keep but
one horse saddled. When he went in to call the next guard he would be expected
to bring that man's horse back with him, and would turn his own loose before
he went to sleep. Certainly there was nothing to be gained by rousing the
camp.

He did not suspect the trick being played upon him, though he did wonder if
someone was leading the horses away. Still, in that case whoever did it would
surely have sense enough to muffle the bell. Besides, it sounded exactly like
a horse feeding and moving away at random--which, to those familiar with the
sound, can never be mistaken for the tinkle of an animal traveling steadily to
some definite point.

It was an extremely puzzled young man who rode and rode that night in pursuit
of that evasive, nagging, altogether maddening tinkle. Always just over the
next little rise he would hear it, or down in the next little draw; never
close enough for him to discover the trick; never far enough away for him to
give up the chase. The stars he had been watching in camp swam through the
purple immensity above him and slid behind the skyline. Other stars as
brilliant appeared and began their slow, swimming journey. Pink rode, and
stopped to listen, and rode on again until it seemed to him that he must be
dreaming some terribly realistic nightmare.

He was sitting on his horse on a lava-crusted ridge, straining bloodshot eyes
into the mesa that stretched dimly before him, when dawn came streaking the
sky with blood orange and purple and crimson. The stars were quenched in that
flood of light; and Pink, looking now with clearer vision, saw that there was
no living thing in sight save a coyote trotting home from his night's hunting.
He turned short around and, getting his bearings from his memory of certain
stars and from the sun that was peering at him from the top of a bare peak,
and from that sense of direction which becomes second nature to a man who had
lived long on the range, started for camp with his ill news.



CHAPTER XIV. ONE PUT OVER ON THE BUNCH

"Sounds to me," volunteered the irrepressible Big Medicine after a heavy
silence, "like as if you'd gone to sleep on your hawse, Little One, and
dreamed that there tinkle-tinkle stuff. By cripes, I'd like to see the
bell-hawse that could walk away from ME 'nless I was asleep an' dreamin' about
it. Sounds like--"

"Sounds like Navvy work," Applehead put in, eyeing the surrounding rim of
sun-gilded mesa, where little brown birds fluttered in short, swift flights
and chirped with exasperating cheerfulness.

"If it was anybody, it was Ramon Chavez," Luck declared with the positiveness
of his firm conviction. "By the tracks here, we're crowding up on him. And no
man that's guilty of a crime, Applehead, is going to ride day after day
without wanting to take a look over his shoulder to see if be's followed. He's
probably seen us from some of these ridges--yesterday, most likely. And do you
think he wouldn't know this bunch as far as he could see us, even without
glasses? The chances are he has them, though. He'd be a fool if he didn't
stake himself to a pair."

"Say, by gracious," Andy observed somewhat irrelevantly, his eyes going over
the group, "this would sure make great picture dope, wouldn't it? Why didn't
we bring Pete along, darn it? Us all standing around here, plumb helpless
because we're afoot--"

"Aw, shut up!" snapped Pink, upon whom the burden of responsibility lay heavy.
"I oughta be hung for laying around the fire here instead of being out there
on guard! I oughta--"

"It ain't your fault," Weary championed him warmly. "We all heard the bell--"

"Yes--and damn it,_I_ heard the bell from then on till daylight!" Pink's lips
quivered perceptibly with the mortification that burned within him. "If I'd
been on guard--"

"Well, I calc'late you'd a been laid out now with a knife-cut in yuh som'ers,"
Applehead stopped twisting his sunburnt mustache to say bluntly. "'S a dang
lucky thing fer you, young man, 't you WASN'T on guard, 'n' the only thing't
looks queer to me is that you wasn't potted las' night when yuh got out away
from here. Musta been only one of 'em stayed behind, an' he had t' keep out in
front uh yuh t' tinkle that dang bell. Figgered on wearin' out yer hoss, I
reckon, 'n' didn't skurcely dare t' take the risk uh killin' you off 'nless
they was a bunch around t' handle us." His bright blue eyes with their range
squint went from one to another with a certain speculative pride in the
glance. "'N' they shore want t' bring a crowd along when they tie into this
yere outfit, now I'm tellin' yuh!"

Lite Avery, who had gone prowling down the draw by himself, came back to camp,
tilting stiff-leggedly along in his high-heeled boots and betraying, in every
step he took, just how handicapped a cowpuncher is when set afoot upon the
range and forced to walk where he has always been accustomed to ride. He
stopped to give Pink's exhausted horse a sympathetic pat on the shoulder, and
came on, grinning a little with the comers of his mouth tipped down.

"Here's what's left of the hobbles the buckskin wore," he said, holding up the
cut loops of a figure-eight rope hobble. "Kinda speaks for itself, don't it?"

They crowded around to inspect this plain evidence of stealing. Afterwards
they stood hard-eyed and with a flush on their cheek-bones, considering what
was the best and wisest way to meet this emergency. As to hunting afoot for
their horses, the chance of success was almost too small to be considered at
all, Pink's horse was not fit for further travel until he had rested. There
was one pair of field glasses -and there were nine irate men to whom inaction
was intolerable.

"One thing we can do, if we have to," Luck said at last, with the fighting
look in his face which moving-picture people had cause to remember. "We can
help ourselves to any horses we run across. Applehead, how's the best way to
go about it?"

Applehead, thus pushed into leadership, chewed his mustache and eyed the mesa
sourly. "Well, seein' they've set us afoot, I calc'late we're jest about
entitled to any dang thing we run across that's ridable," he acceded. "'N' the
way I'd do, would be to git on high groun' with them glasses 'n' look fer
hosses. 'N' then head fer 'em 'n' round 'em up afoot 'n' rope out what we
want. They's enough of us t' mebby git a mount apiece, but it shore ain't
goin' t' be no snap, now I'm tellin' ye. 'N' if yuh do that," he added, "yuh
want t' leave a man er two in camp--'n' they want to keep their dang eyes
peeled, lemme tell yuh! Ef we was t' find ourselves afoot an' our grub 'n'
outfit stole--"

"We won't give them that chance at us." Luck was searching with his eyes for
the nearest high point that was yet not too far from camp. "I think I'll just
take Andy up on that pinnacle there, and camp down by that pile of boulders.
The rest of you stay around camp and rest yourselves while you've got the
chance. In a couple of hours, Applehead, you and Lite come up and take our
place; then Miguel and Bud, and after that Weary and Happy. Pink, you go and
bed down in the shade somewhere and go to sleep--and quit worrying over last
night. Nobody could have done any better than you did. It was just one put
over on the bunch, and you happened to be the particular goat, that's all.

"Now, if one of us waves his hat over his head, all of you but Happy and Bud
and Pink come up with your rifles and your ropes, because we'll have some
horses sighted. If we wave from side to side, like this, about even with our
belts, you boys want to look out for trouble. So one of you keep an eye on us
all the time we're up there. We'll be up outa reach of any trouble ourselves,
if I remember that little pinnacle right." He hung the strap that held the
leather case of the glasses over one shoulder, picked up his rifle and his
rope and started off, with Andy similarly equipped coming close behind him.

The mesa, when they reached the pinnacle and looked down over the wide expanse
of it, glimmered like clear, running water with the heat waves that rose from
the sand. Away to the southward a scattered band of sheep showed in a mirage
that made them look long-legged as camels and half convinced them both that
they were seeing the lost horses, until the vision changed and shrunk the
moving objects to mere dots upon the mesa.

Often before they had watched the fantastic airpictures of the desert mirage,
and they knew well enough that what they saw might be one mile away or twenty.
But unless the atmospheric conditions happened to be just right, what was
pictured in the air could not be depended upon to portray truthfully what was
reflected. They sat there and saw the animals suddenly grow clearly defined
and very close, and discovered at last that they were sheep, and that a man
was walking beside the flock; and even while they watched it and wondered if
the sheep were really as close as they seemed, the vision slowly faded into
blank, wavery distance and the mesa lay empty and quivering under the sun.

"Fine chance we've got of locating anything," Andy grumbled, "if it's going to
be miragy all day. We could run our fool heads off trying to get up to a bunch
that would puff out into nothing. Makes a fellow think of the stories they
tell about old prospectors going crazy trying to find mirage water-holes. I'm
glad we didn't get hung up at a dry camp, Luck. Yuh realize what that would be
like?"

"Oh, I may have some faint idea," Luck drawled whimsically. "Look over there,
Andy over toward Albuquerque. Is that a mirage again, or do you see something
moving?"

Andy, having the glasses, swung them slowly to the southeast. After a minute
or two he shook his head and gave the glasses to Luck. "There was one square
look I got, and I'd been willing to swear it was our saddle-bunch," he said.
"And then they got to wobbling and I couldn't make out what they are. They
might be field mice, or they might be giraffes--I'm darned if I know which."

Luck focussed the glasses, but whatever the objects had been, they were no
longer to he seen. So the two hours passed and they saw Applehead and Lite
come slowly up the hill from camp bearing their rifles and their ropes and a
canteen of fresh water, as the three things they might find most use for.

These two settled themselves to watch for horses--their own range horses. When
they were relieved they reported nothing save a continued inclination on the
part of the atmosphere to be what Andy called miragy. So, the day passed,
chafing their spirits worse than any amount of active trouble would have done.
Pink slept and brooded by turns, still blaming himself for the misfortune. The
others moped, or took their turns on the pinnacle to strain their eyes
unavailingly into the four corners of the earth--or as much as they could in
those directions.

With the going of the sun Applehead and Lite, sitting out their second guard
on the pinnacle, discussed seriously the desperate idea of going in the night
to the nearest Navajo ranch and helping themselves to what horses they could
find about the place. The biggest obstacle was their absolute ignorance of
where the nearest ranch lay. Not, surely, that half-day's ride back towards
Albuquerque, where they bad seen but one pony and that a poor specimen of
horseflesh. Another obstacle would be the dogs, which could be quieted only
with bullets.

"We might git hold of something to ride," Applehead stated glumly, "an' then
agin the chances is we wouldn't git nothin' more'n a scrap on our hands. 'N'
I'm tellin' yuh right now, Lite, I ain't hankerin' fer no fuss till I git a
hoss under me."

"Me either," Lite testified succinctly. "Say, is that something coming, away
up that draw the camp's in? Seems to me I saw something pass that line of
lava, about half a mile over."

Applehead stood up and peered into the half darkness. In a couple of minutes
he said: "Ye better git down an' tell the boys t' be on the watch, Lite. They
can't see no hat-wavin' this time uh day. They's somethin' movin' up to-wards
camp, but what er who they be I can't make out in the dark. Tell Luck--"

"What's the matter with us both going?" Lite asked, cupping his hands around
his eyes that he might see better. "It's getting too dark to do any good up
here--"

"Well, I calc'late mebby yore right," Applehead admitted, and began to pick
his way down over the rocks. "Ef them's Injuns, the bigger we stack up in camp
the better. If it's Ramon 'n' his bunch, I want t' git m' hands on 'im."

He must have turned the matter over pretty thoroughly in his mind, for when
the two reached camp he had his ideas fixed and his plans all perfected. He
told Luck that somebody was working down the draw in the dark, and that it
looked like a Navvy trick; and that they had better be ready for them, because
they weren't coming just to pass the time of day--"now I'm tellin' ye!"

The nerves of the Happy Family were raw enough by now to welcome anything that
promised action; even an Indian fight would not be so much a disaster as a
novel way of breaking the monotony. Applehead, with the experience gathered in
the old days when he was a young fellow with a freighting outfit and old
Geronimo was terrorizing all this country, sent them back in compact half
circle just within the shelter of the trees and several rods .away from their
campfire and the waterhole. There, lying crouched behind their saddles with
their rifles across the seat-sides and with ammunition belts full of
cartridges, they waited for whatever might be coming in the dark.

"It's horses," Pink exclaimed under his breath, as faint sounds came down the
draw. "Maybe--"

"Horses--and an Injun laying along the back of every one, most likely,"
Applehead returned grimly. "An old Navvy trick, that is--don't let 'em fool
ye, boys! You jest wait, 'n' I'll tell ye 'when t' shoot, er whether t' shoot
at all. They can't fool ME--now I'm tellin' yuh!

After that they were silent, listening strainedly to the growing sounds of
approach. There was the dull, unmistakable click of a hoof striking against a
rock, the softer sound of treading on yielding soil. Then a blur of dark
objects became visible, moving slowly and steadily toward the camp.

"Aw, it's just horses," Happy Jack muttered disgustedly.

Applehead stretched a lean leg in his direction and gave Happy Jack a kick.
"They're cunnin'," he hissed warningly. "Don't yuh be fooled--"

"That's Johnny in the lead," Pink whispered excitedly. "I'd know the way he
walks--"

"'N' you THOUGHT yuh knowed how he jingled his dang bell," Applehead retorted
unkindly. "Sh-sh-sh--"

Reminded by the taunt of the clever trick that had been played upon them the
night before, the Happy Family stiffened again into strained, waiting
silence, their rifles aimed straight at the advancing objects. These, still
vague in the first real darkness of early night, moved steadily in a
scattered group behind a leader that was undoubtedly Johnny of the erstwhile
tinkling bell. He circled the campfire just without its radius of light, so
that they could not tell whether an Indian lay along his back, and beaded
straight for the water-hole. The others followed him, and not one came into
the firelight--a detail which sharpened the suspicions of the men crouched
there in the edge of the bushes, and tingled their nerves with the sense of
something sinister in the very unconcernedness of the animals.

They splashed into the water-hole and drank thirstily and long. They stood
there as though they were luxuriating in the feel of more water than they
could drink, and one horse blew the moisture from his nostrils with a sound
that made Happy Jack jump.

After a few minutes that seemed an hour to those who waited with fingers
crooked upon gun-triggers, the horse that looked vaguely like Johnny turned
away from the water-hole and sneezed while he appeared to be wondering what to
do next. He moved slowly toward the packs that were thrown down just where
they had been taken from the horses, and began nosing tentatively about.

The others loitered still at the water-hole, save one--the buckskin, by his
lighter look in the dark--that came over to Johnny. The two horses nosed the
packs. A dull sound of clashing metal came to the ears of the Happy Family.

"Hey! Get outa that grain, doggone your fool hide," Pink called out
impulsively, crawling over his saddle and catching his foot in the stirrup
leather so that he came near going headlong.

Applehead yelled something, but Pink had recovered his balance and was running
to save the precious horsefeed from waste, and Johnny from foundering. There
might have been two Indiana on every horse in sight, but Pink was not thinking
of that possibility just then.

Johnny whirled guiltily away from the grain bag, licking his lips and blowing
dust from his nostrils. Pink went up to him and slipped a rope around his
neck. "Where's that bell?" he called out in his soft treble. "Or do you think
we better tie the old son-of-a-gun up and be sure of him?"

"Aw," said Happy Jack disgustedly a few minutes later, when the Happy Family
had crawled out of their ambush and were feeling particularly foolish. "Nex'
time old granny Furrman says Injuns t' this bunch, somebody oughta gag him "

"I notice you waited till he'd gone outa hearing before you said that," Luck
told him drily. "We're going to put out extra guards tonight, just the same.
And I guess you can stand the first shift, Happy, up there on the
ridge--you're so sure of things!"



CHAPTER XV. "NOW, DANG IT, RIDE!"

Indians are Indians, though they wear the green sweater and overalls of
civilization and set upon their black hair the hat made famous by John B.
Stetson. You may meet them in town and think them tamed to stupidity. You may
travel out upon their reservations and find them shearing sheep or hoeing corn
or plodding along the furrow, plowing their fields; or you may watch them
dancing grotesquely in their festivals, and still think that civilization is
fast erasing the savage instincts from their natures. You will be partly right
--but you will also be partly mistaken. An Indian is always an Indian, and a
Navajo Indian carries a thinner crust of civilization than do some others; as
I am going to illustrate.

As you have suspected, the Happy Family was not following the trail of Ramon
Chavez and his band. Ramon was a good many miles away in another direction;
unwittingly the Happy Family was keeping doggedly upon the trail of a party of
renegade Navajos who had been out on a thieving expedition among those
Mexicans who live upon the Rio Grande bottomland. Having plenty of reasons
for hurrying back to their stronghold, and having plenty of lawlessness to
account for, when they realized that they were being followed by nine white
men who had four packed horses with them to provide for their needs on a long
journey, it was no more than natural that the Indians should take it for
granted that they were being pursued, and that if they were caught they would
be taken back to town and shut up in that evil place which the white men
called their jail.

When it was known that the nine men who followed had twice recovered the trail
after sheep and cattle had trampled it out, the renegades became sufficiently
alarmed to call upon their tribesmen for help. And that was perfectly natural
and sensible from their point of view.

Now, the Navajos are peaceable enough if you leave them strictly alone and do
not come snooping upon their reservation trying to arrest somebody. But they
don't like jails, and if you persist in trailing their lawbreakers you are
going to have trouble on your hands. The Happy Family, with Luck and
Applehead, had no intention whatever of molesting the Navajos; but the Navajos
did not know that, and they acted according to their lights and their ideas of
honorable warfare.

Roused to resistance in behalf of their fellows, they straightway forsook
their looms, where they wove rugs for tourists, and the silver which they
fashioned into odd bracelets and rings; and the flocks of sheep whose wool
they used in the rugs and they went upon a quiet, crafty warpath against these
persistent white men.

They stole their horses and started them well on the trail back to
Albuquerque--since it is just as well to keep within the white men's law, if
it may be done without suffering any great incon venience. They would have
preferred to keep the horses, but they decided to start them home and let them
go. You could not call that stealing, and no one need go to jail for it. They
failed to realize that these horses might be so thoroughly broken to camp ways
that they would prefer the camp of the Happy Family to a long trail that held
only a memory of discomfort; they did not know that every night these horses
were given grain by the camp-fire, and that they would remember it when
feeding time came again. So the horses, led by wise old Johnny, swung in a
large circle when their Indian drivers left them, and went back to their men.

Then the Navajos, finding that simple maneuver a failure--and too late to
prevent its failing without risk of being discovered and forced into an open
fight -got together and tried something else; something more
characteristically Indian and therefore more actively hostile. They rode in
haste that night to a point well out upon the fresh trail of their fleeing
tribesmen, where the tracks came out of a barren, lava-encrusted hollow to
softer soil beyond. They summoned their squaws and their half-grown papooses
armed with branches that had stiff twigs and answered the purpose of brooms.
With great care about leaving any betraying tracks of their own until they
were quite ready to leave a trail, a party was formed to represent the six
whom the Happy Family bad been following. These divided and made off in
different directions, leaving a plain trail behind them to lure the white men
into the traps which would be prepared for them farther on.

When dawn made it possible to do so effectively, the squaws began to whip out
the trail of the six renegade Indians, and the chance footprints of those who
bad gone ahead to leave the false trail for the white men to follow. Very
painstakingly the squaws worked, and the young ones who could be trusted.
Brushing the sand smoothly across a hoofprint here, and another one there;
walking backward, their bodies bent, their sharp eyes scanning every little
depression, every faint trace of the passing of their tribesmen; brushing,
replacing pebbles kicked aside by a hoof, wiping out completely that trail
which the Happy Family bad followed with such persistence, the squaws did
their part, while their men went on to prepare the trap.

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