The civilization of the Englishman is only skin deep. And therein lies
his strength and his salvation. Beneath that outer surface, tubbed and
groomed and prosperous, there is the man, raw and crude from the
workshops of Creation. Back of that brain, trained to a nicety of
balance and perception and judgment, there are the illogical passions of
a savage. An adaptation of the proverb might run that you scratch an
Englishman and you find a Briton--one of those same Britons who stained
themselves blue with woad, who fell upon their foes with clumsy swords
and flaming torches, who wore the skins of beasts, and lived in huts of
straw, and who burned men and animals together, in sacrifice to their
gods.
And the savage shows, too, in that your Englishman is not gregarious.
His house is his castle, his life is to himself, and his sentiments are
locked within him. He is a lonely creature, in the midst of his kind,
and he loves his loneliness.
But it is because of just this that no scion of ultra-civilization
degenerates so thoroughly as does he. Retrogression is easy to him. He
can hardly go higher, because he is on the height already; but he can
slip back. Set him in a lower civilization, he sinks one degree lower
than that. Put him among savages, and he is nearer the beasts than they.
It does not come to pass in a day, nor yet at all if he be part of a
community, which keeps in mind its traditions and its church, and which
forms its own public opinion. Then he is the leaven of all the measures
of meal about him, the surest, steadiest, most irresistible civilizing
force. But he cannot advance alone. He goes back, and, being cursed with
the wisdom which shows him his debasement, in loathing and disgust with
himself, he grows sullen and falls back yet more.
It was so with Cairness. He was sinking down, and ever down, to the
level of his surroundings; he was even ceasing to realize that it was
so. He had begun by studying the life of the savages, but he was so
entirely grasping their point of view that he was losing all other. He
was not so dirty as they--not yet. His stone cabin was clean enough, and
their villages were squalid. A morning plunge in the river was still a
necessity, while with them it was an event. But where he had once spent
his leisure in reading in several tongues--in keeping in touch with the
world--and in painting, he would now sit for hours looking before him
into space, thinking unprofitable thoughts. He lived from hand to mouth.
Eventually he would without doubt marry a squaw. The thing was more than
common upon the frontier.
He was in a manner forgetting Felipa. He had forced himself to try to do
so. But once in a way he remembered her vividly, so that the blood would
burn in his heart and head, and he would start up and beat off the
thought, as if it were a visible thing. It was happening less and less
often, however. For two years he had not seen her and had heard of her
directly only once. An officer who came into the Agency had been with
her, but having no reason to suppose that a scout could be interested in
the details of the private life of an officer's wife, he had merely said
that she had been very ill, but was better now. He had not seen fit to
add that it was said in the garrison--which observed all things with a
microscopic eye--that she was very unhappy with Landor, and that the
sympathy was not all with her.
"Mrs. Landor is very beautiful," Cairness hazarded. He wanted to talk of
her, or to make some one else do it.
"She is very magnificent," said the officer, coldly. It was plain that
magnificence was not what he admired in woman. And there it had dropped.
Cairness remembered with an anger and disgust with himself he could
still feel, that last time he had seen her in the mouth of the cave.
That had been two springs ago. Since then there had been no occupation
for him as a guide or scout. The country had been at peace. The War
Department and the Indian Department were dividing the control of the
Agency, with the War Department ranking. Crook had been trying his
theories as practice. He had been demonstrating that the Indian can
work, with a degree of success that was highly displeasing to the class
of politicians whose whole social fabric for the southwest rested on his
only being able to kill.
But the star of the politician was once more in the ascendant. For two
years there had been not one depredation, not one outrage from the
Indians, for whose good conduct the general had given his personal word.
They were self-supporting, and from the products of their farms they not
only kept themselves, but supplied the neighboring towns. It was a state
of affairs entirely unsatisfactory to the politician. So he set about
correcting it.
His methods were explained to Cairness by an old buck who slouched up to
the cabin and sat himself down cross-legged in front of the door. He
meant to share in the venison breakfast Cairness was getting himself.
"So long as these stones of your house shall remain one upon the other,"
began the Apache, "so long shall I be your friend. Have you any
tobacco?" Cairness went into the cabin, got a pouch, and tossed it to
him. He took a package of straw papers and a match from somewhere about
himself and rolled a cigarette deftly.
"I have been lied to," came the muttering voice from the folds of the
red I. D. blanket, which almost met the red flannel band binding down
his coarse and dirty black hair. It was early dawn and cold. Cairness
himself was close to the brush fire.
"I have been cheated."
Cairness nodded. He thought it very likely.
"The Sun and the Darkness and the Winds were all listening. He promised
to pay me _dos reales_ each day. To prove to you that I am now telling
the truth, here is what he wrote for me." He held it out to Cairness, a
dirty scrap of wrapping-paper scrawled over with senseless words.
"Yes," said Cairness, examining it, "but this has no meaning."
"That is a promise," the Indian insisted, "to pay me _dos reales_ a day
if I would cut hay for him."
The White explained carefully that it was not a contract, that it was
nothing at all, in fact.
"Then he lied," said the buck, and tucked the scrap back under his head
band. "They all lie. I worked for him two weeks. I worked hard. And each
night when I asked him for money he would say to me that to-morrow he
would pay me. When all his hay was cut he laughed in my face. He would
pay me nothing." He seemed resigned enough about it.
Cairness gave a grunt that was startlingly savage--so much so that he
realized it, and shook himself slightly as a man does who is trying to
shake himself free from a lethargy that is stealing over him.
"And then, there was the trouble about the cows. They promised us one
thousand, and they gave us not quite six hundred. And those--the Dawn
and the Sky hear that what I tell you is true--and those were so old we
could not use them."
Cairness nodded. He knew that the Interior Department had sent an agent
out to investigate that complaint, and that the agent had gone his way
rejoicing and reporting that all was well with the Indian and honest
with the contractor. It was not true. Every one who knew anything about
it knew that. Cairness supposed that also was the work of the
politicians. But there are things one cannot make plain to a savage
having no notions of government.
The buck went on, the while he held a piece of venison in his dirty hand
and dragged at it with his teeth, to say that there was a feeling of
great uneasiness upon the reservation.
The Chiricahuas could see that there was trouble between the officials,
both military and civil, and the government. They did not know what it
was. They did not understand that the harassed general, whose word--and
his alone--had their entire belief, nagged and thwarted, given authority
and then prevented from enforcing it, had rebelled at last, had asked to
be relieved, and had been refused. But they drew in with delight the air
of strife and unrest. It was the one they loved best, there could and
can be no doubt about that.
"Geronimo," mumbled the Apache, "has prayed to the Dawn and the Darkness
and the Sun and the Sky to help him put a stop to those bad stories that
people put in the papers about him. He is afraid it will be done as they
say." The press of the country was full just then, and had been for some
time past, of suggestions that the only good use the much-feared
Geronimo could be put to would be hanging, the which he no doubt richly
deserved. But if every one in the territories who deserved hanging had
been given his dues, the land would have been dotted with blasted trees.
"Geronimo does not want that any more. He has tried to do right. He is
not thinking bad. Such stories ought not to be put in the newspapers."
Cairness also thought that they should not, chiefly because they had a
tendency to frighten the timid Apaches. But he went on quietly eating
his breakfast, and said nothing. He knew that only silence can obtain
loquacity from silent natures. He was holding his meat in his fingers,
too, and biting it, though he did not drag it like a wild beast yet;
and, moreover, he had it upon a piece of bread of his own baking.
"There will be trouble with Geronimo's people soon."
"Shall you go with them?" asked Cairness.
"No, I am a friend of the soldier. And I am a friend of Chato, who is
the enemy of Geronimo. I have no bad thoughts," he added piously.
"And you think there will be trouble?" He knew that the buck had come
there for nothing but to inform.
"I think that Geronimo will make trouble. He knows that the agent and
the soldiers are quarrelling, and he and his people have been drinking
tizwin for many days."
Cairness stood up and walked down to the water to wash his hands. Then
he went into the cabin and brought out a small mirror, and all the
shaving apparatus he had not used for months, and proceeded to take off
his thick brown beard, while the Indian sat stolidly watching him with
that deep interest in trifles of the primitive brain, which sees and
marks, and fails to learn or to profit correspondingly.
And later in the day, when the buck had shuffled off again, Cairness
brought out his pony,--a new one now, for the little pinto one had died
of a rattlesnake bite, from which no golondrina weed had been able to
save it,--and saddled it. Then he went again into the cabin. There was
but one thing there that he valued,--a life-size head of Felipa he had
done in charcoal. It was in a chest beneath his cot. He locked his
chest, and going out locked the door also, and putting both keys upon a
ring, mounted and rode off along the trail.
It was his intention to go to Crook and to warn him if he needed
warning, which was not probable, since he was never napping. He would
then offer his services as a scout. He was sincerely attached to the
general, and felt his own career in a way involved with that of the
officer, because he had been with him, in one capacity or another, in
every campaign he had made in the southwest.
Already he felt more respectable at the mere prospect of contact with
his kind again. He was glad that the unkempt beard was gone, and he was
allowing himself to hope, no, he was deliberately hoping, that he would
see Felipa.