by Zane Grey
Red and gold streaked the sky, and through the cedars remote spires and peaks gleamed above vermilion mountains. A breeze sprang up and sighed through cedars and brush. Soon the sun sank, the afterglow faded, and Curry’s fire split the gloom of twilight. High-Lo had fallen into a heavy, troubled sleep. Occasionally John caught the sound of Topsy and Nugget grazing nearby, the rattle of a stone, the scraping of hoof against a rock. But aside from these peaceful sounds and the increasing moan of the desert wind there was silence.
John rehearsed the things High-Lo had related. As the dirty schemes of the two men began to register more clearly in his consciousness, he felt an overwhelming desire someday to catch Hanley and Newton red-handed so he and High-Lo would have the satisfaction of turning them over to the authorities. But he had not thought of Mary then. Suddenly what it would mean to her crowded everything else from his mind. He owed her his protection. Yet how best to protect her was a problem. After all, a man like Newton had to be brought to justice — both he and Hanley — for the harm they could do among the Indians was incalculable. But in that event Mary would be the crushed and broken wife of a man publicly dishonored. Could he have a hand in her disgrace?
Accompanying his thoughts came the mournful sound of the night wind crying its travail through the trees. Hours passed during which John watched, waited, and replenished the fire. After a long time there came the distant sound of a complaining motor climbing a steep grade. John rose, stretched his stiff limbs and walked down to the trail to meet the car.
CHAPTER VII
BY TACIT AGREEMENT, though no compact existed between them, neither John nor High-Lo explained the misadventure in Noname Valley beyond the brief statements that High-Lo had been thrown from his horse and his horse had taken to the hills. If Magdaline had been impressed by the things High-Lo uttered in his delirium, she certainly kept rigid silence. The affair blew over quickly, as had many of High-Lo’s escapades in the past, the boy’s rapid recovery being the sole reminder of his latest adventure. The doctor from Taho had pronounced the extent of the injuries to be a slight concussion and several broken ribs, and rest was prescribed for the cure.
High-Lo, who was deft at hand work, occupied part of his enforced leisure by weaving a quirt for Magdaline out of leather strips. It was his way of expressing his gratitude to the Indian girl. However, when the quirt was completed, he inflicted upon John the duty of its presentation.
“Give it to her with my compliments,” said High-Lo, “an’ tell her it’s the first quirt I ever made for any girl.”
John could not find Magdaline at once, so the quirt was cached in the store. Later, down by the windmill, he came upon her watering her horse. The girl’s dark face did not wear the usual smile. A questioning glance constituted her only greeting.
“I’ve been looking for you,” John called.
She waited for him to draw near. “For me? I thought you had forgotten me. Your time is so busy. You seldom have a word for Magdaline like the other boys.”
With her large, luminous eyes upon him and her pretty olive face in sad repose, it was difficult for John to imagine anyone neglecting Magdaline.
“Oh, come now!” he teased. “Don’t I always say good morning?”
“Yes, I almost forgot that,” she replied with a touch of irony in her low voice. “But I have not forgotten how kind High-Lo is. How is he?”
“Much better, thank God!”
“Why thank God?” Magdaline inquired half-angrily. “Why not thank yourself, and me, and the doctor?”
John was amused by the remark until he was struck by Magdaline’s gravity.
“I do not think there is a God, John Curry, and if there is, what can He have to do with our little lives?” she pursued. “I have been thinking of that all morning. Why, if there is a God, did He make races one to conquer the other, one to be superior to the other, one to break the hearts of the other?”
“Good heavens, girl! What has set you thinking this way?” John exclaimed.
“Well, is it not so? Did not the white man conquer my people? Are they not trying to force their superiority upon us? Look at me! Would I not be happier just an Indian in the hogan of my father with a name that belongs to my people? Who am I? Magdaline! Why Magdaline? Because somebody at the white man’s school cannot say my Indian name, finds it too long and hard to write. So I am Magdaline, a stranger to myself after they make the change. I am taken away from my people, like a dog made to change his master and name. I am put with many other Indian children who are given names that mean nothing to them. For years I go to the white man’s school, first to Taho, then far away to Riverside where for years I do not see my people. And you give me knowledge, you wake something that has been asleep in the breast of my race. You make me desire to learn more and more. But all the things I learn, one on the other, I build up between my people and me like a mountain that has no trails. And when my mountain is high against the sky, you send me back. You say, ‘Now climb this terrible mountain. Your people are on the other side. They will meet you there.’ But you are wrong. I can never meet my people ever again.”
John realized the poignant truth of this tragic-eyed girl’s accusations. Months of brooding were behind the passion of her words and once the long-inhibited ideas were released, she had no will to check them.
“When I came home from Riverside to my people I shook like a cottonwood leaf in a storm I was so glad. ‘Home!’ I thought. ‘Home!’ I sang the word over and over. I was not then aware of the mountain. I forgot I had not been living close to the earth as my people do. I forgot the hogan, ill-smelling to those who were no longer used to it. I forgot the customs of my people — the sheep killed before the hogan and immediately served half-cooked. I forgot that they slept on the ground with sometimes no blanket beneath them. I forgot that living close to animals breeds lice and pests for the body. I had been eating the white man’s food. I had been sleeping in the white man’s bed. I had been living in the white man’s way. I had been thinking much as he thinks even to his God, who was forced upon me and whom I do not understand.”
There were tears of grief and anger in the girl’s eyes as she continued: “And when I came home because of these things, I did not know my people — that is, I could not reach them with my love, and they surely did not know me. They did not want to hear the things I had to tell. How ever could they have understood them? I could not get over the mountain to my people, and they could not get over to me. I stood it only for a night and a day. Then I came to Mrs. Weston who is very good. She seemed to understand and said, ‘Go back and help them, little by little. Teach them the things you know.’ When she spoke I remembered the electric washing machine with which we were taught to wash. And at the same time I remembered my father’s hogan. And my knowledge was like that washing machine. There was no place for it in my father’s hogan. There was no usefulness for one there or ever would be. A washing machine would need electricity, like my knowledge for operation needed desire from my parents. They have no such desire. They are satisfied as they are. And they are strangers to me. They watch me with half-distrust as they would an unknown white woman. My education has made me an outcast. My people have no place for me; and what place has the white man? I can go to his towns and cities and be a servant in the homes, paid much less than a white servant. That I learned at Riverside. I do not want to be an underpaid servant to white people. I do not want to be a servant in that sense. For Mrs. Weston I would work just for love, but she does not need help always — only through the spring and summer months. In the winter I must go back to the hogan — sealed up in a hogan I must be with my family who do not understand me, with my family whose customs are so strange to me now.... And winter is coming soon.”
A stick he had whittled to the thinness of a wafer fell from John’s fingers. He deliberated a moment over his knife as he struggled for words that might console the unhappy girl beside him.
“You won’t always live in the hogan of your father, Mag
daline. Some day one of the schoolboys will come home and see what a beautiful girl his old playmate has become and he will fall in love with you and ask you to become his wife.”
She laughed a thin, unnatural laugh. “And because he loves me, I will be supposed to love him and go to his hogan and kill sheep to half-cook for him. Where are your eyes not to see that education makes no difference to the men of my race? They go back quickly to old customs. But I am a girl — a woman. I am altogether different. I could go back, yes, like a slave. But what would it do for me? Some of the girls go back and seem happy. Yes, they are happy in losing one leg to have the other. Some people are that way.”
“But would you trade your desert for the white man’s cities?” John asked.
“No. But I am really unfit for both now. By birth and tradition I am part of the desert. Perhaps that is why you send us back to the desert when you are through changing us. Yet there is such a terrible loneliness in the desert when you are different from your people and like nobody else! Sometimes I am afraid, I am so lonely. I feel a great burst of pain in my heart. I feel as if the great walls of rock under which my people love to ride would fall and crush me if I went close.”
“Poor Magdaline!” John said, his voice very low and very tender. “How you must hate us for all our mistakes! Try to believe that it is only our blindness — that we mean well. You call us a superior race. Intellectually, yes! But morally and spiritually, no! And while we try to develop your intellect we give you an insight to our moral and spiritual weaknesses, and you see the terrible futility of so much that we live and do. We do not, alas, live the lives we profess in our religion. And you wonder because your own people fit their lives to their own faith instead of ours. You are justly contemptuous.... But, Magdaline, it is not our God you do not understand. It is our lives you do not understand — our failure to conform to our professed teachings. I know we preach to you to convert your people from their own beliefs, and that’s a great mistake. Suppose you tried. You wouldn’t convert them, you would only confound them. Even the children we take into the schools become confounded. We say you must believe, and try to tell you that your fathers are damned because they think differently. We are terribly, terribly wrong in this.... But the white people are coming more and more into your lives, into your desert. Change in your people is inevitable, just as inevitable as the progress of what we like to call civilization. Your change will be a part of that progress. Of late years we have been forcing radical changes in your lives, and you, Magdaline, belong to the generation upon whom the change is going to be inflicted. You will suffer most. You are young and your feelings are unbridled. Your parents are suffering, too, Magdaline, but they have a resignation that comes with age. They know they must die soon and that with them must go many of the traditions of their race. To them death will be an escape. On the other hand, your children and the children of your sister now at school in Taho will never know how you and she have suffered. You will make circumstances easier for them.”
“Then I do not matter? I am only a sacrifice!” retorted Magdaline bitterly. “How I feel is nothing.”
“How you feel is very important, indeed, to consider,” John parried. “Just by watching you I understood. I have been sorry and helpless. I would do everything for you, and I can do nothing.”
From fiery wells of reproach Magdaline’s eyes cooled to gentle gratitude.
“You have been watching me,” she said unsteadily. “You have been sorry for me.... I did not know that.”
Curry looked away to the familiar red slopes. Waves of heat rose from the glaring surfaces. They were almost like a visible expression of Magdaline’s trembling voice. Her words themselves were lost to John. Suddenly he felt her hand on his in silent appeal to give back his arrested attention. As soon as she had brought his eyes to hers again, she spoke. Her voice was very low. Her dark eyes never left his.
“There is something you can do for me, John. Marry me. Do so because I love you, because you understand and are sorry and care. Do not make me go to a hogan — or to worse things — to those fears I cannot explain even to myself.”
Her very directness rendered Curry unprepared to meet the startling and moving proposal she had made to him. Nothing could have been further from his thoughts than the solution she was offering with such simplicity and appealing directness that a mist came suddenly to his eyes.
“Magdaline, I can’t marry you,” he said unhappily, taking her hand in his.
The girl turned her eyes away from him, and fixed them as if in careful scrutiny upon a far golden spire.
“Because I am Indian and you are white?”
“Because I don’t love you,” John answered simply.
“That should be enough,” Magdaline said, her eyes still intent on the distant spire. “But maybe I could make you love me.”
“No, Magdaline. You couldn’t do that. And I say that with all finality,” John replied helplessly. “But believe me, I am very very sorry for your unhappiness and for any part of it for which I am responsible.”
Magdaline drew back and swept John with a long and troubled gaze.
“You love someone else,” she said finally. “I thought your heart was empty and hungry like mine.... No, I do not want what you cannot give me.”
She shrugged her shoulders, as if with that gesture she completely abandoned hope. Her eyes went back to steadfast contemplation of the peak.
“There is no girl here whom you love. I would have known,” she went on. “Whoever she is, she does not love you or you would be where she is. Or if she cared, or knew how you care, she would come to you, because she could not stay away. No one who loves you could stay away.”
“I haven’t said I love anyone else,” John declared in an effort to defend himself against her intuition.
“Your sorriness for me tells me that you do. There is pain in your feeling for me because you too have suffered. Perhaps it is better to be sorry for me than for yourself.” Magdaline’s voice trembled again. “Maybe I will try to be sorry for you, now.”
“Count on me as a friend any time and any place,” said John, nonetheless sincerely for his desire to change the direction of Magdaline’s thoughts.
She looked about her quickly, seemingly in a desire to run from herself had the open barrenness of the desert not defied her.
“It is not that I am Indian that makes you hold back your love?” she pleaded once more.
“No!” John’s reply was immediate. “That would make no difference if I cared.”
“There are white men who marry Indian girls!” she insisted, fighting her last doubt. “But you are different from those white men, John, and it is the difference that I love.”
Before John was aware of her intention she had grasped his hand and kissed it. Then she backed away toward her horse with a choking half-laugh, half-cry.
“Good-by, my friend,” she called. “I am going to ride under the great wall that my people love. But if I knew where she lived I would go there first and kill her for not loving you.”
Nimbly she mounted and whirled her horse in the direction of the golden spire. John watched her disappear smaller and smaller into the distance.
Everything he had known or thought concerning Magdaline rushed to him for approval or correction. Mrs. Weston had declared her exceptionally bright and well-read, and deplored that more complete educational advantages were not given to prepare such girls as she for social service work on the reservation, that her inadequate knowledge had not prepared her for such service, but had only rendered her helpless and miserable. And in this he had agreed. And watching Magdaline squander her smiles on any and every man who met her glance, he had feared to think what would become of her. He was convinced that she was a coquette, and fickle in fancy, and he knew too well the ways of men. Now Magdaline had startled him with her earnest protestations of love, and bared to him the strife and struggle in her soul. What would become of her, she whom life among her own filled with r
epulsion? He could not follow her and bring her back. She would misunderstand such a gesture. Perhaps ancestral pride would stir her blood, and dignity and stoicism help her over her present dark hour. Perhaps she fled to the mountains to summon courage to meet life. John prayed that she might find it.
He rounded up the horses he had brought down to water and drove them to the corral. Then reminded of the hour by the lunch gong, he went to the hogan to clean up. High-Lo hailed him jocularly.
“Did you see my sweetie?”
John was nonplused for a second. “Your sweetie?”
“Magdaline.”
“Yes, I saw her. Why?”
“Well, didn’t she act pleased when you gave her the quirt?”
The quirt! John rebuked himself for forgetting all about his mission for High-Lo. His expression must have betrayed him for High-Lo said at once, “You’re a fine hombre. You forgot. What did you do with it?”
“Left it in the store.”
“Be doin’ Magdaline a lot of good there.”
John felt High-Lo scrutinizing him closely.
“You seldom forget things,” High-Lo continued. “It’s only when you’re worried that you do. I’m all right now, honest I am. I’ll be around in another week lookin’ up more trouble.”
CHAPTER VIII
KATHARINE WAS HANGING up dish towels. As they flapped in the wind, she saw between them Alice’s golden head turn toward her and nestle in careless repose against the top of her cushioned chair.
“Wilbur Newton has been just outrageous to Mary since he came home,” Alice said. “I know you’ll be so worried about her while we are away that you won’t have a good time. I’m willing to give up the trip, Sis.”
“But Mary said you’d love Black Mesa in the middle of September,” replied Katharine. “The rains are pretty well over and the fall flowers will be in bloom. You’re strong enough to make some trips. And you’ve been so enthusiastic about going.”