by Zane Grey
Marian saw an Indian running down the avenue between the poplars. Some of the watching Indians shouted. This Noki evidently was frightened, for he looked back, and then darted in among his fellows.
Friel’s car appeared, still containing the same number. Marian recognized two of them. The missionary drove to the steps, where he stopped the car and got out. Manifestly he was starting for the window to speak to Marian, when one of the other men called out, “Hold on, Friel.”
The missionary, halted by the peremptory call, impatiently turned back. The Indians were looking now up the avenue. Marian heard another car coming. Before it reached range of her sight four white men came hurrying along. Rhur, the policeman, was the foremost, and the last two were Glendon and Naylor. Marian did not recognize the second man. They had the mien of angry, excited men, yet not overbold. Then the second car hove in sight. Sam Ween, the interpreter, was driving it. Morgan stood on the running board and Blucher stood up inside. It was not a difficult matter for Marian to perceive the state of their minds. When the car stopped Morgan dropped off and Blucher piled out.
“Arrest that Indian!” he yelled.
Rhur apparently had the least reluctance to penetrate the suddenly silent crowd of Indians, and one of his deputies, the stranger Marian did not recognize, rather haltingly followed him. Glendon and Naylor hung back, a fact that added to Blucher’s exasperation. Morgan, too, edged away from the ominous- looking front line of Indians. Presently that line was broken to emit Rhur dragging an Indian behind him — the Noki that had hidden. Blucher ran in and shackled him.
“What’d you put irons on him for, you blockhead?” called Morgan. “Indians hate irons. And I told you they were in bad mood. Some of them drunk!”
“Who’s doing this?” hoarsely called the agent.
The younger and probably more intoxicated number of the Indians suddenly appeared to move in unison and to spread round Blucher and his men. They closed in, shouting.
“Let that Indian go!” yelled Morgan, with all his might.
“See him — in hell first,” yelled back Blucher.
Then the crowd became noisy, violent, and decidedly threatening. Marian lost sight of the white men in the mêlée. She felt her pulses beat in excitement and fear. Surely the Indians were in no mood to trifle. How dark and wild their upturned faces! They surged into a knot. That, too, broke as before, only more rudely, and it let out the white men, disheveled, pale, and thoroughly frightened. The Indians had forced Blucher to unshackle the Noki he had arrested. They jeered at him. Bottles flashed aloft, held by dark, sinewy hands. “Whisky!” some of the Indians shouted, and several deliberately drank in the very face of Blucher. He was forced back toward the side of the trading post, as it chanced near the window where Marian crouched.
“Skin stretched over stick!” yelled a Noki who could speak good English. Then both Nokis and Nopahs took up that slogan, each in their own tongue. Taunt, contempt, hate, and warning all seemed embodied in this outburst.
Then older and sober Indians in the crowd dragged the violent ones back and away from the trading post. But, plainly, it was no easy task. Cooler heads prevailed, however, and it seemed that Blucher and Morgan had narrowly escaped violence.
“What’d I tell you?” shouted the missionary, hoarsely.
Blucher vouchsafed no reply. His pale sweaty face seemed to have fixed in an expression of furious trance. Marian had a good look at him as he passed the window to go to his car. He might have been walking in a nightmare. Indians were naught to him. His strident orders and violent movements had been merely explosion of an unabatable and terrible passion. Stolid, heavy, immovable German that he was, he had heard news to unseat his reason for this hour.
Likewise Marian had a fleeting glimpse of Morgan’s face. Did she catch a lurking sardonic gleam, a malignant flash of eyes? Or had her sensitive imagination conjured up illusive justifications of her opinion of this man? She marveled at the missionary. As a woman she seemed to shrink from her enormous conception of him. Was she right or wrong? She would have wagered her all that his mind was an abyss as dark as hell and that his soul was a wilderness.
Then these two men, at once so infinitesimally little in her conception of life and so monstrously powerful to rouse the drum and beat of her passions, slowly passed out of her sight.
December came, bleak and raw, but holding off on the inclement weather that made the desert an inhospitable place for white people. Influenza was reported by the authorities on widely separated parts of the desert. No effort was made to check the disease or to minister to any Indians except the school children. But it was not considered serious.
Marian awoke one day to a realization that she had found favor with the Nokis. Long before she expected it she was welcome in the secluded homes of these strange desert people. After all, they were very human, very susceptible to kindness and goodness. They would accept charity and presents, but a material gift was no sure way to their hearts. Marian really did not discover this until after she had won them.
Then it became clear to her that she had been under as intelligent and careful a scrutiny as she had bent upon them. She was judged by what she said and did, and by developments that verified the appearance of her actions.
After Marian had acquainted herself with the actual condition of these Indians she set to work in her own way to help them. There were babies and old men going blind from trachoma; there were children with congenital hip- disease; there were always injured horsemen and sick housekeepers; last of all, the whole village was poor and growing poorer.
The war might be over, but its aftermath had just begun. There were signs that more than warranted the gloomy forebodings of Withers.
Marian never saw the government school doctor waste a ride down to Copenwashie. She brought a physician from Flagerstown. And his several visits, followed by her own ministrations, alleviated considerable distress. When the skeptical Nokis saw there was no aftermath from this, no obligation, nothing but the kindness of Benow di cleash, they subtly and almost imperceptibly changed. The old Nokis learned to relax their somber faces in a slight smile; the children grew glad to see Marian, more for her presence than for gifts.
It was very hard for Marian to remain even half an hour inside the little houses because of the acrid smoke from the open fires. This severely affected her eyes and even her throat. When she got out into the cold cutting desert wind she was always relieved. So she did the best that she could, grateful indeed that her efforts were not futile.
Paxton went out of his routine to help her. Eckersall, in his rough, uncouth way, left no stone unturned in her behalf. Between the two of them Marian seldom had to walk the wind-swept two-mile stretch up the mesa. She did not come into contact with Blucher or Morgan, and so far as she could tell, they were not paying any attention to her affairs. This apparent fact, however, did not blind Marian to their possibilities. They were like moles, burrowing in the dark.
Naturally Marian’s increasingly close relation to some of the Nokis resulted in their confidences. And by the middle of December most of the little tribe who owned horses or cattle, and especially all of the freighters were hard pressed for feed for their stock. Marian lent money to some of the neediest. But the situation was not to be met by the little money she could spare. So she took up the matter with Eckersall.
“Reckon I seen it comin’ all along,” was Eckersall’s reply. “The Nokis are in for a hell of a winter, if you’ll excuse my talk, miss.”
“How much will it cost to buy hay for the winter?” asked Marian.
“Them freighters alone will eat up a thousand dollars before spring.”
“Oh, so much! I can’t afford that.”
“Wal, sure you can’t. An’ what you are doin’ more’n shows up this bunch.”
“Where can we get help?” went on Marian.
“Reckon I don’t know. Have you any friends you could ask?”
“Hardly. I wonder if Withers could help us.”<
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“Withers! I should say not. Why, that trader is goin’ broke on the Indians this winter. Mark my words. I met him at Red Sandy last week. An’ I asked how about things out Kaidab way. He just threw up his hands.”
“Eckersall, who has all the alfalfa raised here this last summer?” queried Marian, curiously.
“Friel has most of it.”
“Ah! And has Blucher any hay?”
“Aplenty. Some I raised an’ the rest freighted from town.”
“Well, cannot the Indians get some of that hay?”
“Hump! They’ll have to pay d —— high for it. An’ jest now is a bad time. Blucher is sore over the meat deal.”
“What is that?”
“Wal, miss, I’m only a government employee, an’ I reckon I ought to keep my mouth shut. Sure I could trust you. But that’s not the point.... I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll go to the agent an’ make a strong talk for the Nokis.”
“Thank you, Eckersall. That’s good of you. Maybe we can do something.”
But Marian’s hopes were not high. And when from another source she learned the current talk about the meat deal she was even less sanguine. It appeared that as the winter advanced Blucher had solicited meat from the Nokis and Nopahs. But he would not pay over five dollars for a beef. As a result the Indians sold but little of their stock and the Indian school children had considerably less of a meat diet. Marian knew that the government advanced more money than offered by Blucher. But he refused to pay more than five dollars. It took no clever acumen to deduct why this was so and what he did with the difference.
Several days elapsed before Marian again saw Eckersall.
“Wal, me an’ you are on the wrong side of the fence,” he complained, ruefully, in reply to her eager query.
“How so?”
“We have a hankerin’ for these poor devils of Indians.... Miss, I went to our German agent an’ I made the speech of my life. I painted the woe of the Nokis an’ the sufferin’ of the horses as it was never done before. I told him that he made the Nokis freight supplies from town; that he didn’t pay them enough; that these freighters had no other way to make a livin’. He said he hadn’t any hay to spare at twenty dollars the ton. Go to the missionary!... Wal, I went to Friel an’ talked with him. An’ he said forty dollars a ton!... The Nokis can’t pay that. So I went back to Blucher an’ railed at him again. He snapped at me: ‘If Friel wants forty dollars a ton for their hay, then the Indians will have to pay forty dollars!’”
Not long after that Marian met one of the freight wagons at the foot of the mesa grade. The wagon was packed full of boxes and bales, making a prodigious load to haul through sand and up the desert hills. Three teams of mustangs Were hitched to it. Six little horses! They were skin and bones. How dejected and weary and hungry they appeared! Their ribs showed like fence pickets. Raw sores had been worn by the makeshift harness.
The drivers, both young Nokis, were walking. One held the long reins; the other led at the head of the first team. They were as tired as their horses. They had walked from Flagerstown — the whole distance of near eighty miles — to spare their teams. Marian questioned them, and though they grinned, their replies were significantly of depression.
Following that incident, Marian fell upon another equally illuminating. Friel had several times told an intelligent Noki: “Hay and grain will be provided by Jesus Christ if you believe all I tell you.” This missionary left his two skinny horses to graze round the trading post. One day the intelligent Noki was driving home and in his wagon was some hay for his horses. When the Noki went into the post the starved horses belonging to Friel approached the wagon and ate up the hay. Upon discovering the circumstance, the Noki dryly remarked:
“Yes, missionary off somewhere praying Jesus Christ to send hay — and his horses here steal and eat mine!”
The Nokis realized that their land was being gradually taken away from them and this winter they had grown restive and morbid under the strain. In former years the Nokis had been allowed to raise alfalfa on a certain number of acres of the school farm, but this year that privilege had been taken from them. If the government was using all the hay raised and if the missionary demanded exorbitant prices for theirs, then all the Noki could do was to quit freighting supplies. For his horses had grown too weak to pull.
Winter came at last, biting, icy, and the desert became an open waste to dread. Day after day dark clouds rose, threatening storm.
Privation followed hard on the cold heels of winter, and many of the Noki families began to suffer. What with lack of food for man and beast the outlook was discouraging indeed. Marian bought stores of supplies from Paxton — who charged exactly what they had cost him — but these did not go far or long.
Then came the incident that heaped fuel on the fires of Noki resentment.
Friel had made a hurried trip to Flagerstown, where he learned that flour had gone up two dollars a hundred weight. It so happened that on his return trip he passed several Noki wagons going into Copenwashie to buy flour. Therefore, in possession of this information, he hurriedly drove to the trading posts at Copenwashie and Mesa, and bought all the flour the traders had, some two thousand pounds, at the old price.
Friel before this incident had won a universal dislike for himself. It then fell out that he was to go beyond the endurance of even these stoical Nokis.
He got permission from the agent to preach to the school children after they had assembled in the schoolroom each day. So he chose the first hour of the morning session and talked to the children about his interpretation of the Bible. The Nokis objected to Friel’s taking the time from the school work to impose his doctrine upon them, and they complained to the agent. Nothing was done. The Nokis grew more resentful. They roused dissension. Their activities caused reports to be made to the government, and an inspector was sent out. He ruled that the preaching during school hours be discontinued. But after he had gone Friel was seen to get audience with Morgan and Blucher, with the result that he kept up the preaching during the forbidden hour.
The Nokis held council over this turn of affairs and absolute usurpation of their rights. The chief himself came to Marian and asked her to read to him the ruling of the inspector. She did so, in Nopah and in English, both of which languages he understood.
“Benow di cleash, don’t you think we ought to kill him?” asked the Noki.
Marian was shocked and told him with all the force she could command that murder would only add to their troubles.
“Don’t you think we ought to kill him?” the chief kept repeating to everything Marian said.
“No, no, you must not,” she protested. “Try sending a delegation to face Friel. Show him the inspector’s ruling and tell him you have had white people read it.”
“Don’t you think we ought to kill him?” was all the chief said.
But the next day, while Friel was preaching to the children, this delegation suggested by Marian assembled in front of the village.
It was a cold, lowering day, with wind sweeping down across the desert. The village had been swept clear of snow, except in the protected corners of stone walls. Marian had anticipated some untoward event, and she had borrowed a horse to ride down early. That trip had required something of fortitude. When she neared the village she saw Nokis riding in from the Red Sandy trail. And when she reached the dip of mesa rim she had further cause for excitement.
The delegation contained all the male Nokis, and some of the other sex, with a plentiful addition of Nopahs. Marian’s eyes gladdened at sight of the tall, graceful, picturesque Nopah riders, blanketed as they were. Manifestly there was something in the wind. The crowd was walking and riding toward the school. Marian followed. It was some distance, and all the way new riders fell in with the delegation. What surprised Marian and added to her excitement was the apparent fact that the Nopahs were going to take part in this protest. But to Marian it looked more ominous than a formal stating of objections. The Nokis meant
to stop the preaching that they considered an imposition on the time and attention of the school children.
“Friel, come out!” shouted a clear voice, in good English. It rang in Marian’s ears. Unmistakably Indian, but was it Noki? Marian had to restrain a strange agitation. She convinced herself she was nervous and overinclined to imaginings. But she felt that she could trust to her eyes, and she rode farther, to within one hundred feet of the school.
Friel did not appear promptly enough to please the Nokis. They began to shout. Some one pounded on the door. Then again the clear, high Indian voice pealed above the others, silencing them.
“Come out or we’ll come in!”
The door opened and Friel appeared. His face was red. His figure, which resembled Morgan’s, seemed instinct with intolerant authority. Yet in spite of this he was not at ease.
“What do you want?” he demanded.
“Get out. Quit preaching,” replied the leader, and from the crowd came shouts confirming his order.
“I won’t!” yelled Friel, furiously. “Blucher gave me permission to preach. I’m going to do it.”
“Read the order from Washington.”
The man waved aside the paper flaunted in his face. It appeared to be in the hands of a short Noki, beside whom stood a tall Nopah. He wore a wide sombrero pulled down over his face. The crowd of Indians rode and pressed closer. A low hubbub of voices began to rise.
“Come. Go to Blucher. Let us hear what he says. Let us have understanding. You’ve got to stop preaching in school!”
“No!” exclaimed Friel, hotly. “I won’t stop. And I won’t go to Blucher.”
One of the mounted Nokis cast a lasso, the noose of which circled Friel’s neck. The crowd shouted wildly.
“Haul him out,” yelled the leader.
Then the mounted Noki rode away from the school, drawing the lasso taut and dragging the missionary out through the crowd. His face was not now red. Both his hands clutched at the noose round his neck. Manifestly the intention had merely been to rope him and drag him into the presence of the agent. A wild young Noki, mounted on a spirited horse, pulled it up until its front hoofs pawed the air.