The Watchers of the Plains: A Tale of the Western Prairies

CHAPTER VI

A NEWSPAPER

Seth was bending over his work among the potatoes. It was a large order, for there were more than five acres of it. Every time he stood erect to ease his back he scanned the distance in the direction of the White River. Each time he bent again over his hoe, it was with a dissatisfied look on his sunburnt face. He made up his mind that Rosebud was playing truant again. He cared nothing for the fact of the truancy, but the direction in which his eyes turned whenever he looked up displayed his real source of dissatisfaction. Rosebud had been out since the midday dinner, and he guessed where she was. The mosquitoes worried him to-day, which meant that his temper was ruffled.

Suddenly he paused. But this time he didn’t look round. He heard the sound of galloping hoofs racing across the prairie. Continuing his work, he roughly estimated the distance the rider was away.

He gave no sign at all until Rosebud’s voice called to him.

“Seth, I’ve come to help you hoe,” she said.

The man saw that the horse was standing pawing the ground among the potatoes.

“I take it friendly of you,” he said, eyeing the havoc the animal was creating. “Guess that horse o’ yours has intentions that aways too. They’re laud’ble, but misplaced.”

The girl checked the creature, and turned him off the patch. Then she quietly slid to the ground and removed her saddle and bridle, and drove him off out on the prairie for a roll.

“I’m so sorry, Seth! I’m afraid he’s made a mess of these plants.”

Rosebud stooped and tried to repair the damage her horse had done. She did not look in Seth’s direction, but her smiling face conveyed nothing of her regret. Presently she stood up and stepped gingerly along the furrows toward the man.

“Did you bring a hoe out for me?” she asked innocently.

But her companion was used to the wiles of this tyrant.

“Guess not,” he said quietly. “Didn’t reckon you’d get back that soon. Say, Rosebud, you’d best git out o’ those fixin’s if you’re going to git busy with a hoe. Ma has her notions.”

“Ye-es. Do you think I’m getting any better with a hoe?”

The eyes that looked up into Seth’s face were candidly inquiring. There was not a shadow of a smile on the man’s face when he answered.

“I’ve a notion you have few equals with a hoe.”

“I was afraid – ”

“Ah, that’s always the way of folks wi’ real talent. Guess you’re an eddication with a hoe.”

Seth went on with his work until Rosebud spoke again. She was looking away out across the prairie, and her eyes were just a trifle troubled.

“Then I’d best get my things changed and – bring out a hoe. How many rows do you think I could do before tea?”

“That mostly depends on how many p’tater plants git in your way, I guess.”

The girl’s face suddenly wreathed itself in smiles.

“There, you’re laughing at me, and – well, I was going to help you, but now I shan’t. I’ve been down to see my Wanaha. Seth, you ought to have married her. She’s the sweetest creature – except Ma – I know. I think it’s a pity she married Nevil Steyne. He’s a queer fellow. I never know what to make of him. He’s kind to her, and he’s kind to me – which I’m not sure I like – but I somehow don’t like his eyes. They’re blue, and I don’t like blue eyes. And I don’t believe he ever washes. Do you?”

Seth replied without pausing in his work. He even seemed to put more force into it, for the hoe cut into the earth with a vicious ring. But he avoided her direct challenge.

“Guess I haven’t a heap of regard for no Injuns nor squaws. I’ve no call to. But I allow Wanaha’s a good woman.”

Just for a moment the girl’s face became very serious.

“I’m glad you say that, Seth. I knew you wouldn’t say anything else; you’re too generous. Wanaha is good. Do you know she goes to the Mission because she loves it? She helps us teach the little papooses because she believes in the ‘God of the white folks,’ she says. I know you don’t like me to see so much of her, but somehow I can’t help it. Seth, do you believe in foreboding?”

“Can’t say I’d gamble a heap that aways.”

“Well, I don’t know, but I believe it’s a good thing that Wanaha loves me – loves us all. She has such an influence over people.”

Seth looked up at last. The serious tone of the girl was unusual. But as he said nothing, and simply went on with his work, Rosebud continued.

“Sometimes I can’t understand you, Seth. I know, generally speaking, you have no cause to like Indians, while perhaps I have. You see, I have always known them. But you seem to have taken exception only to Little Black Fox and Wanaha as far as I am concerned. You let me teach the Mission children, you even teach them yourself, yet, while admitting Wanaha’s goodness, you get angry with me for seeing her. As for Little Black Fox, he is the chief. He’s a great warrior, and acknowledged by even the agent and missionary to be the best chief the Rosebuds have ever had. Quite different from his father.”

“Guess that’s so.”

“Then why – may I not talk to them? And, oh, Seth” – the girl’s eyes danced with mischief – “he is such a romantic fellow. You should hear him talk in English. He talks – well, he has much more poetry in him than you have.”

“Which is mostly a form of craziness,” observed Seth, quite unruffled.

“Well, I like craziness.”

“Ah!”

Seth’s occasional lapses into monosyllables annoyed Rosebud. She never understood them. Now there came a gleam of anger into her eyes, and their color seemed to have changed to a hard gray.

“Well, whether you like it or not, you needn’t be so ill-tempered about it.”

Seth looked up in real astonishment at this unwarrantable charge, and his dark eyes twinkled as he beheld Rosebud’s own evident anger.

He shook his head regretfully, and cut out a bunch of weeds with his hoe.

“Guess I’m pretty mean,” he said, implying that her assertion was correct.

“Yes.” Rosebud’s anger was like all her moods, swift rising and as swift to pass. Now it was approaching its zenith. “And to show you how good Wanaha is, look at this.” She unfolded her parcel and threw the paper down, disclosing the perfect moccasins the Indian had made for her. “Aren’t they lovely? She didn’t forget it was my birthday, like – like – ”

“Ah, so it is.” Seth spoke as though he had just realized the fact of her birthday.

“Aren’t they lovely?” reiterated the girl. Her anger had passed. She was all smiles again.

“Indian,” said Seth, with a curious click of the tongue, which Rosebud was quick to interpret into an expression of scorn.

“Yes,” she exclaimed, firing up again, and her eyes sparkling. “And I like Indian things, and I like Indian people, and I like Little Black Fox. He’s nice, and isn’t always sneering. And I shall see them all when I like. And – and you can do the hoeing yourself.”

She walked off toward the house without the least regard for the potatoes, which now suffered indiscriminately. Her golden head was held very high, but she had less dignity than she thought, for she stumbled in the furrows as she went.

She went straight into the house and up to her room; but she could not fling herself upon her bed and cry, as she probably intended to do. Three large parcels occupied its entire narrow limits. Each was addressed to her, wishing her all happiness on her birthday, and the biggest of the three was from Seth. So, failing room anywhere else, she sat in her rocking-chair, and, instead of an angry outburst, she shed a few quiet, happy tears.

Meanwhile Seth continued his work as though nothing had interrupted him. It was not until supper-time, and he was making his way to the house, that he happened to observe the newspaper which Rosebud had left lying among the potatoes. He stepped across the intervening furrows and picked it up. Newspapers always interested him, he saw so few.

This one, he saw at once, was an English paper. And from London at that. He glanced at the date, and saw that was nearly a month old, and, at the same time, he saw that it was addressed to Nevil Steyne, and beside the address was a note in blue pencil, “Page 3.”

His curiosity was aroused, and he turned over to the page indicated. There was a long paragraph marked by four blue crosses. It was headed —

“The Estate of the Missing Colonel Raynor.”

Seth read the first few lines casually. Then, as he went on, a curious look crept into his dark eyes, his clean-shaven face took on an expression of strained interest, and his lips closed until they were lost in a straight line which drew down at the corners of his mouth. He read on to the end, and then quietly folded up the paper, and stuffed it into the bosom of his shirt. Once he turned and looked away in the direction in which Nevil Steyne’s hut lay tucked away on the river bank. Then he shouldered his hoe and strolled leisurely homeward.

CHAPTER VII

AN INDIAN POW-WOW

Nevil Steyne was indifferent to such blessings as a refreshing thunder-shower at sundown on a hot summer’s day. It is doubtful if he would have admitted the beneficence of Providence in thus alleviating the parching heat of the day. He had no crops to think of, which made all the difference. Now, as he walked along through the brush on the north bank of the White River, in the direction of the log bridge, with the dripping trees splashing all round him, and his boots clogging with the heavy, wet loam, he openly cursed the half-hour’s drenching. His vindictiveness was in no way half-measured. He cursed those who were glad of it, and who, when in direst necessity, occasionally remembered to offer up prayers for it.

This man had no love for the woods; no love even for the prairie, or his life on it. He lived a grudging existence. From his manner nothing in life seemed to give him real joy. But there is no doubt but that he had purpose of a sort which had much to do with his associations with his Indian neighbors. With him purpose served for everything else, and made existence tolerable.

There was purpose in his movements now. He could just as easily have made his way to the bridge through the open, but he chose the woods, and put up with the wet while he railed at it. And there was some haste in his slouching, loose-jointed gait which gave to his journey a suggestion of furtiveness.

At the bridge he paused, gave a quick look round, and then crossed it more rapidly still. For at this point he was in full view of the prairie. Once on the Indian Reservation, which began beyond the bridge, he again took to the cover the park-like land afforded him. Nor did he appear again in the open until he had passed the Mission and the Agency.

Once clear of these, however, he gave no more heed to secrecy, and walked boldly along open paths in the full, bright evening light. He passed in and out among the scattered tepees, speaking a word here and there to the men as he passed, or nodding a greeting. The latter being the more frequent of the two, for the Indian is a silent man.

The life amidst which he was walking was too familiar to cause such a man as he any unusual interest. Perhaps it was because he felt he had a certain underhand power with these people; like a person who loses interest in the thing which he has mastered. Certain it is that the busy homes he beheld were all unnoticed. The smoke-begrimed tepees with their great wooden trailers propped against them; the strings of drying meats stretching along under the boughs of adjacent trees. The bucks huddled, in spite of the warmth of summer, in their parti-colored blankets, gazing indolently at their squaws pounding the early berries into a sort of muddy preserve, or dressing a skin for manufacture into leggings, moccasins, or buckskin shirt. He gave no heed to the swarms of papooses, like so many flies buzzing round the tepees, whooping in imitation of their father braves, or amusing themselves with the pursuit of one of the many currish camp dogs, which, from their earliest years, they love to persecute to the limits of the poor beasts’ endurance. The totem poles with their hideous carved heads had no meaning for him, just as the dried scalps which hung from the tepee poles might have been rabbit skins for all he thought of them.

Just now his purpose was to reach the house of Little Black Fox, and this he came to at last. It was a large building; next to the Mission and Agency it was by far the largest house on the Reservation. It was built of logs and thatch and plaster, and backed into a thick clump of shady maple trees. The son was more lavish than the father. Big Wolf had always been content to live in a tepee. He was an older type of chief. The son moved with the times and was given to display.

Nevil raised the latch of the door and walked in, and his manner was that of a privileged visitor. He entered the spacious living-room without word for those he beheld gathered there. He walked to a certain vacant place, and sat down upon the mud floor. It was at once plain that he had been expected. More, it was evident that he belonged by right to that gathering.

Despite the display in the dimensions of Little Black Fox’s house the interior revealed the old savage. There was nothing civilized about the council-chamber. There was the central fire of smouldering logs, without which no Indian can exist in summer or winter. The smoke passed out through a square chimney in the middle of the roof.

In a large circle the chief’s councilors sat perched upon their haunches and swathed in their blankets. There was not a seat or table there. They sat in their councils as their forefathers had done before them, their leader in their midst with nothing but his youth to distinguish him from those who were his subjects.

The debate proceeded in its spasmodic fashion. There was no haste, no heat like in the debates of civilized folk. Each man was listened to in respectful silence, which might have served as an example to modern legislatures. Nevil spoke like the rest in their low, musical tongue. Whenever he spoke it was noticeable that the great, wild eyes of the chief were turned upon him with interest. But even he seemed a mere unit in the debate, no more and no less, unless it were that Little Black Fox was more influenced by what he said than by what was said by the others.

At length, well on into the night, the meeting drew to a close. The business in hand had been threshed out and a decision arrived at. The warriors and the men of “medicine” filed slowly out. Even in this there was a certain formality and precedence. Each man addressed his chief, shook hands, and passed through the door. And no two went out together.

When the last had gone Nevil and the chief remained alone in the bare room. Little Black Fox rose from his pile of skins and stood erect. He was a mere youth, but of such shape and appearance that one could easily understand the epithet “romantic” Rosebud had applied to him. He stood at least four inches over six feet, and dwarfed even Nevil’s height. But it was in the perfect symmetry of his lithe, sinuous body, and the keen, handsome, high-caste face where his attractions lay.

His eyes were the eyes of the untamed savage, but of a man capable of great thought as well as great reckless courage. There was nothing sinister in them, but they were glowing, live eyes which might blaze or soften in two succeeding moments, which exactly expresses the man’s character. He was handsome as Indian men go. Not like the women. They are often beautiful in a way that appeals to any artistic eye, but the men are a type for study before they can be appreciated.

This chief was in the first flush of manhood, and had attained nothing of the seared, bloated appearance which comes to the Indian later in life. His face was almost as delicately chiseled as his sister’s, but it was strong as well as high caste. The eagle beakishness of his nose matched the flashing black eyes. His mouth was sensitive and clean-cut. His forehead was high and broad, and his cheeks were delicately round.

Nevil became a wretched, unkempt type of manhood in comparison. In form, at least, this chief of twenty-one years was a veritable king.

He smiled on his white councilor when the last of his own people had departed. He thrust out a slim, strong hand, and the two men shook hands heartily.

“It is slow with many in council,” the chief said, in his own smooth-flowing tongue. “You, white man, and I can settle matters quickly. Quicker than these wise men of my father.”

There was a flash of impatience in his speaking eyes. Nevil nodded approval.

“They think much before they speak,” he replied, in the language in which he had been addressed. He, too, smiled; and in their manner toward each other it was plain the excellent understanding they were on.

“Sit, my white brother, we have many things for talk. Even we, like those others, must sit if we would pow-wow well. It is good. Sit.” Little Black Fox laughed shortly, conceiving himself superior in thought to the older generation of wise men. He was possessed of all the vanity of his years.

They both returned to the ground, and the chief kicked together the embers of the council-fire.

“Tell me, brother, of Wanaha,” this still unproved warrior went on, in an even, indifferent voice; “she who was the light of our father’s eyes; she who has the wisdom of the rattlesnake, and the gentle heart of the summer moon.”

“She is well.” Nevil was not expansive. He knew the man had other things to talk of, and he wanted him to talk.

“Ah. And all the friends of my white brother?”

The face smiled, but the eyes were keenly alight.

“They are well. And Rosebud – ”

“Ah.”

“She grows fairer every day.”

There was a truly Indian pause. The fire sputtered and cast shadows upon the dark, bare walls. The two men gazed thoughtfully into the little flame which vauntingly struggled to rear itself in the dense atmosphere. At last the Indian spoke.

“That man who killed my father is a great brave.”

“Yes,” nodded Nevil, with a reflective smile in his pale eyes. “And Rosebud is a ripe woman. Beautiful as the flower which is her name.”

“Hah!” Then the Indian said slowly with an assumed indifference, “She will be his squaw. This white brave.”

“That is how they say.” It might have puzzled Nevil to apply names to those represented by “they.” “He is a great brave, truly. He fought for her. He killed your father. That is how these things go. She is for him surely.”

A frown had settled on the fierce young chief’s face.

“My father was old,” he said.

Nevil glanced at the speaker out of the corner of his eyes, and then continued his watch on the flame still struggling so ardently to devour the half-green wood. He knew when to hold his tongue.

“Yes,” the young man went on. “My father was a wise chief, but he was old – too old. Why did he keep the white girl alive?”

“He took her for you. You only had fifteen summers. The white girl had eleven or thereabouts. He was wise. It was good med’cine.”

Then the chief stirred himself. And Nevil, who lost no movement on the other’s part, detected the restless action of one who chafes under his thought. Little Black Fox prefixed his next remark with another short laugh.

“My people love peace now. It is good. So good that your people come and teach us. They show our squaws how to make things like the white squaws make. And the papooses forget our tongue, and they make words out of strange drawings which the white med’cine man makes on a board. Tchah! We forget our fathers. We feed when your people give us food, and our young men are made to plough. We only hunt when we are told to hunt. Our life is easy, but it is not a brave’s life.”