apiece?” asked Limpy.
“We can’t do better than make the offer,” said Yank.
“This cash’ll come handy at the other end of the line,” said the Captain,
intrusting the gold to the care of his daughters and reinstating his men,
after a sharp exhortation to avoid repeating the offence.
XXI
_AN UNEXPECTED ENCOUNTER_
“Oh, this wonderful Western country!” wrote Jean in her diary, under date
of midnight, July 4. “After travelling so long on the banks of the Platte
that we had come to look upon it as a familiar friend, we left it to the
southward and turned our course up the valley of the Sweet Water, through
a succession of low, wooded hills. This little river, though not more
than a hundred feet wide, is quite deep, and runs like a mill-race. The
water is as clear as ether, and agreeably cold.
“Nobody can conceive the vastness of this country, or imagine its future
possibilities, until he has crossed the great unsettled part of this
continent to the westward and seen it for himself.
“Some days we move for many hours over great stretches of alluvial soil,
which only needs the impulse of cultivation to make it yield of the
fruits of the earth like magic. Again, we are in the midst of big fields
of crude saleratus, or salt, or sulphur. Now and then our cattle are
compelled to wade through an alkali swamp, suggesting more foot-ail; but
our Little Doctor says that danger is past for this year; she has not
stated why, and maybe she doesn’t know.
“We encamped last night near Independence Rock,—a huge pile of gray
basalt, covering an area of perhaps ten acres, and looking to be about
three hundred feet high. Its sides are formed of great irregular
bowlders, worn smooth by the warring elements of ages.
“July 5. Yesterday was Independence Day, and as we had camped near
Independence Rock, daddie laid over to celebrate.
“About noon, Mary, Marjorie, and I concluded that we would climb the rock
to its summit, carrying with us the only star-spangled banner the train
could boast. But our scheme failed through the fickleness and fury of the
same elements that have been smoothing the surface of the rock during the
ages gone.
“We had climbed over halfway to the top when a low, dense cloud, as
blue-black as a kettle of indigo dye, enveloped us. It came upon us so
suddenly that we hardly realized our danger till we were surrounded
by semi-darkness in the midst of a pelting hailstorm. We retreated so
blindly and hastily that it is a miracle we didn’t break our necks.
“Thunder and lightning followed, or rather accompanied the hail, and
were succeeded by a deluge of rain. Sudden squalls of wind would fairly
lift us off our feet at times as we hurried downward, making the descent
doubly perilous. But the storm soon spent its fury, leaving the air as
clear and sweet as a chime of bells.
“A roaring fire welcomed us at camp, by which we warmed our chilled
marrow-bones and dried our sodden toggery.
“Daddie scolded; Mame charged our mishap all to me; Marj blamed both of
us, and excused herself. It is the way of the world, or of most people in
it, but it is sometimes very provoking. I hadn’t thought of attempting
the climb till the other girls proposed it; but I took the brunt of the
blame, and, as usual, got all the scolding.
“The storm wouldn’t let us try to float the flag, but it got very wet,
and we had our labor for our pains.
“Sally and Susannah prepared a Fourth of July banquet of antelope steaks,
to go with our regulation diet of beans and coffee. After dinner Mrs.
McAlpin sang ‘The Star-Spangled Banner,’ the rest of us joining in the
chorus. Susannah sang a lot of negro melodies, and George Washington
danced for us, his white teeth shining, and eyeballs gleaming. Hal read
the Declaration of Independence, and daddie ‘made the eagle scream.’
“He was in the midst of his oration, and I was wondering where all
the men of valor came from, seeing they had had no mothers to assist
in getting up this spread-eagle scheme we call a republic, when I was
compelled to leave the crowd and poise myself on a wet wagon-tongue
to write the thing up. Scotty, who is still on crutches, delivered an
oration on the side, of which I heard but little, owing to my banishment.
“But I won’t always be so meek and silent on the Fourth of July. I’ll
write a Declaration of Independence for women some day.
“Daddie burned some powder after dark, ‘to amuse the children,’ he said,
but I noticed that the men enjoyed the noise even more than the children
did. Poor Bobbie got some powder burns about the face, and Sadie and the
babies gave us a squalling chorus, prompted by fright, causing me to
wonder why men must always celebrate our patriotism with the emblems of
death and destruction.”
On July 6 she wrote: “We have reached the edges of the Rocky Mountains
now; and as we climb slowly and almost imperceptibly toward their
summits, our road winds in and out along the meandering bases of a great
divide, down which many little streams of icy water dash with foam and
roar, forever in a hurry, always trying to go somewhere, and never
reaching any settled goal.
“Now and then we get glimpses of distant summits, but we are reaching
them by an ascent so gradual that daddie says we shall not realize that
we have crossed the great divide till we see the water has changed its
course from east to west.
“We passed a trading-post to-day, belonging to a company having its
headquarters at Salt Lake. The men in charge wore big sombreros, buckskin
trousers, and moccasins of buffalo hide. They all smoked incessantly
and affected the airs of the genus cowboy, or _vaquero_ of the plains,
of whom we often see specimens roving over hill and plain on horseback,
their shoulders covered with gayly colored serapes, flapping in the wind
like wings.
“We pass daily from six to a dozen graves, but not so newly made as those
noticed heretofore; so we conclude the cholera is abating.
“There, old Journal! I’ve done my level best to write you up to date.
But it’s like climbing these mountains,—uphill work, and dreadfully
monotonous!”
* * * * *
“Did you buy a fresh stock of provisions, Captain?” asked Sally O’Dowd,
as they were preparing to leave the trading-post which Jean had
mentioned, after he had held a long parley with a big, bronzed, and
heavily bearded mountaineer, who was strikingly handsome despite his
peculiar make-up.
“Yes, Sally. I bought a couple o’ hundred pounds o’ flour, for which I
paid a twenty-dollar gold-piece.”
“I was feeding the children, and didn’t get a chance to make my purchases
at the proper time. Won’t you hold the teams back a few minutes for me?”
“Yes, but hurry up.”
“Let me have a hundred pounds of flour, sir,” she said, approaching the
counter, behind which the trader stood, smoking a huge meerschaum.
“Anything else?”
“Yes; the balance of this twenty-dollar gold-piece in dried peaches,
please.”
In filling her order, the trader raised the cloth partition of the tent
to reach his base of supplies, and in the middle of the tent Sally espied
an unkempt squaw and half-a-dozen dusky children.
“I’ll be compelled to hurry,” she said, as he leisurely weighed her
fruit. “Captain Ranger is always demanding haste.”
The trader started suddenly, his face blanching.
“Where does your train hail from?” he asked.
“From the middle West, sir. We are going from the West to the West.”
The trader balanced two sacks of Salt Lake flour on his shoulders, and
grasping the smaller package of peaches, strode out hurriedly toward the
wagon near which Captain Ranger was standing, impatient to be gone.
“These purchases are for the lady, sir. Where will you have them dumped?”
“Any place where there’s room, and don’t let any grass grow under your
feet!”
“The lady tells me your name is Ranger, sir.”
“Yes. What of it?”
“Will you walk with me a little way ahead of the wagons? I have something
important to say to you alone.”
“We are scarce of drivers,” replied the Captain, hesitating. “Two of my
men are out hunting.”
“I can drive,” exclaimed Jean, reaching for the whip, which she handled
with the skill of a freighter, finishing her flourishes with a series of
snaps at the end of a deerskin cracker, like the explosion of a bunch of
fire-crackers.
“If we’ll take this cut-off, we’ll come out a mile or more ahead of the
wagons,” said the trader. “Then we can rest by the roadside till they
catch up.”
The Captain strode by his side in silence.
“Don’t you know me, John?” asked the stranger, grasping him by the arm,
and speaking in a hoarse whisper.
Captain Ranger eyed him earnestly, his cheeks paling.
“Can it be possible that you are—Joe?” he asked, seizing his hand with a
vise-like grip.
“I am indeed your brother Joe,—an outlaw, now and always.”
“No, you are not an outlaw; the fellow over whom you got into that
trouble is alive and well. You’d have got out of that scrape all right if
you hadn’t jumped your bail and left all the rest of us in the lurch. Why
didn’t you stand your trial, like a man?”
John Ranger’s feelings overcame him, and he sank upon the ground, filled
with old-time memories. He buried his face in his hands. Time and
distance faded away, and he saw, with eyes of memory, the gentle, fading
face of his toiling, uncomplaining wife, whose life had been for years a
sacrifice to penury through the debt entailed by this brother’s cowardice.
“Do you mean to tell me that Elmer Edson is not dead?”
The question called him back to present conditions with a sudden start.
“Elmer Edson is not dead, but Annie Ranger is!” he said hoarsely. “We had
to leave her precious dust in the ground away back yonder in the Black
Hills. We started together on this terrible journey, hoping to escape the
consequences of that awful mortgage with which you left us in the lurch.
She had denied herself many comforts and all the luxuries of life for a
dozen years to feed the ever-eating cankerworm of interest. No, Joe, you
didn’t kill Edson; but through my efforts to help you out of a trouble in
which you should never have been entangled, you became accessory to the
lingering death of my wife.”
“Don’t reproach me, John! I loved Annie like a sister. I did indeed. She
was a sister to me from the day she became your wife. You don’t or won’t
see how it grieves me to hear of her death.”
“Why didn’t you write to us, like a man?”
The brother had risen to his feet, and was pacing nervously to and fro,
whittling aimlessly on a bit of sagebrush.
“I was afraid to write. There was a price upon my head, as you have no
need to be informed.”
“Yes, Joe; and to pay the interest on that price was the bane of my
existence for a dozen years. But you can write now. Our dear mother—God
bless her!—would forget all the terrible past if she could hold you in
her arms once more. It is your duty to return at once, and settle, as
well as you can, for the trouble you have caused. You ought at least to
lift that accursed mortgage from the farm, and let Lije Robinson and
Sister Mary and our parents spend the remainder of their lives in peace.
You are a free man, and can go where you please.”
“But I am not a free man, John. Even with that horrible load off my
shoulders, I still am bound, hand and foot.”
“Are you married, Joe?”
“Yes, John. You see, when a fellow is in hiding among the Indians, with a
price set upon his head, and is therefore afraid to go home, he’s nothing
but a fugitive from justice; he expects to spend his life there, and
never see the face of another white woman; and when there are scores of
pretty Indian girls in sight—”
John Ranger jumped to his feet, his fists clinched and his eyes glaring.
“You don’t mean to tell me that my brother is married to—to a—squaw?”
There was ineffable scorn in his tone and manner. It was now Joe’s turn
to sink upon the ground and bury his face in his hands. When he again
looked at his brother, there was an expression of age and anguish upon
his face which had not been there before.
“I am the husband of an Indian woman, and the father of seven half-breed
children,” he said with the air of a guilty man on trial for his life.
“But there are extenuating circumstances, John. My wife was no common
squaw. If you care for me at all, you will not apply that epithet to the
mother of my children. She was the daughter of a Mandan chief, who had
large dealings with the Hudson Bay Company, and who sent her to England
to be educated. You’d hardly think it to see her now, though; for the
Indian women fall back into aboriginal customs when they leave the haunts
of civilization to return to their people and take up life, especially as
mothers, among their own kind and kin. At least, that is what Wahnetta
did.”
John Ranger groaned. “My God! has it come to this?” he cried, looking the
picture of despair.
“If you had been in my place, you would have married her yourself, John.
Nobody has a right to judge another; for no one knows what he will do
till he is tried.”
“Don’t you regret the marriage, Joe?”
“It is too late for regrets. The deed is done, and I cannot get away from
my fate. Shall we part as friends and brothers? Or is there an impassable
gulf between us?”
There was an unspoken appeal in his tone, far stronger than words, which
John Ranger remembered for many a day. But he refused his brother’s
proffered hand, and said hoarsely, as he sprang to his feet: “Don’t, at
your peril, let anybody know that you are my brother!”
He wheeled upon his heel and was gone.
XXII
_THE SQUAW MAN_
Captain Ranger overtook his train at a late hour, still nursing his
towering wrath. His face was livid, and his breathing stertorous.
Snatching the ox-whip from the hands of Jean and frightening the
discouraged cattle into the semblance of an attempt at hurry by the cruel
vehemence with which he belabored their lash-beflecked hides, he urged
them forward, never once relaxing his attacks with the whip till he had
rushed them over the uneven road and rocks for six or seven miles.
“Daddie is in a terrible tantrum over something very unusual,” said Jean.
“Do you know what is the matter?” she asked aside, addressing Sally
O’Dowd.
“No, Jean; unless he had some hot words with that post-trader. I know
he thought ten dollars a hundred for flour was robbery. And think of a
dollar a pound for dried peaches!”
“Daddie’s not idiot enough to work himself into a fever over a trifle
like that,” answered Jean. “But suppose he has been thrown into a passion
by anybody, the poor half-sick and half-famished oxen ought not to be
punished for it. He reminds me of an old Kentucky slave-owner who got
so mad because one of his sons failed to pass his first exams at West
Point that he went out, as soon as he heard about it, and cruelly whipped
a nigger.” And falling back to the family team, beside which Hal was
trudging, whip in hand, striving to keep the jaded cattle close behind
his father’s oxen, she dropped hastily on one knee on the wagon-tongue
and climbed nimbly to a seat.
“That trader is still sitting by the roadside,” she cried to Sally, who
was trudging through the sand. “He’s digging the earth with a jack-knife
or dirk, or some other sharp implement, and seems quite as savage and out
of humor as daddie. Wonder what daddie said to him.”
One by one the wagons passed the solitary trader, who had climbed to a
low ledge of rocks, where he sat as silent as the sun. His knife had
fallen to the ground and lay glittering at his feet. His broad sombrero
shaded his face.
The sudden rebound from the great happiness that had been his when first
informed that he was not a murderer and an outlaw, to the abject position
of a spurned and degraded “squaw man” seemed more than he could bear. “I
am not a murderer, though, and that’s some comfort,” he moaned. “But
I am still a Pariah,—an outcast from my own people. What will my dear
mother think of me when John acquaints her with the facts? What will my
father say or do?”
It is well that Mother Nature, in her wisdom and mercy, has provided a
limit to human suffering, else everybody in this world would at times
become insane.
Cicadas gave forth their rasping notes in the dry grass, and a colony
of prairie dogs played hide-and-seek over the uneven streets above an
underground settlement hard by. A badger peeped cautiously from the mouth
of his sagebrush-guarded den, and a rattlesnake crawled unnoticed past
his feet.
“I don’t blame John for being disappointed and angry,” he said aloud,
“but I am amazed at his lack of charity. If he could have seen and known
Wahnetta as I did, at the time of our marriage, he would have been
pleased with my choice. But it is too late now. Her girlish grace and
beauty are gone, and one could hardly distinguish her from any of the
other pappoose-burdened, camas-digging squaws that abound in spots in the
land of the Latter-Day Saints. I might send her back, with the children,
to the remnant of her tribe among the Bad Lands, but the act would be
infamous. No, Joseph Ranger; you must take your medicine.”
He thought of his joyous exultation at the time he had won the
accomplished and graceful Indian princess, whom half-a-dozen
distinguished braves and as many handsome white traders had sought in
marriage; of her trusting preference for him; of their joyous honeymoon;
and of the herd of beautiful horses with which he had purchased her for
his chosen bride, thus making her a slave. He winced as he thought of the
legal status of his wife and children.
He blushed with shame as he thought of her loyalty to him through all the
years of her transformation from a lithe and pretty maiden of sixteen,
whom every man admired, to the shapeless and slovenly specimen of her
people, of whom he was now ashamed. He thought bitterly yet lovingly of
the numerous children she had borne him uncomplainingly, while wandering
from place to place in quest of roots and berries to save them from
starvation in their early married years, when game would be scarce and
his fickle fortunes had vanished for months at a stretch.
He remembered with what loving pride he had named his first two children
John and Annie, in honor of the brother and sister for whom his heart had
so often hungered. “And the end is this!” he cried, noting with a start
that the sun was down. “Why did I name them John and Annie? I might have
known better. I was a fool. And yet why should they be spurned on account
of their Indian blood? If, instead of marrying Wahnetta, I had refused to
make her my lawful wife, would my white relations have spurned me now?”
His childhood days passed and repassed before his mental vision like a
panorama.
His family had been proud of him. What sacrifices they had made to send
him to college, and with what base ingratitude he had repaid their
loyalty and love! He had worse than wasted his opportunities, he thought,
as he gazed abroad over the mighty landscape, bounded on the one hand by
the wide basin of the receded and still slowly receding waters of Great
Salt Lake, and on the other by the Rocky Mountains,—so near that they
obstructed his vision, though he well knew their extent and majesty.
“This won’t do!” cried the wretched man, as he started homeward, reeling
like a drunken man.
“Papa!” cried a childish voice. “Do hurry home! We are so hungry! Where
have you been for so long?”
“All right, Johnnie; I’m coming. Papa forgot.”
* * * * *
In a large military tent, or annex, at the rear end of the trader’s tent
sat Wahnetta, his wife. He shuddered at the thought. And yet why should
he? Was she not as good as he? Had all her years of faithful servitude
counted for nothing?
A meal of boiled buffalo meat and vegetables, with bread, coffee, butter,
and eggs, was waiting on a table of rough boards resting on trestles, and
covered with an oilcloth that had once been white.
In one corner, beside a big sheet-iron cook-stove, sat, or rather
crouched, the woman whom he had made his wife. She was not yet thirty
years of age, but all traces of her girlish youth and beauty of face
and figure were gone. Her dress, a cheap and garish print, was open at
the neck and arms, and hung in slovenly folds about her fat form and
moccasined feet.
“Why in thunder don’t you keep yourself and the young ones clean and
dressed up?” asked her husband, as he dropped into his seat at table.
“You keep yourself like a Digger squaw!”
“I should belie the customs of my people if I aped the airs of white
folks when I must live like an Indian, Joseph Addicks!” said the woman,
in well-modulated English, as she arose and approached the table,
coffee-pot in hand.
“I loathe and abhor the very sight of you!” he exclaimed with a savage
glare.
“You didn’t talk like that when I was young and pretty, Joseph! If you
had tried it once, you would not have had a chance to repeat it then.
Perhaps,” she added bitterly, a moment later, as she filled his plate,
“perhaps I could have retained my charms if you had taken me back to
London and kept me within the pale of civilization in which I was
educated. You said before you married me that you would take me back to
Canada, where you said your people lived, who would be glad to welcome
me. How well you have kept your promise let these surroundings answer. I
married you believing that your people would be my people, and your God
my God. And,” looking around her, “this is the result!”
The sleeves of her gaudy dress were rolled back above the elbows,
exposing her fat yet muscular arms, not over-clean; and the dingy pipe
she had been smoking protruded from the open bosom of her gown.
“Where have you been during all this busy afternoon, Joseph?” she asked,
still standing.
“To hell!”
“Your missionaries have taught me that people only go to hell from
choice, Joseph; that is, if there is any worse hell anywhere than we
are in all the time,—which I love the Great Spirit too well to believe.
It seems to me we are compelled to take the punishment we bring upon
ourselves here and now.”
“You haven’t any right to think, you loathsome, disgusting—”
“Stop, Joseph Addicks! This is, you say, a white man’s country now. Will
you prove it by behaving yourself like a gentleman? I didn’t live for
four years in a white man’s country for nothing.”
He arose and left the table without a word. His wife had seen him in
moods like this before.
“Come, John; come, Annie; take your seats at table. You must be half
famished.”
Four or five smaller children as dusky as herself were playing on the
earthen floor; and, leaning helplessly against a pyramid of flour sacks,
lashed in Indian style to its birchen cradle, was a pappoose of three
months, defencelessly enduring an attack of mosquitoes on its face and
eyes.
“My father was a fool for sending me to college,” thought Joseph Ranger,
who, like many others that go wrong, was ready to blame everything and
everybody except himself. “The university should have stopped that hazing
before it began, so I couldn’t have had that fracas.”
“Why didn’t you eat your dinner, Joseph?” asked his wife, after she had
fed the children.
“Because I hate this accursed life too heartily to have any appetite for
food.”
“Haven’t I always urged you to go with us back to civilization, Joseph?”
“With you for a wife? You don’t know what you are talking about.”
Then—but it was not the first time since Wahnetta had become his property
by purchase—he fired himself up with the vile whiskey his company held
in stock, and, taking advantage of the English common law, at that time
an acknowledged authority in every State and Territory in the Union,
he provided himself with a stick, no thicker than his thumb, and beat
Wahnetta, his wife, long and brutally.
* * * * *
Captain Ranger had allowed his anger to cool before the sun went down. To
his credit be it spoken, he was very much ashamed of himself. “I was like
an enraged, unreasoning animal,” he exclaimed aloud. “I might at least
have repulsed Joe with kindness. I will write to my father and mother and
tell them that my brother who was lost is alive and is found. But I’ll
say nothing about the domestic side of his history. It would only grieve
them all, and they couldn’t help matters. It is none of my business,
anyhow.”
But he could not sleep. The memory of his and Joseph’s boyhood days
reproached him, and he thought lovingly, in spite of himself, of the
younger brother of whom he had been so proud. Many incidents of their
childhood, long forgotten, passed before him with startling vividness.