The hero had killed what he thought was the last Indian and went in to claim his quivering prize. While they were embracing, a leftover redskin crawled in through the broken window. The heroine saw him over her rescuer’s shoulder and opened her mouth in a silent scream. The hero spun around. The Indian leered evilly and advanced toward him with a knife in his hand. Heroically, the hero threw aside his gun and stalked forward to meet him with nothing more than his bare hands. They closed. The Indian forced the hero into a corner. The knife, slowed by the white man’s grip on the savage’s wrist, descended toward the hero’s chest. Again the girl screamed. Then the hero ducked, twisted the Indian’s arm, and the would-be killer was flipped to the floor, where he fell upon his own knife. At last the embrace between the handsome hero and the pretty heroine was completed. The image on the screen faded. The lights came up.
I sat there for a couple of minutes afterward, staring at the blank, fly-specked screen which a short while before had been the center of everyone’s attention. The room emptied and I was still there. I ignored Ted’s impatient tug on my sleeve.
I had recognized the Indian.
Of course, I could have been mistaken. The situations were so similar that I may only have thought I was seeing the same man. I told myself that, and yet I didn’t believe it. For a moment, while the Indian on the screen had been stalking toward the hero, knife in hand, I saw in his leer the ghost of a faint smile I had not seen for fourteen years. At Ted’s insistence, I got up and left the theater, but the image of that smiling face haunted me all the way home and lingered throughout dinner.
Just to make sure, I came back the next night without Ted. Again I saw the hero vanquish the last of the Indians he was to meet outside and bound into the cabin. Again I saw him take the frightened girl into his arms. For a second time I watched as the grinning savage climbed in through the window. This time I saw that he held the knife in his left hand, and, as he grappled with the hero, I noticed something else. I noticed that he never used his right arm. The camera took pains to hide it, but all through the fight the Indian kept his right arm stiff at his side. When he fell and squirmed in his death agonies, the limb lay motionless on the floor. it might as well have been artificial for all the use he had made of it.
There were no film credits flashed on the screen in those days, so I had no way of checking for Logan’s name. I thought of writing to the company that made the film—it was one of those early southern California firms that have since passed out of sight—but I never got around to it. I remembered that Logan had told us about going to California. Maybe he had finally found his niche. I doubt it, though, because I never saw him on the screen again, playing an Indian or anything else, and after that day I was a rabid film fan. Maybe it was just a passing thing. I suppose now I’ll never know.
As for Jack, I never heard from him again. I thought once or twice about trying to get in touch with him, and even wrote a letter once to a magazine that specialized in publishing notices by people looking for lost loved ones, but although they printed it I never received an answer. For all I know, Jack may never have learned to read or write anyway. I think it’s more likely that he just didn’t see it.
Maybe it’s a good thing that we didn’t meet after that parting on the hill. Age affects different people different ways, and I’d have hated to have to remember Jack Butterworth as a decrepit old man in his dotage, or dead, as he must surely be by now. I’d rather think of him as a lean old hider carrying a Sharps Big Fifty and riding a mule on the trail of a buffalo he’ll never shoot because he knows if he shoots it, he’ll die too.
And that’s the story you didn’t read in the papers about the spring a youth and an old man struck out across Oregon in search of the last buffalo in the United States.
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