That Girl Montana

“Umph! How?” and Lyster glanced in comical dismay at his friend as his hand was grasped by one so dirty, so redolent of cooked fish, as the one Black Bow was gracious enough to offer him.

Thereupon they were asked to seat themselves on the blanket of that dignitary – no small favor in the eyes of an Indian. Overton talked of the fish, and the easy markets there would soon be for them, when the boats and the cars came pushing swiftly through the forests; of the many wolves Black Bow had killed in the winter past; of how well the hunting shirt of deer-skin had worn that Black Bow’s squaw had sold him when he met them last on the trail; of any and many things but the episode of the evening of which Lyster was waiting to hear.

As the dusk fell, Lyster fully appreciated the picturesque qualities of the scene before him. The many dogs and their friendly attentions disturbed him somewhat, but he sat there feeling much as if in a theater; for those barbarians, in their groupings, reminded him of bits of stage setting he had seen at some time or another.

One big fire was outside the lodges, and over it a big kettle hung, and the steam drifted up and over the squaws and children gathered there. Some of them came over and looked at him, and several grunted at Overton. Black Bow would order them away once in a while with a lordly “Klehowyeh,” much as he did the dogs; and, like the dogs, they would promptly return, and gaze with half-veiled eyes at the elegance of the high boots covering the shapely limbs of Mr. Lyster.

The men were away on a hunt, Black Bow explained; only he and Akkomi, the head chief, had not gone. Akkomi was growing very old and no longer led the hunts; therefore a young chief must ever be near to his call; so Black Bow was also absent from the hunt.

“We stay until two suns rise,” and Overton pointed across to the camp of the whites. “To-morrow I would ask that Black Bow and the chief Akkomi eat at our table. This is the kinsman —tillicums– of the men who make the great work where the mines are and the boats that are big and the cars that go faster than the horses run. He wants that the two great chiefs of the Kootenais eat of his food before he goes back again to the towns of the white people.”

Lyster barely repressed a groan as he heard the proposal made, but Overton was blandly oblivious of the appealing expression of his friend; the thing he was interested in was to bring Black Bow to a communicative mood, for not a sign could he discover of a white woman in the camp, though he was convinced there was or had been one there.

The invitation to eat succeeded. Black Bow would tell the old chief of their visit; maybe he would talk with them now, but he was not sure. The chief was tired, his thoughts had been troubled that day. The son of his daughter had been near death in the river there. He was only a child, and could not swim yet; a young squaw of the white people had kept him from drowning, and the squaw of Akkomi had been making medicines for her ever since.

“Young squaw! Where comes a white squaw from to the Kootenai lakes?” asked Overton, incredulously. “Half white, half red, maybe.”

“White,” affirmed their host. “Where? Humph! Where come the sea-birds from that get lost when they fly too far from shore? Kootenai not know, but they drop down sometimes by the rivers. So this one has come. She has talked with Akkomi; but he tell nothing; only maybe we will all dance a dance some day, and then she will be Kootenai, too.”

“Adopt her,” muttered Overton, and glanced at Lyster; but that gentleman’s attention was given at the moment to a couple of squaws who walked past and looked at him out of the corners of their eyes, so he missed that portion of Black Bow’s figurative information.

“I have need to see the chief Akkomi,” said Overton, after a moment’s thought. “It would be well if I could see him before sleeping. Of these,” producing two colored handkerchiefs, “will you give one to him, that he may know I am in earnest, the other will you not wear for Dan?”

The brave grunted a pleased assent, and carefully selecting the handkerchief with the brightest border, thrust it within his hunting shirt. He then proceeded to the lodge of the old chief, bearing the other ostentatiously in his hand, as though he were carrying the fate of his nation in the gaudy bit of silk and cotton weaving.

“What are you trading for?” asked Lyster, and looked like protesting, when Overton answered:

“An audience with Akkomi.”

“Great Cæsar! is one of that sort not enough? I’ll never feel that my hand is clean again until I can give it a bath with some sort of disinfectant stuff. Now there’s another one to greet! I’ll not be able to eat fish again for a year. Why didn’t luck send the old vagabond hunting with the rest? I can endure the women, for they don’t sprawl around you and shake hands with you. Just tell me what I’m to donate for being allowed to bask in the light of Akkomi’s countenance? Haven’t a thing over here but some cigars.”

Overton only laughed silently, and gave more attention to the lodge of Akkomi than to his companion’s disgust. When Black Bow emerged from the tent, he watched him sharply as he approached, to learn from the Indian’s countenance, if possible, the result of the message.

“If he sends a royal request that we partake of supper, I warn you, I shall be violently and immediately taken ill – too ill to eat,” whispered Lyster, meaningly.

Black Bow seated himself, filled his pipe, handed it to a squaw to light, and then sent several puffs of smoke skyward, ere he said:

“Akkomi is old, and the time for his rest has come. He says the door of his lodge is open – that Dan may go within and speak what there is to say. But the stranger – he must wait till the day comes again.”

“Snubbed me, by George!” laughed Lyster. “Well, am I then to wait outside the portals, and be content with the crumbs you choose to carry out to me?”

“Oh, amuse yourself,” returned Overton, carelessly, and was on his feet at once. “I leave you to the enjoyment of Black Bow.”

A moment later he reached the lodge of the old chief and, without ceremony, walked in to the center of it.

A slight fire was there, – just enough to kill the dampness of the river’s edge, and over it the old squaw of Akkomi bent, raking the dry sticks, until the flames fluttered upward and outlined the form of the chief, coiled on a pile of skins and blankets against the wall.

He nodded a welcome, said “Klehowyeh,” and motioned with his pipe that his visitor should be seated on another pile of clothing and bedding, near his own person.

Then it was that Overton discovered a fourth person in the shadows opposite him – the white woman he had been curious about.

And it was not a woman at all, – only a girl of perhaps sixteen years instead – who shrank back into the gloom, and frowned on him with great, dark, unchildlike eyes, and from under brows wide and straight as those of a sculptor’s model for a young Greek god; for, if any beauty of feature was hers, it was boyish in its character. As for beauty of expression, she assuredly did not cultivate that. The curved red mouth was sullen and the eyes antagonistic.

One sharp glance showed Overton all this, and also that there was no Indian blood back of the rather pale cheek.

“So you got out of the water alive, did you?” he asked, in a matter of fact way, as though the dip in the river was a usual thing to see.

She raised her eyes and lowered them again with a sort of insolence, as though to show her resentment of the fact that he addressed her at all.

“I rather guess I’m alive,” she answered, curtly, and the visitor turned to the chief.

“I saw to-day your child’s child in the waters of the Kootenai. I saw the white friend lifting him up out of the river, and fighting with death for him. It would have been a good thing for a man to do, Akkomi. I crossed the water to-night, to see if your boy is well once more, or if there is any way I can do service for the young white squaw who is your friend.”

The old Indian smoked in silence for a full minute. He was a sharp-eyed, shrewd-faced old fellow. When he spoke, it was in the Chinook jargon, and with a significant nod toward the girl, as though she was not to hear or understand his words.

“It is true, the son of my daughter is again alive. The breath was gone when the young squaw reached him, but she was in time. Dan know the young squaw, maybe?”

“No, Akkomi. Who?”

The old fellow shook his head, as if not inclined to give the information required.

“She tell white men if she want white men to know,” he observed. “The heart of Akkomi is heavy for her – heavy. A lone trail is a hard one for a squaw in the Kootenai land – a white squaw who is young. She rests here, and may eat of our meat all her days if she will.”

Overton glanced again at the girl, who was evidently, from the words of the chief, following some lone trail through the wilderness, – a trail starting whence, and leading whither? All that he could read was that no happiness kept her company.

“But the life of a red squaw in the white men’s camps is a bad life,” resumed the old man, after a season of deliberation; “and the life of the white squaw in the red man’s village is bad as well.”

Overton nodded gravely, but said nothing. By the manner of Akkomi, he perceived that some important thought was stirring in the old man’s mind, and that it would develop into speech all the sooner if not hurried.

“Of all the men of the white camps it is you Akkomi is gladdest to talk to this day,” continued the chief, after another season of silence; “for you, Dan, talk with a tongue that is straight, and you go many times where the great towns are built.”

“The words of Akkomi are true words,” assented Overton, “and my ears listen to hear what he will say.”

“Where the white men live is where this young white squaw should live,” said Akkomi, and the listening squaw of Akkomi grunted assent. It was easy to read that she looked with little favor on the strange white girl within their lodge. To be sure, Akkomi was growing old; but the wife of Akkomi had memories of his lusty youth and of various wars she had been forced to wage on ambitious squaws who fancied it would be well to dwell in the lodge of the head chief.

And remembering those days, though so long past, the old squaw was sorely averse to the adoption dance for the white girl who lay on their blankets, and thought it good, indeed, that she go to live in the villages of the white people.

Overton nodded gravely.

“You speak wisely, Akkomi,” he said.

Glancing at the girl, Dan noted that she was leaning forward and gazing at him intently. Her face gave him the uncomfortable feeling that she perhaps knew what they were talking of, but she dropped back into the shadows again, and he dismissed the idea as improbable, for white girls were seldom versed in the lore of Indian jargon.

He waited a bit for Akkomi to continue, but as that dignitary evidently thought he had said enough, if Overton chose to interpret it correctly, the white man asked:

“Would it please Akkomi that I, Dan, should lead the young squaw where white families are?”

“Yes. It is that I thought of when I heard your name. I am old. I cannot take her. She has come a long way on a trail for that which has not been found, and her heart is so heavy she does not care where the next trail leads her. So it seems to Akkomi. But she saved the son of my daughter, and I would wish good to her. So, if she is willing, I would have her go to your people.”

“If she is willing!” Overton doubted it, and thought of the scowl with which she had answered him before. After a little hesitation, he said: “It shall be as you wish. I am very busy now, but to serve one who is your friend I will take time for a few days. Do you know the girl?”

“I know her, and her father before her. It was long ago, but my eyes are good. I remember. She is good – girl not afraid.”

“Father! Where is her father?”

“In the grave blankets – so she tells me.”

“And her name – what is she called?”

But Akkomi was not to be stripped of all his knowledge by questions. He puffed at the pipe in silence and then, as Overton was as persistently quiet as himself, he finally said:

“The white girl will tell to you the things she wants you to know, if she goes with your people. If she stays here, the lodge of Akkomi has a blanket for her.”

The girl was now face downward on the couch of skins, and when Overton wished to speak to her he crossed over and gently touched her shoulder. He was almost afraid she was weeping, because of the position; but when she raised her head he saw no signs of tears.

“Why do you come to me?” she demanded. “I ain’t troubling the white folks any. Huh! I didn’t even stop at their camp across the river.”

The grunt of disdain she launched at him made him smile. It was so much more like that of an Indian than a white person, yet she was white, despite all the red manners she chose to adopt.

“No, I reckon you didn’t stop at the white camp, else I’d have heard of it. But as you’re alone in this country, don’t you think you’d be better off where other white women live?”

He spoke in the kindliest tone, and she only bit her lip and shrugged her angular shoulders.

“I will see that you are left with good people,” he continued; “so don’t be afraid about that. I’m Dan Overton. Akkomi will tell you I’m square. I know where there’s a good sort of white woman who would be glad to have you around, I guess.”

“Is it your wife?” she demanded, with the same sullen, suspicious wrinkle between her brows.

His face paled ever so little and he took a step backward, as he looked at her through narrowing eyes.

“No, miss, it is not my wife,” he said, curtly, and then walked back and sat down beside the old chief. “In fact, she isn’t any relation to me, but she’s the nearest white woman I know to leave you with. If you want to go farther, I reckon I can help you. Anyway, you come along across the line to Sinna Ferry, and I feel sure you’ll find friends there.”

She looked at him unbelievingly. “She’s used to being deceived,” decided Overton, as she watched him; but he stood her gaze without flinching and smiled back at her.

“Do you live there?” she asked again, in that abrupt, uncivil way, and turned her eyes to Akkomi, as though to read his countenance as well as that of the white man, – a difficult thing, however, for the head of the old man was again shrouded in his blanket, from which only the tip of his nose and his pipe protruded.

In a far corner the squaw of Akkomi was crouched, her bead-like eyes glittering with a watchful interest, as they turned from one to the other of the speakers, and missed no tone or gesture of the two so strangely met within her tepee. Overton noticed her once, and thought what a subject for a picture Lyster would think the whole thing – at long range. He would want to view it from the door of the tepee, and not from the interior.

But the questioning eyes of the girl were turned to him, and remembering them, he said:

“Live there? Well, as much – a little more than I do anywhere else of late. I am to go there in two days; and if you are ready to go, I will take you and be glad to do it.”

“You don’t know anything about me,” she protested.

He smiled, for her tone told him she was yielding.

“Oh, no – not much,” he confessed, “but you can tell me, you know.”

“I know I can, but I won’t,” she said, doggedly. “So I guess you’ll just move on down to the ferry without me. He knows, and he says I can live here if I want to. I’m tired of the white people. A girl alone is as well with the Indians. I think so, anyway, and I guess I’ll try camping with them. They don’t ask a word – only what I tell myself. They don’t even care whether I have a name; they would give me one if I hadn’t.”

“A suitable name – and a nice Indian one – for you would be, ’The Water Rat’ or ’The Girl Who Swims.’ Maybe,” he added, “they will hunt you up one more like poetry in books (the only place one finds poetry in Indians), ’Laughing Eyes,’ or ’The One Who Smiles.’ Oh, yes, they’ll find you a name fast enough. So will I, if you have none. But you have, haven’t you?”

“Yes, I have, and it’s ’Tana,” said the girl, piqued into telling by the humorous twinkle in the man’s eyes.

“’Tana? Why, that itself is an Indian name, is it not? And you are not Indian.”

“It’s ’Tana, for short. Montana is my name.”

“It is? Well, you’ve got a big name, little girl, and as it is proof that you belong to the States, don’t you think you’d better let me take you back there?”

“I ain’t going down among white folks who will turn up their noses at me, just because you found me among these redskins,” she answered, scowling at him and speaking very deliberately. “I know how proud decent women are, and I ain’t going among any other sort and that’s settled.”

“Why, you poor little one, what sort of folks have you been among?” he asked, compassionately. Her stubborn antagonism filled him with more of pity than tears could have done; it showed so much suspicion, that spoke of horrible associations, and she was so young!

“See here! No one need know I found you among the Indians. I can make up some story – say you’re the daughter of an old partner of mine. It’ll be a lie, of course, and I don’t approve of lies. But if it makes you feel better, it goes just the same! Partner dies, you know, and I fall heir to you. See? Then, of course, I pack you back to civilization, where you can – well, go to school or something. How’s that?”

She did not answer, only looked at him strangely, from under those straight brows. He felt an angry impatience with her that she did not take the proposal differently, when it was so plainly for her good he was making schemes.

“As to your father being dead – that part of it would be true enough, I suppose,” he continued; “for Akkomi told me he was dead.”

“Yes – yes, he is dead,” she said coldly, and her tones were so even no one would imagine it was her father she spoke of.

“Your mother, too?”

“My mother, too,” she assented. “But I told you I wasn’t going to talk any more about myself, and I ain’t. If I can’t go to your Sunday-school without a pedigree, I’ll stop where I am – that’s all.”

She spoke with the independence of a boy, and it was, perhaps, her independence that induced the man to be persistent.

“All right, ’Tana,” he said cheerfully. “You come along on your own terms, so long as you get out of these quarters. I’ll tell the dead partner story – only the partner must have a name, you know. Montana is a good name, but it is only a half one, after all. You can give me another, I reckon.”

She hesitated a little and stared at the glowing embers of the lodge fire. He wondered if she was deciding to tell him a true one, or if she was trying to think of a fictitious one.

“Well?” he said at last.

Then she looked up, and the sullen, troubled, unchildlike eyes made him troubled for her sake.

“Rivers is a good name – Rivers?” she asked, and he nodded his head, grimly.

“That will do,” he agreed. “But you give it just because you were baptized in the river this evening, don’t you?”

“I guess I give it because I haven’t any other I intend to be called by,” she answered.

“And you will cut loose from this outfit?” he asked. “You will come with me, little girl, across there into God’s country, where you must belong.”

“You won’t let them look down on me?”

“If any one looks down on you, it will be because of something you will do in the future, ’Tana,” he said, looking at her very steadily. “Understand that, for I will settle it that no one knows how I came across you. And you will go?”

“I – will go.”

“Come, now! that’s a good decision – the best you could have made, little girl; and I’ll take care of you as though you were a cargo of gold. Shake hands on the agreement, won’t you?”

She held out her hand, and the old squaw in the corner grunted at the symbol of friendship. Akkomi watched them with his glittering eyes, but made no sign.

It surely was a strange beginning to a strange friendship.

“You poor little thing!” said Overton, compassionately, as she half shrank from the clasp of his fingers. The tender tone broke through whatever wall of indifference she had built about her, for she flung herself face downward on the couch, and sobbed passionately, refusing to speak again, though Overton tried in vain to calm her.