The Long Journey Home

by Don Coldsmith

  “Sure. It’s more or less family now, ain’t it? I’ll be okay, John.”

  She snuggled close again, and this time he didn’t protest.

  It was difficult and confusing to stay in touch with McGregor for the rest of the circuit. John felt a responsibility to the 101 to finish the agreed-upon show season. It took a couple of letters back and forth to finalize the arrangements. That in itself was not easy, because the show was on the move. John kept McGregor informed as to their schedule, as the summer rolled on.

  It was agreed that after the Minnesota State Fair appearances, John would travel by train to Pennsylvania and Carlisle, to join the coaching staff and the athletes with whom they worked.

  He had no contract as such. Most of the 101 Ranch employees operated on a cowboy handshake, and thought nothing of it. Many could not have read their contract, anyway. Basically, contracts were reserved for a few of the headliners. Despite this, however, the strength of the implied agreement was in many cases stronger than words on paper. Unless circumstances were extremely unusual, once the season started, everyone expected to finish it on the show circuit with the rest of the “gang.”

  Finally, John simply wrote McGregor to that effect. I’ll be there this fall. …

  This removed some of the pressure to be doing something. The time he found to be with Hebbie, and to deepen their understanding, was valuable. Their relationship became closer with the knowledge that soon they must be apart for a while.

  He found that he dreaded the parting as the time neared for his trip east. He proposed again.

  “No,” Hebbie said firmly. “I said not now. You got work to do. I’d be a distraction.”

  Then she gave him a seductive wink.

  “But … Just ask me again when you get back!”

  She put him on the train, kissing him good-bye with a few tears.

  “It’ll be okay, John. I’ll take care of Strawberry. Can I ride her in the show?”

  “Sure. You’ll have to cue her left lead sometimes.”

  “Yes, yes … Get on the train, now. And, I’ll take your saddle back to the ranch. I’ll be waitin’!”

  He watched her as long as he could, standing on the platform, waving good-bye. His heart was very heavy, and he nearly decided to jump off the train and go back. But it was accelerating now, and a glance at the cross ties flickering backward beneath the iron wheels quickly changed his mind. He tried to concentrate on what lay ahead, but for a long time he could think only of something Hebbie had said: Ask me again when you get back.

  It was nearing October when John found himself backtracking his journey west a few years ago. He arrived at the station and hitched a ride to the campus.

  The familiar brick buildings looked smaller than he remembered. It was difficult to put things into perspective, after a few years of worldly experience. The bittersweet memories came flowing back … . This had been an important place in his life, and in the lives of many people. Facts which he had known before but which had seemed unimportant now loomed large. More than a century ago, these buildings had been the headquarters of General Washington’s army during the Revolution. That had seemed long ago and far away to him when he had been told of it … . Much more important now … .

  He watched the students in their blue uniforms at close-order drill, heard the bugle calls which regulated the day’s schedule. It was a dreamy return to days long gone, and which could never be recovered … .

  “John! John Buffalo!” a voice called from the practice area for track and field, drawing him back to the present.

  “Good to see you, laddie,” said McGregor, pumping his hand enthusiastically. “Let’s get you settled, and then talk some strategy. Here … let me take one of your bags.”

  Reluctantly, John relinquished the smaller of his bags.

  Across the way on the old field that John had known as the “gridiron,” a football squad worked out.

  “Is your boy—Thorpe, is it?—Is he working at football or track?” John asked.

  McGregor looked somewhat embarrassed.

  “Well, John,” he said haltingly, “I … We … That is … John, he’s not here.”

  “Not here? Where is he?”

  “It’s hard to explain. Come, let’s walk on over to your quarters while we talk. You’re familiar with the ‘outing system’: Students hire out for the summer term to work?”

  “Of course. I did that at Haskell. Not quite the same …”

  “Yes, yes … . Well, Thorpe didn’t come back.”

  “Something happened to him?”

  “No, we’d have heard. But, he never got to that job. We figure he got on the wrong train. John, you’d have to know this Thorpe. He’s a bit unpredictable. Actually, a bit like yourself.”

  “But, Mac … He just didn’t come back, this fall?”

  “Well … Not last year, either.”

  “My God, Mac! He’s missing for two years?”

  “John, it’s not quite like that. We know he’s been working in North Carolina. Just between us, I think Pop Warner has a pretty good idea where he is.”

  “But you expected him back when the fall term started.”

  “Yes, we did. He’ll turn up, sometime, when he thinks it’s time.” McGregor paused with a mischievous grin. “Surely you know about that.”

  The white man’s preoccupation with time was a frequent joke.

  When will it happen?

  A white man states a day and hour. Ask an Indian, and he shrugs … .

  When it’s time.

  It was often said of the red man: “He’s on Indian time.”

  John was sifting this information through his mind.

  “Then … If your athlete’s not here, I guess there’s no job for me?”

  “Oh, yes, John. Warner still wants you, for when we do find Thorpe. Meanwhile, we have some others with great potential. Pop sees this Olympiad as a team effort, not just one star headliner. You’ll be working with others. You can not only coach, but act as a pacesetter for some of the distance runners. Oh, here’s one you need to meet!”

  He motioned to a runner just coming off the track. The young man was short, slender, and wiry, and came trotting over.

  “John, this is Louis Tewanima. He’s a distance man … . Hopi … You’ll be working with him. Louis, John here played football at Carlisle a few years back. He’ll be a trainer and assistant coach—whatever Pop Warner decides to call him. We’ll use him to pace some of the distance runners.”

  Tewanima merely nodded, but John held out a hand and the little Hopi shook it.

  “Guess we’ll be seeing a lot of each other,” suggested John.

  “Yes,” said Tewanima.

  “Well, let’s get you settled,” Mac said to John. “You can get acquainted later.”

  The meeting with Coach Warner was brief and to the point.

  “Mac tells me you’re good with young athletes,” Warner said abruptly. “I won’t try to tell you how to do it. If I had to do that, I wouldn’t need you. We’ve got this Thorpe …”

  “He’s here, then?”

  A strange twinkle appeared in the eyes of the wily coach for a moment and quickly faded. John had a feeling that there was a strong possibility that Thorpe’s disappearance for a while may have been at Warner’s suggestion—or, at least, consent—while the young athlete grew and matured.

  “He’ll be here,” Pop Warner stated positively.

  THIRTY FOUR

  Louis Tewanima proved to be both a challenge and a joy to work with. His command of English was far from fluent, and Louis seemed to consider it unimportant that he attempt to change. There was a story that when he attempted to go out for track, he was told by Pop Warner that he was too small.

  “Me run fast good,” the little Hopi had stated. “All Hopis run fast good.”

  Warner had given him a try, and quickly realized that there was nothing boastful about “run fast good,” but merely fact. The coach had been unaware at the time that
a traditional Hopi game involves running long distances while kicking a ball ahead of the runner.

  Tewanima had never weighed more than 110 pounds as his training weight, but exemplified the truism that dynamite comes in small packages. His specialty had become the ten- and fifteen-mile distances.

  “Last year, we had a meet over at Harrisburg,” McGregor recalled. “Louis missed the train, so he just ran the eighteen miles to Harrisburg and got there in time to win his race. He was entered in the two-mile. He’d probably have run back to Carlisle, but we managed to corner him and put him on the train for the ride home.”

  John laughed and shook his head.

  “Mac, how can I teach anything to a runner with that kind of talent?”

  “Maybe you can’t,” McGregor admitted, “but he needs some help sometimes to understand what it’s about. Warner wants to qualify him for the Olympics. You know that involves a lot of pacing and timing. You’re pretty good at that. Now, while we’re lookin’ to find Thorpe, you work with Tewanima. He’s still thinkin’ in terms of cross-country, and a lot of the distance events will be on the circular track. Louis has a hard time understandin’ the sense of that. I guess he figures, why run in a circle when you can go someplace with it?”

  “Well, there’s somethin’ to be said for that,” John observed.

  “That’s true. But you know what I mean. We took a team to New York to run in Madison Square Garden last spring. Tewanima was entered in the ten-mile competition. He looked at that little track—ten laps to the mile—and just shook his head. He went over to Warner and told him, ‘Me afraid get mixed up go round and round. You tell me front man, and I get him.’”

  “What happened?” John asked.

  “That’s just what happened,” laughed Mac. “When the race began to line out, Pop Warner would catch Tewanima’s eye as he came past, and point out some runner who was leading him. Louis would pass him. Lapped the whole field one at a time, and turned up the heat at the finish … . He set a new indoor world’s record that day.”

  John was laughing.

  “Just ride herd on him, as you’d say in your cowboy talk,” Mac went on. “Pace him on his workouts. I’ve seen you work with runners. You’ll find ways to help him.”

  John had his doubts. It was a long time since he’d done any running. Among the 101 cowboys, he’d step up into the saddle to go anywhere, even a few hundred yards. This would require the use of muscles he hadn’t called on for several years.

  The first week was torture. On the morning after his first attempt to pace Tewanima, he awoke with a dull ache up the insides of both thighs. When he attempted to move, his muscles jerked into unbelievably painful cramps. Stifling the gasp of agony that threatened to reveal his condition to others in the dormitory building, he rose and hobbled a few steps to get everything working.

  By the week’s end, his conditioning had progressed far enough that he felt more confident. Warner seemed satisfied with his work as a trainer and assistant, and he settled into the routine of the school year.

  He wrote Hebbie occasionally, and she attempted to do the same. He had not realized until now just how limited her schooling had been. He felt a certain amount of guilt for having placed her in a situation that called attention to her lack of education.

  Dere John,

  it was gud to here of you. I am fine here. I am ridin straw berry, teachin her to rop offn her. Shes a gud horse. I hope yur work is goin gud. I miss you.

  Senserely,

  Hebbie

  Somehow, the clumsily lettered and poorly spelled note, written on a sheet of ruled tablet paper, struck him emotionally as nothing else could have. Only now did he fully realize how much he missed her. In the time since he had been at the Hundred and One, Hebbie had become one of the most important things in his life. He should not have left her … .

  There was a short time when he actually considered leaving Carlisle to return to Hebbie and the 101. He abandoned the idea for a variety of reasons. He was needed and appreciated here. Hebbie would give him the scolding of his life if he let these people down. Besides, his pay was pretty meager in the nondescript job that was part of Pop Warner’s program to field an Olympic team. Each day and week contributed more to the shaping of that goal.

  He wrote to Hebbie more frequently. He knew that she could read much better than she could write. In the dim recesses of his mind, he began to imagine ways that he could help her further her education when they were together. Always, there was that goal, distant but achievable. Some day they would be together.

  Meanwhile, his letters could serve a useful purpose. She’d read them, which would help her reading skills. It would also help him to feel closer to her. He was missing her terribly.

  My dearest Hebbie,

  I got your letter yesterday, and it was wonderful to hear from you. I miss you a lot, even as busy as I am with Tewanima and the other runners. He’s the Hopi I told you about.

  We still haven’t seen anything of Jim Thorpe, but Pop Warner says he’ll turn up. I wondered why they call him “Pop,” and somebody told me: When he was playing football at Cornell, Warner was a little older than the others on the team. He was about 25, I guess, and they joked about his being the ‘old man’ of the squad. So, he’s still called “Pop.” Sometimes, “Pappy.”

  Things are going pretty well here, but it’s lonely. I’m thinking maybe I’ll come back to the 101 for Christmas, but I don’t have a very good idea what they’ll expect here. I still wish you were with me. We’ll talk more about that when I see you, too!

  We did have a close call a while back. We’d taken a track team to a meet in New York City, and stayed overnight at a hotel. In one of the rooms, three of our students who had never seen gaslights before didn’t understand how it worked. They blew it out when they went to bed and damn’ near suffocated in the night. Luckily, they’d opened the window, or they’d probably have been dead when we found them. Of course they could have blown up the whole hotel, too, if one of them had struck a match!

  I’d better quit now and get to work. Take care of yourself, and stay away from those cowboys! Ha!

  I love you,

  John

  The Christmas trip never materialized, and the winter dragged on into spring, with the return of the outdoor track events. There was still no sign of Thorpe.

  Hebbie’s letters seemed to reflect her willingness to at least try to improve on her scholastic abilities.

  … The school teacher at the 101 is helping me … I don’t want you to be ashamed of my ignorance. I never had much schooling …

  She told of rewriting her letter for the approval of the teacher …

  … and she says I’m doing better. I do miss you, John.

  Love,

  Hebbie

  It was summer before the event occurred that began to give some sense of purpose to John’s return to Carlisle. The track team had had a good spring season. John considered rejoining the Miller Brothers for the show season, but there was pressure for him to remain at Carlisle.

  Under the leadership of Pop Warner, the Carlisle Indians were becoming established as the power to beat in collegiate athletics. They were formidable opponents in football, track, and, more recently, basketball. On the gridiron, they had shown well against all of the country’s top teams, including the military academies. Carlisle was being described as on a par with the YMCA’s Springfield College, the premier athletic school of the nation.

  Even so, John was frustrated. He had been recruited to assist in training and conditioning a star Indian athlete. So far, he had never even met the young man, and no one seemed to know where he was. “He’ll turn up” was becoming a well-worn excuse. There was a bittersweet amusement in the fact that in this case, the white coaches seemed unconcerned, as if they were the ones on “Indian time,” while John Buffalo fidgeted and worried.

  But there came a day …

  , John was hailed on the campus by Arthur Martin, secretary to the Athletic De
partment.

  “John! Great news! They’ve found Jim Thorpe. He’s on the way here.”

  “Great! Where is he?”

  Now Martin was laughing. “In Oklahoma! Exendine ran into him on the street in Anadarko.”

  “What was he doing there? For that matter, what was Exendine doing there?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe looking for Thorpe. We knew he has family in that area. And Albert says Thorpe’s in great shape. He was a little small when he was here before.”

  John’s thinking took a strange direction for a moment. How was it that Albert Exendine, track coach and holder of many school records, happened to be in Anadarko, Oklahoma at the right moment? It was not beyond belief that Pop Warner would intentionally hold someone out of competition until he had gained some size and maturity. And Thorpe had been described as small. But that was two years ago, it now appeared.

  “Do we know anything about Jim Thorpe’s eligibility?” he asked Martin.

  “Well … he played football here for two seasons … . Mostly intramural the first year, I guess. But he should have two years of eligibility left. Unless, of course, he’s been in college someplace else.”

  “Is that likely?” asked John.

  Martin laughed. “Not a chance. If he competed in athletics, we’d know it, because he’d be winning.”

  Just the sort of scheme that would appeal to Pop Warner, John guessed. Track-and-field athletes mature later than some. Why not farm out a potential winner until he gets some maturity and then send somebody to bring him back … .

  THIRTY-FIVE

  “That is Jim Thorpe?” asked John. “I was led to think he was small.”

  “Well, he was,” Mac admitted. “When he came to Carlisle, he was just a kid. The records in the office say he was five foot, five and one-half inches. He grew some, I guess, before he left. But that’s a while back, too. Lord, he’s filled out now! No wonder Exendine was impressed. Jim’s probably six feet, and nearing 200 pounds, wouldn’t you say?”