by Wister, Owen
"They're after your contract," said he, quietly. "They say they're going to have the job of takin' the balance of your stuff that's left acrosst the Okanagon over to this side."
"What did you say?" asked Mrs. Clallam.
"I set 'em up drinks to gain time."
"Do you want me there?" said Clallam.
"Begosh, no! That would mix things worse."
"Can't you make them go away?" Elizabeth inquired.
"Me and them, ye see, ma'am, we hev a sort of bargain they're to git certain ferryin'. I can't make 'em savvy how I took charge of you. If you want them—" He paused.
"We want them!" exclaimed Elizabeth. "If you're joking, it's a poor joke."
"It ain't no joke at all, ma'am." Jake's face grew brooding. "Of course folks kin say who they'll be ferried by. And you may believe I'd rather do it. I didn't look for jest this complication; but maybe I kin steer through; and it's myself I've got to thank. Of course, if them Siwashes did git your job, they'd sober up gittin' ready. And—"
The emigrants waited, but he did not go on with what was in his mind. "It's all right," said he, in a brisk tone. "Whatever's a-comin's a-comin'." He turned abruptly towards the door. "Keep yerselves away jest now," he added, and went inside.
The parents sought their children, finding Mart had concealed Nancy in the haystack. They put Mrs. Clallam also in a protected place, as a loud altercation seemed to be rising at the cabin; this grew as they listened, and Jake's squaw came running to hide herself. She could tell them nothing, nor make them understand more than they knew; but she touched John's rifle, signing to know if it were loaded, and was greatly relieved when he showed her the magazine full of cartridges. The quarrelling had fallen silent, but rose in a new gust of fierceness, sounding as if in the open air and coming their way. No Indian appeared, however, and the noise passed to the river, where the emigrants soon could hear wood being split in pieces.
John risked a survey. "It's the raft," he said. "They're smashing it. Now they're going back. Stay with the children, Liza."
"You're never going to that cabin?" she said.
"He's in a scrape, mother."
John started away, heedless of his wife's despair. At his coming the Indians shouted and surrounded him, while he heard Jake say, "Drop your gun and drink with them."
"Drink!" said Andy, laughing with the same screech he had made at the match going out. "We re all going to Canaan, Connecticut."
Each Indian held a tin cup, and at the instant these were emptied they were thrust towards Jake, who filled them again, going and coming through a door that led a step or two down into a dark place which was half underground. Once he was not quick, or was imagined to be refusing, for an Indian raised his cup and drunkenly dashed it on Jake's head. Jake laughed good-humoredly, and filled the cup.
"It's our one chance," said he to John as the Indian, propping himself by a hand on the wall, offered the whiskey to Clallam.
"We cross you Okanagon," he said. "What yes?"
"Maybe you say no?" said another, pressing the emigrant to the wall.
A third interfered, saying something in their language, at which the other two disagreed. They talked a moment with threatening rage till suddenly all drew pistols. At this the two remaining stumbled among the group, and a shot went into the roof. Jake was there in one step with a keg, that they no sooner saw than they fell upon it, and the liquor jetted out as they clinched, wrestling over the room till one lay on his back with his mouth at the open bung. It was wrenched from him, and directly there was not a drop more in it. They tilted it, and when none ran out, flung the keg out of doors and crowded to the door of the dark place, where Jake barred the way. "Don't take to that yet!" he said to Clallam, for John was lifting his rifle.
"Piah-chuck!" yelled the Indians, scarcely able to stand. All other thought had left them, and a new thought came to Jake. He reached for a fresh keg, while they held their tin cups in the left hand and pistols in the right, pushing so it was a slow matter to get the keg opened. They were fast nearing the sodden stage, and one sank on the floor. Jake glanced in at the door behind him, and filled the cups once again. While all were drinking he went in the store-room and set more liquor open, beckoning them to come as they looked up from the rims to which their lips had been glued. They moved round behind the table, grasping it to keep on their feet, with the one on the floor crawling among the legs of the rest. When they were all inside, Jake leaped out and locked the door.
"They kin sleep now," said he. "Gunpowder won't be needed. Keep wide away from in front."
There was a minute of stillness within, and then a groveling noise and struggle. A couple of bullets came harmless through the door. Those inside fought together as well as they could, while those outside listened as it grew less, the bodies falling stupefied without further sound of rising. One or two, still active, began striking at the boards with what heavy thing they could find, until suddenly the blade of an axe crashed through.
"Keep away!" cried Jake. But Andy had leaped insanely in front of the door, and fell dead with a bullet through him. With a terrible scream, Jake flung himself at the place, and poured six shots through the panel; then, as Clallam caught him, wrenched at the lock, and they saw inside. Whiskey and blood dripped together, and no one was moving there. It was liquor with some, and death with others, and all of it lay upon the guilty soul of Jake.
"You deserve killing yourself," said Clallam.
"That's been attended to," replied Jake, and he reeled, for during his fire some Indian had shot once more.
Clallam supported him to the room where his wife and Nancy had passed the night, and laid him on the bed. "I'll get Mrs. Clallam," said he.
"If she'll be willin' to see me," said the wounded man, humbly.
She came, dazed beyond feeling any horror, or even any joy, and she did what she could.
"It was seein' 'em hit Andy," said Jake. "Is Andy gone? Yes, I kin tell he's gone from your face." He shut his eyes, and lay still so long a time that they thought he might be dying now; but he moved at length, and looked slowly round the wall till he saw the print of the village among the elms and the covered bridge. His hand lifted to show them this. "That's the road," said he. "Andy and me used to go fishin' acrosst that bridge. Did you ever see the Housatonic River? I've fished a lot there. Cornwall, Connecticut. The hills are pretty there. Then Andy got worse. You look in that drawer." John remembered, and when he got out the tintype, Jake stretched for it eagerly. "His mother and him, age ten," he explained to Elizabeth, and held it for her to see, then studied the faces in silence. "You kin tell it's Andy, can't yu'?" She told him yes. "That was before we knowed he weren't—weren't goin' to grow up like the other boys he played with. So after a while, when she was gone, I got ashamed seein' Andy's friends makin' their way when he couldn't seem to, and so I took him away where nobody hed ever been acquainted with us. I was layin' money by to get him the best doctor in Europe. I 'ain't been a good man."
A faintness mastered him, and Elizabeth would have put the picture on the table, but his hand closed round it. They let him lie so, and Elizabeth sat there, while John, with Mart, kept Nancy away till the horror in the outer room was made invisible. They came and went quietly, and Jake seemed in a deepening torpor, once only rousing suddenly to call his son's name, and then, upon looking from one to the other, he recollected, and his eyes closed again. His mind wandered, but very little, for torpor seemed to be overcoming him. The squaw had stolen in, and sat cowering and useless. Towards sundown John's heart sickened at the sound of more horsemen; but it was only two white men, a sheriff and his deputy.
"Go easy," said John. "He's not going to resist."
"What's up here, anyway? Who are you?"
Clallam explained, and was evidently not so much as half believed.
"If there are Indians killed," said the sheriff, "there's still another matter for the law to settle with him. We're sent to search for whiskey. The county's about tired of him
."
"You'll find him pretty sick," said John.
"People I find always are pretty sick," said the sheriff, and pushed his way in, stopping at sight of Mrs. Clallam and the figure on the bed. "I'm arresting that man, madam," he said, with a shade of apology. "The county court wants him."
Jake sat up and knew the sheriff. "You're a little late, Proctor," said he. "The Supreme Court's a-goin' to call my case." Then he fell back, for his case had been called.
Hank's Woman
I
Many fish were still in the pool; and though luck seemed to have left me, still I stood at the end of the point, casting and casting my vain line, while the Virginian lay and watched. Noonday's extreme brightness had left the river and the plain in cooling shadow, but spread and glowed over the yet undimmed mountains. Westward, the Tetons lifted their peaks pale and keen as steel through the high, radiant air. Deep down between the blue gashes of their canons the sun sank long shafts of light, and the glazed laps of their snow-fields shone separate and white upon their lofty vastness, like handkerchiefs laid out to dry. Opposite, above the valley, rose that other range, the Continental Divide, not sharp, but long and ample. It was bare in some high places, and below these it stretched everywhere, high and low, in brown and yellow parks, or in purple miles of pine a world of serene undulations, a great sweet country of silence.
A passing band of antelope stood herded suddenly together at sight of us; then a little breeze blew for a moment from us to them, and they drifted like phantoms away, and were lost in the levels of the sage-brush.
"If humans could do like that," said the Virginian, watching them go.
"Run, you mean?" said I.
"Tell a foe by the smell of him," explained the cow-puncher; "at fifty yards—or a mile."
"Yes," I said; "men would be hard to catch."
"A woman needs it most," he murmured. He lay down again in his lounging sprawl, with his grave eyes intently fixed upon my fly-casting.
The gradual day mounted up the hills farther from the floor of earth. Warm airs eddied in its wake slowly, stirring the scents of the plain together. I looked at the Southerner; and there was no guessing what his thoughts might be at work upon behind that drowsy glance. Then for a moment a trout rose, but only to look and whip down again into the pool that wedged its calm into the riffle from below.
"Second thoughts," mused the Virginian; and as the trout came no more, "Second thoughts," he repeated; "and even a fish will have them sooner than folks has them in this mighty hasty country." And he rolled over into a new position of ease.
At whom or what was he aiming these shafts of truth? Or did he moralize merely because health and the weather had steeped him in that serenity which lifts us among the spheres? Well, sometimes he went on from these beginnings and told me wonderful things.
"I reckon," said he, presently, "that knowing when to change your mind would be pretty near knowledge enough for plain people."
Since my acquaintance with him—this was the second summer of it—I had come to understand him enough to know that he was unfathomable. Still, for a moment it crossed my thoughts that perhaps now he was discoursing about himself. He had allowed a jealous foreman to fall out with him at Sunk Creek ranch in the spring, during Judge Henry's absence. The man, having a brief authority, parted with him. The Southerner had chosen that this should be the means of ultimately getting the foreman dismissed and himself recalled. It was strategic. As he put it to me: "When I am gone, it will be right easy for the Judge to see which of us two he wants. And I'll not have done any talking." All of which duly befell in the autumn as he had planned: the foreman was sent off, his assistant promoted, and the Virginian again hired. But this was meanwhile. He was indulging himself in a several months' drifting, and while thus drifting he had written to me. That is how we two came to be on our way from the railroad to hunt the elk and the mountain-sheep, and were pausing to fish where Buffalo Fork joins its waters with Snake River. In those days the antelope still ran there in hundreds, the Yellowstone Park was a new thing, and mankind lived very far away. Since meeting me with the horses in Idaho the Virginian had been silent, even for him. So now I stood casting my fly, and trusting that he was not troubled with second thoughts over his strategy.
"Have yu' studded much about marriage?" he now inquired. His serious eyes met mine as he lay stretched along the ground.
"Not much," I said; "not very much."
"Let's swim," he said. "They have changed their minds."
Forthwith we shook off our boots and dropped our few clothes, and heedless of what fish we might now drive away, we went into the cool, slow, deep breadth of backwater which the bend makes just there. As he came up near me, shaking his head of black hair, the cowpuncher was smiling a little.
"Not that any number of baths," he remarked, "would conceal a man's objectionableness from an antelope—not even a she-one."
Then he went under water, and came up again a long way off.
We dried before the fire, without haste. To need no clothes is better than purple and fine linen. Then he tossed the flap-jacks, and I served the trout, and after this we lay on our backs upon a buffalo-hide to smoke and watch the Tetons grow more solemn, as the large stars opened out over the sky.
"I don't care if I never go home," said I.
The Virginian nodded. "It gives all the peace o' being asleep with all the pleasure o' feeling the widest kind of awake," said he. "Yu' might say the whole year's strength flows hearty in every waggle of your thumb." We lay still for a while. "How many things surprise yu' any more?" he next asked.
I began considering; but his silence had at length worked round to speech.
"Inventions, of course," said he, "these hyeh telephones an' truck yu' see so much about in the papers—but I ain't speaking o' such things of the brain. It is just the common things I mean. The things that a livin', noticin' man is liable to see and maybe sample for himself. How many o' them kind can surprise yu' still?"
I still considered.
"Most everything surprised me onced," the cow-puncher continued, in his gentle Southern voice. "I must have been a mighty green boy. Till I was fourteen or fifteen I expect I was astonished by ten o'clock every morning. But a man begins to ketch on to folks and things after a while. I don't consideh that when—that afteh a man is, say twenty-five, it is creditable he should get astonished too easy. And so yu've not examined yourself that-away?"
I had not.
"Well, there's two things anyway—I know them for sure—that I expect will always get me—don't care if I live to thirty-five, or forty-five, or eighty. And one's the ways lightning can strike." He paused. Then he got up and kicked the fire, and stood by it, staring at me. "And the other is the people that other people will marry."
He stopped again; and I said nothing.
"The people that other people will marry," he repeated. "That will surprise me till I die."
"If my sympathy—" I began.
But the brief sound that he gave was answer enough, and more than enough cure for my levity.
"No," said he, reflectively; "not any such thing as a fam'ly for me, yet. Never, it may be. Not till I can't help it. And that woman has not come along so far. But I have been sorry for a woman lately. I keep thinking what she will do. For she will have to do something. Do yu' know Austrians? Are they quick in their feelings, like I-talians? Or are they apt to be sluggish, same as Norwegians and them other Dutch-speakin' races?"
I told him what little I knew about Austrians.
"This woman is the first I have ever saw of 'em," he continued. "Of course men will stampede into marriage in this hyeh Western country, where a woman is a scanty thing. It ain't what Hank has done that surprises me. And it is not on him that the sorrow will fall. For she is good. She is very good. Do yu' remember little black Hank? From Texas he claims he is. He was working on the main ditch over at Sunk Creek last summer when that Em'ly hen was around. Well, seh, yu' would not have pleasured in
his company. And this year Hank is placer-mining on Galena Creek, where we'll likely go for sheep. There's Honey Wiggin and a young fello' named Lin McLean, and some others along with the outfit. But Hank's woman will not look at any of them, though the McLean boy is a likely hand. I have seen that; for I have done a right smart o' business that-a-way myself, here and there. She will mend their clothes for them, and she will cook lunches for them any time o' day, and her conduct gave them hopes at the start. But I reckon Austrians have good religion."
"No better than Americans," said I.
But the Virginian shook his head. "Better'n what I've saw any Americans have. Of course I am not judging a whole nation by one citizen, and especially her a woman. And of course in them big Austrian towns the folks has shook their virtuous sayin's loose from their daily doin's, same as we have. I expect selling yourself brings the quickest returns to man or woman all the world over. But I am speakin' not of towns, but of the back country, where folks don't just merely arrive on the cyars, but come into the world the natural way, and grow up slow. Onced a week anyway they see the bunch of old grave-stones that marks their fam'ly. Their blood and name are knowed about in the neighborhood, and it's not often one of such will sell themselves. But their religion ain't to them like this woman's. They can be rip-snortin' or'tn'ary in ways. Now she is getting naught but hindrance and temptation and meanness from her husband and every livin' thing around her—yet she keeps right along, nor does she mostly bear any signs in her face. She has cert'nly come from where they are used to believing in God and a hereafter mighty hard, and all day long. She has got one o' them crucifixes, and Hank can't make her quit prayin' to it. But what is she going to do?"
"He will probably leave her," I said.
"Yes," said the Virginian—"leave her. Alone; her money all spent; knowin' maybe twenty words of English; and thousands of miles away from everything she can understand. For our words and ways is all alike strange to her."
"Then why did he want such a person?" I exclaimed.