The lodge of tanned buffalo-skins in which Ni-ha-be and Rita were
sitting with Mother Dolores, was large and commodious. It was a round
tent, upheld by strong, slender poles, that came together at the top so
as to leave a small opening. On the outside the covering was painted
in bright colors with a great many rude figures of men and animals.
There was no furniture; but some buffalo and bear skins and some
blankets were spread upon the ground, and it was a very comfortable
lodge for any weather that was likely to come in that region.
In such a bright day as that all the light needed came through the open
door, for the "flap" was still thrown back.
The two girls, therefore, could see every change on the dark face of
the great chiefs Mexican squaw.
A good many changes came, for Dolores was very busily "remembering,"
and it was full five minutes before the thoughts brought to her by that
picture of the "Way-side Shrine" began to fade away, so that she was
again an Indian.
"Rita," whispered Ni-ha-be, "did it say anything to you?"
"Yes. A little. I saw something like it long ago. But I don't know
what it means."
"Rita! Ni-ha-be!"
"What is it, Dolores?"
"Go. You will be in my way. I must cook supper for the chief. He is
hungry. You must not go beyond the camp."
"What did the talking leaf say to you?" asked Ni-ha-be.
"Nothing. It is a great medicine leaf. I shall keep it. Perhaps it
will say more to Rita by-and-by. Go."
The Apaches, like other Indians, know very little about cookery. They
can roast meat and broil it, after a fashion, and they have several
ways of cooking fish. They know how to boil when they are rich enough
to have kettles, and they can make a miserable kind of corn-bread with
Indian corn, dried or parched and pounded fine.
The one strong point in the character of Dolores, so far as the good
opinion of old Many Bears went, was that she was the best cook in his
band. She had not quite forgotten some things of that kind that she
had learned before she became a squaw. Nobody else, therefore, was
permitted to cook supper for the hungry chief.
It was a source of many jealousies among his other squaws, but then he
was almost always hungry, and none of them knew how to cook as she did.
She was proud of it too, and neither Ni-ha-be nor her adopted sister
dreamed of disputing with her after she had uttered the word "supper."
They hurried out of the lodge, therefore, and Dolores was left alone.
She had no fire to kindle.
That would be lighted in the open air by other female members of the
family.
There were no pots and saucepans to be washed, although the one round,
shallow, sheet-iron "fryer," such as soldiers sometimes use in camp,
which she dragged from under a buffalo-skin in the corner, would have
been none the worse for a little scrubbing.
She brought it out, and then she dropped it and sat down to take
another look at that wonderful "talking leaf."
"What made me kneel down and shut my eyes? I could remember then. It
is all gone now. It went away as soon as I got up again."
She folded the leaf carefully, and hid it in the folds of her deer-skin
dress, but she was evidently a good deal puzzled.
"Maria Santissima--yes, I do remember that. It will all come back to
me by-and-by. No! I don't want it to. It makes me afraid. I will
cook supper and forget all about it."
A Mexican woman of the lower class, unable to read, ignorant of almost
everything but a little plain cookery, has less to forget than have
most American children of six years old. But why should it frighten
her if the little she knew and had lost began to come back to her mind?
She did not stop to answer any such questions as that, but poured some
pounded corn, a coarse, uneven meal, into a battered tin pan. To this
was added a little salt, some water was stirred in till a thick paste
was made, and then the best cook of the Apaches was ready to carry her
batter to the fire. Envious black eyes watched her while she heated
her saucepan on the coals she raked out. Then she melted a carefully
measured piece of buffalo tallow, and began to fry for her husband and
master the cakes no other of his squaws could so well prepare.
When the cakes were done brown, the same fryer and a little water would
serve to take the toughness out of some strips of dried venison before
she broiled them, and the great chief would be the best-fed man in camp
until the hunters should return from the valley below with fresh game.
They were quite likely to do that before night, but Many Bears was a
man who never waited long for something to eat after a hard day's march.
If Dolores had been a little alarmed at the prospect of being forced to
"remember," a very different feeling had entered the mind of Rita when
she and her sister came out of the lodge.
"What shall we do, Ni-ha-be?"
"Red Wolf told me he had something to say to me. There he is now. He
beckons me to come. He does not want you."
"I am glad of it. There are trees and bushes down there beyond the
corral. I will go and be alone."
"You will tell me all the talking leaves say to you?"
"Yes, but they will talk very slowly, I'm afraid."
Even the harsher sounds of the Apache tongue had a pleasant ring in the
sweet, clear voices of the two girls, and the softer syllables, of
which there were many, rippled after each other like water in a brook.
It seemed, too, as if they said quite as much to each other by signs as
by words. That is always so among people who live a great deal
out-of-doors, or in narrow quarters, where other people can easily hear
ordinary conversation.
The one peculiar thing about the signs used by the American Indians is
that they mean so much and express it so clearly. Men of different
tribes, not able to understand a word of each other's spoken tongue,
will meet and talk together by the hour in "sign language" as
intelligently as two well-trained deaf mutes among the whites.
Perhaps one reason more for so much "sign talking" is that there are so
many tribes, each with a very rough tongue of its own, that is not easy
for other tribes to pick up.
Red Wolf was again beckoning to Ni-ha-be, and there was an impatient
look on his dark, self-willed face. It was time for her to make haste,
therefore, and Rita put the three magazines under the light folds of
her broad antelope-skin cap and tripped away toward the bit of bushy
grove just beyond the "corral."
What is that?
In the language of the very "far West" it is any spot or place where
horses are gathered and kept, outside of a stable.
The great Apache nation does not own a single stable or barn, although
it does own multitudes of horses, ponies, mules, and even horned
cattle. All these, therefore, have to be "corralled," except when they
are running loose among their unfenced pastures. There are no fences
in that part of the world any more than barns.
Immediately on going into camp the long train of pack mules and ponies
had been relieved of their burdens, and they and most of the
saddle-horses had been sent off, under the care of mounted herders, to
pick their dinners for themselves in the rich green grass of the valley.
Chiefs and warriors, however, never walk if they can help it, and so,
as some one of them might wish to go here or there at any moment,
several dozens of the freshest animals were kept on the spot between
the camp and the grove, tethered by long hide lariats, and compelled to
wait their turn for something to eat.
There was a warrior on guard at the "corral," as a matter of course,
but he hardly gave a glance to the pretty adopted daughter of Many
Bears as she tripped hurriedly past him.
It was his business to look out for the horses and not for giddy young
squaws who might find "talking leaves."
Rita could not have told him, if he had asked her, why it was that her
prizes were making her heart beat so fast, as she held them against it.
She was not frightened. She knew that very well. But she was glad to
be alone, without even the company of Ni-ha-be.
The bushes were very thick around the spot where she at last threw
herself upon the grass. She had never lived in any lodge where there
were doors to shut behind her, or if she had, all those houses and
their doors were alike forgotten; but she knew that her quick ears
would give her notice of any approaching footsteps.
There they lay now before her, the three magazines, and it seemed to
Rita as if they had come on purpose to see her, and were looking at her.
No two of them were alike.
They did not even belong to the same family. She could tell that by
their faces.
Slowly and half-timidly she turned the first leaf; it was the
cover-leaf of the nearest.
A sharp exclamation sprung to her lips.
"I have seen her! Oh, so long ago! It is me, Rita. I wore a dress
like that once. And the tall squaw behind her, with the robe that
drags on the ground, I remember her, too. How did they know she was my
mother?"
Rita's face had been growing very white, and now she covered it with
both her hands and began to cry. The picture was one of a fine-looking
lady and a little girl of, it might be, seven or eight years. Not Rita
and her mother, surely, for the lady wore a coronet upon her head and
carried a sceptre in her hand; but the little girl looked very much as
Rita must have looked at her age. It was a picture of some Spanish
princess and her daughter, but like many pictures of such people that
are printed, it would have served as well for a portrait of almost
anybody else--particularly, as it seemed, of Rita and her mother.
"He is not there. Why did they not put him in? I love him best. Oh,
he was so good to me! He had plenty of talking leaves, too, and he
taught them to speak to me. I will look and see if he is here."
Rita was talking aloud to herself, but her own voice sounded strange to
her, with its Indian words and ways of expression. She was listening,
without knowing it, for another voice--for several of them--and none of
them spoke Apache.
She turned leaf after leaf with fluttering haste, in her eager search
for that other face she had spoken of.
In a moment more she paused, as the full-length picture of a man gazed
at her from the paper.
"No; not him. He is too old. My father was not old; and he was
handsome, and he was not dark at all."
She shut the book for a moment, and her face was full of puzzle and of
pain.
"I said it. I was not talking Apache then. And I understood what I
was saying."
She had indeed, when she mentioned her father, spoken pretty clearly in
English.
Was it her mother-tongue? and had it come back to her?
She turned over the leaves more eagerly than ever now, and she found in
that and the two other magazines many pictured faces of men of all
ages, but each one brought her a fresh disappointment.
"He is not here," she said, mournfully; "and it was he who taught me
to--to--to read--read books."
She had found two words now that were like little windows, for through
them she could see a world of wonderful things that she had not seen
before.
"Read" and "books."
The three magazines were no longer "talking leaves" to her, although
they were really beginning to talk. Her head ached, and her eyes were
burning hot, as she gazed so intently at word after word of the page
which happened to be open before her. It was not printed like the
rest--less closely, and not in such a thronging mass of little black
spots of letters. It was a piece of very simple poetry, in short lines
and brief stanzas, and Rita was staring at its title.
The letters slowly came to her one by one, bringing behind them the
first word of the title; but they seemed to Rita to be in her own brain
more than on the paper.
It was a hard moment for Rita.
"He made me say them one word at a time. He was so good to me! Yes, I
can say them now! I know what they mean! Oh, so long ago! so long
ago!"
There was no longer any doubt about it. Rita could read English.
Not very easily or rapidly at first, and many of the words she came to
puzzled her exceedingly. Perhaps some of them also would come back to
her after a while. Some of them had always been strangers, for the
very brightest little girls of seven or eight, even when they read well
and have their fathers to help them, are but at the beginning of their
acquaintance with "hard words."
"I shall know what the pictures mean now. But I will not tell anybody
a word about it--only Ni-ha-be."