The Vanishing American

by Zane Grey

  But Nophaie gave no outward sign of the storm within him. It passed, like a wind of death. And he marveled at the strange chances of life. Here stood this Blucher, utterly unaware of the presence of the Indian who had no fear of anything, who had waived murder by the breadth of a hair. Evil men there had been and still were in the world–men who knew the perils of life and had the nerve to gamble with them–but Blucher was not one of these. Morgan was a stronger man, as he was a greater villain, yet he too was as blind as a bat. Dead to something righteous and terrible in the souls of some men! The agent of the government and the missionary of the church were but little and miserable destroyers, vermin of the devil, with all their twisted and deformed mentality centered upon self.

  Before sunset that day Nophaie was in Flagerstown and had dispatched a note to Marian. Before he started to meet her he had enlisted at the recruiting station and was a soldier of the United States army.

  At the end of a street near the outskirts of town Nophaie found the number he was looking for. And as he mounted the porch of the little cottage Marian opened the door. Fair golden flash of face and hair! He did not see clearly, stumbling as he went in. Her voice sounded strange. Then they were alone in a little room with vague walls. Dread he had felt at prospect of this meeting, but he had not understood. He only wanted to spare her pain. This woman now, holding his hands, gazing with strained dark eyes of agony up at him, was remembered by her beloved fair face, but something in it was strange to him.

  “Benow di cleash!” he said, unsteadily.

  “Nophaie–lover–my Indian!... You are going to war,” she whispered, and threw her arms round his neck.

  Even as Nophaie bent to her white face and to her lips, he grasped at the meaning of her singular abandon. One word had been enough. War! And he pitied her, and loved her as never before, and understood her, and clasped her close, and kissed her until she sank against him, pale and spent. To him her kisses, with all their sweetness of fire, called to his own lips only an austerity of farewell. Long ago, in his Canyon of Silent Walls, he had fought his battle against love. Here he was as strong, tranquil, grave as she was weak and passionate.

  “Nophaie–when do you–go away?” she whispered.

  “To-night at ten.”

  “Oh!–So soon?–But you go first to training camp?” she queried, breathlessly.

  “Yes.”

  “You might not be sent abroad.”

  “Benow di cleash, do not have false hopes. You want me to go to France. I’m fit now to fight. And it will not take long to make soldiers of my Nopahs.”

  “That means the–the front line–the trenches–scout and sharpshooter duty–the most dangerous posts!” she cried, with a hand going to her mouth.

  “Indians would not court the safe places, Benow di cleash. We are going– sixty-four Nopahs, most of whom I enlisted.”

  Then he told her of his long rides and his importunities to beat Blucher’s influence, and of his failure. She warmed to that and in her anger at the treachery of the agent and her pride in Nophaie she passed by the more poignant moment of this meeting.

  “I knew he was pro-German,” she said, with flashing eyes. “Yet strange to say he has strong friends here. Oh, this little town is out of its head. What must Philadelphia or New York be now?”

  “If the Indians are excited, what must white men be?” replied Nophaie. “All this war feeling is bad, wild, terrible. But I have nothing to lose and everything to gain. I–”

  “Nothing to–to–lose,” she cried, suddenly sobbing, and again her arms flashed round his neck. “Nophaie–you have me to lose.... Don’t you love me still?”

  “Love you! Child, you are beside yourself,” he replied, tenderly. He saw the havoc of war in this girl’s breaking of reserve and intensity of emotion. “Only to-day I proved my love to you, Benow di cleash.”

  “How? Not to me–not yet.”

  He told of the incident where Blucher passed within reach of his arm–at a crucial moment when all the savagery of Indian nature was in the ascendant, and he had denied it.

  “Only thought of you kept me from killing him,” he concluded.

  “Me! I’d have been glad,” she returned, with again that strange blaze in her eyes.

  Nophaie realized anew that the white girl now presented a complexity of character perhaps beyond his comprehension. She who had been the one to save Blucher’s life now would have gloried in hearing of his death through her lover. This war spirit had unsettled her mind.

  “Nophaie, let me follow you to New York–to France,” she begged.

  “Let you follow me! Why, Benow di cleash–I couldn’t prevent you, but I implore against it.”

  “I would never disobey you. Let me go. I can become a nurse–do Red Cross work–anything.”

  “No. If you want to obey me–give me happiness–stay hereand go on helping my people until I come back–or–”

  “Don’t say it,” she cried and shut his lips with hers. “I can’t bear the thought. Not yet. Maybe some courage will come to me after you have gone. I love you, Nophaie. A million times more since I came out here to your country. The desert has changed me. Listen, after you leave I will go East for awhile. But I promise I will come back here and work–and wait.”

  “All is well, Benow di cleash,” he said. “I feel that I will come back.... Now let us go outside and walk. I cannot say good-by to you inside a house.”

  Gold and purple clouds attended the last steps of sunset–a magnificent panorama along the western slope of the mountain range. At the end of a lane a low rocky eminence rose, the first lift toward the higher ground above the town. Stately pine trees grew there. Wide apart, rugged and brown, with their thick green tops, they appealed strangely to Nophaie. A solemn and beautiful and splendid emotion came to him as he walked under them with Marian. Strength seemed to have passed from him to her. She was growing calmer and assimilating something of his faith, of the mystic in him.

  The warm summer air floated away, and the cool wind from the mountain took its place. The rosy afterglow of sunset faded into pale blue. A lonely star glimmered in the west. The great still pines grew black against the sky.

  “Benow di cleash, when the Indian says at the end of his prayer, ‘All is well,’ he must mean just that. Your missionary never interprets any prayer as a submission to life, to nature. The white prayer is a fear of death–of what comes beyond. I have no fear of death, nor of what comes after–if anything does come. The only fear I have is for you–and such of my people as Gekin Yashi. Women of my race are marked for suffering. I deplore that. It is one of my atheistic repudiations of the white man’s God. There is enough physical suffering for women. Just last week when I stayed at a hogan I saw an Indian woman die in childbirth.... You must understand how gladly I welcome a chance to forget myself in a righteous war. I know the nature of fight–what violence does to the body–and if it does not kill me it will cure my trouble. Perhaps over there I may find the God I could not find in my silent canyons. Then there is the man–the Indian in me–rising up fierce and hard to fight. If all Germans are like Blucher I want to kill some of them.... You must not have one unhappy hour on account of my going to war. Think of me as an American soldier. Physical pain is nothing to me. I have played football with injuries that would have laid white men in the hospital. I welcome this chance to justify the Indian. Any Indian not steeped in his ancestral blindness and ignorance would be as I am now. So I bid you not be unhappy. If I live to come back to the reservation then you may have cause to be unhappy about me. For I know the war will bring misery and poverty and plague to my people. But be glad now that with all my misfortune I can rise above it and hate, and fight for you and your people. Love of you saved me from the dissolute life so strangely easy for the Indian among white people. It saved me to strive against my unbelief. And it has uplifted me to believe I may come somewheres near the noble Indian you have dreamed me.”

  CHAPTER XVIII

  After Nopha
ie’s departure Marian felt as if the end of all had come. She had not looked beyond this last meeting. And now with the poignant and stinging experiences in the past she seemed lost and broken- hearted. She fell into a terrible depression out of which she struggled with difficulty. The desert called her; the promise to Nophaie was a sacred obligation; but she could not at once return to her work among the Indians. She decided to go back East for a while.

  The hour she arrived in Philadelphia she realized that outside of her need of change and the pleasure of old associations there was other cause for her to be glad she had returned.

  Philadelphia, like other great cities, was in the throes of preparing for war. The fever of the war emotion had seized every one. The equilibrium of the staid and tranquil city of brotherly love had been upset. Marian found her relatives as changed as if many years had intervened between her departure and return. They had forgotten her. Each was obsessed by his or her peculiar relation to the war. The draft of a son or brother or nephew, the seeking of war offices, the shifting of trade to meet the exigencies of war demands–all these attitudes seemed personal and self-seeking. Many of Marian’s acquaintances, young men under thirty, in one way or another evaded the clutch of the service. Conduct such as this was thrown into relief by the eagerness with which others enlisted before the draft. Young women were finding the world changed for them. Every opportunity appeared thrust upon them, even to the extreme of donning khaki trousers and driving ambulances in France. Marian could have found a hundred positions, all more remunerative than any she had ever had. It was a time of stress. It was a time of intense emotional strain. It was a time when the nobility and selfishness of human nature were enhanced. It was a time that tried the souls of mothers. It was a time which called forth strange, deep and far-reaching instincts in young women. It was a time when many soldiers misused the glamour of their uniforms.

  Marian had her own reasons for being personally and tremendously stirred by the war. That made her charitable and generous in her judgments of others. But the wildness and unrestraint she could not condone. She could not blame any girl for heedlessly rushing into marriage with a soldier–for she had yearned to marry Nophaie–but she was affronted and disgusted by the abandon she saw in so many young people. The war had given them a headlong impetus toward she knew not what.

  Yet Marian felt this strange and terrible thing herself.

  Why did her heart swell when she saw a soldier? Why did her eyes dim when she saw from her window a train-load of soldiers speeding toward New York? The spectacular sale of Liberty Bonds, the drives, the bazaars, the balls, the crowded theaters, the enlistment of half the graduating class of the University of Pennsylvania–in the midst of all this strange exalting atmosphere Marian found her reason for being glad she had come. No American should have failed to see and feel these days. The desert had isolated and insulated Marian, until it had seemed she was no longer a part of the great Republic. She had as much reason as any woman–except mother of a soldier–to be terribly drawn into the chaos of war times. Whenever she thought of Nophaie a shuddering possessed her internal body and she was sick. Yet there was a pride in him that was growing infinite.

  Marian did her bit in the way of buying and selling bonds, and in Y. M. C. A. and Red Cross work. But for her promise to Nophaie to go back to the reservation she would have gone, like so many young women, to extremes of war enthusiasm. The urge to go to France was something hard to resist.

  Nophaie’s letters were few and far between, and not what they had been out in the desert, but upon them Marian lived and sustained her hope. In September she went to the seashore to get away from the humidity and tainted air of the city, which, since her sojourn in the West, she could hardly endure. And she needed rest. She went to Cape May and haunted the places on the beach where she had been with Nophaie.

  The restless bright Atlantic! Marian bathed in the surf and spent long hours upon the sand. This period was restful, yet it was singularly acute and living. The grand roll of the breakers, the thunder and boom, the white foam and the flying spindrift, the green heaving sea far out–these elements seemed to be understood better and appreciated more through her memory of the desert. But she loved the desert most; and every day the call of the wide colored wastes, the loneliness, and something she could not define, rang more insistently in her ears.

  So time flew by, and autumn began to decline into winter. It took time for Marian to dispose of the little property she had, and following that came a letter from Nophaie telling her when he was to sail from New York for France. Marian went to New York in a vain hope of seeing him. But all she had of him was the sound of his voice over the telephone. For this she was unutterably grateful. The instant she had answered his “hello,” he had called: “Benow di cleash?” Then shaking all over there in the little booth, she had listened to his brief words of love and farewell.

  She was one of the throng of thousands of women on the Hoboken docks when the huge liner left her moorings. Thousands of faces of soldiers blurred in Marian’s sight. Perhaps one of them was Nophaie. She waved to them and to him. She was only one of these thousands of women left behind to suffer and endure. This was harder for Marian than the farewell in Flagerstown.

  White fluttering sea of waving handkerchiefs! Flash of ruddy boyish faces! These meant so much. They were so infinitely more than just incidents of life.

  The keen bright winter sun shone down on the deck of weeping women, on the huge liner with its tan-colored fringe of human freight, on the choppy green- waved Hudson River, and the glitter of the city beyond.

  Marian returned to Philadelphia with her spirit at lowest ebb and for once in her life fell prey to an apparently endless dejection. Besides, the cold wet climate had a bad effect upon her after the dry bracing desert. She suffered a spell of illness, and when she recovered from that she deemed it best to wait for spring before starting west. Meanwhile she went into war work. All of her notes on the reservation and the Indian school remained untouched. She had not the heart to rewrite them for publication. She read newspapers and periodicals upon the war until her mind was in a chaotic state. Once at least she was stung into specific realization and an agony of suspense.

  A newspaper printed a report of French operations along a river at the front. For some reason not stated it was important that observations be kept from the end of a certain bridge, long under German gun-fire. For three days a soldier had stood motionless, whitewashed to resemble a post, at the exposed end of that bridge. He was successful in his observations and had not drawn the gun- fire of the enemy. But he died from the strain and the coatings of whitewash. This scout was an American Indian.

  “He–he might have been Nophaie!” whispered Marian, in torture.

  In the spring Marian received a reply to a letter she had written Mrs. Wolterson:

  Dear Marian:

  I am long indeed in replying to your most welcome and interesting letter. But you will forgive me, for my excuse is work, work, work. Imagine! out of six white people and thirty little Indian children I was the only one not down with influenza.

  First your account of the goings-on of people in the East, and all that war stuff, stirred me to thrills, made me long to be home–for I too am an Easterner–and yet caused me to thank God I am out in the open country.

  We were transferred here, as you already know, and left Mesa without regret, except for our few true friends there. We are fortunate to be retained in the service at all. The wrong done my husband by Blucher and Morgan was not undone and never will be.

  Blucher, you will be glad to hear, had a sudden check to his open pro- Germanism. Something or somebody frightened him. My friends write me that his reaction to this fear, whatever it was, resulted in his applying himself to reservation work. But he will not last much longer as superintendent. He will get the ‘steam-roller.’

  Morgan, however, goes on his triumphant way with his Old Book behind him. What a monster that man is! It is utterly inconceiva
ble that such a fanatical devil could have such power among many good missionaries.

  Here is a bit of news that comes closer to us. Gekin Yashi has again disappeared. Headquarters reported she had run off. But my correspondent in Mesa does not believe it. No attempt was made to trace her. If she had run off she would have been tracked. Neither Rhur or any of the policemen has left Mesa. I know what I think, and so does Robert. But it seems best not to trust my suspicions to a letter. Some day the truth will come out. Alas for the Little Beauty of the Nopahs! When I think of her, and the child prodigy Evangeline, and noble Nophaie, I am sore at heart.

  King Point is not at all like Mesa. I loved Mesa, despite what I suffered there. This place is high up on the desert, over seven thousand feet above sea level. It is bleak, barren, bitter cold, and the winds are terrible. The snow last winter blew level with the sand. It did not fall! But there is beauty here. Great red bluffs, covered with cedars and sand dunes forever changing with the wind, and yellow mesas, and long white slopes of valley. But the solitude, the cold, and the mournful winds are dreadful. Influenza swooped down on us late in winter, a very fortunate circumstance. Had spring not come I believe the whole population of thirty-six would have been wiped out.

  As it was everybody but myself fell sick. Can you imagine my labors? I had them all to myself before a doctor came, and then after he was gone. The poor little Indian children–they were so sick! I hardly had time to eat, let alone sleep. And when relief came it was none too soon for me.

  I have no direct information regarding influenza ravages at other points on the reservation. But I understand it hit the Nopahs pretty hard. I never saw any disease like this. I dread the return of winter. Warm weather kills the germ or whatever spreads this sickness. If it should come early in winter I shudder to think what might happen out here on the reservation.