Within the covering of a wild plum thicket at the side of the trail
a saddled and bridled horse was lariated to a stake, and a man sat
near by upon a rock, repeatedly tapping the horse on the flanks as it
galloped about in a circle.
“Lather up there!” cried the man, as he nipped the horse with the
whiplash; “lather up there!” And the horse dashed about the circle
until its flanks were dripping and its mouth was white with foam.
At length the man took out his watch, saw that it was 5:30 o’clock, and
untying the lariat, he mounted and put the spurs to his already jaded
animal, dashing at a furious pace down the dusty old trail toward the
Agency.
A few moments later McBarty and the Judge caught sight of a furious
rider dashing toward them in a cloud of dust.
“Who do you suppose that can be riding so fast?” said the Judge.
“Oh,” said McBarty, smiling broadly, “that, Judge, is merely my
election coming up at the gallop!”
Amid dust and yelling and a general spectacular confusion the horseman
dashed up to the door of the pay station, threw his horse on its
haunches in stopping, and cried: “A telegram from Washington for the
Agent!”
In a few moments a great crowd of Indians had gathered about the horse
and rider. The Agent, with a smile upon his face, rushed out of the
station and seized a bit of yellow paper that the rider held in his
hand. Breathlessly the crowd of Omahas waited.
“Listen!” shouted a crier in the Omaha tongue, standing by the Agent,
who was reading the telegram. “The Big Father at Washington sends this
word to his brown brothers: ‘The children’s money shall be paid!’”
For a moment following the shout of the crier, there was a great
silence. Then a roar went up from the Omahas—a wild, hoarse shout of
joy! Judge Roberts turned pale, and extending his hand to McBarty,
said: “Well, you have won. Allow me to congratulate the Hon. James
McBarty of Nebraska.”
And when the next morning’s sun arose, the polls were besieged by a
throng of brown Republicans.
XIX
THE LAST THUNDER SONG
IT is an ancient custom to paint tragedy in blood tints. This is
because men were once merely animals, and have not as yet been able to
live down their ancestry. Yet the stroke of a dagger is a caress beside
the throb of hopeless days.
Life can ache; the living will tell you this. But the dead make no
complaint.
There is no greater tragedy than the fall of a dream! Napoleon dreamed;
so did a savage. It is the same. I know of the scene of a great
tragedy. Very few have recognised it as such; there was so little noise
along with it. It happened at the Omaha Agency, which is situated on
the Missouri River some seventy miles above Omaha.
The summer of 1900 debilitated all thermal adjectives. It was not
hot; it was _Saharical_! It would hardly have been hyperbole to have
said that the Old Century lay dying of a fever. The untilled hills of
the reservation thrust themselves up in the August sunshine like the
emaciated joints of one bedridden. The land lay as yellow as the skin
of a fever patient, except in those rare spots where the melancholy
corn struggled heartlessly up a hillside, making a blotch like a
bedsore!
The blood of the prairie was impoverished, and the sky would give no
drink with which to fill the dwindling veins. When one wished to search
the horizon for the cloud that was not there, he did it from beneath
an arched hand. The small whirlwinds that awoke like sudden fits of
madness in the sultry air, rearing yellow columns of dust into the
sky—these alone relieved the monotony of dazzle.
Every evening the clouds rolled flashing about the horizon and
thundered back into the night. They were merely taunts, like the
holding of a cool cup just out of reach of a fevered mouth; and the
clear nights passed, bringing dewless dawns, until the ground cracked
like a parched lip!
The annual Indian powwow was to be ended prematurely that year, for
the sun beat uninvitingly upon the flat bottom where the dances were
held, and the Indians found much comfort in the shade of their summer
tepees. But when it was noised about that, upon the next day, the old
medicine-man Mahowari (Passing Cloud) would dance potent dances and
sing a thunder song with which to awaken the lazy thunder spirits to
their neglected duty of rain-making, then the argument of the heat
became feeble.
So the next morning, the bronze head of every Indian tepeehold took his
pony, his dogs, his squaw, and his papooses of indefinite number to the
powwow ground. In addition to these, the old men carried with them long
memories and an implicit faith.
The young men, who had been away to Indian school, and had succeeded
to some extent in stuffing their brown skins with white souls, carried
with them curiosity and doubt, which, if properly united, beget
derision.
The old men went to a shrine; the young men went to a show. When a
shrine becomes a show, the World advances a step. And _that_ is the
benevolence of Natural Law!
About the open space in which the dances were held, an oval covering
had been built with willow boughs, beneath which the Indians lounged
in sweating groups. Slowly about the various small circles went the
cumbersome stone pipes.
To one listening, drowsed with the intense sunshine, the _buzzle_ and
mutter and snarl of the gossiping Omahas seemed the grotesque echoes
from a vanished age. Between the fierce dazzle of the sun and the
sharply contrasting blue shade, there was but a line of division; yet
a thousand years lay between one gazing in the sun and those dozing in
the shadow. It was as if God had flung down a bit of the Young World’s
twilight into the midst of the Old World’s noon. Here lounged the
masterpiece of the toiling centuries—a Yankee. There sat the remnant
of a race as primitive as Israel. Yet the white man looked on with the
contempt of superiority.
Before ten o’clock everybody had arrived and his family with him. A
little group, composed of the Indian Agent, the Agency Physician,
the Mission Preacher, and a newspaper man, down from the city for
reportorial purposes, waited and chatted, sitting upon a ragged patch
of available shadow.
“These Omahas are an exceptional race,” the preacher was saying in his
ministerial tone of voice; “an exceptional race!”
The newspaper man mopped his face, lit a cigarette and nodded assent
with a hidden meaning twinkling in his eye.
“Quite exceptional!” he said, tossing his head in the direction of an
unusually corpulent bunch of steaming, sweating, bronze men and women.
“God, like some lesser master-musicians, has not confined himself to
grand opera, it seems!”
He took a long pull at his cigarette, and his next words came out in a
cloud of smoke.
“This particular creation savours somewhat of opera bouffe!”
With severe unconcern the preacher mended the broken thread of his
discourse. “Quite an exceptional race in many ways. The Omaha is quite
as honest as the white man.”
“That is a truism!” The pencil-pusher drove this observation between
the minister’s words like a wedge.
“In his natural state he was much more so,” uninterruptedly continued
the preacher; he was used to continuous discourse. “I have been told
by many of the old men that in the olden times an Indian could leave
his tepee for months at a time, and on his return would find his most
valuable possessions untouched. I tell you, gentlemen, the Indian is
like a prairie flower that has been transplanted from the blue sky
and the summer sun and the pure winds into the steaming, artificial
atmosphere of the hothouse! A glass roof is not the blue sky! Man’s
talent is not God’s genius! That is why you are looking at a perverted
growth.
“Look into an Indian’s face and observe the ruins of what was once
manly dignity, indomitable energy, masterful prowess! When I look upon
one of these faces, I have the same thoughts as, when travelling in
Europe, I looked upon the ruins of Rome.
“Everywhere broken arches, fallen columns, tumbled walls! Yet through
these as through a mist one can discern the magnificence of the living
city. So in looking upon one of these faces, which are merely ruins in
another sense. They were once as noble, as beautiful as——”
In his momentary search for an eloquent simile, the minister paused.
“As pumpkin pies!” added the newspaper man with a chuckle; and he
whipped out his notebook and pencil to jot down this brilliant thought,
for he had conceived a very witty “story” which he would pound out for
the Sunday edition.
“Well,” said the Agency Physician, finally sucked into the whirlpool of
discussion, “it seems to me that there is no room for crowing on either
side. Indians are pretty much like white men; livers and kidneys and
lungs, and that sort of thing; slight difference in the pigment under
the skin. I’ve looked into the machinery of both species and find just
as much room in one as the other for a soul!”
“And both will go upward,” added the minister.
“Like different grades of tobacco,” observed the Indian Agent, “the
smoke of each goes up in the same way.”
“Just so,” said the reporter; “but let us cut out the metaphysics.
I wonder when this magical _cuggie_ is going to begin his humid
evolutions. Lamentable, isn’t it, that, such institutions as rain
prayers should exist on the very threshold of the Twentieth Century?”
“I think,” returned the minister, “that the Twentieth Century has no
intention of eliminating God! This medicine-man’s prayer, in my belief,
is as sacred as the prayer of any churchman. The difference between
Wakunda and God is merely orthographical.”
“But,” insisted the cynical young man from the city, “I had not been
taught to think of God as of one who forgets! Do you know what I would
do if I had no confidence in the executive ability of my God?”
Taking the subsequent silence as a question, the young man answered:
“Why, I would take a day off and whittle one out of wood!”
“A youth’s way is the wind’s way,” quoted the preacher, with a paternal
air.
“And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts; but what is all
this noise about?” returned the reporter.
A buzz of expectant voices had grown at one end of the oval, and had
spread contagiously throughout the elliptical strip of shade. For with
slow, majestic step the medicine-man, Mahowari, entered the enclosure
and walked toward the centre. The fierce sun emphasised the brilliancy
of the old man’s garments and glittered upon the profusion of trinkets,
the magic heirlooms of the medicine-man. It was not the robe nor the
dazzling trinkets that caught the eye of one acquainted with Mahowari.
It was the erectness of his figure, for he had been bowed with years,
and many vertical suns had shone upon the old man’s back since his face
had been turned toward the ground. But now with firm step and form
rigidly erect he walked.
Any sympathetic eye could easily read the thoughts that passed through
the old man’s being like an elixir infusing youth. Now in his feeble
years would come his greatest triumph! To-day he would sing with
greater power than ever he had sung. Wakunda would hear the cry. The
rains would come! Then the white men would be stricken with belief!
Already his heart sang before his lips. In spite of the hideous
painting of his face, the light of triumph shone there like the
reflection of a great fire.
Slowly he approached the circle of drummers who sat in the glaring
centre of the ellipse of sunlight. It was all as though the First
Century had awakened like a ghost and stood in the very doorway of the
Twentieth!
When Mahowari had approached within a yard of the drums, he stopped,
and raising his arms and his eyes to the cloudless sky, uttered a low
cry like a wail of supplication. Then the drums began to throb with
that barbaric music as old as the world; a sound like the pounding of a
fever temple, with a recurring snarl like the warning of a rattlesnake.
Every sound of the rejoicing and suffering prairie echoes in the
Indian’s drum.
With a slow, majestic bending of the knees and an alternate lifting of
his feet, the medicine-man danced in a circle about the snarling drums.
Then like a faint wail of winds toiling up a wooded bluff, his thunder
song began.
The drone and whine of the mysterious, untranslatable words pierced
the drowse of the day, lived for a moment with the echoes of the
drums among the surrounding hills, and languished from a whisper into
silence. At intervals the old man raised his face, radiant with fanatic
ecstasy, to the meridian glare of the sun, and the song swelled to a
supplicating shout.
Faster and faster the old man moved about the circle; louder and wilder
grew the song. Those who watched from the shade were absorbed in an
intense silence, which, with the drowse of the sultry day, made every
sound a paradox! The old men forgot their pipes and sat motionless.
Suddenly, at one end of the covering, came the sound of laughter! At
first an indefinite sound like the spirit of merriment entering a
capricious dream of sacred things; then it grew and spread until it was
no longer merriment, but a loud jeer of derision! It startled the old
men from the intenseness of their watching. They looked up and were
stricken with awe. The young men were jeering this, the holiest rite of
their fathers!
Slower and slower the medicine-man danced; fainter and fainter grew
the song and ceased abruptly. With one quick glance, Mahowari saw the
shattering of his hopes. He glanced at the sky; but saw no swarm of
black spirits to avenge such sacrilege. Only the blaze of the sun, the
glitter of the arid zenith!
In that one moment, the temporary youth of the old man died out. His
shoulders drooped to their wonted position. His limbs tottered. He was
old again.
It was the Night stricken heart-sick with the laughter of the Dawn. It
was the audacious Present jeering at the Past, tottering with years. At
that moment, the impudent, cruel, brilliant youth called Civilisation
snatched the halo from the grey hairs of patriarchal Ignorance. Light
flouted the rags of Night. A clarion challenge shrilled across the
years.
Never before in all the myriad moons had such a thing occurred. It was
too great a cause to produce an effect of grief or anger. It stupefied.
The old men and women sat motionless. They could not understand.
With uneven step and with eyes that saw nothing, Mahowari passed from
among his kinsmen and tottered up the valley toward his lonesome shack
and tepee upon the hillside. It was far past noon when the last of the
older Omahas left the scene of the dance.
The greater number of the white men who had witnessed the last thunder
dance of the Omahas went homeward much pleased. The show had turned
out quite funny indeed. “Ha, ha, ha! Did you see how surprised the old
_cuggy_ looked? He, he, he!” Life, being necessarily selfish, argues
from its own standpoint.
But as the minister rode slowly toward his home there was no laughter
in his heart. He was saying to himself: “If the whole fabric of my
belief should suddenly be wrenched from me, what then?” Even this
question was born of selfishness, but it brought pity.
In the cool of the evening the minister mounted his horse and rode to
the home of Mahowari, which was a shack in the winter and a tepee in
the summer. Dismounting, he threw the bridle reins upon the ground,
and raised the door flap of the tepee. Mahowari sat cross-legged upon
the ground, staring steadily before him with unseeing eyes.
“How!” said the minister.
The old Indian did not answer. There was no expression of grief
or anger or despair upon his face. He sat like a statue. Yet, the
irregularity of his breathing showed where the pain lay. An Indian
suffers in his breast. His face is a mask.
The minister sat down in front of the silent old man and, after the
immemorial manner of ministers, talked of a better world, of a pitying
Christ, and of God, the Great Father. For the first time the Indian
raised his face and spoke briefly in English:
“God? He dead, guess!”
Then he was silent again for some time.
Suddenly his eyes lit up with a light that was not the light of age.
The heart of his youth had awakened. The old memories came back and he
spoke fluently in his own tongue, which the minister understood.
“These times are not like the old times. The young men have caught
some of the wisdom of the white man. Nothing is sure. It is not good.
I cannot understand. Everything is young and new. All old things are
dead. Many moons ago, the wisdom of Mahowari was great. I can remember
how my father said to me one day when I was yet young and all things
lay new before me: ‘Let my son go to a high hill and dream a great
dream’; and I went up in the evening and cried out to Wakunda and I
slept and dreamed.
“I saw a great cloud sweeping up from under the horizon, and it was
terrible with lightning and loud thunder. Then it passed over me and
rumbled down the sky and disappeared. And when I awoke and told my
people of my dream, they rejoiced and said: ‘Great things are in store
for this youth. We shall call him the Passing Cloud, and he shall be a
thunder man, keen and quick of thought, with the keenness and quickness
of the lightning; and his name shall be as thunder in the ears of men.’
And I grew and believed in these sayings and I was strong. But now I
can see the meaning of the dream—a great light and a great noise and a
passing.”
The old man sighed, and the light passed out of his eyes. Then he
looked searchingly into the face of the minister and said, speaking in
English:
“You white medicine-man. You pray?”
The minister nodded.
Mahowari turned his gaze to the ground and said wearily:
“White God dead too, guess.”
XX
THE NEMESIS OF THE DEUCES
FRENCHY called for two cards and reached for a glass and the bottle.
His head swam dizzily. The clinking of glasses at the bar smote upon
his ears like gongs. He was about to risk upon one “show-down” the
realisation of a five-years’ dream. He felt certain of losing; that was
the strange thing about it. Yet somewhere in the buzzing back of his
head a compelling little devil whispered and he obeyed.
He drank three big ones straight, and for a moment things stood still
and the buzzing ceased; but in the sudden silence the hissing of the
little devil increased to a roaring like the river’s in the June rise.
“_All on the deuces! All on the deuces! Every damned cent!_” That is
what the little devil in the back of his head was howling now.
“But if I lose it all—and wanting to go back home in the spring?” That
was the question his pounding heart hurled at the insistent little
devil.
“You won _once_—didn’t you—_didn’t you_?—DIDN’T YOU?” howled back the
little devil jeeringly.
“Five hundred,” said Frenchy quietly. His bronze face had grown livid;
his black eyes narrowed and glittered with a steady stare. With a hand
that betrayed the least perceptible tremor, he pushed the chips to the
centre.
The next man tossed his hand into the discards. The next hesitated,
carefully studying the face of Frenchy with a furtive lifting of the
eyes under his hat brim; he too laid down his hand.
“Raise you two hundred,” said the next with quiet cheerfulness.
“Two hundred more,” said the next nonchalantly, drumming a devil’s
tattoo with his fingers on the table.
The fifth drew a long breath, grinned nervously, showing his teeth like
a hungry wolf—and tossed his hand into the discards.
It was now up to Frenchy.
“Pardon me,” said he, “but did you call me?”
His face had turned a dull, ghastly green, but his voice was quiet and
clear.
“Raised it.”
“Oh, certainly,” said he, smiling. “Thinking of something else—trip
home, I guess.” His voice lowered until it was almost inaudible. This
absent-mindedness was unusual for Frenchy.
An oppressive silence had fallen in the barroom of the “Big 6.” There
was no longer any clinking of glasses or hum of maudlin voices. The
loungers drew up in a hushed circle about the table and stared with
fascinated eyes. A “big game” was on—and it was up to Frenchy. Frenchy
was no quitter; he was a gambler to his finger-tips. “Frenchy? He’d
bet on which’d be the last breath of his dying mother!” That was the
way the popular legend ran, and the man lived up to it.
“Stake it all—stake it all on the deuces—_the deuces_—THE DEUCES!” The
little devil in the back of his head was shrieking now and stamping
red-hot heels into Frenchy’s brain.
“But the trip home—I’ve planned five years——” urged his pounding heart.
“You won on them _once_—didn’t you?—_didn’t you_?—DIDN’T YOU?”
reiterated the little devil.
Frenchy quietly poured out another glass and downed it. Then he pulled
off his boots, produced a bunch of bills from the bottom of each, put
on his boots again and looked at his hand.
“Come two thousand more!” he whispered.
A sound of deeper breathing grew up about the fascinated circle of
on-lookers. Frenchy had gone into his boots—they knew what that meant.
Would the others stay? _Would_ they?
The place became uncanny with stillness. Nothing moved in the room.
The circle of eyes stared steadily upon the three who sat with
expressionless faces blanched with the pitiless struggle that was going
on. For a minute that seemed endless the soundless battle continued.
Psychic forces exchanged invisible sword-thrusts across the table.
Nerve wrestled with nerve that cowered but still fought on.
The whole scene vanished for Frenchy. It seemed to him that he was the
centre of a silent hollowness; only a voice, that was rather an ache
felt than a sound heard, kept up a pitiless jeering.
“They’ll stay—they’ll stay,” shrieked the little devil; “your bluff
won’t work—you’re a dead horse and they’re crows—crows—crows!”
“They’re weakening!” beat the heart of Frenchy.
“Deuces—ha, ha! Deuces! And they’ve both got face cards—deuces—ho,
ho!—going home, eh?—win on deuces?—ho, ho, ho—deuces!” The insistent
devil laughed spitefully.
“Raise you five hundred more!”
The words echoed and re-echoed in the lonesome hollowness. Frenchy
stared at his cards.
“Five hundred more!”
Frenchy winced and shivered. It seemed to him that a long, thin-bladed
knife had reached out of the silent hollow that surrounded him and
stabbed him twice in the breast.
“Ho, ho, ho!” went the little devil at the back of his head. “Stay with
’em! Put up the horses—everything on the deuces—ho, ho, ho!”
“But I can lay down now and save the horses,” urged the sick heart of
Frenchy.
“You won on the deuces _once_!” shrieked the little devil; “didn’t
you—DIDN’T YOU?”
Frenchy now heard his own voice growing up out of the hollow. “Taken:
my five horses and outfit are good for it.”
Then he emerged from the soundless hollow and was aware of the circle
of glittering eyes staring down on the field whereon he had just staked
five years of his life and his last cherished dream.
“Full house—aces on queens.”
Frenchy heard the words and grinned exultantly. The little spiteful
devil was silent.
“Four kings!”
Frenchy dropped his cards face up and reached for the bottle. “Ho, ho,
ho!” went the little devil, dancing all over his brain; “everything
lost on the deuces—dead horse for the crows to pick!—he, he, he!”
A ripple of exclamations ran about the circle of loungers as they
leaned forward to see the hand upon which Frenchy had staked all that
he owned.
“Deuces! By the jumping—four dirty deuces!”
“_Deuces?_”
“Four of ’em.”
“How’s that for a bluff?”
“Fool play!”
A buzzing undertone of comment filled the room and steadily grew into
a chattering as of crows about a spot where something has just died.
Frenchy seemed not to hear; he was busy filling and refilling glasses.
The man with the four kings quietly raked in his winnings. “And the
horses——?” he suggested.
Frenchy set the drained glass down with a bang, and with a snake-like
forward thrusting of the head leered hideously at the winner. “_Can’t
you shut up about the horses?_” He forced the words menacingly through
his shut teeth.
A hush fell upon the loungers as they looked upon the pinched,
malignant face with the upper lip lifted quiveringly and the close-set
teeth showing beneath. This was no longer the Frenchy of legend; that
Frenchy had always been known as one who lost or won large sums with
the utter nervelessness of a machine. This was no longer the face
of Frenchy—the gay, careless, haughty face of him who flirted with
Fortune. This was a new Frenchy—a terrible Frenchy; with a coiled snake
lurking just behind each glittering eyeball. This face sent a shiver
through the crowd—like the sight of an ugly knife unsheathed in anger.