We had our swim before sundown, and while we were cooking our supper the
oblique rays of light made a dazzling glare on the white sand about
us. The translucent red ball itself sank behind the brown stretches
of cornfield as we sat down to eat, and the warm layer of air that had
rested over the water and our clean sand bar grew fresher and smelled of
the rank ironweed and sunflowers growing on the flatter shore. The river
was brown and sluggish, like any other of the half-dozen streams that
water the Nebraska corn lands. On one shore was an irregular line of
bald clay bluffs where a few scrub oaks with thick trunks and flat,
twisted tops threw light shadows on the long grass. The western shore
was low and level, with cornfields that stretched to the skyline, and
all along the water's edge were little sandy coves and beaches where
slim cottonwoods and willow saplings flickered.
The turbulence of the river in springtime discouraged milling, and,
beyond keeping the old red bridge in repair, the busy farmers did not
concern themselves with the stream; so the Sandtown boys were left in
undisputed possession. In the autumn we hunted quail through the miles
of stubble and fodder land along the flat shore, and, after the winter
skating season was over and the ice had gone out, the spring freshets
and flooded bottoms gave us our great excitement of the year. The
channel was never the same for two successive seasons. Every spring the
swollen stream undermined a bluff to the east, or bit out a few acres of
cornfield to the west and whirled the soil away, to deposit it in spumy
mud banks somewhere else. When the water fell low in midsummer, new sand
bars were thus exposed to dry and whiten in the August sun. Sometimes
these were banked so firmly that the fury of the next freshet failed to
unseat them; the little willow seedlings emerged triumphantly from the
yellow froth, broke into spring leaf, shot up into summer growth, and
with their mesh of roots bound together the moist sand beneath them
against the batterings of another April. Here and there a cottonwood
soon glittered among them, quivering in the low current of air that,
even on breathless days when the dust hung like smoke above the wagon
road, trembled along the face of the water.
It was on such an island, in the third summer of its yellow green, that
we built our watch fire; not in the thicket of dancing willow wands, but
on the level terrace of fine sand which had been added that spring;
a little new bit of world, beautifully ridged with ripple marks, and
strewn with the tiny skeletons of turtles and fish, all as white and dry
as if they had been expertly cured. We had been careful not to mar the
freshness of the place, although we often swam to it on summer evenings
and lay on the sand to rest.
This was our last watch fire of the year, and there were reasons why I
should remember it better than any of the others. Next week the other
boys were to file back to their old places in the Sandtown High School,
but I was to go up to the Divide to teach my first country school in the
Norwegian district. I was already homesick at the thought of quitting
the boys with whom I had always played; of leaving the river, and going
up into a windy plain that was all windmills and cornfields and
big pastures; where there was nothing wilful or unmanageable in the
landscape, no new islands, and no chance of unfamiliar birds--such as
often followed the watercourses.
Other boys came and went and used the river for fishing or skating,
but we six were sworn to the spirit of the stream, and we were friends
mainly because of the river. There were the two Hassler boys, Fritz and
Otto, sons of the little German tailor. They were the youngest of us;
ragged boys of ten and twelve, with sunburned hair, weather-stained
faces, and pale blue eyes. Otto, the elder, was the best mathematician
in school, and clever at his books, but he always dropped out in the
spring term as if the river could not get on without him. He and Fritz
caught the fat, horned catfish and sold them about the town, and they
lived so much in the water that they were as brown and sandy as the
river itself.
There was Percy Pound, a fat, freckled boy with chubby cheeks, who took
half a dozen boys' story-papers and was always being kept in for reading
detective stories behind his desk. There was Tip Smith, destined by
his freckles and red hair to be the buffoon in all our games, though he
walked like a timid little old man and had a funny, cracked laugh. Tip
worked hard in his father's grocery store every afternoon, and swept it
out before school in the morning. Even his recreations were laborious.
He collected cigarette cards and tin tobacco-tags indefatigably, and
would sit for hours humped up over a snarling little scroll-saw which he
kept in his attic. His dearest possessions were some little pill bottles
that purported to contain grains of wheat from the Holy Land, water from
the Jordan and the Dead Sea, and earth from the Mount of Olives. His
father had bought these dull things from a Baptist missionary who
peddled them, and Tip seemed to derive great satisfaction from their
remote origin.
The tall boy was Arthur Adams. He had fine hazel eyes that were almost
too reflective and sympathetic for a boy, and such a pleasant voice that
we all loved to hear him read aloud. Even when he had to read poetry
aloud at school, no one ever thought of laughing. To be sure, he was
not at school very much of the time. He was seventeen and should
have finished the High School the year before, but he was always off
somewhere with his gun. Arthur's mother was dead, and his father, who
was feverishly absorbed in promoting schemes, wanted to send the boy
away to school and get him off his hands; but Arthur always begged off
for another year and promised to study. I remember him as a tall, brown
boy with an intelligent face, always lounging among a lot of us little
fellows, laughing at us oftener than with us, but such a soft, satisfied
laugh that we felt rather flattered when we provoked it. In after-years
people said that Arthur had been given to evil ways as a lad, and it is
true that we often saw him with the gambler's sons and with old Spanish
Fanny's boy, but if he learned anything ugly in their company he never
betrayed it to us. We would have followed Arthur anywhere, and I am
bound to say that he led us into no worse places than the cattail
marshes and the stubble fields. These, then, were the boys who camped
with me that summer night upon the sand bar.
After we finished our supper we beat the willow thicket for driftwood.
By the time we had collected enough, night had fallen, and the pungent,
weedy smell from the shore increased with the coolness. We threw
ourselves down about the fire and made another futile effort to show
Percy Pound the Little Dipper. We had tried it often before, but he
could never be got past the big one.
“You see those three big stars just below the handle, with the bright
one in the middle?” said Otto Hassler; “that's Orion's belt, and the
bright one is the clasp.” I crawled behind Otto's shoulder and sighted
up his arm to the star that seemed perched upon the tip of his steady
forefinger. The Hassler boys did seine-fishing at night, and they knew a
good many stars.
Percy gave up the Little Dipper and lay back on the sand, his hands
clasped under his head. “I can see the North Star,” he announced,
contentedly, pointing toward it with his big toe. “Anyone might get lost
and need to know that.”
We all looked up at it.
“How do you suppose Columbus felt when his compass didn't point north
any more?” Tip asked.
Otto shook his head. “My father says that there was another North Star
once, and that maybe this one won't last always. I wonder what would
happen to us down here if anything went wrong with it?”
Arthur chuckled. “I wouldn't worry, Ott. Nothing's apt to happen to it
in your time. Look at the Milky Way! There must be lots of good dead
Indians.”
We lay back and looked, meditating, at the dark cover of the world. The
gurgle of the water had become heavier. We had often noticed a mutinous,
complaining note in it at night, quite different from its cheerful
daytime chuckle, and seeming like the voice of a much deeper and more
powerful stream. Our water had always these two moods: the one of sunny
complaisance, the other of inconsolable, passionate regret.
“Queer how the stars are all in sort of diagrams,” remarked Otto. “You
could do most any proposition in geometry with 'em. They always look
as if they meant something. Some folks say everybody's fortune is all
written out in the stars, don't they?”
“They believe so in the old country,” Fritz affirmed.
But Arthur only laughed at him. “You're thinking of Napoleon, Fritzey.
He had a star that went out when he began to lose battles. I guess the
stars don't keep any close tally on Sandtown folks.”
We were speculating on how many times we could count a hundred before
the evening star went down behind the cornfields, when someone cried,
“There comes the moon, and it's as big as a cart wheel!”
We all jumped up to greet it as it swam over the bluffs behind us. It
came up like a galleon in full sail; an enormous, barbaric thing, red as
an angry heathen god.
“When the moon came up red like that, the Aztecs used to sacrifice their
prisoners on the temple top,” Percy announced.
“Go on, Perce. You got that out of _Golden Days_. Do you believe that,
Arthur?” I appealed.
Arthur answered, quite seriously: “Like as not. The moon was one of
their gods. When my father was in Mexico City he saw the stone where
they used to sacrifice their prisoners.”
As we dropped down by the fire again some one asked whether the
Mound-Builders were older than the Aztecs. When we once got upon the
Mound-Builders we never willingly got away from them, and we were still
conjecturing when we heard a loud splash in the water.
“Must have been a big cat jumping,” said Fritz. “They do sometimes. They
must see bugs in the dark. Look what a track the moon makes!”
There was a long, silvery streak on the water, and where the current
fretted over a big log it boiled up like gold pieces.
“Suppose there ever _was_ any gold hid away in this old river?” Fritz
asked. He lay like a little brown Indian, close to the fire, his chin on
his hand and his bare feet in the air. His brother laughed at him, but
Arthur took his suggestion seriously.
“Some of the Spaniards thought there was gold up here somewhere. Seven
cities chuck full of gold, they had it, and Coronado and his men came up
to hunt it. The Spaniards were all over this country once.”
Percy looked interested. “Was that before the Mormons went through?”
We all laughed at this.
“Long enough before. Before the Pilgrim Fathers, Perce. Maybe they came
along this very river. They always followed the watercourses.”
“I wonder where this river really does begin?” Tip mused. That was an
old and a favorite mystery which the map did not clearly explain. On the
map the little black line stopped somewhere in western Kansas; but since
rivers generally rose in mountains, it was only reasonable to suppose
that ours came from the Rockies. Its destination, we knew, was the
Missouri, and the Hassler boys always maintained that we could embark
at Sandtown in floodtime, follow our noses, and eventually arrive at
New Orleans. Now they took up their old argument. “If us boys had grit
enough to try it, it wouldn't take no time to get to Kansas City and St.
Joe.”
We began to talk about the places we wanted to go to. The Hassler boys
wanted to see the stockyards in Kansas City, and Percy wanted to see
a big store in Chicago. Arthur was interlocutor and did not betray
himself.
“Now it's your turn, Tip.”
Tip rolled over on his elbow and poked the fire, and his eyes looked
shyly out of his queer, tight little face. “My place is awful far away.
My Uncle Bill told me about it.”
Tip's Uncle Bill was a wanderer, bitten with mining fever, who had
drifted into Sandtown with a broken arm, and when it was well had
drifted out again.
“Where is it?”
“Aw, it's down in New Mexico somewheres. There aren't no railroads or
anything. You have to go on mules, and you run out of water before you
get there and have to drink canned tomatoes.”
“Well, go on, kid. What's it like when you do get there?”
Tip sat up and excitedly began his story.
“There's a big red rock there that goes right up out of the sand for
about nine hundred feet. The country's flat all around it, and this here
rock goes up all by itself, like a monument. They call it the Enchanted
Bluff down there, because no white man has ever been on top of it. The
sides are smooth rock, and straight up, like a wall. The Indians say
that hundreds of years ago, before the Spaniards came, there was a
village away up there in the air. The tribe that lived there had some
sort of steps, made out of wood and bark, bung down over the face of the
bluff, and the braves went down to hunt and carried water up in big jars
swung on their backs. They kept a big supply of water and dried meat up
there, and never went down except to hunt. They were a peaceful tribe
that made cloth and pottery, and they went up there to get out of the
wars. You see, they could pick off any war party that tried to get up
their little steps. The Indians say they were a handsome people, and
they had some sort of queer religion. Uncle Bill thinks they were
Cliff-Dwellers who had got into trouble and left home. They weren't
fighters, anyhow.
“One time the braves were down hunting and an awful storm came up--a
kind of waterspout--and when they got back to their rock they found
their little staircase had been all broken to pieces, and only a few
steps were left hanging away up in the air. While they were camped at
the foot of the rock, wondering what to do, a war party from the north
came along and massacred 'em to a man, with all the old folks and women
looking on from the rock. Then the war party went on south and left the
village to get down the best way they could. Of course they never got
down. They starved to death up there, and when the war party came back
on their way north, they could hear the children crying from the edge
of the bluff where they had crawled out, but they didn't see a sign of a
grown Indian, and nobody has ever been up there since.”
We exclaimed at this dolorous legend and sat up.
“There couldn't have been many people up there,” Percy demurred. “How
big is the top, Tip?”
“Oh, pretty big. Big enough so that the rock doesn't look nearly as tall
as it is. The top's bigger than the base. The bluff is sort of worn away
for several hundred feet up. That's one reason it's so hard to climb.”