The stage-driver and mail-carrier to Fort Smith was young Crane's Voice,
and this was his first trip in December. He congratulated himself on
having his back to the wind on the fifty-mile ride up the valley. A
norther was abroad over the earth, and, sweeping down from arctic
wildernesses, seemingly gathered power as it came. It crossed two vast
States in a single night and fell upon the Fort Smith reservation with
terrible fury about ten o'clock in the morning.
Crane's Voice did not get his mail-sack till twelve, but his ponies were
fed and watered and ready to move when the bag came. He did not know
that it contained a letter to warm the heart of his hero, the Captain,
but he flung the sack into his cart and put stick to his broncos quite
as manfully as though the Little Father waited. The road was smooth and
hard and quite level for thirty miles, and he intended to cover this
stretch in five hours. Darkness would come early, and the snow, which
was hardly more than a frost at noon, might thicken into a blizzard. So
he pushed on steadily, fiercely, silently, till a sinister dusk began to
fall over the buttes, and then, lifting his voice in a deep, humming,
throbbing incantation, he sang to keep off spirits of evil.
Crane's Voice was something of an aristocrat. As the son of Chief Elk he
had improved his opportunities to learn of the white man, and could
speak a little English and understand a good deal more than he
acknowledged, which gave him a startling insight at times into the words
and actions of the white people. It was his report of the unvarying
kindliness and right feeling of Captain Curtis which had done so much to
make the whole tribe trust and obey the new agent.
Crane's Voice was afraid of spirits, but he shrank from no hardship. He
was proud of his blue uniform, and of the revolver which he was
permitted to wear to guard the mail. No storm had ever prevented him
from making his trip, and his uncomplaining endurance of heat, cold,
snow, and rain would have been counted heroic in a military scout. His
virtues were so evident even to the cowboys that they made him an
exception by saying, "Yes, Crane is purty near white," and being
besotted in their own vanity, they failed to see the humor of such a
phrase in the mouth of a drunken, obscene, lawless son of a Missouri
emigrant. As a matter of fact there were many like Crane in the tribe,
only the settlers never came in personal contact with them.
Crane found his road heavy with drifts as he left the main valley and
began to climb, and he did not reach the agency till long after Curtis
had gone to bed, but he found his anxious mother waiting for him,
together with the captain of police, who took the bag of mail to the
office. As he drove into the big corral out of the wind the boy said, in
his quaint English: "Me no like 'um blizzard. Fleeze ears like buffalo
horn."
Curtis came to the office next morning with a heavy heart. He knew how
hard the bitter cold pressed upon his helpless wards, and suffered
acutely for sympathy. He spoke to all of those he met with unusual
tenderness, and asked minutely after the children, to be sure that none
were ill or hungry.
As Wilson, his clerk, laid the big package of letters and papers on his
table, the pale-blue, square envelope which bore Elsie's handwriting was
ostentatiously balanced on top. Wilson, the lovelorn clerk, sighed to
think he had no such missive in his mail that gloomy morning. Looking
in, a half-hour later, he found Curtis writing busily in answer to that
letter, all the rest of his mail being untouched. "I thought so," said
he; "I'd neglect any business for a sweet little envelope like that,"
and he sighed again.
Curtis had opened the letter eagerly, but with no expectation of
comfort. As he read he forgot the storm outside. A warm glow crept into
his blood. Lover-like, he got from the letter a great deal more than
Elsie had intended to say. He seized his pen to reply at once--just a
few lines to set her mind at rest; but his thought ran on so fast, so
full of energy, that his writing became all but illegible:
"DEAR MISS BRISBANE,--You have given me a great pleasure by
your letter, and I am replying at once to assure you that I did
not lay your words up against you, because I felt you did not
fully understand the situation. Your letter gives me courage to
say that I think you are unjust in your attitude towards these
primitive races--and I also hope that as fuller understanding
comes you will change your views.
"Here they are, fenced in on the poorest part of this bleak
reservation, on the cold slope of the range, exposed to the
heat and drought of summer and the storms of winter. This
morning, for example, the wind is rushing up the converging
walls of this valley--which opens out to the northeast, you
remember--and the cold is intense. I am just sending out
messengers to see that no children are freezing. Everything is
hard as iron, and the Indians, muffled in their blankets, are
sitting beside their fires glum as owls, waiting the coming of
the sunshine.
"I must tell you something which happened since you went
away--it may correct your views of the Tetongs. It is my policy
to give all hauling and wood contracts to the Indian instead of
the white man, and when I told the white who has been putting
in the wood that I was about to let the contract to the reds he
laughed and said, 'You can't get 'em to do that work!' But I
felt sure I could. I called them together and gave them fifty
axes and told them how much wood I wanted. A few days later I
thought I'd ride over to see how they were getting along. As I
drew near I heard the most astonishing click-clack of
axe-strokes, shouts, laughter, the falling of trees, and when I
came in sight I 'trun up both hands.' They had hundreds of
cords already cut--twice as much, it seemed, as I could use. I
begged them to stop, and finally got them to begin to haul. In
the end I was obliged to take sixty cords more than I needed.
"You cannot understand what a pleasure it is for me to see
ancient lies about these people destroyed by such experiences
as this. It was pathetic to me to find the Two Horns, the
Crawling Elk, and other proud old warriors toiling awkwardly
with their axes, their small hands covered with blisters; but
they laughed and joked about it, and encouraged each other as
if they were New-Englanders at a husking-bee. My days and
nights are full of trouble, because I can do so little for
them. If they were on tillable land I could make them
self-supporting in two years, but this land is arid as a
desert. It is fair to look upon, but it will not yield a living
to any one but a herder.
"Your attitude towards the so-called _savage_ races troubles me
more than I have any right to mention. The older I grow the
less certain I am that any race or people has a monopoly of the
virtues. I do not care to see the 'little peoples' of the world
civilized in the sense in which the word is commonly used. It
will be a sorrowful time to me when all the tribes of the earth
shall have cottonade trousers and derby hats. You, as an
artist, ought to shrink from the dead level of utilitarian
dress which the English-speaking race seems determined to
impose on the world. If I could, I would civilize only to the
extent of making life easier and happier--the religious
beliefs, the songs, the native dress--all these things I would
retain. What is life for, if not for this?
"My artist friends as a rule agree with me in these matters,
and that is another reason why your unsympathetic attitude
surprises and grieves me. I know your home-life has been such
as would prejudice you against the redman, but your training in
Paris should have changed all that. You consider the Tetongs
'good material'--if you come to know them as I do you will find
they are _folks_, just like anybody else, with the same rights
to the earth that we have. Of course, they _are_ crude and
unlovely--and sometimes they are cruel; but they have an
astonishing power over those who come to know them well.
"Pardon this long letter. You may call me a crank or any hard
name you please, but I am anxious to have you on the right side
in this struggle, for it is a struggle to the death. The
tragedy of their certain extinction overwhelms me at times. I
found a little scrap of canvas with a sketch of Peta on it--may
I keep it? My sister is quite well and deep in 'the work.' She
often speaks of you and we are both hoping to see you next
year."
It was foolish for him to expect an immediate reply to this epistle, but
he did--he counted the days which lay between its posting and a
possible date for return mail. Perhaps, had he been in Washington,
diverted by Congress, cheered by the Army and Navy Club, and entertained
by his friends, he would not have surrendered so completely to the
domination of that imperious girl-face; but in the dead of winter,
surrounded by ragged, smoky squaws and their impatient, complaining
husbands, with no companionship but his sister and Wilson, the love-sick
clerk, his thought in every moment of relaxation went back to the
moments he had spent in Elsie's company. Nature cried out, "It is not
good for man to be alone," but the iron ring of circumstance held him a
prisoner in a land where delicate women were as alien as orange blossoms
or tea-roses.
Outwardly composed, indefatigable, stern in discipline and judicial of
report, he was inwardly filled with a mighty longing to see again that
slim young girl with the big, black, changeful eyes. He made careful
attempt to conceal his growing unrest from Jennie, but her sharp eyes,
accustomed to every change in his face, detected a tremor when Elsie's
name was mentioned, and her ears discovered a subtle vibration in his
voice which instructed her, though she did not attain complete
realization of his absorbing interest. She was sympathetic enough to
search out Elsie's name in the social columns of the Washington papers,
and it was pitiful to see with what joy the busy Indian agent listened
to the brief item concerning "Miss Brisbane's reception on Monday," or
the description of her dress at the McCartney ball.
Jennie sighed as she read of these brilliant assemblages. "George, I
wonder if we will ever spend another winter in Washington?"
"Oh, I think so, sis--some time."
"Some time! But we'll both be so old we won't enjoy it. Sometimes I feel
that we are missing everything that's worth while."
He did not mention Elsie's letter, and as the weeks passed without any
reply he was very glad he had kept silence. Jennie had her secret, also,
which was that Elsie was as good as engaged to Lawson. No one knew this
for a certainty, but Mrs. Wilcox was quite free to say she considered it
a settled thing.
Jennie was relieved to know how indifferent her brother was to Miss
Colson, the missionary, who seemed to be undergoing a subtle
transformation. With Jennie she was always moaning and sighing, but in
the presence of her lord, the agent, she relaxed and became quite
cheerful and dangerously pretty. The other teachers--good, commonplace
souls!--went their mechanical way, with very little communication with
the agent's household, but Miss Colson seized every opportunity to
escape her messmates. "They are so material," she said, sighfully; "they
make spiritual growth impossible to me."
Jennie was not deceived. "You're a cat, that's what you are--a nice,
little, scared cat; but you're getting over your scare," she added, as
she watched the devotee in spirited conversation with her brother.
Elsie's reply to Curtis's long letter was studiedly cool but polite. "I
feel the force of what you say, but the course of civilization lies
across the lands of the 'small peoples.' It is sorrowful, of course, but
they must go, like the wolves and the rattlesnakes." In this phrase he
recognized the voice of Andrew J. Brisbane, and it gave him a twinge to
see it written by Elsie's small hand. The letter ended by leaving
matters very adroitly at an equipoise. It was friendlier than she had
ever been in conversation, yet not so womanly as he had hoped it might
be. As he studied it, however, some subtler sense than sight detected in
its carefully compounded phrases something to feed upon, and though he
did not write in answer to it, he had a feeling that she expected him to
do so.
Meanwhile the tone of the opposition grew confident. The settlers were
convinced that Congress would accede to their wishes and remove the
Tetongs, and they began to treat the redmen with a certain good-natured
tolerance, as if to say, "Well, you'll soon be settled for, anyway."
Calvin Streeter came often to the agency, and not infrequently stayed to
dinner with Curtis, paying timid court to Jennie, who retained enough of
her girlhood's coquetry to enjoy the handsome cowboy's open-eyed
admiration, even though she laughed at him afterwards in response to her
brother's jesting. Calvin vastly improved under the stress of his desire
to be worthy of her. He caught up many of the Captain's nice mannerisms,
and handled his fork and napkin with very good grace indeed. He usually
came galloping across the flat, his horse outstretched at full speed,
his hat-rim uprolled by the wind, his gay neckerchief fluttering, his
hands holding the reins high--a magnificent picture of powerful young
manhood. As he reached the gate it was his habit to put his horse on his
haunches with one sudden, pitiless wrench on the Mexican bit and drop to
the ground, and in dramatic contrast with his approach call out in
smooth, quiet voice:
"Howdy, folks, howdy! Nice day."
These affectations pleased Jennie very much, though she finally
complained of his cruelty in reining in his horse so sharply.
"All right, miss, I won't do it no more," he said, instantly.
He quite regularly invited them to the dances given round about, and
Jennie was ready to go, but Curtis, being too deeply occupied, could not
spare the time, and that debarred Jennie, though Calvin could see no
good reason why it should. "I'll take care of you," said he, but the
girl could not trust herself to his protection.
His was not a secretive nature, and he kept Curtis very well informed as
to the feeling of the settlers, reporting, as he did, their
conversations as well as their speeches, with great freedom and
remarkable accuracy.
In this way the agent learned that the cattlemen had agreed to use
caution in dealing with him. "He's a bad man to monkey with," was the
sentiment Calvin reported to be current among the settlers on the West
Fork. Young Crane's Voice also circulated this phrase, properly
translated into Dakota, to his uncles Lame Paw and Two Horns, and so the
tribe came to understand that they had a redoubtable defender in Swift
Eagle, as they called the agent in their own tongue.
From every source they heard good things of him, and they came to love
him and to obey him as they had never loved and obeyed even their
best-regarded chief. The squaws made excuse to come in and shake hands
with him and hear his laughter, and the children no longer hid or turned
away when he came near--on the contrary, they ran to him, crying "Hello,
Hagent!" and clung to his legs as he walked. The old men often laid
their arms across his shoulders as they jokingly threatened to pull out
the hairs of his face, in order to make him a redman. His lightest wish
was respected. The wildest young dare-devil would dismount and take a
hand at pushing a wagon or lifting a piece of machinery when Curtis
asked it of him.
"If I only had the water that flows in these three little streams," he
often said to Jennie, "I'd make these people self-supporting."
"We'll have things our own way yet," replied Jennie, always the
optimist.