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MEMBERS OF THE FAMILY
[Illustration]
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
NEW YORK · BOSTON · CHICAGO
SAN FRANCISCO
MACMILLAN & CO., LIMITED
LONDON · BOMBAY · CALCUTTA
MELBOURNE
THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, LTD.
TORONTO
[Illustration: “Pie like mother made,” said Scipio]
MEMBERS OF THE FAMILY
BY
OWEN WISTER
WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY H. T. DUNN
New York
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1911
_All rights reserved_
COPYRIGHT, 1901,
BY THE COSMOPOLITAN MAGAZINE.
COPYRIGHT, 1903,
BY P. F. COLLIER AND SON.
COPYRIGHT, 1902, 1908, 1909, 1911,
BY THE CURTIS PUBLISHING COMPANY.
COPYRIGHT, 1911,
BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
Set up and electrotyped. Published May, 1911.
Norwood Press
J. S. Cushing Co.--Berwick & Smith Co.
Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.
To
HORACE HOWARD FURNESS
OF LINDENSHADE, WALLINGFORD
_That is my home of love: if I have rang’d,
Like him that travels, I return again._
--SONNET CIX.
PREFACE
When this October comes, twenty years will be sped since the author of
these Western tales sat down one evening to begin his first tale of the
West, and--will you forgive him a preamble of gossip, of retrospection?
Time steps in between the now that is and the then that was with a
vengeance; it blocks the way for us all; we cannot go back. When the old
corner, the old place, the old house, wear the remembered look, beckon
to the memory as if to say, No change here! then verily is the change
worst, the shell most empty, the cheat well-nigh too piercing. In a
certain garden I used to plunder in 1866, the smell to-day of warm,
dusty strawberries.... But did we admit to our companionship ghosts
only, what would living be? I continue to eat strawberries. As for
smells, they’re worse than old melodies, I think. Lately I was the sport
of one. My train was trundling over the plains--a true train of the
past, half freight, half passenger, cars of an obsolete build, big
smoke-stack on the archaic engine, stops for meals, inveterate news-boy
with bad candy, bad novels, bad bananas--a dear old horrible train, when
magic was suddenly wrought. It came in through the open window, its
wand touched me, and the evoked spirits rose. With closed eyes I saw
them once more, standing there out in the alkali, the antelope by scores
and hundreds, only a little way off, a sort of color between cinnamon
and amber in the morning sun, transparent and phantom-like, with pale
legs. Only a little way off. Eyes closed, I watched them, as in 1885
with open ones I beheld them first from the train. Now they were
running; I saw the bobbing dots of their white receding rears, and
through me passed the ghost of that first thrill at first seeing
antelope yesterday--it seemed yesterday: only a little way off. I opened
my eyes; there was the train as it ought to look, there were the plains,
the alkali, the dry gullies, the mounds, the flats, the enormous
sunlight, the virgin air like the first five measures of
_Lohengrin_--but where were the antelope? So natural did everything
continue to look, surely they must be just over that next rise! No; over
the one beyond that? No; only a little, little way off, but gone for
evermore! And magic smote me once again through the window. Thousands of
cattle were there, with horsemen. Were they not there? Not over the next
rise? No; gone for evermore. What was this magic that came in through
the window? The smell of the sage-brush. After several years it was
greeting me again. All day long it breathed a welcome and a sigh, as if
the desert whispered: Yes, I look as if I were here; but I am a ghost,
too, there’s no coming back. All day long the whiffs of sage-brush
conjured old sights before me, till my heart ran over with homesickness
for what was no more, and the desert seemed to whisper: It’s not I
you’re seeking, you’re straining your eyes to see yourself,--you as you
were in your early twenties, with your illusion that I, the happy
hunting-ground of your young irresponsibility, was going to be
permanent. You must shut your eyes to see yourself and me and the
antelope as we all used to be. Why, if Adam and Eve had evaded the angel
and got back into the garden, do you think they would have found it the
same after Cain and Abel? Thus moralized the desert, and I thought, How
many things we have to shut our eyes to see!
Permanent! Living men, not very old yet, have seen the Indian on the
war-path, the buffalo stopping the train, the cow-boy driving his
cattle, the herder watching his sheep, the government irrigation dam,
and the automobile--have seen every one of these slides which progress
puts for a moment into its magic-lantern and removes to replace with a
new one. The final tale in this book could not possibly have happened in
the day of the first tale, although scarcely twenty years separate the
new, present Wyoming from that cow-boy Wyoming which then flourished so
boisterously, and is now like the antelope. Steam and electricity make
short work of epochs. We don’t know how many centuries the Indian and
the buffalo enjoyed before the trapper and pioneer arrived. These latter
had fifty or sixty good years of it, pushing westward until no west was
left to push to; a little beyond Ogden in 1869, the driving of that
golden spike which riveted the rails between New York and San Francisco,
rang out the old, rang in the new, and progress began to work its
magic-lantern faster. The soldier of the frontier, the frontier
post--gone; the cattle-range--gone; the sheep episode just come, yet
going already, or at any rate already mixed, diluted, with the farm, the
truck garden, the poultry yard, the wife, the telephone, the summer
boarder, and the Victor playing the latest Broadway “records” in valleys
where the august wilderness reigned silent--yesterday. The nomadic,
bachelor West is over, the housed, married West is established. This
rush of change, this speed we live at everywhere (only faster in some
places than in others) has led some one to remark sententiously that
when a Western baby is born, it immediately makes its will, while when a
New York baby is born, it merely applies for a divorce.
But what changes can ever efface that early vision which began with the
antelope? Wyoming burst upon the tenderfoot resplendent, like all the
story-books, like Cooper and Irving and Parkman come true again; here,
actually going on, was that something which the boy runs away from
school to find, that land safe and far from Monday morning, nine
o’clock, and the spelling-book; here was Saturday eternal, where you
slept out-of-doors, hunted big animals, rode a horse, roped steers, and
wore deadly weapons. Make no mistake: fire-arms were at times practical
and imperative, but this was not the whole reason for sporting them on
your hip; you had escaped from civilization’s school-room, an air never
breathed before filled your lungs, and you were become one large shout
of joy. College-boy, farm-boy, street-boy, this West melted you all down
to the same first principles. Were you seeking fortune? Perhaps,
incidentally, but money was not the point; you had escaped from school.
This holiday was leavened by hard bodily work, manly deeds, and deeds
heroic, and beneath all the bright brave ripple moved the ground-swell
of tragedy. Something of promise, also, was in the air, promise of a
democracy which the East had missed:--
“With no spread-eagle brag do I gather conviction each year that we
Americans, judged not hastily, are sound at heart, kind, courageous,
often of the truest delicacy, and always ultimately of excellent good
sense. With such belief, or, rather, knowledge, it is sorrowful to see
our fatal complacence, our as yet undisciplined folly, in sending to our
State Legislatures and to that general business office of ours at
Washington, a herd of mismanagers that seems each year to grow more
inefficient and contemptible, whether branded Republican or Democrat.
But I take heart, because oftener and oftener I hear upon my journey the
citizens high and low muttering, ‘There’s too much politics in this
country’; and we shake hands.”
Such “insurgent” sentiments did I in 1895, some time before insurgency’s
day, speak out in the preface to my first book of Western tales; to-day
my faith begins to be justified. In the West, where the heart of our
country has been this long while, and where the head may be pretty soon,
the citizens are awakening to the fact that our first century of “self”
government merely substituted the divine right of corporations for the
divine right of Kings. Surprising it is not, that a people whose genius
for machinery has always been paramount should expect more from
constitutions and institutions than these mere mechanisms of government
can of themselves perform; the initiative, referendum, and recall are
excellent inventions, but if left to run alone, as all our other patent
devices have been, they will grind out nothing for us: By his very creed
is the American dedicated to eternal vigilance. This we forgot for so
long that learning it anew is both painful and slow. We have further to
remember that prosperity is something of a curse in disguise; it is the
poor governments in history that have always been the purest; where
there is much to steal, there will be many to steal it. We must
discern, too, the illusion of “natural rights,” once an inspiration, now
a shell from which life has passed on into new formulas. A “right” has
no existence, save in its potential exercise; it does not proceed from
within, it is permitted from without, and “natural rights” is a phrase
empty of other meaning than to denote whatever primitive or acquired
inclinations of man each individual is by common consent allowed to
realize. These permissions have varied, and will vary, with the ages.
Polygamy would be called a natural right now in some parts of the world;
to the criminal and the diseased one wife will presently be forbidden in
many places. Let this single illustration serve. No argument based upon
the dogmatic premise of natural rights can end anywhere save in drifting
fog. We see this whenever a meeting of anarchists leads a judge or an
editor into the trap of attempting to define the “right” of free speech.
In fact, all government, all liberty, reduces itself to one man saying
to another: You may do _this_; but if you do _that_, I will kill you.
This power Democracy vests in “the people,” and our final lesson to
learn is that in a Democracy there is no such separate thing as “the
people”; all of us are the people. Truly his creed compels the American
to eternal vigilance! Will he learn to live up to it?
From the West the tenderfoot took home with him the health he had
sought, and an enthusiasm his friends fled from; what was Wyoming to
them or they to Wyoming? In 1885 the Eastern notion of the West was
“Alkali Ike” and smoking pistols. No kind of serious art had presented
the frontier as yet. Fresh visits but served to deepen the tenderfoot’s
enthusiasm and whet his impatience that so much splendid indigenous
material should literally be wasting its sweetness on the desert air. It
is likely always to be true that in each hundred of mankind ninety-nine
can see nothing new until the hundredth shakes it in their faces--and he
must keep shaking it. No plan of shaking was yet in the tenderfoot’s
mind, he was dedicated to other calling; but he besieged the ears of our
great painter and our great novelist. He told the painter of the strong,
strange shapes of the buttes, the epic landscape, the color, the
marvellous light, the red men blanketed, the white men in chapareros,
the little bronze Indian children; particularly does he recall--in 1887
or 1888--an occasion about two o’clock in the morning in a certain
beloved club in Boston, when he had been preaching to the painter. A
lesser painter (he is long dead) sat by, unbelieving. No, he said, don’t
go. I’m sure it’s all crude, repulsive, no beauty. But John Sargent did
believe. Other work waited him; his path lay elsewhere, he said, but he
was sure the tenderfoot spoke truth. Other work awaited the novelist,
too; both painter and novelist were wiser than to leave what they knew
to be their own for unknown fields. But would no one, then, disperse
the Alkali Ikes and bring the West into American art and letters?
It was a happy day for the tenderfoot when he read the first sage-brush
story by Mary Hallock Foote. At last a voice was lifted to honor the
cattle country and not to libel it. Almost at the same moment Charles
King opened for us the door upon frontier military life. He brought
spirited army scenes to our ken, Mrs. Foote more generally clothed the
civilian frontier with serious and tender art. They (so far as I know)
were the first that ever burst into that silent sea. Next, Mr. Roosevelt
began to publish his vivid, robust accounts of Montana life. But words
alone, no matter how skilfully used, were not of themselves adequate to
present to the public a picture so strange and new. Another art was
needed, and most luckily the man with the seeing eye and shaping hand
arrived.
A monument to Frederic Remington will undoubtedly rise some day; the
artist who more than any one has gathered up in a grand grasp an entire
era of this country’s history, and handed it down visible, living,
picturesque, for coming generations to see--such man will have a
monument. But in the manner of commemorating national benefactors, I
would we resembled the French who celebrate their great ones--not
soldiers and statesmen alone, but all their great ones--by naming public
places in their honor: the Quai Voltaire, the Rue Bizet, the Rue
Auber--to mention the first that come to memory. Everywhere in France
you will meet with these instances of a good custom. In this country we
seem to value even third-rate politicians more than first-rate men of
art and letters. If Paris can by her streets perpetuate the memory of
the composers of _Carmen_ and _Fra Diavolo_, would it not be fitting
that Denver, Cheyenne, Tucson, and other western cities, should have a
Remington street? I am glad I did not wait until he was dead to pay my
tribute to him. The two opportunities that came to me in his life I
took, nor has my opinion of his work changed since then. If he never
quite found himself in color, he was an incomparable draftsman; best of
all, he was a great wholesome force making for independence, and he
taught to our over-imitative American painters the needed lesson that
their own country furnishes subjects as worthy as any that Delacroix or
Millet ever saw. I have lived to see what I did not expect, the desert
on canvas; for which I thank Fernand Lungren. Tributes to the dead seem
late to me, and I shall take this chance to acknowledge my debt to some
more of the living.
Four years after that night vigil with Sargent, the tenderfoot had still
written no word about the West. It was in 1891, after repeated
sojournings in camp, ranch, and military post, that his saturation with
the whole thing ran over, so to speak, in the form of fiction. Writing
had been a constant pastime since the school paper; in 1884 Mr. Howells
(how kind he was!) had felt my literary pulse and pronounced it
promising; a quickening came from the pages of Stevenson; a far stronger
shove next from the genius of _Plain Tales from the Hills_; during an
unusually long and broad wandering through the Platte valley, Powder
River, Buffalo, Cheyenne, Fort Washakie, Jackson’s Hole, and the Park,
the final push happened to be given by Prosper Mérimée; I had the volume
containing _Carmen_ with me. After reading it in the Park I straightway
invented a traveller’s tale. This was written down after I got home--I
left some good company at a club dinner table one night to go off to a
lonely library and begin it. A second followed, both were sent to
Franklin Square and accepted by Mr. Alden. Then I found my pretty
faithfully-kept Western diaries (they would now fill a shelf) to be a
reservoir of suggestion--and at times a source of despair; as, for
instance, when I unearthed the following abbreviations: Be sure to
remember Green-hides--perpendicular--sediment--Tuesdays as a rule.
Aware of Mérimée’snot highly expansive nature, I should hesitate, were
he alive, to disclose my debt to his _Carmen_--my favorite of all short
stories; but Mr. Howells and Mr. Kipling will be indulgent, and there is
another who will have to bear with my gratitude. In 1896 I sat with him
and he went over my first book, patiently, minutely pointing out many
things. Everything that he said I could repeat this moment, and his own
pages have continued to give me hints without end. That the pupil in one
or two matters ventures to disagree with his benefactor may be from much
lingering ignorance, or because no two ever think wholly alike: _tot
homines quot sententiæ_, as the Latin grammar used so incontrovertibly
to remark. It is significant to note how this master seems to be
teaching a numerous young generation. Often do I pick up some popular
magazine and read a story (one even of murder, it may be, in tropic seas
or city slums) where some canny bit of foreshortening, of presentation,
reveals the spreading influence, and I say, Ah, my friend, never would
you have found out how to do that if Henry James hadn’t set you
thinking!
It can happen, says Montesquieu, that the individual through pursuing
his own welfare contributes to the general good; Mr. Herbert Croly
admirably and sagaciously applies this thought to the case of the artist
and the writer. Their way to be worthy citizens and serve the State, he
says, is to see to it that their work be reverently thorough, for thus
they set high the standard of national excellence. To which I would add,
that a writer can easily take himself too seriously, but he can never
take his art too seriously. In our country, the painter and writer have
far outstripped the working-man in their ideal of honest work. This is
(partly) because painter and writer have to turn out a good product to
survive, while the working-man manages to survive with the least
possible of personal effort and skill. Did I offer my publisher such
work as the plumber and carpenter offer me, I should feel myself
disgraced. Are we to see the day when the slovenly, lazy poet shall
enact that the careful, industrious poet must work no longer and sell no
more than he?
Editors have at times lamented to me that good work isn’t distinguished
from bad by our multifarious millions. I have the happiness to know the
editors to be wrong. Let the subject of a piece of fiction contain a
simple, broad appeal, and the better its art, the greater its success;
although the noble army of readers will not suspect that their pleasure
is largely due to the skill. Such a book as _The Egoist_, where the
subject is rarefied and complex, of course no height of art will render
acceptable, save to the rehearsed few. Thanks to certain of our more
robust editors, the noble army grows daily more rehearsed, reads
“harder” books than it did, accepts plainer speech and wider range of
subject than the skittish spinster generation of a while ago. But mark
here an underlying principle. The plain speech in Richardson was in his
day nothing to start back from; to-day it is inhibited by a change in
our circumambient reticence. The circumambient reticence varies in
degree with each race, and almost with every generation of each race.
Something like a natural law, it sets the limits for what can be said
aloud in grown-up company--and Art is speaking aloud in grown-up
company; it consists no more of the professional secrets of the doctor
than it does of the prattle of the nursery. Its business is indeed to
take notice of everything in life, but always subject to the
circumambient reticence. Those gentlemen (and ladies) who utter that
gaseous shibboleth about Art for Art (as well cry Beefsteak for
Beefsteak) and would have our books and plays be foul because Ben Jonson
frequently was and Anatole France frequently is, are out of their
reckoning; and generally they may be suspected not so much of an
abstract passion for truth as of a concrete letch for animalism. Almost
the only advice for the beginner is, Clearly feel what you intend to
express, and then go ahead, listening to nobody, unless to one who also
perceives clearly your intention. Great and small things does this rule
fit. Once in an early tale I sought to make our poor alphabet express
the sound of cow-bells, and I wrote that they _tankled_ on the hillside.
In the margin I stated my spelling to be intentional. Back it came in
the galley, tinkled. A revised proof being necessary, I restored my word
with emphasis--and lo, tinkle was returned me again. I appealed to the
veteran and well-loved sage at the head of _Harper’s Magazine_. He
supported me. Well, in the new Oxford dictionary, behold Tankle and me,
two flies in amber, perpetuated by that Supreme Court; I have coined a
new acknowledged word for the English language. This should not be told,
but for its small moral, and if I could not render a final set of thanks
to the living. Countless blunders have been saved me by the watchful eye
of the printer and proofreader, those friends I never see, whose names I
do not know. For twenty years they have marked places where through
carelessness or fatigue I have slipped; may some of them know through
this page that I appreciate their service.
This book is three years late; the first tale designed for it was
published in 1901. Its follower should even now be ready. It is not yet
begun; it exists merely in notes and intentions. Give me health and a
day, sighs Emerson; and I am sorry for all who have to say that. When
you see the new moon over your left shoulder, wish always for health;
never mind all the other things. I own to an attachment for the members
of this family; I would fain follow their lives a little more, into
twentieth century Wyoming, which knows not the cow-boy, and where the
cow-boy feels at times more lost than ever he was on the range. Of all
the ills that harass writing, plans deferred seem at times the worst;
yet great pleasures offset them--the sight of one’s pages in a foreign
tongue, meeting horses in the Rocky Mountains named after the members
of one’s family, being asked from across the world for further news of
some member. Lately a suggestion full of allurement came from one who
had read of Sir Francis, the duchess, and the countess, in the _Saturday
Evening Post_. (There, by the way, is an intrepid editor!) Why not add,
said the reader, a third lady to the group in Jimsy’s pond, and see what
they would all do then? Only consider the possibilities! But I dare not.
Life, without whose gifts none of us could have a story to tell--not
even Scheherezadè--life presented to me Sir Francis and his adoring
household. Never could I risk trusting to invention in a matter so
delicate. Would the duchess and the countess unite to draw the line at
the added sister? Would Sir Francis rise to the emergency? and if so,
what line would he take? The added sister might prove a lamb, a minx, or
a vixen. You see the possibilities. Dearly should I like to return this
summer to the singing waters of Buffalo Horn, and place a third lady in
that pond of Jimsy’s; then we might have another story if others are
ever to be. My science in the third tale is of course out of date; since
Kelvin, energy is immortal no longer, and a _lower_ form of it was
transmitted to the Secretary than was originally stored in Captain
Stone.
CONTENTS
PAGE
I. HAPPY-TEETH 27
II. SPIT-CAT CREEK 67
III. IN THE BACK 89
IV. TIMBERLINE 124
V. THE GIFT HORSE 159
VI. EXTRA DRY 207
VII. WHERE IT WAS 229
VIII. THE DRAKE WHO HAD MEANS OF HIS OWN 276
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
“‘Pie like Mother made,’ said Scipio” _Frontispiece_
FACING PAGE
“High Bear galloped away into the dusk” 56
“Out of the door he flew,--squaws and bucks flapped after
him like poultry” 66
“‘Is Sistah Stone heah?’ Leonidas inquired” 108
“‘If that I was where I would be, then should I be where I am
not’” 126
“_Waiting for nothing_ was stamped plain upon him from head
to foot” 140
“The stage rattled up as I sat” 171
“I found nothing new--the plain, the sage-brush, the dry
ground--no more” 188
“He shuffled the shells straight at the freighter as if he were
making love to him” 216
“How could he know that Bellyful had only become a road-agent
in the last ten minutes?” 226
“‘My, but it’s turrable easy to get married’” 284
“‘Well, Jimsy, are you going to get me any wood for this stove--or
ain’t you?’” 296
I
HAPPY-TEETH
Scipio Le Moyne lay in bed, held together with bandages. His body had
need for many bandages. A Bar-Circle-Zee three-year-old had done him
violent mischief at the forks of Stinking Water.[1] But for the fence,
Scipio might have swung clear of the wild, rearing animal. When they
lifted his wrecked frame from the ground one of them had said:--
“A spade’s all he’ll need now.”
Overhearing this with some still unconquered piece of his mind, Scipio
made one last remark: “I ain’t going to die for years and years.”
Upon this his head had rolled over, and no further statements came from
him for--I forget how long. Yet somehow, we all believed that last
remark of his.
“Since I’ve known him,” said the Virginian, “I have found him a truthful
man.”
“Which don’t mean,” Honey Wiggin put in, “that he can’t lie when he
ought to.”
Judge Henry always sent his hurt cow-punchers to the nearest surgical
aid, which in this case was the hospital on the reservation. Here then,
one afternoon, Scipio lay, his body still bound tight at a number of
places, but his brain needing no bandages whatever; he was able to see
one friend for a little while each day. It was almost time for this
day’s visitor to go, and the visitor looked at his watch.
“Oh, don’t do that!” pleaded the man in bed. “I’m not sick any more.”
“You will be sick some more if you keep talking,” replied the Virginian.
“Thinkin’ is a heap more dangerous, if y’u can’t let it out,” Scipio
urged. “I’m not half through tellin’ y’u about Horacles.”
“Did his mother name him that?” inquired the Virginian.
“Naw! but his mother brought it on him. Didn’t y’u know? Of course you
don’t often get so far north in the Basin as the Agency. His name is
Horace Pericles Byram. Well, the Agent wasn’t going to call his
assistant store-clerk all that, y’u know, not even if he _has_ got an
uncle in the Senate of the United States. Couldn’t spare the time. Days
not long enough. Not even in June. So everybody calls him Horacles now.
He’s reconciled to it. But I ain’t. It’s too good for him. A heap too
good. I’ve knowed him all my life, and I can’t think of a name that’s
not less foolish than he is. Well, where was I? I was tellin’ y’u how
back in Gallipol_eece_ he couldn’t understand anything. Not dogs. Not
horses. Not girls.”
“Do you understand girls?” the Virginian interrupted.
“Better’n Horacles. Well, now it seems he can’t understand Indians. Here
he is sellin’ goods to ’em across the counter at the Agency store. I
could sell twiced what he does, from what they tell me. I guess the
Agent has begun to discover what a trick the Uncle played him when he
unloaded Horacles on him. Now why did the Uncle do that?”
Scipio stopped in his rambling discourse, and his brows knitted as he
began to think about the Uncle. The Virginian once again looked at his
watch, but Scipio, deep in his thoughts, did not notice him. “Uncle,” he
resumed to himself, half aloud, “Uncle was the damnedest scoundrel in
Gallipol_eece_.--Say!” he exclaimed suddenly, and made an eager movement
to sit up. “Oh Lord!” he groaned, sinking back. “I forgot.--What’s your
hurry?”
But the Virginian had seen the pain transfix his friend’s face, and
though that face had instantly smiled, it was white. He stood up. “I’d
ought to get kicked from here to the ranch,” he said, remorsefully.
“I’ll get the doctor.”
Vainly the man in bed protested; his visitor was already at the door.
“I’ve not told y’u about his false teeth!” shrieked Scipio, hoping this
would detain him. “And he does tricks with a rabbit and a bowl of fish.”
But the guest was gone. In his place presently the Post surgeon came,
and was not pleased. Indeed, this excellent army doctor swore. Still, it
was not the first time that he had done so, nor did it prove the last;
and Scipio, it soon appeared, had given himself no hurt. But in answer
to a severe threat, he whined:--
“Oh, ain’t y’u goin’ to let me see him to-morro’?”
“You’ll see nobody to-morrow except me.”
“Well, that’ll be seein’ nobody,” whined Scipio, more grievously.
The doctor grinned. “In some ways you’re incurable. Better go to sleep
now.” And he left him.
Scipio did not go to sleep then, though by morning he had slept ten
healthful hours, waking with the Uncle still at the centre of his
thoughts. It made him again knit his brows.
“No, you can’t see him to-day,” said the doctor, in reply to a request.
“But I hadn’t finished sayin’ something to him,” Scipio protested. “And
I’m well enough to see my dead grandmother.”
“That I’ll not forbid,” answered the doctor. And he added that the
Virginian had gone back to Sunk Creek with some horses.
“Oh, yes,” said Scipio. “I’d forgot. Well, he’ll be coming through on
his way to Billings next week. You been up to the Agency lately?
Yesterday? Well, there’s going to be something new happen. Agent seem
worried or anything?”
“Not that I noticed. Are the Indians going on the war-path?”
“Nothing like that. But why does a senator of the United States put his
nephew in that store? Y’u needn’t to tell me it’s to provide for him,
for it don’t provide. I thought I had it figured out last night, but
Horacles don’t fit. I can’t make him fit. He don’t understand Injuns.
That’s my trouble. Now the Uncle must know Horacles don’t understand.
But if he didn’t know?” pursued Scipio, and fell to thinking.
“Well,” said the doctor indulgently, as he rose, “it’s good you can
invent these romances. Keeps you from fretting, shut up here alone.”
“There’d be no romances here,” retorted Scipio. “Uncle is exclusively
hard cash.” The doctor departed.
At his visit next morning, he was pleased with his patient’s condition.
“Keep on,” said he, “and I’ll let you sit up Monday for ten minutes. Any
more romances?”
“Been thinkin’ of my past life,” said Scipio.
The doctor laughed long. “Why, how old are you, anyhow?” he asked at
length.
“Oh, there’s some lovely years still to come before I’m thirty. But I’ve
got a whole lot of past life, all the same.” Then he pointed a solemn,
oracular finger at the doctor. “What white man savvys the Injun? Not
you. Not me. And I’ve drifted around some, too. The map of the United
States has been my home. Been in Arizona and New Mexico and among the
Siwashes--seen all kinds of Injun--but I don’t savvy ’em. I know most
any Injun’s better’n most any white man till he meets the white man. Not
smarter, y’u know, but better. And I do know this: You take an Injun and
let him be a warrior and a chief and a grandfather who has killed heaps
of white men in his day--but all that don’t make him grown up. Not like
we’re grown up. He stays a child in some respects till he’s dead. He’ll
believe things and be scared at things that ain’t nothin’ to you and me.
You take Old High Bear right on this reservation. He’s got hair like
snow and eyes like an eagle’s and he can sing a war-song about fights
that happened when our fathers were kids. But if you want to deal with
him, you got to remember he’s a child of five.”
“I do know all this,” said the doctor, interested. “I’ve not been twenty
years on the frontier for nothing.”
“Horacles don’t know it,” said Scipio. “I’ve saw him in the store all
season.”
“Well,” said the doctor, “see you to-morrow. I’ve some new patients in
the ward.”
“Soldiers?”
“Soldiers.”
“Guess I know why they’re here.”
“Oh, yes,” sighed the doctor. “You know. Few come here for any other
reason.” The doctor held views about how a military post should be
regulated, which popular sentiment will never share. “Can I do anything
for you?” he inquired.
“If I could have some newspapers?” said Scipio.
“Why didn’t you tell me before?” said the doctor. After that he saw to
it that Scipio had them liberally.
With newspapers the patient sat surrounded deep, when the Virginian,
passing north on his way to Billings, looked in for a moment to give his
friend the good word. That is what he came for, but what he said was:--
“So he has got false teeth?”
Scipio, hearing the voice at the door, looked over the top of his paper
at the visitor.
“Yes,” he replied, precisely as if the visitor had never been out of the
room.
“What d’ y’u know?” inquired the Virginian.
“Nothing; what do you?”
“Nothing.”
After all, such brief greetings cover the ground.
“Better sit down,” suggested Scipio.
The Virginian sat, and took up a paper. Thus for a little while they
both read in silence.
“Did y’u stop at the Agency as y’u came along?” asked Scipio, not
looking up from his paper.
“No.”
There was silence again as they continued reading. The Virginian, just
come from Sunk Creek, had seen no newspapers as recent as these. When
two friends on meeting after absence can sit together for half an hour
without a word passing between them, it is proof that they really enjoy
each other’s company. The gentle air came in the window, bringing the
tonic odor of the sage-brush. Outside the window stretched a yellow
world to distant golden hills. The talkative voice of a magpie somewhere
near at hand was the only sound.
“Nothing in the newspapers in particular,” said Scipio, finally.
“You expaictin’ something particular?” the Virginian asked.
“Yes.”
“Mind sayin’ what it is?”
“Wish I knew what it is.”
“Always Horacles?”
“Always him--and Uncle. I’d like to spot Uncle.”
Mess call sounded from the parade ground. It recalled the flight of time
to the Virginian.
“When you get back from Billings,” said Scipio, “you’re liable to find
me up and around.”
“Hope so. Maybe you’ll be well enough to go with me to the ranch.”
But when the Virginian returned, a great deal had happened all at once,
as is the custom of events.
Scipio’s vigorous convalescence brought him in the next few days to
sitting about in the open air, and then enlarged his freedom to a
crutch. He hobbled hither and yon, paying visits, many of them to the
doctor. The doctor it was, and no newspaper, who gave to Scipio the
first grain of that “something particular” which he had been daily
seeking and never found. He mentioned a new building that was being put
up rather far away down in the corner of the reservation. The rumor in
the air was that it had something to do with the Quartermaster’s
department. The odd thing was that the Quartermaster himself had heard
nothing about it. The Agent up at the Agency store considered this
extremely odd. But a profound absence of further explanations seemed to
prevail. What possible need for a building was there at that
inconvenient, isolated spot?
Scipio slapped his leg. “I guess what y’u call my romance is about to
start.”
“Well,” the doctor admitted, “it may be. Curious things are done upon
Indian reservations. Our management of them may be likened to putting
the Lord’s Prayer and the Ten Commandments into a bag and crushing them
to powder. Let our statesmen at Washington get their hands on an Indian
reservation, and not even honor among thieves remains.”
“Say, doc,” said Scipio, “when d’ y’u guess I can get off?”
“Don’t be in too much of a hurry,” the doctor cautioned him. “If you go
to Sunk Creek--”
“Sunk Creek! I only want to go to the Agency.”
“Oh, well, you could do that to-day--but don’t you want to see the
entertainment? Conjuring tricks are promised.”
“I want to see Horacles.”
“But he is the entertainment. Supper comes after he’s through.”
Scipio stayed. He was not repaid, he thought. “A poor show,” was his
comment as he went to bed. He came later to be very glad indeed that he
had gone to that entertainment.
The next day found him seated in the Agency store, being warmly greeted
by his friends the Indians. They knew him well; perhaps he understood
them better than he had said. By Horacles he was not warmly greeted;
perhaps Horacles did not wish to be understood--and then, Scipio, in his
comings and goings through the reservation, had played with Horacles for
the benefit of bystanders. There is no doubt whatever that Horacles did
not understand Scipio. He was sorry to notice how the Agent, his
employer, shook Scipio’s hand and invited him to come and stop with him
till he was fit to return to his work. And Scipio accepted this
invitation. He sat him down in the store, and made himself at home. Legs
stretched out on one chair, crutch within reach, hands comfortably
clasped round the arms of the chair he sat in, head tilted back, eyes
apparently studying the goods which hung from the beams overhead, he
visibly sniffed the air.
“Smell anything you don’t like?” inquired the clerk, tartly--and
unwisely.
“Nothin’ except you, Horacles,” was the perfectly amiable
rejoinder.--“It’s good,” Scipio then confessed, “to be smellin’ buckskin
and leather and groceries instead of ether and iodoform.”
“Guess you were pretty sick,” observed the clerk, with relish.
“Yes. Oh, yes. I was pretty sick. That’s right. Yes.” Scipio had
continued through these slowly drawled remarks to look at the ceiling.
Then his glance dropped to the level of Horacles, and keenly fixed that
unconscious youth’s plump little form, pink little face, and mean little
mustache. Behind one ear stuck a pen, behind the other a pencil, as the
assistant clerk was arranging some tins of Arbuckle’s Arioso coffee.
Then Scipio took aim and fired: “So you’re going to quit your job?”
Horacles whirled round. “Who says so?”
The chance shot--if there ever is such a thing, if such shots are not
always the result of visions and perceptions which lie beyond our
present knowledge--this chance shot had hit.
“First I’ve heard of it,” then said Horacles sulkily. “Guess you’re
delirious still.” He returned to his coffee, and life grew more
interesting than ever to Scipio.
Instead of trickling back, health began to rush back into his long
imprisoned body, and though he could not fully use it yet, and though if
he hobbled a hundred yards he was compelled to rest it, his wiry mind
knew no fatigue. How athletic his brains were was easily perceived by
the Indian Agent. The convalescent would hobble over to the store after
breakfast and hail the assistant clerk at once. “Morning, Horacles,” he
would begin; “how’s Uncle?”--“Oh, when are you going to give us a new
joke?” the worried Horacles would retort.--“Just as soon as you give us
a new Uncle, Horacles. Or any other relation to make us feel proud we
know you. What did his letter last night say?” The second or third time
this had been asked still found Horacles with no better repartee than
angry silence. “Didn’t he send me his love?” Scipio then said; and still
the hapless Horacles said nothing. “Well, y’u give him mine when you
write him this afternoon.”--“I ain’t writing this afternoon,” snapped
the clerk.--“You’re not! Why, I thought you wrote each other every
day!” This was so near the truth that Horacles flared out: “I’d be
ashamed if I’d nothing better to do than spy on other people’s mails.”
Thus by dinner-time generally an audience would be gathered round Scipio
where he sat with his legs on the chair, and Horacles over his ledger
would be furiously muttering that “Some day they would all see.”
Horacles asked for a couple of days’ holiday, and got it. He wished to
hunt, he said. But the Agent happened to find that he had been to the
railroad about some freight. This he mentioned to Scipio. “I don’t know
what he’s up to,” he said. He had found that worrying Horacles was
merely one of the things that Scipio’s brains were good for; Scipio had
advised him prudently about a sale of beeves, and had introduced a
simple contrivance for luring to the store the customers whom Horacles
failed to attract. It was merely a free lunch counter,--cheese and
crackers every day, and deviled ham on pay-day,--but it put up the daily
receipts.
And next, one evening after the mail was in, Scipio, sitting alone in
the front of the store, saw the Agent, sitting alone in the back of the
store, spring suddenly from his chair, crush a newspaper into his
pocket, and stride out to his house. At breakfast the Agent spoke thus
to Scipio:--
“I must go to Washington. I shall be back before they let you and your
leg run loose. Will you do something for me?”
“Name it. Just name it.”
“Run the store while I’m gone.”
“D’ y’u think I can?”
“I know you can. There’ll be no trouble under you. You understand
Indians.”
“But suppose something turns up?”
“I don’t think anything will before I’m back. I’d sooner leave you than
Horacles in charge here. Will you do it and take two dollars a day?”
“Do it for nothing. Horacles’ll be compensation enough.”
“No, he won’t.--And see here, he can’t help being himself.”
“Enough said. I’ll strive to pity him. None of us was consulted about
being born. And I’ll keep remembering that we was both raised at
Gallipol_eece_, Ohio, and that he inherited a bigger outrage of a name
than I did. That’s what comes of havin’ a French ancestor.--Only, he
used to steal my lunch at school.” And Scipio’s bleached blue eye grew
cold. Later injuries one may forgive, but school ones never.
“Didn’t you whale him?” asked the Agent.
“Every time,” said Scipio, “till he told Uncle. Uncle was mayor of
Gallipol_eece_ then. So I wasn’t ready to get expelled,--I got ready
later; nothin’ is easier than gettin’ expelled,--but I locked up my
lunch after that.”
“Uncle’s pretty good to him,” muttered the Agent. “Got him this
position.--Well, nobody will expel you here. Look after things. I’ll
feel easy to think you’re on hand.”
For that newspaper which the Agent had crushed into his pocket, Scipio
searched cracks and corners, but searched in vain. A fear quite
unreasoning possessed him for a while: could he but learn what was in
the paper that had so stirred his patron, perhaps he could avert
whatever the thing was that he felt in the air, threatening some sort of
injury. He knew himself resourceful. Dislike of Horacles and Uncle had
been enough to start his wish to thwart them--if there was anything to
thwart; but now pride and gratitude fired him; he had been trusted; he
cared more to be trusted than for anything on earth; he must rise equal
to it now! The Agent had evidently taken the paper away with him--and so
Scipio absurdly read all the papers. He collected old ones, and laid his
hands upon the new the moment they were out of the mail-bag. It may be
said that he lived daily in a wrapping of newspapers.
“Why, you have got Horacles laughing at you.”
This the observant Virginian pointed out to Scipio immediately on his
arrival from Billings. Scipio turned a sickened look upon his friend.
The look was accompanied by a cold wave in his stomach.
“Y’u cert’nly have,” the remorseless friend pursued. “I reckon he must
have had a plumb happy time watchin’ y’u still-hunt them newspapers. Now
who’d ever have foretold you would afford Horacles enjoyment?”
In a weak voice Scipio essayed to fight it off. “Don’t you try to
hoodwink me with any of your frog lies.”
“No need,” said the Virginian. “From the door as I came in I saw him at
his desk lookin’ at y’u easy-like. ’Twas a right quaint pictyeh--him
smilin’ at the desk, and your nose tight agaynst the Omaha _Bee_. I
thought first y’u didn’t have a handkerchief.”
“I wonder if he has me beat?” muttered poor Scipio.
The Virginian now had a word of consolation. “Don’t y’u see,” he again
pointed out, “that no newspaper could have helped you? If it could why
did he go away to Washington without tellin’ you? He don’t look for you
to deal with troubles he don’t mention to you.”
“I wonder if Horacles has me beat?” said Scipio once more.
The Virginian standing by the seated, brooding man clapped him twice on
the shoulders, gently. It was enough. They were very fast friends.
“I know,” said Scipio in response. “Thank y’u. But I’d hate for him to
have me beat.”
It was the doctor who now furnished information that would have relieved
any reasonable man from a sense of failure. The doctor was excited
because his view of our faith in Indian matters was again justified by a
further instance.
“Oh, yes!” he said. “Just give those people at Washington time, and
every step they’ve taken from the start will be in the mud puddle of a
lie. Uncle’s in the game all right. He’s been meditating how to serve
his country and increase his income. There’s a railroad at the big end
of his notion, but the entering wedge seems only to be a new store down
in the corner of this reservation. You see, it has been long settled by
the sacredest compacts that two stores shall be enough here--the
Post-trader’s and the Agent’s--but the dear Indians need a third, Uncle
says. He has told the Senate and the Interior Department and the White
House that a lot of them have to travel too far for supplies. So now
Washington is sure the Indians need a third store. The Post-trader and
the Agent are stopping at the Post to-night. They got East too late to
hold up the job. If Horacles opens that new store, the Agent might just
as well shut up his own.”
“Ain’t y’u going to look at my leg?” was all the reply that Scipio made.
The doctor laughed. It was to examine the leg that he had come, and he
had forgotten all about it. “You can forget all about it, too,” he told
Scipio when he had finished. “Go back to Sunk Creek when you like. Go
back to full work next week, say. Your wicked body is sound again. A
better man would unquestionably have died.”
But the cheery doctor could not cheer the unreasonable Scipio. In the
morning the complacent little Horacles made known to all the world his
perfected arrangements. Directly the Agent had safely turned his back
and gone to Washington, his disloyal clerk had become doubly busy. He
had at once perceived that this was a comfortable time for him to hurry
his new rival store into readiness and be securely established behind
its counter before his betrayed employer should return. In this last he
might not quite succeed; the Agent had come back a day or two sooner
than Horacles had calculated, but it was a trifle; after all, he had
carried through the small part of his uncle’s scheme which he had been
sent here to do. Inside that building in the far corner of the
reservation, once rumored to be connected with the Quartermaster’s
department, he would now sell luxuries and necessities to the Indians at
a price cheaper than his employer’s, and his employer’s store would
henceforth be empty of customers. Perhaps the sweetest moment that
Horacles had known for many weeks was when he said to Scipio:--
“I’m writing Uncle about it to-day.”
That this should have gone on under his nose while he sat searching the
papers was to Scipio utterly unbearable. His mind was in a turmoil,
feeling about helplessly but furiously for vengeance; and the
Virginian’s sane question--What could he have done to stop it if he had
discovered it?--comforted him not at all. They were outside the store,
sitting under a tree, waiting for the returning Agent to appear. But he
did not come, and the suspense added to Scipio’s wretchedness.
“He put me in charge,” he kept repeating.
“The driver ain’t responsible when a stage is held up,” reasoned the
Virginian.
Scipio hardly heard him. “He put me in charge,” he said. Then he worked
round to Horacles again. “He ain’t got strength. He ain’t got beauty. He
ain’t got riches. He ain’t got brains. He’s just got sense enough for
parlor conjuring tricks--not good ones, either. And yet he has me beat.”
“He’s got an uncle in the Senate,” said the Virginian.
The disconsolate Scipio took a pull at his cigar,--he had taken one
between every sentence. “Damn his false teeth.”
The Virginian looked grave. “Don’t be hasty. Maybe the day will come
when you and me’ll need ’em to chew our tenderloin.”
“We’ll be old. Horacles is twenty-five.”
“Twenty-five is certainly young to commence eatin’ by machinery,”
admitted the Virginian.
“And he’s proud of ’em,” whined Scipio. “Proud! Opens his bone box and
sticks ’em out at y’u on the end of his tongue.”
“I hate an immodest man,” said the Virginian.