Good Indian
B >>
B. M. Bower >> Good Indian
Pages:
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10 |
11 |
12 |
13 |
14 |
15 |
16 |
17 |
18 GOOD INDIAN
by
B.M. Bower
CHAPTER I
PEACEFUL HART RANCH
It was somewhere in the seventies when old Peaceful Hart woke to
a realization that gold-hunting and lumbago do not take kindly to
one another, and the fact that his pipe and dim-eyed meditation
appealed to him more keenly than did his prospector's pick and
shovel and pan seemed to imply that he was growing old. He was a
silent man, by occupation and by nature, so he said nothing about
it; but, like the wild things of prairie and wood, instinctively
began preparing for the winter of his life. Where he had lately
been washing tentatively the sand along Snake River, he built a
ranch. His prospector's tools he used in digging ditches to
irrigate his new-made meadows, and his mining days he lived over
again only in halting recital to his sons when they clamored for
details of the old days when Indians were not mere untidy
neighbors to be gossiped with and fed, but enemies to be fought,
upon occasion.
They felt that fate had cheated them--did those five sons; for
they had been born a few years too late for the fun. Not one of
them would ever have earned the title of "Peaceful," as had his
father. Nature had played a joke upon old Peaceful Hart; for he,
the mildest-mannered man who ever helped to tame the West when it
really needed taming, had somehow fathered five riotous young
males to whom fight meant fun--and the fiercer, the funnier.
He used to suck at his old, straight-stemmed pipe and regard them
with a bewildered curiosity sometimes; but he never tried to put
his puzzlement into speech. The nearest he ever came to
elucidation, perhaps, was when he turned from them and let his
pale-blue eyes dwell speculatively upon the face of his wife,
Phoebe. Clearly he considered that she was responsible for their
dispositions.
The house stood cuddled against a rocky bluff so high it dwarfed
the whole ranch to pygmy size when one gazed down from the rim,
and so steep that one wondered how the huge, gray bowlders
managed to perch upon its side instead of rolling down and
crushing the buildings to dust and fragments. Strangers used to
keep a wary eye upon that bluff, as if they never felt quite safe
from its menace. Coyotes skulked there, and tarantulas and
"bobcats" and snakes. Once an outlaw hid there for days, within
sight and hearing of the house, and stole bread from Phoebe's
pantry at night--but that is a story in itself.
A great spring gurgled out from under a huge bowlder just behind
the house, and over it Peaceful had built a stone milk house,
where Phoebe spent long hours in cool retirement on churning day,
and where one went to beg good things to eat and to drink. There
was fruit cake always hidden away in stone jars, and cheese, and
buttermilk, and cream.
Peaceful Hart must have had a streak of poetry somewhere hidden
away in his silent soul. He built a pond against the bluff;
hollowed it out from the sand he had once washed for traces of
gold, and let the big spring fill it full and seek an outlet at
the far end, where it slid away under a little stone bridge. He
planted the pond with rainbow trout, and on the margin a rampart
of Lombardy poplars, which grew and grew until they threatened to
reach up and tear ragged holes in the drifting clouds. Their
slender shadows lay, like gigantic fingers, far up the bluff when
the sun sank low in the afternoon.
Behind them grew a small jungle of trees-catalpa and locust among
them--a jungle which surrounded the house, and in summer hid it
from sight entirely.
With the spring creek whispering through the grove and away to
where it was defiled by trampling hoofs in the corrals and
pastures beyond, and with the roses which Phoebe Hart kept abloom
until tho frosts came, and the bees, and humming--birds which
somehow found their way across the parched sagebrush plains and
foregathered there, Peaceful Hart's ranch betrayed his secret
longing for girls, as if he had unconsciously planned it for the
daughters he had been denied.
It was an ideal place for hammocks and romance--a place where
dainty maidens might dream their way to womanhood. And Peaceful
Hart, when all was done, grew old watching five full-blooded boys
clicking their heels unromantically together as they roosted upon
the porch, and threw cigarette stubs at the water lilies while
they wrangled amiably over the merits of their mounts; saw them
drag their blankets out into the broody dusk of the grove when
the nights were hot, and heard their muffled swearing under their
"tarps" because of the mosquitoes which kept the night air
twanging like a stricken harp string with their song.
They liked the place well enough. There were plenty of shady
places to lie and smoke in when the mercury went sizzling up its
tiny tube. Sometimes, when there was a dance, they would choose
the best of Phoebe's roses to decorate their horses' bridles; and
perhaps their hatbands, also. Peaceful would then suck harder
than ever at his pipe, and his faded blue eyes would wander
pathetically about the little paradise of his making, as if he
wondered whether, after all, it had been worth while.
A tight picket fence, built in three unswerving lines from the
post planted solidly in a cairn of rocks against a bowlder on the
eastern rim of the pond, to the road which cut straight through
the ranch, down that to the farthest tree of the grove, then back
to the bluff again, shut in that tribute to the sentimental side
of Peaceful's nature. Outside the fence dwelt sturdier, Western
realities.
Once the gate swung shut upon the grove one blinked in the garish
sunlight of the plains. There began the real ranch world. There
was the pile of sagebrush fuel, all twisted and gray, pungent as
a bottle of spilled liniment, where braided, blanketed bucks were
sometimes prevailed upon to labor desultorily with an ax in hope
of being rewarded with fruit new-gathered from the orchard or a
place at Phoebe's long table in the great kitchen.
There was the stone blacksmith shop, where the boys sweated over
the nice adjustment of shoes upon the feet of fighting, wild-eyed
horses, which afterward would furnish a spectacle of unseemly
behavior under the saddle.
Farther away were the long stable, the corrals where
broncho-taming was simply so much work to be performed,
hayfields, an orchard or two, then rocks and sand and sage which
grayed the earth to the very skyline.
A glint of slithering green showed where the Snake hugged the
bluff a mile away, and a brown trail, ankle-deep in dust,
stretched straight out to the west, and then lost itself
unexpectedly behind a sharp, jutting point of rocks where the
blufF had thrust out a rugged finger into the valley.
By devious turnings and breath-taking climbs, the trail finally
reached the top at the only point for miles, where it was
possible for a horseman to pass up or down.
Then began the desert, a great stretch of unlovely sage and lava
rock and sand for mile upon mile, to where the distant mountain
ridges reached out and halted peremptorily the ugly sweep of it.
The railroad gashed it boldly, after the manner of the iron trail
of modern industry; but the trails of the desert dwellers wound
through it diffidently, avoiding the rough crest of lava rock
where they might, dodging the most aggressive sagebrush and
dipping tentatively into hollows, seeking always the easiest way
to reach some remote settlement or ranch.
Of the men who followed those trails, not one of them but could
have ridden straight to the Peaceful Hart ranch in black
darkness; and there were few, indeed, white men or Indians, who
could have ridden there at midnight and not been sure of blankets
and a welcome to sweeten their sleep. Such was the Peaceful Hart
Ranch, conjured from the sage and the sand in the valley of the
Snake.
CHAPTER II
GOOD INDIAN
There is a saying--and if it is not purely Western, it is at
least purely American--that the only good Indian is a dead
Indian. In the very teeth of that, and in spite of tho fact that
he was neither very good, nor an Indian--nor in any sense
"dead"-- men called Grant Imsen "Good Indian" to his face; and if
he resented the title, his resentment was never made
manifest--perhaps because he had grown up with the name, he
rather liked it when he was a little fellow, and with custom had
come to take it as a matter of course.
Because his paternal ancestry went back, and back to no one knows
where among the race of blue eyes and fair skin, the Indians
repudiated relationship with him, and called him white
man--though they also spoke of him unthinkingly as "Good Injun."
Because old Wolfbelly himself would grudgingly admit under
pressure that the mother of Grant had been the half-caste
daughter of Wolfbelly's sister, white men remembered the taint
when they were angry, and called him Injun. And because he stood
thus between the two races of men, his exact social status a
subject always open to argument, not even the fact that he was
looked upon by the Harts as one of the family, with his own bed
always ready for him in a corner of the big room set apart for
the boys, and with a certain place at the table which was called
his--not even his assured position there could keep him from
sometimes feeling quite alone, and perhaps a trifle bitter over
his loneliness.
Phoebe Hart had mothered him from the time when his father had
sickened and died in her house, leaving Grant there with twelve
years behind him, in his hands a dirty canvas bag of gold coin so
heavy he could scarce lift it, which stood for the mining claim
the old man had just sold, and the command to invest every one of
the gold coins in schooling.
Old John Imsen was steeped in knowledge of the open; nothing of
the great outdoors had ever slipped past him and remained
mysterious. Put when he sold his last claim--others he had
which promised little and so did not count--he had signed his
name with an X. Another had written the word John before that X,
and the word Imsen after; above, a word which he explained was
"his," and below the word "mark." John Imsen had stared down
suspiciously at the words, and he had not felt quite easy in his
mind until the bag of gold coins was actually in his keeping.
Also, he had been ashamed of that X. It was a simple thing to
make with a pen, and yet he had only succeeded in making it look
like two crooked sticks thrown down carelessly, one upon the
other. His face had gone darkly red with the shame of it, and he
had stood scowling down at the paper.
"That boy uh mine's goin' to do better 'n that, by God!" he had
sworn, and the words had sounded like a vow.
When, two months after that, he had faced--incredulously, as is
the way with strong men--the fact that for him life was over,
with nothing left to him save an hour or so of labored breath and
a few muttered sentences, he did not forget that vow. He called
Phoebe close to the bed, placed the bag of gold in Grant's
trembling hands, and stared intently from one face to the other.
"Mis' Hart, he ain't got--anybody--my folks--I lost track of 'em
years ago. You see to it--git some learnin' in his head. When a
man knows books--it's--like bein' heeled--good gun--plenty uh
ca't'idges-- in a fight. When I got that gold--it was like
fightin' with my bare hands--against a gatlin' gun. They coulda
cheated me--whole thing--on paper--I wouldn't know--luck--just
luck they didn't. So you take it--and git the boy schoolin'.
Costs money--I know that--git him all it'll buy. Send him--
where they keep--the best. Don't yuh let up--n'er let
him--whilst they's a dollar left. Put it all--into his
head--then he can't lose it, and he can--make it earn more.
An'--I guess I needn't ask yuh--be good to him. He ain't got
anybody--not a soul--Injuns don't count. You see to it--don't
let up till--it's all gone."
Phoebe had taken him literally. And Grant, if he had little
taste for the task, had learned books and other things not
mentioned in the curriculums of the schools she sent him to--and
when the bag was reported by Phoebe to be empty, he had returned
with inward relief to the desultory life of the Hart ranch and
its immediate vicinity.
His father would probably have been amazed to see how little
difference that schooling made in the boy. The money had lasted
long enough to take him through a preparatory school and into the
second year of a college; and the only result apparent was speech
a shade less slipshod than that of his fellows, and a vocabulary
which permitted him to indulge in an amazing number of epithets
and in colorful vituperation when the fancy seized him.
He rode, hot and thirsty and tired, from Sage Hill one day and
found Hartley empty of interest, hot as the trail he had just now
left thankfully behind him, and so absolutely sleepy that it
seemed likely to sink into the sage-clothed earth under the
weight of its own dullness. Even the whisky was so warm it
burned like fire, and the beer he tried left upon his outraged
palate the unhappy memory of insipid warmth and great bitterness.
He plumped the heavy glass down upon the grimy counter in the
dusty far corner of the little store and stared sourly at Pete
Hamilton, who was apathetically opening hatboxes for the
inspection of an Indian in a red blanket and frowsy braids.
"How much?" The braided one fingered indecisively the broad brim
of a gray sombrero.
"Nine dollars." Pete leaned heavily against the shelves behind
him and sighed with the weariness of mere living.
"Huh! All same buy one good hoss." The braided one dropped the
hat, hitched his blanket over his shoulder in stoical disregard
of the heat, and turned away.
Pete replaced the cover, seemed about to place the box upon the
shelf behind him, and then evidently decided that it was not
worth the effort. He sighed again.
"It is almighty hot," he mumbled languidly. "Want another drink,
Good Injun?"
"I do not. Hot toddy never did appeal to me, my friend. If you
weren't too lazy to give orders, Pete, you'd have cold beer for a
day like this. You'd give Saunders something to do beside lie in
the shade and tell what kind of a man he used to be before his
lungs went to the bad. Put him to work. Make him pack this
stuff down cellar where it isn't two hundred in the shade. Why
don't you?"
"We was going to get ice t'day, but they didn't throw it off when
the train went through."
"That's comforting--to a man with a thirst like the great Sahara.
Ice! Pete, do you know what I'd like to do to a man that mentions
ice after a drink like that?"
Pete neither knew nor wanted to know, and he told Grant so. "If
you're going down to the ranch," he added, by way of changing the
subject, "there's some mail you might as well take along."
"Sure, I'm going--for a drink out of that spring, if nothing
else. You've lost a good customer to-day, Pete. I rode up here
prepared to get sinfully jagged--and here I've got to go on a
still hunt for water with a chill to it--or maybe buttermilk.
Pete, do you know what I think of you and your joint?"
"I told you I don't wanta know. Some folks ain't never
satisfied. A fellow that's rode thirty or forty miles to get
here, on a day like this, had oughta be glad to get anything that
looks like beer."
"Is that so?" Grant walked purposefully down to the front of the
store, where Pete was fumbling behind the rampart of crude
pigeonholes which was the post-office. "Let me inform you, then,
that--"
There was a swish of skirts upon the rough platform outside, and
a young woman entered with the manner of feeling perfectly at
home there. She was rather tall, rather strong and capable
looking, and she was bareheaded, and carried a door key suspended
from a smooth-worn bit of wood.
"Don't get into a perspiration making up the mail, Pete," she
advised calmly, quite ignoring both Grant and the Indian.
"Fifteen is an hour late--as usual. Jockey Bates always seems to
be under the impression he's an undertaker's assistant, and is
headed for the graveyard when he takes fifteen out. He'll get
the can, first he knows--and he'll put in a month or two
wondering why. I could make better time than he does myself."
By then she was leaning with both elbows upon the counter beside
the post-office, bored beyond words with life as it must be
lived--to judge from her tone and her attitude.
"For Heaven's sake, Pete," she went on languidly, "can't you
scare up a novel, or chocolates, or gum, or--ANYTHING to kill
time? I'd even enjoy chewing gum right now--it would give my
jaws something to think of, anyway."
Pete, grinning indulgently, came out of retirement behind the
pigeonholes, and looked inquiringly around the store.
"I've got cards," he suggested. "What's the matter with a game
of solitary? I've known men to put in hull winters alone, up in
the mountains, jest eating and sleeping and playin' solitary."
The young woman made a grimace of disgust. "I've come from three
solid hours of it. What I really do want is something to read.
Haven't you even got an almanac?"
"Saunders is readin' 'The Brokenhearted Bride'-- you can have it
soon's he's through. He says it's a peach."
"Fifteen is bringing up a bunch of magazines. I'll have reading
in plenty two hours from now; but my heavens above, those two
hours!" She struck both fists despairingly upon the counter.
"I've got gumdrops, and fancy mixed--"
"Forget it, then. A five-pound box of chocolates is due--on
fifteen." She sighed heavily. "I wish you weren't so old, and
hadn't quite so many chins, Pete," she complained. "I'd inveigle
you into a flirtation. You see how desperate I am for something
to do!"
Pete smiled unhappily. He was sensitive about all those chins,
and the general bulk which accompanied them.
"Let me make you acquainted with my friend, Good In--er--Mr.
Imsen." Pete considered that he was behaving with great
discernment and tact. "This is Miss Georgie Howard, the new
operator." He twinkled his little eyes at her maliciously.
"Say, he ain't got but one chin, and he's only twenty-three years
old." He felt that the inference was too plain to be ignored.
She turned her head slowly and looked Grant over with an air of
disparagement, while she nodded negligently as an acknowledgment
to the introduction. "Pete thinks he's awfully witty," she
remarked. "It's really pathetic."
Pete bristled--as much as a fat man could bristle on so hot a
day. "Well, you said you wanted to flirt, and so I took it for
granted you'd like--"
Good Indian looked straight past the girl, and scowled at Pete.
"Pete, you're an idiot ordinarily, but when you try to be smart
you're absolutely insufferable. You're mentally incapable of
recognizing the line of demarcation between legitimate persiflage
and objectionable familiarity. An ignoramus of your particular
class ought to confine his repartee to unqualified affirmation or
the negative monosyllable." Whereupon he pulled his hat more
firmly upon his head, hunched his shoulders in disgust,
remembered his manners, and bowed to Miss Georgie Howard, and
stalked out, as straight of back as the Indian whose blanket he
brushed, and who may have been, for all he knew, a blood relative
of his.
"I guess that ought to hold you for a while, Pete," Miss Georgie
approved under her breath, and stared after Grant curiously.
"'You're mentally incapable of recognizing the line of
demarcation between legitimate persiflage and objectionable
familiarity.' I'll bet two bits you don't know what that means,
Pete; but it hits you off exactly. Who is this Mr. Imsen?"
She got no reply to that. Indeed, she did not wait for a reply.
Outside, things were happening--and, since Miss Georgie was dying
of dullness, she hailed the disturbance as a Heaven-sent
blessing, and ran to see what was going on.
Briefly, Grant had inadvertently stepped on a sleeping dog's
paw--a dog of the mongrel breed which infests Indian camps, and
which had attached itself to the blanketed buck inside. The dog
awoke with a yelp, saw that it was a stranger who had perpetrated
the outrage, and straightway fastened its teeth in the leg of
Grant's trousers. Grant kicked it loose, and when it came at him
again, he swore vengeance and mounted his horse in haste.
He did not say a word. He even smiled while he uncoiled his
rope, widened the loop, and, while the dog was circling warily
and watching for another chance at him, dropped the loop neatly
over its front quarters, and drew it tight.
Saunders, a weak-lunged, bandy-legged individual, who was
officially a general chore man for Pete, but who did little
except lie in the shade, reading novels or gossiping, awoke then,
and, having a reputation for tender-heartedness, waved his arms
and called aloud in the name of peace.
"Turn him loose, I tell yuh! A helpless critter like that--you
oughta be ashamed--abusin' dumb animals that can't fight back!"
"Oh, can't he?" Grant laughed grimly.
"You turn that dog loose!" Saunders became vehement, and paid the
penalty of a paroxysm of coughing.
"You go to the devil. If you were an able-bodied man, I'd get
you, too--just to have a pair of you. Yelping, snapping curs,
both of you." He played the dog as a fisherman plays a trout.
"That dog, him Viney dog. Viney heap likum. You no killum, Good
Injun." The Indian, his arms folded in his blanket, stood upon
the porch watching calmly the fun. "Viney all time heap mad, you
killum," he added indifferently.
"Sure it isn't old Hagar's?"
"No b'long-um Hagar--b'long-um Viney. Viney heap likum."
Grant hesitated, circling erratically with his victim close to
the steps. "All right, no killum--teachum lesson, though. Viney
heap bueno squaw--heap likum Viney. No likum dog, though. Dog
all time come along me." He glanced up, passed over the fact
that Miss Georgie Howard was watching him and clapping her hands
enthusiastically at the spectacle, and settled an unfriendly
stare upon Saunders.
"You shut up your yowling. You'll burst a blood vessel and go to
heaven, first thing you know. I've never contemplated hiring you
as my guardian angel, you blatting buck sheep. Go off and lie
down somewhere." He turned in the saddle and looked down at the
dog, clawing and fighting the rope which held him fast just back
of the shoulder--blades. "Come along, doggie--NICE doggie!" he
grinned, and touched his horse with the spurs. With one leap, it
was off at a sharp gallop, up over the hill and through the
sagebrush to where he knew the Indian camp must be.
Old Wolfbelly had but that morning brought his thirty or forty
followers to camp in the hollow where was a spring of clear
water--the hollow which had for long been known locally as "the
Indian Camp," because of Wolfbelly's predilection for the spot.
Without warning save for the beat of hoofs in the sandy soil,
Grant charged over the brow of the hill and into camp, scattering
dogs, papooses, and squaws alike as he rode.
ShriLL clamor filled the sultry air. Sleeping bucks awoke,
scowling at the uproar; and the horse of Good Indian, hating
always the smell and the litter of an Indian camp, pitched
furiously into the very wikiup of old Hagar, who hated the rider
of old. In the first breathing spell he loosed the dog, which
skulked, limping, into the first sheltered spot be found, and
laid him down to lick his outraged person and whimper to himself
at the memory of his plight. Grant pulled his horse to a restive
stand before a group of screeching squaws, and laughed outright
at the panic of them.
"Hello! Viney! I brought back your dog," he drawled. "He tried
to bite me--heap kay bueno* dog. Mebbyso you killum. Me no
hurtum--all time him Hartley, all time him try hard bite me.
Sleeping Turtle tell me him Viney dog. he likum Viney, me no
kill Viney dog. You all time mebbyso eat that dog--sabe? No
keep--Kay bueno. All time try for bite. You cookum, no can
bite. Sabe?"
*AUTHOR'S NOTE.--The Indians of southern Idaho spoke a somewhat
mixed dialect. Bueno (wayno), their word for 'good,' undoubtedly
being taken from the Spanish language. I believe the word "kay"
to be Indian. It means "no', and thus the "Kay bueno" so often
used by them means literally 'no good," and is a term of reproach
On the other hand, "heap bueno" is "very good," their enthusiasm
being manifested merely by drawing out the word "heap." In
speaking English they appear to have no other way of expressing,
in a single phrase, their like or dislike of an object or person.
Without waiting to see whether Viney approved of his method of
disciplining her dog, or intended to take his advice regarding
its disposal, he wheeled and started off in the direction of the
trail which led down the bluff to the Hart ranch. When he
reached the first steep descent, however, he remembered that Pete
had spoken of some mail for the Harts, and turned back to get it.
Once more in Hartley, he found that the belated train was making
up time, and would be there within an hour; and, since it carried
mail from the West, it seemed hardly worthwhile to ride away
before its arrival. Also, Pete intimated that there was a good
chance of prevailing upon the dining-car conductor to throw off a
chunk of ice. Grant, therefore, led his horse around into the
shade, and made himself comfortable while he waited.
Pages:
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10 |
11 |
12 |
13 |
14 |
15 |
16 |
17 |
18