THE INTRUDER.
The little village of the horse-hunters, if village it could be called
when it was a sort of communal dwelling house, was built upon a very
flat and scantily herbaged plain, forming an elevated mesa, rather
sharply defined by cliff-sides. These cliffs were not continuously
precipitate or high, on all sides; and at one point access to the
summit was readily gained by broken inclines which actually permitted
the inhabitants of this isolated spot to form a rude road, so
skillfully constructed that by adaptation and selection, a pathway had
been built or smoothed to the bottom of the citadel of rock on which
the village stood. The butte rose with receding walls, disposed in
ascending steps or terraces from a canyon-like valley, from which again
escape to the country beyond was gained by less easy means.
The butte of the horse-hunters formed indeed a depressed elliptical
elevation, planular at the top, which stood at the intersection of two
canyons, whose walls actually rose above it on all sides. Its position
was very picturesque. Running southwestward a deep gorge opened,
which extended back around the insular terrace, and divided on its
north eastern exposures into two tributary canyons of extreme depth
and narrowness. These two smaller arroyos united in the larger gorge,
and in both of them a stream, with intermittent flow, gave a temporary
animation to the dismal loveliness, the confluence of the rivers making
a more considerable body of water in the larger canyon. From the
plain of the butte’s crest, encircling walls were seen on all sides;
southward the descending vista, along the broken and bold declivities
of the large canyon with the river it contained reduced to a white
ribbon; northward the ascending vistas, in the two narrower canyons
with vertical walls, the streams running through their deep defiles,
reduced to a white thread.
The butte only, amongst the eminences about it, was at all easily
approached, and then its ascent on one side alone offered any
attractive invitations. The rocks of the canyon were variously colored,
and the myriad fancy which had carved and trenched and cut them into
innumerable profiles, had indulged in a still wider complexity of
invention in its panoramic marvels of color. Bands of blood red lay
across the exposed strata, fading with inconstant undulations into
brown and yellow ochres--purple shades filled up the diversified
pallet, and white strips of quartz or unctuous edges of clay streaked
the cliffs with weird and sudden contrasts.
In the mornings the extraordinary picture was dim with mists, the
tricks of optical interference, reflection and diffraction raising
strange phantoms in the silent gorges, and at night the shadows
stealing upward and quenching the radiant illumination imparted an
almost theatrical effectiveness, as if an artful scene shifter had
manipulated the setting sun, and pulled into place the changing and
relevant flies and screens.
It was in the latter time that shadows settled like a flood upon the
home of the horse-hunters--when the sunlight still fell on the heights
about them, and they were submerged in a twilight night long before the
sun had deserted the uplands.
It was the evening of the day when Ogga killed the mastodon that the
four medicine men of the little village--Shan, Flitout, Slin and
Slaggar--squatted on the edge of the mesa, gazing with half shut,
squinting eyes, into the vacancy before them. They had attained
a sufficient distinction in ugliness, querulousness, abiding and
carefully nurtured vindictiveness to hold without question in that
aboriginal community, the preeminence their position implied. Their
mutual distrust of one another had rendered more acute their craftiness
of demeanor. They incessantly quarreled, and the religious exhibitions
of their thaumaturgic powers were made none the less ridiculous by
their evident desire to excell their rivals in impossible antics.
Nature had furnished them with contrasted physical features, but a
common calling, and a very uniform tendency to intrigue produced a
noticeable resemblance amongst them. They were seldom separate from
each other, although their companionship led them into the most
discordant wrangles which usually ended in an encounter which excelled
in acerbity of language, rather than in bodily violence.
Perhaps expressions in that early age were more restricted than in a
later age, but as Renan has pointed out, primal language gained in
compression what it lacked in capriciousness, and the squabbles and
fights of the four _doctors_, consisting generally of hair-pulling
and flesh scratching, like modern duels amongst cats, were punctuated
by sharp and shrieking exclamations which had sufficient poignancy of
meaning to make the melee more prolonged and vigorous.
It may be objected that the assumption of Medicine Men amongst these
prehistoric and glacial people is audacious and impossible. But in this
current of pictures given in this absolutely veracious reconstruction
of that vanished time, it must be remembered that the author is dealing
with ethnic conditions that had reached some degree of complexity.
The instincts and rudimentary or moral or psychic motions in men had
begun their sway long before the time given in this story. Men had
been long upon the earth, and their distribution which involved means
and ways more primitive and considerably slower than the railroad or
the steamship, had been accomplished through a process of migration
which not only brought them under influences in Nature contrasted and
various, and developed self-initiative and constructive faculties, but
by every possible avenue of appeal stirred their fear and reverence,
and very quickly inaugurated morality and intensity of religious
practices. And such practices would have developed quite rapidly as the
imagination was powerfully excited by their environment.
It has been from the first assumed that in this Ice Age, as depicted
in this story, the arctic severity of the north did, at least in the
western portion of this continent, come close at hand with far milder
conditions, and that the severity of self-preservation in this zone was
not at all so urgent as to repress or degrade or eliminate religious
customs. This is in itself, however, a concession to unnecessary
censoriousness, as the Esquimaux who to-day live in the ice, have well
advanced religious customs of humane and symbolic interest.
That medicine men or something like, them should have reached an almost
instantaneous importance is most likely. The credulity of an aboriginal
mind increased by the wonders of natural phenomena and the hardships
of life, the mystery of death and the growth of many natural feelings
of love and terror, would have quite quickly started the pretensions
of crazy or inflamed, senile or adroit, individuals who could have
easily insisted upon their special privileges and powers of divination,
and by reason of ingenuity and fortuitous circumstance, given their
pretensions a very deceiving appearance of reality.
At any rate, the four worthies to whom the attention of the reader is
now invited--Shan, Flitout, Slin and Slaggar--were veritable facts
at the very time when the mountain of Zit was incased in the broad
skirts of a semi-continental ice-sheet, when Ogga the hunter killed the
mastodon in the steppe country south of the glacier, and when Lhatto
left the upland of the Sierras in the Fair Land to kill seal in the
coast waters of the Pacific. And they were also, be it insisted with no
less emphasis, the medicine men of the horse-hunters who lived in the
Canyon Country east of the Fair Land, and who had begun to assume some
premonitional resemblances to the Pueblo Indians of today.
The Horse-Hunters were an outlying settlement of kindred peoples to the
south and their present location was found useful as bringing them near
the grazing grounds of the wild horses in the river bottoms of the Fair
Land. The exchanges amongst aboriginal peoples,--their commerce,--was
more general than might be at first supposed and the Horse-Hunters
found ample opportunities for making useful bargains with the horses
they secured. Their origin, like that of all these disassociated and
stray inhabitants, was even then lost in antiquity. Their habits and
the business which helped to sustain them, were hereditary. They
occupied a peculiar and inaccessible retreat, not contiguous even to
their hunting fields. These latter were, however, reached by a trail
which presented few difficulties for the conduct of their captives,
though the way was long and circuitous. The aspect of their whole life
was unique and unintelligible, though they seldom were inclined to
improve or explain it. How they came to the lonely table-land, and why,
in so remote a position they should have found it convenient to pursue
their peculiar calling, were unanswered, unanswerable questions. The
hunters amongst them were not many, generally the young and artful, and
though they captured and subdued horses, they found no use for them.
The wild people further south who became their customers came to the
mesa with food supplies, clothing and implements, and took away the
animals, and thus the Horse-Hunters, in an impoverished and sad way,
maintained their strange and lofty seclusion.
The four worthies who pretended to direct the spiritual destinies of
the colony, had arisen, and their varying statures and girths, as they
turned to the waning light in the sky above them, became apparent, as
well as the less easily defined peculiarities of their physiognomies.
Shan was a strong and high man, braced with broad thighs which, from
the execution of many trying and prolonged dances, displayed their
muscles in rigid relief, but his narrow chest and pinched neck imparted
insignificance to the rest of his figure. His appearance was completed
by a large head, heavily covered with tangled locks, from which a face
of mingled cruelty and deceit gazed at you from lancet shaped eyes, one
of which had been disabled by disease, and the second, compelled to do
duty for two, opened wide with a sinister glare beneath a low straight
hairy eyebrow. His nose was thin and beaked, his mouth distorted and
sunken, which, in the infrequent occasions when he became amused,
opened with a cackling laugh and revealed a single incisor.
Flitout, who stood next to him, was a thin and shrunken man, stooping
and angular, with a peculiar flapping of his arms, symptomatic of some
nervous irritability or weakness, which gave him a not unfanciful
resemblance to a wounded bird trying to fly. His face was even more
concealed than that of Shan’s by the coarse and unkempt hair which
framed it, and as he lifted his head, his bright and restless eyes
moving incessantly, betokened some mental excitement or disorder which
much of his conduct showed was not far removed from insanity. His
face was really pallid, but the grease, paint and dirt which seamed
or smeared it, concealed the evidences of his anaemic and dissipated
condition. His voice was cracked and piping, a cough racked his weary
chest with intermittent spasms, and he spat with malevolent zeal at
almost everything moving near him.
Slin alone in this extraordinary company was fat, or of such
proportions as made, in contrast with his associates, that epithet
appropriate. But this greater bulk carried with it no compensatory
advantages. His bulging eyes, thick cheeks and puffed lips, were
disfigured with pimples and pustules. His distended abdomen was
suspended above short and thick set legs. His arms, lengthened by
some freak of satirical cunning, reached to his knees, an adjustment
of parts which, taken in conjunction with protruding and heavy ears,
and a skull, alone, amongst the four, largely deprived of its natural
covering, gave him a very real likeness to an orang-outang. His
disposition was, perhaps, as simian as his looks, and while he owed
to that fact some sense of humour, it was also responsible for his
wickedness, his jealousy and his uncontrollable fits of temper.
Slaggar was the youngest of them all and not without pretense to
natural proportions. He was of medium size and apparently muscular. It
was his peculiar pigmentation that attracted comment. He was in a state
of partial decoloration. Irregular patches of pinkish white skin, like
geographic markings, were distributed over his face, and two, extending
from the angles of his mouth to the corners of his eyes, made his
grimace or scowls equally hideous and shocking.
The four men were covered quite imperfectly with skins, and around the
neck of each hung a perforated stone, while ivory beads decorated the
knuckles of their hands, and ribbons of red and yellow ochre striped
their naked legs.
The salutation to the parting day completed, they sat down again with
their eyes fixed on the almost irresolvable depths of gloom beneath
them. The full moon was just then climbing in the east. Suddenly there
emerged amongst them from the shadows a short stalwart figure with a
face, could it have seen clearly, of real distinction and aboriginal
comeliness. It was Lagk, the son of the headman of the little tribe, a
hunchback.
A voice from the shadows--“Are there any horse?”
“No,” from the four doctors, in a basso from Shan, a falsetto from
Flitout, a tenor from Slin, and a barytone from Slaggar. The four
started to their feet and faced the inquirer.
Then came the voice, even and monotonous in intonation, “I go to fetch
them.”
“Not to-night,” exclaimed Flitout with a nasal snarl, as he directed
his expectoration at a moving object at his feet.
“Why! The moon is up--the way I know. To-morrow I will be at the
fields. I will drive in many.”
“Well,” added the nonchalant Slaggar, as the moon, peering now upon
them with its orb almost fully developed above the rim of cliffs,
revealed the entire group, “Luck and return.” “Pray to Zit and watch
the eye of the moon,” was the adjuration from Shan. The interview might
have ended then had not the insolent Slin ventured to interject, “And
keep your hump on your back.”
The young man dropped the thongs and ropes and lassos of hide which he
held, the stone knife from his hand also, and flung himself with a loud
imprecation upon the grinning and wriggling Silenus before him. Slin,
surprised by the sudden resentment, and fearing his capacious abdomen
might meet with some untoward violence from his young assailant, jumped
behind his companions, who quite unwilling to incur the enmity of the
young brave, avoided the efforts of Slin to form of their interposed
bodies a screen, and quickly jumped aside. Slin, quivering with
uncertainty, his talon-like hands spread in deprecation before him,
still dodging and screaming some unintelligible apology for his insult,
was struck fairly in his rumpled and creased visage by the irate youth.
He stumbled and fell on his back, a piteous spectacle of helplessness,
his short legs kicking in the air in an exposure not altogether
deprived of some of the coarser elements of comedy.
His official comrades seemed irresolute in this extremity, as to
whether their rival should be left to his humiliation, or whether
the dignity of their craft required some united assertion of
self-protection. Lagk, half expecting their attack, stood with clenched
fists, one hand reaching to the ground to recover the dropped knives.
The outlook was somewhat too serious for the spirit of the three
religious mendicants, and they drew back, quite aware that their recoil
was interpreted as cowardice, and yet quite unable to conduct any
action that might save their dignity.
Slin had recovered his upright position but not his equanimity. The
struggle between his rage and the sense of his own physical impotence
was not unnoticed by Lagk, who taunted him to some sort of explosion:
“Put more toads in the hump on your own belly, and then you can touch
the hump on my back, old liar.”
Slin was furious, he cowered in a passion of hate and futile
vindictiveness--his glance fell on his inert but uneasy companions. If
he could divert the eye of the youth to them, their discomfiture might
lead to some resistance that would be more dangerous than his own, for
the unconcerned horse-tamer.
“They told me to say it. They said your hump would curse you. They
said you got it because Zit hated you. They said your hump has a snake
in it and it bites, bites, bites all the time.” As Slin uttered this
improvised and well conceived lie he pointed to his astounded friends,
in whose varied expressions of confusion nothing was more clear than
a fundamental dissatisfaction with the turn the affair was taking. As
Slin closed his sentences, his shrill voice rose higher and higher with
insertive ferocity upon the last words. He had not miscalculated the
effect of the scathing taunt. Lagk, with the keen susceptibility of
an injured man, his own strained sense of suffering exasperated into
rage by these repeated allusions to his deformity, knelt to the earth,
seized a big pebble, and leaning forward, hurled it at the bewildered
group. They sprang apart and the stone rolled over the mesa, and with
its last hesitating turn, plunged down the cliff side into the shadows.
The situation became at once dramatic. Flitout, least adapted for
physical defense, was fleeing with asthmatic coughs across the plain,
his arms flapping, producing a spectral imitation of an ambling heron.
Shan, behind him, was using his stiff legs with adroit agility;
Slaggar alone withdrew with sullen and menacing gestures of defiance,
while Slin, thus momentarily relieved of his fears, and enjoying an
oblique revenge, had recovered his equanimity, and while rubbing a
somewhat injured posterior with one hand, controlled his laughter with
the other by holding it over his mouth.
The hero of the fracas disdained pursuit, but contented himself with
suddenly changing Slin’s illusions by kicking him in the shin and
telling him to follow his brave associates.
Lagk turned and looked at the full moon flooding this place of
mysteries and wonder; a thousand shadows, ten thousand surfaces of
light covered the cathedral depths, and far out upon the illimitable
wilderness of spire and butte, crevice, gorge, ravine, wall and
canyon-slope, the silver glory stayed. Lagk was hardly sentimental, but
upon him as upon all these wondering hearts the poetic power of nature
wrought its indispensable and irrevocable spell.
Lagk was a strong and formidable figure, though the accident of his
youth had produced a disfiguring thickening and shortening of his
chest. He was one of the most successful of the horse-hunters and
tamers, and his skill had won him the apt nickname of _the hoofed
beast’s master_. Masterful he was in many ways, and his imperious
scorn of the doctors who were superstitiously regarded by his
contemporaries, was only one exhibition of his proud and fearless
nature.
He strode across the mesa, passed through the shadow of the walls of
the communal house and descended the road, which with many turns and
deflections and straight level lengths, formed the avenue of exit and
entrance for their lonely settlement.
The method adopted or inherited by the horse-tamers for the capture
and subduing of their four-footed prisoners was effective, but it
required boldness, resources and strength in its executants. The horse
lived in droves or families along the edges and in the grass lands of
the Fair Country. Thither the horse-hunters repaired, and equipped
with strong lassos, with which even in that ancient day they were
well supplied, awaited the approach of their prey. The custom was to
entice or drive, or simply wait for their horses to pass near the edge
of the woods in the neighborhood of some tree, and then to lasso some
convenient individual and running back to the tree, hold him by winding
the lasso’s end around the tree. If the hunters were in companies the
lassos were thrown in numbers over the unfortunate animal and he became
fastened to as many trees. His struggles were generally unavailing, and
he could after some hours, be thrown and vanquished.
A more cruel but even more effective system, was to starve the horse
after his capture until his strength and spirit visibly diminished,
and then slowly to revive him. This peculiar practice was pursued
with great refinement by the horse-hunters and its results were
astonishing--pliant and obedient servants were made of the most
obstreperous and apparently invincible beasts. Lagk and his people did
not ride the horse, though amongst their customers there were skillful
horsemen; they drove or led him back to their camp in the canyon, where
at regular seasons the occupants of the southern settlements convened,
and a market day--the prototype of all bargaining and commercial
haggling since--was inaugurated.
Lagk was festooned with lassos, his skill enabling him to use them in
succession on the same animal. In this way he quickly reduced it to
submission, and he often returned to the camp from his expeditions with
half a dozen captives.
When Lagk reached the end of the long slant, his pathway almost
brilliantly illumined by the zenith-soaring moon, he found a pleasant
heat radiating from the walls of rock, and creeping to a familiar
shelter, he lay down and slept.
Long before the dawn, just as Ogga left his stony bed, Lagk had shaken
off the clinging drowsiness of the night, and had resumed his walk. The
trail led him through narrow defiles and over interposed table-lands,
but presented at no point great difficulties, even the last ascent
which extricated him from the aisles of the canyon country, not
claiming any extreme test of endurance.
It was a slope or talus of splintered rock, fragments dejected by frost
or heat, rain and sun, from the steep channelled palisades above, that
arrested Lagk for a moment just at the beginning of this last station
in his journey. He stood looking at the gray, herb-sprinkled surface,
like the stone heap of chippings and refuse in a modern quarry. He took
a thick dense rock from the ground and hurled it against the lower face
of the cliff,--a vibration, a dislodgement of loose particles that came
rattling down in diminishing numbers, and some readjustment of the
flakes in the talus,--and then suddenly a buzz increasing to a rasping
insistent locust cry, and there appeared over the extended incline
the emergent heads of the desert rattlers. Sinister and threatening,
the bodies raised for a foot or so, and thrown into recoiled loops
swinging uneasily with a graceful restlessness, the snakes, except for
size, acted with one impulse and one posture. Their flat heads, darting
tongues, and checkered bodies swam before Lagk’s eyes like a low
thicket of animated plants. He drew back and hurled a pebble amongst
them. The half expiring susurra sprang again into a fierce sibilancy,
and the aroused beasts started out with a simultaneous motion that made
them seem like animal springs worked together, at one and the same
pressure. They shot forward, bending their elated bodies, and then, in
a single sweep, that spread with unanimity amongst them, raising their
squamate heads and falling backward like so many hundred curved and
elastic wands.
Lagk hastened on; the day was climbing fast, and a long distance
intervened before his feet touched the hunting fields. At last he
descended the slope of a pass that brought him to a southern portion
of the same valley, in whose northern extension lay the lake that has
been described, and where Lhatto and Ogga saw the cruel sepulchre of
the wild horses. It was then that Lagk realized the presence of the
volcanic disturbance that clouded Zit. The ashes and dirt fell around
him and far away from the summit of the pass he discerned on those
frozen heights he had never visited, but which to him were a sort of
Olympus, and which only in the clearest days he could see, the wreaths
of smoke, the rushing pillars of darkness, and the forked radiance
playing on their sides or lighting them with livid lambency.
Long did Lagk watch the ominous clouds; he forgot his errand, and stood
like some carven image in the open pass above a chaparral with eyes
fixed on the unearthly picture. And as he looked the earth tremors
came. A mocking bird flew to a tree near him, jumping with excited
interest from branch to branch and uttering the “cha-cha-la-ca” of
the Texan Guan. Some thrushes lingered near the mute spectator and
sang. A tit-mouse whistled its sweet, clear notes in his ear, a group
of woodpeckers gathered near him on a projecting bough like a little
colony of colored toys. Some ground squirrels ran forward and halted
like a corvee of minute cavalry in front of him, and while he remained
unmoved, unnoticing, the sullen movement of terror in the air and earth
brought strangely into his companionship a mountain lion, less rare
then than to-day, crawling with prostrate paunch, upon a lifted cornice
of rock, her outline designated in the sky in a black silhouette. Below
him in the trail of the descending pass, a bear suddenly blocked the
way, snuffing the air, and scratching anxiously upon the trembling
earth. Above him aimlessly wheeled a company of bats.
The singular congery of associates gathered around the solitary
figure, momentarily, in the still panic of the instant, forgetful of
their natural antipathies and fears, resembled some adamic renewal of
intercourse between man and Nature. Even while the motionless group
was thus assembled, Lagk’s ears caught the sound of trampling feet,
the thunder of a thousand desperate hoofs beating the valley floor. He
looked hastily towards the distance and his trained eye saw the phalanx
of wild horses stampeding up the valley.
And yet he remained apathetic and estranged. The terror of Zit rested
on the face of all things, the security of the foot-stool was gone, the
reverberations of rumbling thunder coming nearer, the still darkening
sky, encompassed the whole circle of attention. Again Lagk looked to
the north, and still the birds and animals, and even the crouching
puma, stayed like rivetted and dead beings.
Rapidly the storm gathered and the enlarging circuit of the electric
tempest spread around them and the crawling thunders deepened into
bomb-like explosions. The flood gates of the sky opened, and pitchy
darkness wiped out the heavens and the earth. Lagk hurried to a crevice
in the rocks, a seam of dislocation deep and wide enough to shelter
him. The frightened animals dissolved away and the drenched mountain
side, deserted and smitten, was lit in every recess when the blinding
lightning flashed. The wind, in furious gusts, tore through the oak
trees, howling and moaning, its exasperation raised to a sharp shriek,
as it sped through the fissured cliffs.
Lagk crept from his hiding place in the morning, stiff and depressed.
He sat long in the sun, wondering, eating mechanically of the food he
had brought with him in a skin bag. But the returning serenity of the
world, the resumed chorus of the birds, the cleared ether, his own
improved spirits restored his quailed courage, and as he again saw Zit
triumphant, shining, immobile, the order of things as he knew it,
seemed renewed and he bethought himself of his errand.
He did not turn down the pass to the valley where he had seen the
stream of doomed horses hastening. Had his footsteps been attended by
any sympathetic observer, the latter would have wondered why he climbed
so toilsomely up a pinched, scarcely possible trail to a shoulder of
the mountain range. The difficult way surmounted, Lagk found himself
upon a projecting spur of rock set out from the mountain mass and
rising to an apex from which a very broad view of the region was
obtained. He continued his scramble up to this apex--a cluster of riven
quartz or granite pinnacles--and here the beauties of a great quarry
table-land on one side, the flanks wooded and irregular, falling into
the horse valley on the other, Zit and its icy assemblage of peaks far
north, and the canyon country to the east, like an etching on a copper
plate, were revealed. Lagk lingered a long time watching the shifting
lights, and seemingly fascinated by the wondrous picture. He even lay
flat in the warming sun upon one glistening quartz cleavage, and slept.
The place cherished and suited him and he seemed to have forgotten the
purpose of his expedition.
It was late in the afternoon that as Lagk, yet in his stupor of
admiration or uncertainty, looked upon the trough shaped table-land
in which springs and brooks from the mountain, by slow approximation,
formed the head waters of a stream, he saw a solitary horse moving with
a limp and broken gait, upon the flat plain below him. It was at the
river’s edge, and, with a stumbling and pained approach to the water,
throwing up its head and whinneying, it slowly entered the stream and
drank.
Lagk cautiously left his aery, swinging himself down the rocks by
saplings, the tough branches of low rhododendrons, and sliding here
and there over pine needles. It was not long before he too was on the
upland, creeping out toward the spot where the lonely horse stood,
snorting and switching its tail with nervous reiteration. As Lagk
drew nearer, he could see that the animal had injured a fore-leg, and
was yet, at intervals, shivering with terror. He raised himself, and
as he did so the horse, turning, caught sight of him. With a broken
plunge, he sprang from the river’s shallows and ran directly towards
Lagk, whinneying in apparent recognition. It was a surprising and
disconcerting issue. Lagk was motionless with wonder. The animal came
nearer and nearer, and as its movements were friendly and reassuring
Lagk awaited it.
It came forward sniffing portentously. Lagk raised his hand and
called it soothingly; the wild beast submitted with nonchalant
affection. It pushed its nose upon Lagk’s hand and pressed upon him
with eagerness. Its spirit subdued by the anarchy in nature seemed
tamed into obedience, and it almost nestled, in its big equine way,
against the delighted horse-tamer. Lagk walked over the open plain
and his complacent companion followed him. Lagk examined the wounded
leg, and the horse noted his interest with satisfaction. Rest would
soon restore the sprained ankle of the horse and Lagk, knowing a pine
grove a mile or so further on, patted and encouraged the creature, and
after intervals of halting, as night fell, the two slunk together into
the wood. Lagk tied his willing comrade to a tree with the deepening
shadows and, still weary with his own amazement and exposure, he lay
down in the shielded spot and passed into the nebulous fancies of an
over wrought and mystified mind.
It was the dawn, dewy and slumbrous, the mists rose from the river,
they sped outward above the tips of the trees, they clung in tiny
clouds to the ground. Lagk awoke and leading the horse, now somehow
fastened to him by ties of friendliness, walked to the river and drank.
He looked around him, his eye swept the hillside, and there in the
mist just as he was, phantasmal and yet half expected, stood a man and
woman. It was Ogga and Lhatto. Why half expected?
Lagk could not have explained his eagerness to see them closer nor
how, in feeling this curiosity, expectations seemed to forestall all
wonder that these new creatures should be there. There seemed to be a
naturalness in it, that his heart, his mind, his eyes should meet, in
the adumbrant day, some nascent answer to his dreaming thoughts. And so
he walked toward them. Neither Ogga nor Lhatto moved. The tenderness of
their own happiness forbade the consciousness of interruption.
Lagk came close; Ogga strong, triumphant, with the wildness of that
younger day incorporated in his steel sinews, his dark lines, his
piercing eye, the unchecked richness and color of his hair, in his
arrowy and shooting gestures, in the demeanor of an unsoiled and
dustless youth, gazed at him with recognition. It was Lagk, the son of
the herdsman, whom he had thrown from the cliff in defense of his pet.
And Lagk, strong too, and though not triumphant, confident and brave,
bearing many traces of physical nobility, not altogether dwarfed by
his infirmity, and with a face not unlike the visage he beheld, gazed
also with recognition. It was Ogga who had pushed him from the cliff,
who had brought upon him the ridicule of the Medicine Men, who made him
now hesitating before the charms of the wild woman before him. Lagk had
never felt before the presence of a beautiful woman.
Small wonder that his blood rushed to his cheek, that his eyes blazed
with retaliation, that his hands clutched tightly upon the knife in
his belt. The sense of wrong unnerved and over-mastered him. He sprang
at Ogga with an uplifted arm, but Lhatto ran between them, and Ogga,
curbing his own quickly roused resentment, spoke even softly, “Lagk,
let that be gone. It is over. I am your friend.”
Lagk stumbled backward, and his head fell against the warm shoulder
of the horse, who had moved forward with himself. The mute friendship
of the animal turned his thoughts, and the three, with the horse
following, walked to the river in silence.
Ogga told Lagk of his life, how he had met Lhatto, that they were
man and wife, and Lhatto also told her story. They asked Lagk about
himself, they spoke of the death of the horses, of the terrors that
had threatened Zit, and as soon as the sun rose and it grew warmer and
the hunger of the night had been appeased, they seemed eager and happy
in each other’s company, and the melancholy and brooding Lagk felt a
strange pleasure entering his heart. It was a fitful and perilous joy.
His eyes sought Lhatto with increasing earnestness, with desire. She
was so different from all women he had seen. Her grace, her sweet
strength and aptness, the potency of her beauty, was a revelation, for
in the camp of the horse-hunters and amongst the trading people of the
south, he had not met such a woman. They were coarse and shrunken, age
had wrinkled and distorted them, work had made them pinched and ailing;
exposure, a rude life, and perhaps no heritage of shape or feature,
deprived them of charm. They did not please his eye.
Ogga and Lhatto were exceptionable and yet not unique. The prehistorics
were living close upon the period of emergence from something animal
and unformed. Traces of a strange or a debased ancestry lingered
amongst them, but it was not wonderful, not impossible, that in many
instances the efforts of nature, always ascending, always ameliorating
and artful, should produce types of human perfection. Nature so quickly
raises her ideals and her mechanism is so perfect, her power to follow
up an ideal with execution so implicit! The outlines and muscles
of a wild animal are sometimes the very acme of possible physical
expression, the beauty of an animal’s eye surpasses description, the
grace of an animal’s movement touches the keenest criticism with
despair, the adaptive structure of an animal’s frame and bones excels
the widest appreciation of art and of artificers.
Have we not seen amongst savage races, whose routine of life brings
them into the air, trains them to run, to lie in wait, to fight, to
urge wild beasts, to watch the telltale skies for storm, to strive with
the inert resistance of stone, and refractory materials; who know the
plants of the forest, the bark of the trees, the trail and scent of the
beasts, have we not seen those who have been formed into strict types
of beauty? And thought has left upon them too, its refining stamp,
poetry has lit the flame of their eyes, and emotion spread the seal of
its presence and of its pressure over the whole face.
In Winthrop’s _Canoe and the Saddle_ occurs this opulent description
of Prince and Poins (by soubriquet) his Indian guides. “It was worth a
shirt, nay shirts, merely to be escorted by these graceful centaurs. No
saddle intervened between them and their horses, no stirrup compelled
their legs, a hair rope, twisted around the mustang’s lower lip, was
their only horse furniture. ‘Owhhigh tenas,’ the younger, claimed to
be one of Owhhigh boys. _Nowhere have I seen a more beautiful youth;
he rode like an Elgin marble._ A circlet of Otter fur, plumed with
an eagle’s feather, crowned him. His forehead was hardly perceptibly
flattened, and his expression was honest and merry, not like the
sombre, suspicious visage of Loolocan, disciple of Talipus.”
And again of the chief Kamaiakan, clad in the surplus and the dregs of
human hosiery and tailoring, the superb writer says: “Yet Kamaiakan
was not a scare-crow. Within this garment of disjunctive conjunction he
stood a chieftainly man. He had the advantage of an imposing presence
and hearing and above all a good face, a well lighted Pharos, at the
top of his colossal frame. We generally recognize whether there is a
man looking at us from behind what he chances to use for eyes, and when
we detect the man we are cheered or bullied, according to what we are.
It is intrinsically more likely that the chieftainly man will be an
acknowledged chief among simple savages than in any of the transitional
phases of civilization preceding the educated simplicity of social
life, whither we now tend. Kamaiakan, in order to be the chiefest chief
of the Yakimahs, must be clever enough to master the dodges of salmon,
and the will of wayward mustangs; or, like Fine-Ear, he must know where
Kamas-bulbs are mining a passage for their sprouts; or he must be able
to tramp farther and far better than his fellows; or by a certain
tamanous that is in him, he must have power to persuade or convince, to
win or overbear, he must be best as a hunter, a horseman, a warrior,
an orator. These are personal attributes, not heritable; if Kamaiakan,
Junior, is a Nature’s nobody, he takes no permanent benefit by his
parentage.”
But nature fails to hit the mark persistently. Her efforts, always
intentionally perfect through the obstruction of accident, of heredity,
of use and of misuse, decline into homeliness and torpidity, and even
abortions. Now amongst wild people, let it be insisted amongst these
prehistorics, fortunate conjunctions of mother and father, of embryo
and environment, of employment and indulgence, might naturally have
been mingled with mistakes, indirection, harm, over-work, deprivation,
hunger and hardships of surroundings. But where such fortunate
conjunctions happened, where the efflorescence, the flowering, came to
view under the smile of some creative fancy reckless of tradition or
conventions, making the thing on which it worked beautiful, according
to the law of the thing’s type, may not, even at the earliest moment,
may not such images and glories have arisen?
In Lhatto and in Ogga such an image and glory was realized, and its
power, its attractiveness, was felt by Lagk; he yielded to it as a bird
yields to the call of music, as flowers yield to the summons of the
sun, as rivers yield to the encompassing embrace of the ocean, as all
things incomplete and yearning yield to the complementary that makes
them full and complete, adequate and strong.
And the three, with the changing days, still wandered on southward in
those summer hours full of unlacing heat, of fragrance and endless
mystery, rich in the languid temper of air that develops sense and
feeling, and germinates and brings to fruitage the bud of love. So Lagk
loved Lhatto.
The days were serene and clear. Zit’s contest with the Fire-Breather
had been followed by peace so unmistakable and reassuring that it was a
conviction with the three nomads that the Fire-Breather had abandoned
an unequal fight. The last plume of smoke had faded away, the earth had
again lapsed into sleep, the glacier sky only reflected the poignant
splendor of the ice-cap.
The strange animal companion of their journey still followed, and he
had not been unwisely used. The instinct for human companionship is
soon awakened, indeed, the currents of response spring into motion
almost by anticipation with the dog and horse. Kindness fostered the
natural union, and the horse attached itself with servile affection to
the careful and painstaking Lagk.
Both Lagk and Ogga were skillful in woodcraft. They shaped bows and
arrows, they wrought in stone, they knit the braided boughs above the
fire. Lagk was ingenious and conniving in various skills. He shaped
artful traps for bird and beast, he called the wild things to him by
mimic whistles, notes and cries, he knew the flowers of the wood and
plain, he devised keen hooks and caught gleaming fish from the rivers,
he burrowed in the banks of the streams for the pearl unios, and he
found wonderful spiral shells on the land, he chased the radiant
insects, and sometimes returned from his excursions with tesselated
snakes wound about his arms. And all these wonders and many more he
diligently sought for, to bring them to Lhatto, and he would tell her
what he knew, and Lhatto learned to care for him, to feel an interest
in his knowledge, even in his attentions.
And it was then, even in that old, old time as it has ever been since:
The persuasion of kindness and indulgent interest was mistaken by the
forlorn heart which essayed to find in them its peace and satisfaction,
for a woman’s love. The cruel misconception worked quickly upon the
nervous and excitable temperament of Lagk, and his darkening scowls,
when Ogga drew Lhatto to himself, grew deeper in their dread and
hatred. They betrayed a plotting soul, dark in its sense of injury, apt
to provocation and retaliation, and driven by physical inferiority to
schemes of cunning and deceit, to impish freaks of sin and shame.
The love of Ogga and Lhatto was primal and strong, and carried in
itself and made affirmative in them, the simple principles of the
moral law. Without doubt the moral law may have been ignored in savage
communities, in the irregular gatherings of primal populations, in
those first avulsions from the life of beasts, of ethnic cultures. And
yet, who knows? The sudden step from tree climbing and nest building
monkeys to the attitude and attention of men may have brought with it
some equally sudden illumination, some transcendent push that raises
men at that first instant above the levels they sank to later, even
as the first dawn of day is brighter than the succeeding hours. But,
however imagined, the love of Ogga and Lhatto lifted their union above
accidental intercourse and fitted it to things supreme and eternal.
The singular migration of these three with the ancillary horse, may
awaken ridicule in the reader accustomed to some anxious calculations
about the weather, the size and appointments of his room, his nearness
to a market and the conveniences of transportation for his wife
and family. The domesticities of Arcadia scarcely conform to the
intricacies of the West End Avenue, nor are the virgin instincts of men
cramped or deteriorated by the stiffening varnish of self-indulgence.
Their casual camps embraced a wide loveliness and variety. The open
forest, the glades, the timbered uplands, the valley levels, defile
and peak, lakes set like sapphires within beryl rims of trees, rushing
torrents carrying in their waters the tint of the washed woods, and
holding in their mirrowy pools the cold and painted trout, the cliff
side from whose prominence the world seemed suddenly displayed, or
the climbing pinnacle whence even the blue ocean like a dream swam
upon their vision, still tireless in its endless task of renewing and
destroying continents, and still, with the witchery of its deathless
charm, calling men to its pale lips.
And to them were gathered the most rare of incidents, the appurtenances
of nature swelled their resources in sport and pleasant episodes, the
arsenal of the skies beset their path with thrilling dangers, and all
living things accompanied them in a procession of beauty and wonderment
and terror. They saw the black snake snare the fledged firstlings of
the nest, they met the shrike impaling its furred captive on the thorn,
the herons were startled from their hidden homes, rising cloudlike in
discordant streams to the overhanging trees; the hawk, before their
eyes, set its talons in the squealing chipmunk, and the water moccasin
glided within their reach after the leaping frog along the slimy edges
of pond and pool; the lizards basked in the sunshine, their eyes
glimmering like gold-encircled stones, undisturbed at their approach,
and anon, the silence of some valley changed in a moment to the mocked
minstrelsy of an orchestra, when the migrant birds invaded it.
Deer with timid outlook awaited them within the sheltering shadows
of the forest, their missiles lamed the shuddering partridge in the
fields, and Ogga fought the wild bear, where the edges of the pines
laid their pencilled shadows on the lichened rocks; Lagk trapped the
beaver at its clumsy dam, inundating the woods, and changing a forest
glade to a luxuriant dilapidation of moss covered logs, he chased the
keen whistling bat to its last covert.
The cougar slunk to its lairs with menace and distrust before them,
and, in their adventuresome invasion, they essayed to trace the grizzly
to the verge of its retreat in the mountain caves.
The scenic and theatrical diversity of storms filling the air with
colliding vapors, and the earth’s broad floor with deluge, and seaming
the spent spaces of the heavens with fire, surrounded them.
They saw the stiff oaks snap before the cyclone’s blow, and through the
snapping boughs of the pines caught the lightning in its race to earth.
Beasts and birds and plants crowded then into a shorter space, in an
area to which fled the evicted tenantry of the north, and into which by
an equal impulse of migration, entered the denizens of the south. These
were their clustering companions. They moved amongst them, merged and
lost, as part themselves of the aboriginal concourse, and yet lifted
above all this commotion, this myriad footed and colored and flowered
tapestry of life by the carriage within themselves of the destiny of
men, by the possession of a secret emotion that was to be finally
resolved in the tragedy of death.
A note of interrogation may be here interposed. How was it that Ogga
and Lhatto and Lagk should thus move away from their occupations and
attachments, and begin an aimless wandering, a listless adventure among
perils and surprises and uncertainties? It can be understood better
by implication and suggestion rather than by explanation. It was
not rational. It was ethnic. It belonged to the period of zoological
settlement. It was part of the animal movement which was establishing
biological centres, determining geographical range, bringing too the
sparse population of the world into a heterogeneous distribution, by
which the world itself might become more quickly peopled.
And there were imminent reasons too. To roam, to pass from place to
place, to follow streams, to thread mountain passes, to trace the
shore, to pass north and south, east and west by centrifugal impulses,
which cannot be defined or limited, belonged to the infancy of the race
as they now solely are implanted in the infancy of the individual.
Who shall gauge the “world fever” in the youth of a day which knew
no boarded and bricked and stone domiciles? When the contact with
the elements and all the retinue of their phenomena with the beast,
the fish, the plant, was so quick, so constant, so marked, that man
was drawn into, or rather was the finished expression of geographic
mutability, of the ebb and flow of life in its incessant effort to
cover and possess the earth.
The nomads in the deflections of their travel drew towards the sea
coast. Lhatto told Lagk of the great plain of water, and her pictures,
not inadroitly made, gave her absorbed listener a desire to see the
liquid wonder. Ogga had not been unobservant. The love which Lagk
bore Lhatto, his unconcealed devotion, the simple earnestness of his
industrious attentions came to his ears, and passed before his eyes,
not inaudible nor unseen. But from the confidence of his possession,
from the massiveness and rigorous simplicity of his nature, he did not
care to impugn the motives of Lagk, nor the fidelity of Lhatto. He felt
a tacit self-reproach that he had ever injured Lagk, that he had forced
him to a lower physical level, and it seemed, in his magnanimous motion
for restitution, some consolation that Lagk found joy in Lhatto’s
company, and that Lhatto returned to him a certain measure--not
traitorous nor fatal--of affection.
They finally reached the coast range, a wide and fertile vale had been
traversed, the foot hills of an encompassing mountain chain surmounted,
the dark forests, entombing the gray rocks in a sepulchre of shadow,
crossed, and upon the flat shoulders of the mountain the three stood
looking westward over the ultra-marine floor of the ocean, with its
lighter aqua-marine margins, while scarcely moving, though turreted
upward in the zenith, in illimitable surfaces of resistance, the white
cumuli formed an ermine wall against the unimaginable Orient. The
scene was splendid in its breadth and inspiration, and in the clear
atmosphere, its coloring was simple and strong. It was almost noon.
Lagk gazed as if the splendor, the beauty, the oceanic magnitude of
the water had stunned him. What traces of genealogical survival in
his memory, remote, unfathomable, dimly rising to the surface of
his psychic consciousness, may not have contributed to his profound
feeling! For sometime, doubtless before Zit was imprisoned in the
glaciers, his ancestors, wanderers on the earth, had crossed that azure
field, had trailed along its resounding shores, and fed themselves upon
the life, the fish and mollusks, that spun a web of being upon the
edges of its unfructified and barren breast.
Lagk turned questioningly to Lhatto: “When we came you said I
could hear the story of the Great Water Spirit. There is the great
water--tell me the story. Ogga will listen too.” Ogga was quite
willing. And so Lhatto, sitting between them, with her head in
her hands that rested on her knees, and her eyes fixed, as if in
corroborative inquiry, upon the sea, told the Legend of the Great Water
Spirit.
THE LEGEND OF THE GREAT WATER SPIRIT.
“Many, many suns ago the Great Water Spirit was in the air over the
whole earth, so that Zit could not be seen. It was a white spirit that
was very sorry because it had no children, and it cried, and its tears
ran down upon the earth and wet the trees and the rocks. And then it
stopped crying. And the little lizard that had run into the wet places
which the tears of the Great Water Spirit made, when they dried up
whispered very loud, ‘Great Water Spirit, you have no children, cry
much and you will have more children.’ So the Great Water Spirit cried
again and its tears ran down upon the earth and made holes of water.
And the little lizard ran into the holes of water and kept quiet until
they too were dried up. Then it whispered very loud again, ‘Great Water
Spirit, you have no children, cry much and you will have children.’
“And the Great Water Spirit cried again, and its tears ran down and
made holes of water and little running places. And as it cried, Zit
began to be seen, but all its tears that fell upon Zit were changed to
ice, and as the Great Water Spirit cried it grew thinner and thinner.
And the little lizard was happy a long time in the holes of water and
the running places, and when they dried up again it had grown bigger
and could talk more and it called out very loud, ‘Oh, Great Water
Spirit, you have no children, cry until you die and you will have
children.’
“And then the Great Water Spirit made terrible noises and cried and
cried, until the tears hid Zit again and the mountains and the trees,
and the tears ran down in rivers from the hills, and the ground was
full of tears and spouted them up again, (springs,) but where they fell
upon Zit they only made snow and ice. And still the Great Water Spirit
cried and the tears tore the ground and carried down trees and pushed
out rocks, and the tears ran on and on, until they came together and
made the ocean, and then the Great Water Spirit died and the air was
clear, but the tears ran on over the ground. But when the Fire-Breather
up high (the Sun) sent its arrows on the ocean, the Great Water Spirit
went up again in the air and made the clouds, and when it saw the holes
and murmuring and spouting places dry, it cried again, and the tears
kept its children--for these were its children--alive. And all water
runs to the ocean and the ocean is the grave and the cradle too of the
Great Water Spirit.
“The tears of the Great Water Spirit are the rain. When the Water
Spirit is glad there is no rain, and when the Water Spirit is not
glad there is rain. And the ocean is all the tears of the Great Water
Spirit. And the Water Spirit wanted things to live in the ocean. And so
it saw on the hills the foxes, and it went over them and cried, and the
tears came down big and fast and the foxes were carried into the ocean
and made seals. And the Water Spirit saw snakes and lizards and little
birds on the hills, and it went over them and cried, and the tears came
down big and fast and the snakes and lizards and the little birds made
the fishes of the ocean, because they were carried into the sea.
“And many, many suns ago, before Zit was, and the Ice Spirit was not,
there came a boat on the ocean, and when the Great Water Spirit saw it,
he was very angry. And he cried and blew and the tears filled the boat
and the blowing upset it, and the Men Spirits in it were killed.
“But the Men Spirits made another boat and pushed it out on the ocean,
and they pushed it so fast that it got a great way over the ocean
before the Great Water Spirit saw it, and when he saw it, he ran over
the water making much noise, and he cried great tears and blew--but the
fire spirit (the Sun) shot his arrows at him so that he ran off, and
the Men Spirits in the boat came to the land and lived here.
“And more Men Spirits came and walked over the land. And then the Great
Water Spirit was more angry and he cried and blew, and tears came from
his eyes, and snow blew out of his mouth, and he asked Zit to help
him. And Zit made it very cold, and Zit kept the Fire-Breather under
the ground, and he made it so cold that the rivers were solid, and the
ground was hid under the snow, and the Men Spirits and the bear and the
wolf and the deer came away, and the trees and flowers went with them,
and Zit ruled alone, over the ice. But when the Fire-Breather moves,
the ice goes back a little and the day comes when Zit will die.”
As Lhatto finished, Ogga, who stood by her side, bent upon her and
kissed her on the neck. Lagk had his eyes fixed on Lhatto; the movement
and action of Ogga seemed to bewilder and infuriate him. He drew
aside hastily, his black eyes glittering, his mobile mouth drawn into
a scowl, and his nervous hands clenched hard upon one another as if
under some superhuman control to restrain them. The next instant, as if
seized with a sudden resolve, he leaped through some juniper bushes and
disappeared.
Lhatto and Ogga were alone. Ogga knelt by the woman’s side and took her
hands and drew her face and body nearer to his own. “Lagk loves you,”
he said.
Lhatto smiled. Who shall measure the subtle sense of joy which comes
to a woman, even to a wild emancipated creature like Lhatto, from a
man’s admiration! “Perhaps,” answered Lhatto. “I know it,” persisted
Ogga, and he raised her hands and placed them upon his shoulders,
and a darkness passed over his visage that surrendered its impotent
suspicions as Lhatto flung her face upon his own, and held him closer
and closer, and the whisper crept into his ear: “He may love me, but I
love you, Ogga, and it is all well with us.”
Lagk reappeared, his face was at the aperture of the parted junipers;
behind him the horse was standing, and his head above Lagk’s seemed to
peer forward with almost the same frightened eagerness as his master.
Lagk had seen, had heard all and the momentary agony that creased his
face with frowns, passed into a sullen contraction of the brows, a
settled, determined, half pre-occupied glance at Ogga as he led the
horse upon the upland table--its back covered by thongs and lassos laid
there by Lagk.
He left the horse and approached Ogga and Lhatto, yet oblivious of his
presence. They rose instantly, their eyes filled with that light that
in the savage, as in the modern, does most certainly send its throbbing
fires of passion and yearning and rapture into those strange organs
from whose windows man’s soul looks out upon the world.
Lagk seemed almost unconcerned. He motioned to Ogga to follow him. The
two went out through the junipers, that sprang back again, and Lhatto
was left alone. Lagk led Ogga through some scattered woods and brought
him out upon a higher upland sparsely clothed in grass. There the two
men became engaged in earnest talk. Lagk motioned to the horizon and
his gesticulations became vehement and rapid. Ogga listened, his arms
folded, the braids of his hair framing the brown face, thrown slightly
forward, while the half bent shoulders expressed his interest in the
recital of his friend. At length the appeal prevailed, if appeal it
was, and Ogga walked on, out upon the upland, his ivory spear in his
hand, the nephrite knife about his neck, and the stone sledge in his
belt.
It was curious and not altogether reassuring then to watch Lagk. He
threw his hands backward upon his deformed shoulders, lifted them in
the air, and brought them back upon his breast with the spread fingers
buried in the exposed flesh of his bosom. His face, capable of violent
changes in expression, became sombre and thoughtful, and then there
stole over it an increasing smile, that seemed fed by some anticipation
of pleasure, and lit his face with a wicked and baleful joy. Lagk
watched Ogga until the receding form disappeared, dropping down behind
rocks and trees. Lagk stood for an instant longer, as if gathering his
thoughts for the execution of his plans.
Then he stole back through the juniper trees and saw Lhatto had
resumed her first posture, her head in her hands, her elbows on her
knees, and her face turned in reverie to the distant sea. The horse
was pulling upon the branches of a maple. Lagk stepped quietly in upon
the place that was soon to become the stage of so much terror. He
moved noiselessly to the side of Lhatto, holding a leathern thong of
considerable length in his hand. He leaned upon her. She hastily drew
herself upward. With an inarticulate shout, Lagk threw in rapid coils
the thong about her, pinning her arms closely to her side. They were
drawn tight and strongly; like a vise they held her arms helpless and
motionless. The action was so daring, so unexpected that Lhatto almost
yielded to it without resistance. An instant later she looked at Lagk.
His face was close to hers, his breath brushed her cheeks, a strange
gleam of exultation shone in his eyes. He seized her in his arms and
pushed his lips upon her with the violence of ravenous desire. Lhatto
jumped to her feet and struck him away with a savage kick.
It was not well aimed. It hurt, but the hurt incensed Lagk. The color
had rushed to Lhatto’s face, her chest rose and fell with the tumult
of her own anger and disgust, but the flaming of her temper made her
more beautiful, more desirable, and Lagk felt the tension of his
craven thoughts. Lhatto was motionless. She made no attempt to escape.
She looked at Lagk--her arms straightened to her side, giving her a
strained uprightness--with a curious interest, her eyes wide apart and
her lips compressed, and a red spot in her cheeks that spread to the
spaces beneath her eyes, glowing darkly under her bronzed skin.
But Lagk waited no longer. A leathern thong gathered in his hands,
snatched from the horse’s back, with bowed body he sped like a
ferret forward, and whirled the cord about Lhatto’s legs. He ran on
around her, drawing nearer and nearer with every loop of his circuit
tightening the web that held her rigid like an imprisoned fly, until he
had come quite close to her absolutely still form. He stopped in front
of her and as he turned his face to hers she spat upon it. It was like
a spark to a magazine. The hidden revolt which Lagk nursed, which made
him rebellious against the humiliation of his deformity, which defiled
the springs of his good nature and had fed the poisonous growths of
envy and malice and discontent, burst furiously into flame. From his
jagged lips, malediction started.
He threw his arms around the helpless woman and swung her from him
with rage. The torrent of his indignation was not assuaged by the
sad picture of her fall upon the stony ground. He stood over her and
taunted her helplessness, swore she should be his, that Ogga would not
return, that he would carry her to the eyrie of the horse hunters, that
the Medicine Men would help him, that her life should no longer be by
the side of the Great Water Spirit. And then the tempestuous and fickle
creature, in an outburst of wailing love, knelt by Lhatto, raised her
head and besought her to think well of him; he would make her his wife,
he would treat her well, he loved her, he would bring her birds and
wild animals, and train horses for her, he would make her beautiful
with flowers and plumes, he would show her the stars in the sky, and
tell her where the fish lived, she should forget Ogga, Ogga had gone
away, he had forgotten her, Ogga was dead, Ogga wanted him, Lagk, to
take her to his home.
His supplications became piteous and cringing. The wild man, touched
with the deathless passion which no art of modern affectation or
sycophancy can disguise or control, was in a paroxysm of despair. He
laid his head on Lhatto’s bound arm and implored her to be kind to
him. And Lhatto still was mute. His anger was rekindled. He raised her
roughly and carried her like a log to the horse. He said nothing, but
strapped her Mazeppa-like to the horse’s back. He was even tender,
placing soft skins between her and the animal. His vagaries of temper,
the illicit madness of his first thoughts had been succeeded by stolid
determination, and he made haste to vanish with his captive from their
little camp.
The equipment with which he left it was slight enough. A lasso hung
around his neck, a few knives of stone were stuck in his belt, and
with nothing else he led the horse, carrying the still motionless
Lhatto, from the upland, and began the toilsome descent to the lowland,
trusting to his own sense of direction and the accidents of topography,
to find his way back to the canyon country, but, above all, solicitous,
that by means of his tortuous advance, he might escape pursuit. It
required some skill to bring on the horse without accident or injury to
its burden, but Lagk was both skillful and thoughtful, and slowly the
two threaded a devious path, while Ogga hunted the strange new beast
which Lagk had urged him to capture.
[Illustration]