THE AMAZON
The dog darted into the bunch grass and turned sharply to the right.
One of the men followed it, the others took different directions.
Up a gully the hound ran, nosed the ground in a circle of sniffs, and
dipped down into a dry watercourse. Tom Morse was at heel scarcely a
dozen strides behind.
The yelping of the dog told Morse they were close on their quarry.
Once or twice he thought he made out the vague outline of a flying
figure, but in the night shadows it was lost again almost at once.
They breasted the long slope of a low hill and took the decline
beyond. The young plainsman had the legs and the wind of a Marathon
runner. His was the perfect physical fitness of one who lives a clean,
hard life in the dry air of the high lands. The swiftness and the
endurance of the fugitive told him that he was in the wake of youth
trained to a fine edge.
Unexpectedly, in the deeper darkness of a small ravine below the hill
spur, the hunted turned upon the hunter. Morse caught the gleam of a
knife thrust as he plunged. It was too late to check his dive. A flame
of fire scorched through his forearm. The two went down together,
rolling over and over as they struggled.
Startled, Morse loosened his grip. He had discovered by the feel of
the flesh he was handling so roughly that it was a woman with whom he
was fighting.
She took advantage of his hesitation to shake free and roll away.
They faced each other on their feet. The man was amazed at the young
Amazon's fury. Her eyes were like live coals, flashing at him hatred
and defiance. Beneath the skin smock she wore, her breath came
raggedly and deeply. Neither of them spoke, but her gaze did not yield
a thousandth part of an inch to his.
The girl darted for the knife she had dropped. Morse was upon her
instantly. She tried to trip him, but when they struck the ground she
was underneath.
He struggled to pin down her arms, but she fought with a barbaric
fury. Her hard little fist beat upon his face a dozen times before he
pegged it down.
Lithe as a panther, her body twisted beneath his. Too late the flash
of white teeth warned him. She bit into his arm with the abandon of a
savage.
"You little devil!" he cried between set teeth.
He flung away any scruples he might have had and pinned fast her
flying arms. The slim, muscular body still writhed in vain contortions
till he clamped it fast between knees from which not even an untamed
cayuse could free itself.
She gave up struggling. They glared at each other, panting from their
exertions. Her eyes still flamed defiance, but back of it he read
fear, a horrified and paralyzing terror. To the white traders along
the border a half-breed girl was a squaw, and a squaw was property
just as a horse or a dog was.
For the first time she spoke, and in English. Her voice came
bell-clear and not in the guttural of the tribes.
"Let me up!" It was an imperative, urgent, threatening.
He still held her in the vice, his face close to her flaming eyes.
"You little devil," he said again.
"Let me up!" she repeated wildly. "Let me up, I tell you."
"Like blazes I will. You're through biting and knifing me for one
night." He had tasted no liquor all day, but there was the note of
drunkenness in his voice.
The terror in her grew. "If you don't let me up--"
"You'll do what?" he jeered.
Her furious upheaval took him by surprise. She had unseated him and
was scrambling to her feet before he had her by the shoulders.
The girl ducked her head in an effort to wrench free. She could as
easily have escaped from steel cuffs as from the grip of his brown
fingers.
"You'd better let me go!" she cried. "You don't know who I am."
"Nor care," he flung back. "You're a nitchie, and you smashed our
kegs. That's enough for me."
"I'm no such thing a nitchie[1]," she denied indignantly.
[Footnote 1: In the vernacular of the Northwest Indians were
"nitchies." (W.M.R.)]
The instinct of self-preservation was moving in her. She had played
into the hands of this man and his companions. The traders made their
own laws and set their own standards. The value of a squaw of the
Blackfeet was no more than that of the liquor she had destroyed. It
would be in character for them to keep her as a chattel captured in
war.
"The daughter of a squaw-man then," he said, and there was in his
voice the contempt of the white man for the half-breed.
"I'm Jessie McRae," she said proudly.
Among the Indians she went by her tribal name of Sleeping Dawn, but
always with the whites she used the one her adopted father had given
her. It increased their respect for her. Just now she was in desperate
need of every ounce that would weigh in the scales.
"Daughter of Angus McRae?" he asked, astonished.
"Yes."
"His woman's a Cree?"
"His wife is," the girl corrected.
"What you doin' here?"
"Father's camp is near. He's hunting hides."
"Did he send you to smash our whiskey-barrels?"
"Angus McRae never hides behind a woman," she said, her chin up.
That was true. Morse knew it, though he had never met McRae. His
reputation had gone all over the Northland as a fearless fighting man
honest as daylight and stern as the Day of Judgment. If this girl was
a daughter of the old Scot, not even a whiskey-trader could safely lay
hands on her. For back of Angus was a group of buffalo-hunters related
to him by blood over whom he held half-patriarchal sway.
"Why did you do it?" Morse demanded.
The question struck a spark of spirit from her. "Because you're
ruining my people--destroying them with your fire-water."
He was taken wholly by surprise. "Do you mean you destroyed our
property for that reason?"
She nodded, sullenly.
"But we don't trade with the Crees," he persisted.
It was on the tip of her tongue to tell him that she was of the
Blackfoot tribe and not of the Crees, but again for reasons of policy
she was less than candid. Till she was safely out of the woods, it was
better this man should not know she was only an adopted daughter of
Angus McRae. She offered another reason, and with a flare of passion
which he was to learn as a characteristic of her.
"You make trouble for my brother Fergus. He shot Akokotos (Many
Horses) in the leg when the fire-water burned in him. He was stabbed
by a Piegan brave who did not know what he was doing. Fergus is good.
He minds his own business. But you steal away his brains. Then he runs
wild. It was _you_, not Fergus, that shot Akokotos. The Great Spirit
knows you whiskey-traders, and not my poor people who destroy each
other, are the real murderers."
Her logic was feminine and personal, from his viewpoint wholly unfair.
Moreover, one of her charges did not happen to be literally true.
"We never sold whiskey to your brother--not our outfit. It was
Jackson's, maybe. Anyhow, nobody made him buy it. He was free to take
it or leave it."
"A wolf doesn't have to eat the poisoned meat in a trap, but it eats
and dies," she retorted swiftly and bitterly.
Adroitly she had put him on the defensive. Her words had the sting of
barbed darts.
"We're not talking of wolves."
"No, but of Blackfeet and Bloods and Sarcees," she burst out, again
with that flare of feminine ferocity so out of character in an Indian
woman or the daughter of one. "D'you think I don't know how you
Americans talk? A good Indian is a dead Indian. No wonder we hate you
all. No wonder the tribes fight you to the death."
He had no answer for this. It was true. He had been brought up in a
land of Indian wars and he had accepted without question the common
view that the Sioux, the Crows, and the Cheyennes, with all their
blood brothers, were menaces to civilization. The case for the natives
he had never studied. How great a part broken pledges and callous
injustice had done to drive the tribes to the war-path he did not
know. Few of the actual frontiersmen were aware of the wrongs of the
red men.
The young man's hands fell from her arms. Hard-eyed and grim, he
looked her over from head to foot. The short skirt and smock of
buckskin, the moccasins of buffalo hide, all dusty and travel-stained,
told of life in a primitive country under the simplest and hardest
conditions.
Yet the voice was clear and vibrant, the words well enunciated. She
bloomed like a desert rose, had some quality of vital life that struck
a spark from his imagination.
What manner of girl was she? Not by any possibility would she fit into
the specifications of the cubby-hole his mind had built for Indian
women. The daughters even of the boisbrulés had much of the heaviness
and stolidity of their native mothers. Jessie McRae was graceful as a
fawn. Every turn of the dark head, every lift of the hand, expressed
spirit and verve. She must, he thought, have inherited almost wholly
from her father, though in her lissom youth he could find little of
McRae's heavy solidity of mind and body.
"Your brother is of the métis[2]. He's not a tribesman. And he's no
child. He can look out for himself," Morse said at last.
[Footnote 2: The half-breeds were known as "métis." The word means, of
course, mongrel. (W.M.R.)]
His choice of a word was unfortunate. It applied as much to her as to
Fergus. Often it was used contemptuously.
"Yes, and the métis doesn't matter," she cried, with the note of
bitterness that sat so strangely on her hot-blooded, vital youth. "You
can ride over him as though you're lords of the barren lands. You can
ruin him for the money you make, even if he's a subject of the Great
Mother and not of your country. He's only a breed--a mongrel."
He was a man of action. He brushed aside discussion. "We'll be movin'
back to camp."
Instantly her eyes betrayed the fear she would not put into words.
"No--no! I won't go."
His lids narrowed. The outthrust of his lean jaw left no room for
argument. "You'll go where I say."
She knew it would be that way, if he dragged her by the hair of the
head. Because she was in such evil case she tamed her pride to sullen
pleading.
"Don't take me there! Let me go to father. He'll horsewhip me. I'll
have him do it for you. Isn't that enough? Won't that satisfy you?"
Red spots smoldered like fire in his brown eyes. If he took her back
to the traders' camp, he would have to fight Bully West for her. That
was certain. All sorts of complications would rise. There would be
trouble with McRae. The trade with the Indians of his uncle's firm, of
which he was soon to be a partner, would be wrecked by the Scotchman.
No, he couldn't take her back to the camp in the coulée. There was too
much at stake.
"Suits me. I'll take you up on that. He's to horsewhip you for that
fool trick you played on us and to make good our loss. Where's his
camp?"
From the distance of a stone-throw a heavy, raucous voice called,
"'Lo, Morse!"
The young man turned to the girl, his lips set in a thin, hard line.
"Bully West. The dog's gone back and is bringin' him here, I reckon.
Like to meet him?"
She knew the reputation of Bully West, notorious as a brawler and
a libertine. Who in all the North did not know of it? Her heart
fluttered a signal of despair.
"I--I can get away yet--up the valley," she said in a whisper, eyes
quick with fear.
He smiled grimly. "You mean _we_ can."
"Yes."
"Hit the trail."
She turned and led the way into the darkness.