some of the dried kindling with which Jim Buckley had supplied the
family, and began to build a little wigwam-shaped pyramid against the
side of the wall. Others moved about furtively, prying here and there
for possible plunder. They preserved absolute silence, for the
superstitious terror of the place was working on them, and they had
begun to experience that panic-like tremor which seems to create an
invisible clutch ready to seize from behind.
Even the encouraging presence of Rain-in-the-Face was not potent enough
to prevent this. Out on the plains the personality of the man had
loomed large, but here the legend was greater than he. The warriors
felt the imminence of the frowning, brooding manitou of Harney; they
almost heard the moaned syllables of the Soulless Ones' complaint.
Their movements were those of timid mice, advancing a little,
hesitating much, ready to flee in panic.
Not so Lafond. He strode roughly over to the corner where the child
lay. In his mind, with new vividness, burned that old picture of his
humiliation. He began to realize, now that the patient repression of
his hate was over, how potent it had been. Alfred and Billy Knapp were
out of his reach for the present, but here were the others ready to his
hand. He seized little Prue by the hair of her head.
The child, thus suddenly awakened, screamed violently, shriek upon
shriek, as her terror became more fully conscious of the savage and his
bloody knife. About the room the warriors paused nervously.
Accustomed enough to screams of this sort, they were now dominated by
superstition and were thrown off their wonted balance.
And then a fearful thing occurred. Before their eyes, in the open
door, groped and staggered the woman Lafond had stabbed but a moment
before. From the red raw surface of her scalp blood streamed--streamed
over the remaining fringe of her hair, matting it down; streamed down
into her eyes, blinding them; over her drawn countenance; over the
dabbled, sticky, clinging fabric of her garment, reddened still more by
the pulsing flood from the two great wounds in her body. Her breast
heaved painfully, the breath coming and going with a strange bubbling
gurgle. Her face was turned upward almost to the ceiling above in the
agony of her endeavor. Her little hands, become waxen, clutched and
unclutched the side of the door. The child screamed yet again,
mercifully hidden from this awful sight by the intervention of Lafond's
body. The woman made a supreme effort to advance, plunged forward, and
rolled over and over on the cabin floor.
At the same instant, with a shriek of wind and a roar of rain, the
voice of the thunder spoke.
The savages, who had watched with strained eyes this resurrection from
the dead, yelled in an ecstasy of superstitious terror and rushed for
the door.
Lafond, utterly unmoved, called to them in Indian and swore at them in
French, but they were gone. He hesitated for a moment in evident
indecision as to what should be done next. Then he rapidly bundled the
little girl in a blanket and threw her across his shoulder. As he
hurried to the door, he paused for a moment over the motionless heap of
blood and rags on the floor, coolly thrusting his knife again and again
into the unresisting flesh.
He caught the fugitives only below the canyon of Iron Creek. They had
made no pause until well out of the hills, and were still shaking with
superstitious dread. Even Rain-in-the-Face, bold and self-confident as
he was, had yielded to the panic; nor could the persuasions, threats or
ridicule of the half-breed induce them to return.
For a time Lafond was of two minds as to his own course in the matter.
Should he leave things as they were for the present or should he return
alone to complete the work? Finally he decided on the former. The
Gallic love of the spectacular again intervened; besides, he was
possessed of a certain large feeling that the world was not wide enough
to save his victims from him when he should judge the time fit. He
found much joy in gloating over what he imagined the two men would say,
do, and think when they returned to the cabin. And he was a good deal
of a savage. He looked forward with fierce delight to the great battle
which he foresaw would soon take place between Sitting Bull and his
white enemies. So he rode on with the little band of warriors to
overtake Lone Wolf.
The savages plainly could not understand his encumbering himself with
the child. The custom had always been to seize such a victim by the
ankles, whirl it once about the head to get a good swing, and then to
dash its skull violently against a bowlder. They saw no reason why the
rule should be departed from in this case. Neither did Lafond; but the
queer, zigzag intuition of the half-breed had caused him to feel dimly
that he should preserve the child, and as he was in the habit of
gratifying his whims, he proceeded to carry out his intention in this
case. Once his decision was expressed in emphatic form, his companions
acquiesced. The child was Michail's captive; with his own captive he
could work his will. That is the Indian code.
So little Miss Prue was carried for seven days on the back of a horse.
She did not cry much, and this saved her from violence. Her two years
of outdoor life had made her constitution robust, and this helped her
in inevitable privation. At the end of the week, the band caught up
with Lone Wolf and his camp, and Miss Prue was given over into the care
of Lafond's two young squaws. With them she underwent the customary
two days' jealousy, and then entered fully into the heritage of
kindliness which every Indian woman squeezes, drop by drop, from her
arid life and lavishes on the creatures who are gentle with her.
She had, to be sure, to learn the Indian virtues of silence and
obedience. She had to do the little tasks that are set to girl babies
everywhere among the savage tribes. And, above all, she had to learn
to endure. But, in recompense, the two Indian women adored her. They
decked her out in beaded work and white buckskin; they put bright
feathers in her hair and bright beads about her little neck; they saved
choice bits for her from the family kettle; and when night came they
lay on either side of her and softly stroked her hair as she slept.
Over her head, among others, hung her mother's scalp.
XII
THE LEOPARD AND HIS SPOTS
It is not the purpose of this story to describe the battle of the
Little Big Horn in detail. That has been done many times. There is
little about it that is remarkable, excepting always the heroism of the
men who fought so desperately. The scene itself must have been
impressive, as viewed by the non-combatants of the Indians from the
bluffs near at hand--the swirl of brown about the melting patch of
blue. After Custer fell, the savages turned eagerly down the valley to
attack Reno, leaving the dead as they lay. Lafond did not accompany
them. The sight had aroused certain reflections in his breast, and he
wished to work the thing out.
After sunset, he went alone and on foot over to the battlefield. The
troopers lay as they had fallen--first, Calhoun's company in line, with
its officers in place; then Keogh's; finally, on the knoll, the
remnant, scattered irregularly among the dead of their enemies. In the
cold light their faces shone white and still, even yet instinct with
the eagerness of battle; an eagerness which death had transmuted from
flesh to marble. Near the centre lay Custer, his long yellow hair
framing his face, his hands crossed on his breast. He alone was
unmutilated, save by the shot that had taken his life.
The half-breed did not hesitate on the outer circle of the combat, but
picked his way among the corpses until he stood on the summit of the
little knoll. Then he folded his arms and looked steadily down on the
white man's inscrutable face.
Whatever might be Lafond's intellectual or moral deficiencies, lack of
perspicacity was not among them. Through the red glory of this
apparent victory, the most sweeping ever accomplished by the plains
Indians, he saw clearly the imminence of final defeat. The dead man
before him lay smiling, and Lafond perceived that he smiled because he
saw his people arising to avenge him. The beat of the muster drum
calling the avengers to the frontier now sounded in prophecy to his
hearing, and the echoes of the last battle shot merged into the clang
of an iron civilization, which was destined to push these exulting
victors dispassionately aside. It was a striking picture of light and
of shadow--this dark, savage figure silhouetted against the softened
brightness of the sky, this bright-haired warrior lying bathed in the
glorification of a Western night; the white man humiliated, defeated,
slain, but seeing with closed eyes that at which he smiled with deep
content; the savage, proud in success, triumphant, victor, but
perceiving somehow, in the very evidences of his achievement, that
which made him knit his brows. How little was this great victory
against the background of the people whom it had outraged, and yet how
mightily it would stir that people when once it became known!
Michail Lafond the savage stood before the body of Custer the fallen,
for an hour, moving not one muscle all the time. At the end of the
hour Michail Lafond the civilized turned slowly away, and walked
thoughtfully toward the lodges on the other bank of the Little Big Horn
River. The sight of a brave man, who had died as he lived, had
reformed Lafond, but whether moralists would have approved of the
reformation is to be doubted.
The night ran well along toward morning. The squaws, who had been
plundering and mutilating the dead, had long since returned to hear the
report of the warriors who had gone to attack Reno. The attack had
failed, but the fight had been desperate and the losses on both sides
heavy. Six of Custer's command, captured alive, were burned to death.
At last, the entire camp, with the exception of the women sentinels,
had gone to rest. Toward daybreak, even these became drowsy.
Lafond arose quietly. He gathered a few necessaries into a pack,
placed them outside the doorway of the lodge, hesitated a moment, and
then returned. His two squaws slept, as usual, one each side of the
little girl. Lafond lifted the child carefully in order that he might
not awaken her guardians or herself, and wrapped her closely in his
blanket. At the doorway he again hesitated. Then, chuckling grimly,
he deposited the child by the bundle he had already prepared, and
returning, took down from the tent pole the string of scalps which went
to show how successful and how savage a warrior he had been. By the
light of the stars he selected one of these and laid it carefully
between the two sleeping women. It was the scalp of the little girl's
mother. Then he rehung the string on the tent pole, and went outside
immensely pleased with his bit of humor.
It was his good-by to the wild life. From that time on he dwelt in the
towns, where in a very few years his name became known as standing for
a shrewdness in management, a keenness in seizing opportunities, and an
inflexibility of purpose rarely to be met with among his Anglo-Saxon
competitors. His present objective point, however, was the Spotted
Tail Agency, which was, from the valley of the Little Big Horn, an
affair of five days. Michail Lafond did it in four; or at least at the
end of the fourth he was within a few miles of the agency buildings.
By the evening of the third day, he had transformed both himself and
the little girl into an appearance of civilization, reclothing her in
the garments she had worn at the time of her capture, and himself in a
complete outfit which he had collected piece by piece on that last
night with the savages. The change was truly astonishing.
His last camp in the open was pitched within sight of the Spotted Tail
reservation. The darkness was almost at hand. He had fed himself and
the child, had put the latter to rest under one blanket and was just
about to wrap himself in the other, when he became aware of a prairie
schooner swaying leisurely across the plains in his direction. He at
once sat up again. Every man was to him an object of suspicion.
Not until the wagon had halted within a few feet of him could he
distinguish the occupant. Then he perceived that the latter was a
gentle-faced, silver-haired individual of mild aspect, dressed decently
but strangely, and possessed of introspective blue eyes, which he
turned dreamily on Lafond.
"May I camp here?" he inquired deprecatingly.
The half-breed considered.
"I s'pose so," he said without enthusiasm.
The old man descended and uncoupled his two animals. After he had
picketed them, he returned, and, extracting from the wagon body the
materials for a meal, he proceeded to make himself at home over
Lafond's fire.
"I never did like to camp alone," he confided to the latter.
Lafond watched him intently. No further words were exchanged until the
stranger had finished his supper and had restored his kit to the wagon.
Then the younger man offered the hospitality of the plains.
"Yo' smok'?" he inquired, tendering his tobacco.
"Thank you, no," replied the old man with a tone of breeding which
Lafond felt but could not define.
The half-breed could not make out the newcomer, and the conversation
failed to enlighten him. That was an epoch when all the world turned
to the West; but it was a practical world. There one might in time
meet all sorts and conditions of men, from the English lord to the
turbulent Fenian; from the New York exquisite fallen on hard times to
the "bad man" who had never been east of the Mississippi. One never
betrayed surprise at anything one might bring ashore from this flotsam
and jetsam of the human race. But all these odds and ends were at
least made of tough material, strong enough to run wherever a rapid
current might dash them, capable of supporting hard knocks against one
another or the obstructions in the way; while this placid old man
seemed to Lafond like a crystal vessel, of rare quality, perhaps, but
none the less fragile. At the last he asked bluntly, "What do you
here?"
The old man fell silent for a minute or two and gazed into the coals of
the dying fire.
"My name is Durand," he said at last, with an infinitude of sorrow in
the tones of his voice. "I am an entomologist. I am here to get
specimens--butterflies; but it is not here that I belong. My place is
elsewhere, and that I know. But it is not in my country, and----" he
broke off. Lafond looked on curiously, for the dreamy haze had faded
from the speaker's eyes. "My friend," Durand went on, "there are times
when one cares not to see the face of man except in the bosom of the
great nature. I do not know that you understand that. It is with the
bitterness of a wrong that such knowledge comes, and with it comes the
hate of cities and of the things men do. Some men have had their will
of me, and I am come to the wilderness. They called it revenge to
drive me here."
"Revenge! But you still live!" repeated Lafond in wonder.
"And is it that you think the taking of life is revenge?" cried Durand,
with sudden energy. "They who take their revenge in killing are
actually the merciful ones, and they cheat no one but themselves."
"Yes?" asked Lafond, his soul in the question.
The other turned in surprise at his companion's vehemence. He saw a
stolid; dark-skinned man gazing impassively into the fire.
"They are fools," went on Durand bitterly, after a moment; "just fools.
These others were of more ingenuity; they knew what would hurt, what
would avenge them better than the killing."
"I do not understand," said the half-breed, feeling his way slowly, for
the fear of damming this flow of confidence. He looked away, for his
eye glowed, though his voice was steady. "W'at is it? If one kills,
if one takes that life, w'at is worse?"
"Worse, worse?" cried Durand, flinging his hands impotently upward. "A
thousand things!" He suddenly became calm, and turned to Lafond with
impressive forefinger. "Listen, my friend. Life is a little thing.
Anyone can take it who has a gun, or a knife, or even a stone. But the
true revenge is in finding out what it is that each man prizes the
most, and then taking it from him. And that requires power! power!
power!
"Few there are who have not something they prize more than life," he
added gloomily. The fire died from his eye. He became once again the
timid old butterfly hunter, pushing blindly out into the wilderness,
wondering at himself for thus exposing an old wound to a chance passer;
and yet perhaps feeling in some dim fashion--so inscrutable are the
instincts of these half-childish natures--that in so doing he was
following for a moment the lines of greater destinies than his own.
And certainly, long after the dipper had swung below the pole star,
Lafond sat staring into the ashes of the fire, just as four days since
he had stared into the ashes of a brave and chivalrous life. In his
history there were the two crucial hours--one after the greatest battle
of the plains; the other after a dozen sentences exchanged with a
half-crazy old entomologist. From the potent reflections induced by
these one hundred and twenty minutes it resulted that Michail Lafond
became civilized and a seeker for wealth in the development of the
young country. In wealth he saw power; in power the ability to give or
take away.
The depriving each man of that which he prizes the most!
XIII
THE DISSOLVING VIEW
While things have gone on, we have conducted our business and returned
each evening to our armchairs by the fire. There we have sat at ease
and reviewed the world. Events have come to pass. Diplomats have
quarrelled gravely over the wording of a document. From our evening
papers we have gathered a languid interest in the controversy. Six
months later we pick up the paper and find that the dispute is still
going on. A German and an Englishman play a game of chess over the
cable. This too is reported in our journal, and we follow its progress
with attention through the weeks of its duration. Somebody agitates
the establishment of a new industry in our native town. It will raise
the value of our real estate, so we attend meetings for some months and
talk about it, after which the industry is assured. Two years later it
is in operation and we congratulate ourselves. Friends of our younger
days marry; and before we know it their houses are noisy with the
shoutings of children. Leisurely we grow older. Our ideas become
fixed, often by the most trivial of circumstances. Africa means
tangled forest; India, a jungle; Siberia, broad snow plains; all South
America, a dripping stillness of tropical verdure; simply because
somewhere, some time, a book or paper, the woodcut of a child's lesson,
has so generalized them for us. Against these preconceived notions the
events we read about are cast.
In very much this way the constant facts of the West have been to us
the Indian and the buffalo. Before our eyes the Master Showman has
held insistently this picture. Against the background of the
occidental hills or the flat reach of the grass-nodding prairies has
posed in solemn gravity the naked warrior, leaning from his pony upon
his feather-bedecked lance; or, in the choking dust of its own
progression, has lumbered heavily the buffalo myriad. These have
seemed permanent--the man and the beast.
Then, before our protesting conservatism, the scene has dissolved in a
mist of strange shapes and violent deeds, only to steady a moment later
into a new picture. The mounted figure has disappeared, and in his
place, against the glow of sunset, the sturdy form of the husbandman
grasps the shaft of his plough, gazing past the tired horses, and
brooding the slow thoughts of his calling. The last rays catch the
sheen of grain--a sea of it--and shimmer lightly until they lose
themselves in contrast with the square of ruddy light that marks the
windows of a farmhouse.
This is the new West. We rub our eyes and wonder. The diplomats still
squabble; the chess game dawdles its languid way; the factory is
getting ready to pay its first dividend; our friends' children are
about to enter the high school. Everything has developed along the
usual lines of growth, and yet this greater change has come about in a
night. We turn back the files of our paper, and find that it has
occupied in the world's history just fifteen years! In that little
space of time the institutions of untold ages have been overthrown and
new ones substituted for them.
Deadwood was founded in 1876. In 1890 Sitting Bull and his tribe were
utterly destroyed in the mid-winter fight at Wounded Knee. Between
those dates, the Dakotas have manufactured at home an article of quite
adequate civilization.
To be sure, the product is perhaps a little crude. Although enormous
grain fields attest indubitably that the farmer has tamed the soil,
equally enormous Indian reservations as indubitably dispute too
sweeping an assertion of it. Electric railways may be instanced in
some towns. The sprightly six-shooter is in others the quickest road
to the longest journey. Hot Springs has a modern hotel and an improved
bar; a scant thirty miles north is the unsheriffed log-mining camp
where the "bad man" terrorizes in all his glory.
These things are true, but they count for little. The great facts
remain, and they are these: a cowboy named Tenney tried to lasso the
last buffalo some years since and got himself yanked over several
irregular miles of country; the Sioux are herded nicely on their
reservations and shoot at nickels with bows and arrows for the
amusement of passing tourists. The old frontier conditions have gone.
If you want trouble, you must go out to look for it; it no longer comes
to you unsought. In a word the broad sea of the wilderness has
shrunken to bayous and bays surrounded and intersected by dried areas
fit for the cultivation of paper collars and tenderfeet. The frontier
still exists, but exists in its isolation only because it is not as
commercially desirable as the rest.
This is true of the country at large. It is also true of Pah-sap-pah,
the Black Hills. Already a railroad has pushed its way up the main
valley. The folders show a map with the usual blood-red artery of
mathematical straightness, passing through myriads of small-type towns,
clinging desperately by their noses to the blessings of commerce, and
sundry dignified, large-type cities, standing more aloof on their own
merits. It all looks imposing enough on paper; but in reality the line
does little more than keep itself warm in the narrow valley of its
route. On closer inspection the myriads of towns disappear.
Minnekahta is a station in the midst of a vast plain, Pringles a
sawmill, Stony Point just nothing at all. For the Black Hills are
great of extent, and one county of the Dakotas could swallow an eastern
State.
All this, from border warfare to comparative order--say from Canute to
Elizabeth--not in a thousand years, but in the brief age of a man-child
growing out from his kindergarten into his college!
To one who has lived with the country, the process has been an
education more thorough than that usually vouchsafed men. It has
lacked in the graces and accomplishments, perhaps, but it has brought
to the highest pitch the two qualities of self-reliance and of power of
insight into men's characters. Whatever blunders a frontiersman may
commit when visiting his neighbor cities in the East, they are never
the bashful blunders of a countryman. Bunco men can clean him out in a
gambling joint, but who ever heard of their selling him a gold brick?
He has lived through all this hundreds of years ago, when Wild Bill was
killed at Deadwood, or perhaps a century or so later, when, the year
following, Alfred took the Caldwells to the Hills and was so nearly
rushed by the Sioux. His life has been an epitome. He has met most
conditions at one time or another, and is no longer afraid of them.