Chapter VIII: Part 8

“If you don’t pay me,” shrieked the incensed little undertaker, “I’ll go right out on the hill and _dig up them boxes, by God_!”

“_Muska ningay!_” (no money) said the old man. “No pay ’em chil’n’s money tall. All time lie to us. Goan votem Dimmiticrat, guess.”

And with this statement, bearing with it the fate of a national representative, the old chief kicked the tenacious slumber out of his pony and rode back to the Agency.

“Eh?” ejaculated the politician; “Votin’ Democratic, eh? Well, I’ll be cussed! It’ll snow us under! Why in thunder do they refuse to pay the money to the minor children? I tell you, gentlemen, it’ll snow us under!”

“Drat politics!” squeaked the little undertaker. “Wisht I’d a-buried ’em all afore now. Cussed if I don’t go right out on that there hill and dig them boxes up!”

The day wore on with an alarming recrudescence of Democracy among the red men (who are not red, but chocolate). In the afternoon, the little undertaker chased White Horse, another leading man of the tribe, into the brush and returned with a broad grin upon his face.

“Beats the devil!” ejaculated the thin politician, “where a body sometimes finds merriment! How’s he votin’, Comfort?”

“Votin’ Democrat—the whole cussed posse of ’em! But I don’t give a cuss—Democrat or Republican money’s all the same to me. I got $15; one of his kids I planted five years ago; died of Cuban itch; four-foot pine box! He, he, he! I don’t give a cuss how they’re votin’.”

That night there was a meeting of Republican politicians at the Agency office. A most alarming landslide had begun that day, bearing disaster to the ranks of the Grand Old Party.

“Some more of those confounded departmental rulings!” exclaimed the Agent to the company present. “It’s this grandmotherly solicitude for the Indian that makes him an irresponsible scamp. Why, if the Government had turned them all loose to sink or swim a decade ago, Natural Law would, by this time, have solved the much mooted Indian question. But what are we to do?” And the Agent stroked his Van Dyke beard in perplexity.

“We’ve got to do something,” said the lean wolf with the body like a question mark; “and there’s only one thing to do—get Meekleman here. You remember how he wheedled them into line four years ago. If there’s a man in the world who can bring them around, it’s Meekleman. And we’d better get McBarty here, too. The two of them may be able to kick up a successful powwow.”

Charles D. Meekleman was a Nebraska politician who was almost a statesman, and had held important positions in Washington official circles. McBarty was the Republican candidate for Congress. It was decided that they should be sent for at once.

It was Friday evening when the two great men arrived; and upon Saturday morning they came forth and allowed themselves to be gazed upon freely. McBarty was a heavy-set, middle-sized man, with an earnest expression of countenance, and the rather bewildered air of a candidate being led forth to sacrifice for the first time. Meekleman was tall, superbly built, clad in the faultless manner and bearing about him that air of refinement which had won him from his rural constituents the name of “Gentleman Charlie.” The manner of his shaking hands with any comer was most consummate flattery; and although it was done with an air of magnanimous condescension, there was something masterful in his eyes, looking down kindly from his heavy brows, as from a battlemented tower, that established the utmost confidence. He had the happy faculty of disposing of a boiled potato at a farmhouse with a refined dignity acquired over many a French dish at the banquets of the distinguished; and the manner in which he addressed a bunch of squaws and bucks as “ladies and gentlemen,” was surpassingly suave.

The two great men strolled leisurely, arm in arm, down the dusty road to the pay station, stopping often to shake hands with the Omahas, and radiating smiles like small human suns. When they had reached the pay station, Mr. Meekleman approached the Agent, busy signing checks, and said in his big, clear, slow voice, that it might be heard by the lounging Indians: “Major, I wish you would announce to the gentlemen that I want to talk to them this evening over at Fire Chief lodge. Tell the gentlemen that I am very much grieved for them, and that I shall endeavour to right their wrongs;” and he raised his heavy brows and condescendingly smiled upon the brown loungers, while the Agent instructed a policeman to make the announcement.

That evening a party consisting of the Agent, Messrs. Meekleman and McBarty, and several local politicians, proceeded on foot to Fire Chief lodge, which is a large octagonal shack placed in a lonesome valley a mile distant from the Agency.

“Brace up, Mac!” said Meekleman, as the two walked along the lonesome prairie road. “To-night I shall have the honour to make a man of you—the Honourable James McBarty! Have a cigar and try to keep cool.”

“Yes, thanks. I was just feeling a little surprised at the lonesome road that seems to lead to Congress—that was all. Do you really suppose we can win them over?”

“Well, you shall see,” returned Meekleman. “Follow my suit and don’t make faces at the soup; for one really must drink soup, you know, to be Congressman from this district. I say, Mac, did you ever smoke killikinick? Well, anyway, I advise you to smoke it to-night till the back of your neck aches. Ha, ha! There is really no royal road to Congress, Mac!” And Meekleman slapped the candidate upon the shoulder and filled the great prairie silence with jovial laughter.

As the party neared the lodge, from which the light of the fire within streamed out through the windows into the moon haze, they heard the sound of the drum and the singing that accompanies an Indian feast; a wild melodious flight of notes, threaded with the snarl of the drum like the beat of a fevered temple, rising in ecstasy, like the wail of a fitful night wind in the scrub oaks of a bluff, and falling suddenly to die in a guttural note like the burr of a wounded rattlesnake. A barbaric music filled with the sounds of Nature and old as the wrinkled prairie!

“This,” said Meekleman, stopping near the entrance to listen to the deep, beautiful voices within, “This, McBarty, is the Indian of romance. Now for the bitter truth—and the soup!”

As they entered the long, narrow passageway leading into the lodge, they saw before them a large octagonal room with a wood fire blazing in the centre. About the dusky walls the huge, perverted shadows of the singers flitted in grotesque dances as they swayed in the ecstasy of song. A circle of brown men sat about the sputtering fire over which a large iron kettle steamed forth the scent of beef. Near the circle sat the smaller circle of drummers about a washtub with a cowhide stretched across it.

Within the larger circle near the fire, sat a squaw, cutting bits of beef from a quantity of ribs that she held conveniently in her lap.

“Shade of Mrs. Rorer!” exclaimed the would-be Congressman in a whisper to his companion; “is _that_ the soup?”

“Hist!” returned Meekleman; “one should be willing to suffer for his country!”

At the entrance of the great men, the singing ceased abruptly, and the singers turned their sullen, brute-like eyes upon their visitors and grunted.

“Are there any of the leading men here?” asked Meekleman of the Agent. Rainwalker and White Horse were both present.

“Ah!” said Meekleman, pointing to an unusually homely old Indian; “who is that black scamp with the big face and the re_mark_ably stupendous nose?”

“Rainwalker,” replied the Agent; “a leader; it would be well to make peace with him first.”

Meekleman approached the old chief with his soft, white hand extended and his face the picture of rapture.

“Well, well, Rainwalker! Here you are! I’m glad to see you, Mr. Rainwalker! How well you look; I needn’t ask about your health; your complexion could scarcely be surpassed!”

Mr. Rainwalker turned a shade lighter with pride and grinned, returning the great man’s salutation with a large bunch of beef-scented silence.

Meekleman sat down cross-legged in the circle and took the circulating stone pipe in his turn, smoked heroically and drank large quantities of hot soup. The sullen faces of the firelit circle brightened. Old Rainwalker began to talk in his own tongue, staring meanwhile meditatively into the fire. For several minutes his deep musical voice ran on with occasional dignified pauses and gestures indicating that he spoke of the great white man beside him. Meekleman gave an Indian youth a coin to act as interpreter.

“He says,” said the youth, “that you all time walk with good people and eat good stuff, but you are not too good, he says, to smoke and eat with us, he says. He likes you pretty much, guess.”

The old chief talked again for some time, and then lapsed into dignified silence.

“He says,” continued the youth, “that you have lived in the same lodge with the Big Father at Washington, and you can get the money for the chil’ns, he guess. That’s what he says.”

“Tell my dear brother,” said Meekleman, “that my heart is warm toward my brown brothers, and that the children shall have their money. Tell him that I played with the Big Father when he was a little boy, and that I know the Big Father would be terribly angry if he knew that the children had been refused their money. Tell him that I will see that they get it.”

This short speech translated, sent a murmur of joy around the circle. White Horse arose from the opposite side of the circle and brought a cup of hot soup to his white brother as a special favour.

“And now,” said Meekleman, arising majestically as befitted the erstwhile playmate of the President, “I shall introduce to you Mr. McBarty. He will go to Washington for you and he will do many good things for the Omahas.”

Mr. McBarty came forth and fell to shaking the brown hands of the grown-up children. He started with Rainwalker, who carefully rubbed his left hand upon his blanket before presenting it to the future saviour of his race. Then after having shaken all the hands, including that of the squaw who stripped beef from the ribs, the potential Congressman fell heroically upon the soup and the killikinick.

An old Indian placed cross-legged near a wood fire with the feel of hot soup in his belly, invariably becomes reminiscent. Old White Horse sat staring into the sputtering flame with his face as expressionless as a stone statue of Buddha, and his voice began in a low, musical tone, rising as his memory quickened, and modulated with great oratorical skill, for which he was noted in the tribe. His words translated ran thus:

“These new times are not like the old times. When we old men were young and the bison still bellowed on the prairies, we were strong and swift and wise. Now we are weak and slow and not wise. I cannot understand. It is all like a day when there is fog everywhere. When we were young and fought the Pawnees and the Sioux, there were no bigger, wiser men than Nuzhee Mona [Rainwalker] and Shonga Ska [White Horse]. Look at us now! We are old and slow and we cannot see far to-day. Once when I was young I found a sick bison bull wandering in the hills. He was weak and half blind and he had lost the trail. We are weak and half blind and we cannot find the old trail. I cannot understand.”

“Ah, ah, ah!” A groan ran about the firelit circle, intent upon the old wise man’s word.

“We cannot find Wakunda [God] any more. He is not in the valleys any more, nor on the hills. We cannot talk to the big white Wakunda. What can we old men say to our foolish people when they need wise words? Every day they are more like badgers. They eat much, drink firewater, and are very foolish. But we have these white brothers and we will listen to them. Their wisdom is the new wisdom; we will listen to them.”

“Ah, ah!” assented the listeners.

For an hour the circle sat staring into the flame, thinking of the old times. Then without a word, Rainwalker and White Horse arose and passed out of the lodge and the others followed.

“Well,” said Meekleman to McBarty, as they walked along the lonesome road toward the Agency, “I have the honour to address the Hon. James McBarty!”

The other did not answer for several minutes.

“Meekleman,” said McBarty at length, “don’t you suppose I _can_ do something for these poor devils?”

“Ah, McBarty,” returned Meekleman, “I am afraid you will never be a politician!”

Upon the following Monday morning when the tribe gathered for the continuation of the big payment, the news began to circulate that the great white man had gone to see the Big Father at Washington about the payment of the money to the minor children. As this news was authenticated by White Horse and Rainwalker themselves, it was readily believed, and in one day four hundred brown votes swung over to the Republican faith again.

On Tuesday, a week before election, there was not a brown Democrat on the reserve. This state of affairs continued on through the week until Friday evening, at which time no word had come from the Big Father.

The Democratic candidate for Congress, Judge Roberts, had arrived at the Agency during the week to battle in person against the impending calamity. All week he and his retainers led the forlorn hope. But on Friday afternoon, when the news so impatiently awaited by the Indians had not yet arrived, the all but lost cause began to gain a foothold in a persistent rumour that hinted that maybe the Indian had been fooled after all. Maybe Meekleman didn’t intend to intercede for the Indians at all; and accordingly, one by one, the brown men wondered, doubted, wavered and lost hope, until by Saturday evening, when the pay station closed, there had begun a restless, slow, and certain movement among the Omahas toward the Democratic ranks.

When Monday morning came, twenty-four hours before the opening of the polls, the political condition of the Omahas could have been summed up in one laconic conversation:

“Well, _cuggie_, [friend] how are you voting?”

“Dimmiticrat, guess!”

McBarty strolled leisurely about among the Omahas with an enigmatical smile upon his face, seeming to be unconscious of the crushing defeat he was, apparently, about to receive. The day wore on and hour by hour grew the triumph of the Judge, who now already felt himself the “Gentleman from Nebraska.”

At five o’clock in the evening the two candidates were seen talking together at the door of the pay station.

“Well, Mac,” said the Judge, “it’s looking a little dark for you. I swear, a week ago I would have sold my chances for a cent!”

McBarty repeatedly looked up the dusty government trail leading north from the station with an expression of anxiety.

“Well,” he said, “allow me to congratulate the Hon. John Roberts of Nebraska!” He smiled gravely as he shook the hand of his rival. “All I regret now,” he added, “is that I drank that soup!”

“Thanks!” replied the Judge. “It really seems a shame, however, that one should go to Congress at the hands of these savages, eh?”

“Yes,” said McBarty, taking a long gaze up the trail; “it is a shame, to be sure!”

At that moment a little farce was being enacted a mile up the road. Within the covering of a wild plum thicket at the side of the trail a saddled and bridled horse was lariated to a stake, and a man sat near by upon a rock, repeatedly tapping the horse on the flanks as it galloped about in a circle.

“Lather up there!” cried the man, as he nipped the horse with the whiplash; “lather up there!” And the horse dashed about the circle until its flanks were dripping and its mouth was white with foam.

At length the man took out his watch, saw that it was 5:30 o’clock, and untying the lariat, he mounted and put the spurs to his already jaded animal, dashing at a furious pace down the dusty old trail toward the Agency.

A few moments later McBarty and the Judge caught sight of a furious rider dashing toward them in a cloud of dust.

“Who do you suppose that can be riding so fast?” said the Judge.

“Oh,” said McBarty, smiling broadly, “that, Judge, is merely my election coming up at the gallop!”

Amid dust and yelling and a general spectacular confusion the horseman dashed up to the door of the pay station, threw his horse on its haunches in stopping, and cried: “A telegram from Washington for the Agent!”

In a few moments a great crowd of Indians had gathered about the horse and rider. The Agent, with a smile upon his face, rushed out of the station and seized a bit of yellow paper that the rider held in his hand. Breathlessly the crowd of Omahas waited.

“Listen!” shouted a crier in the Omaha tongue, standing by the Agent, who was reading the telegram. “The Big Father at Washington sends this word to his brown brothers: ‘The children’s money shall be paid!’”

For a moment following the shout of the crier, there was a great silence. Then a roar went up from the Omahas—a wild, hoarse shout of joy! Judge Roberts turned pale, and extending his hand to McBarty, said: “Well, you have won. Allow me to congratulate the Hon. James McBarty of Nebraska.”

And when the next morning’s sun arose, the polls were besieged by a throng of brown Republicans.

XIX

THE LAST THUNDER SONG

IT is an ancient custom to paint tragedy in blood tints. This is because men were once merely animals, and have not as yet been able to live down their ancestry. Yet the stroke of a dagger is a caress beside the throb of hopeless days.

Life can ache; the living will tell you this. But the dead make no complaint.

There is no greater tragedy than the fall of a dream! Napoleon dreamed; so did a savage. It is the same. I know of the scene of a great tragedy. Very few have recognised it as such; there was so little noise along with it. It happened at the Omaha Agency, which is situated on the Missouri River some seventy miles above Omaha.

The summer of 1900 debilitated all thermal adjectives. It was not hot; it was _Saharical_! It would hardly have been hyperbole to have said that the Old Century lay dying of a fever. The untilled hills of the reservation thrust themselves up in the August sunshine like the emaciated joints of one bedridden. The land lay as yellow as the skin of a fever patient, except in those rare spots where the melancholy corn struggled heartlessly up a hillside, making a blotch like a bedsore!

The blood of the prairie was impoverished, and the sky would give no drink with which to fill the dwindling veins. When one wished to search the horizon for the cloud that was not there, he did it from beneath an arched hand. The small whirlwinds that awoke like sudden fits of madness in the sultry air, rearing yellow columns of dust into the sky—these alone relieved the monotony of dazzle.

Every evening the clouds rolled flashing about the horizon and thundered back into the night. They were merely taunts, like the holding of a cool cup just out of reach of a fevered mouth; and the clear nights passed, bringing dewless dawns, until the ground cracked like a parched lip!

The annual Indian powwow was to be ended prematurely that year, for the sun beat uninvitingly upon the flat bottom where the dances were held, and the Indians found much comfort in the shade of their summer tepees. But when it was noised about that, upon the next day, the old medicine-man Mahowari (Passing Cloud) would dance potent dances and sing a thunder song with which to awaken the lazy thunder spirits to their neglected duty of rain-making, then the argument of the heat became feeble.

So the next morning, the bronze head of every Indian tepeehold took his pony, his dogs, his squaw, and his papooses of indefinite number to the powwow ground. In addition to these, the old men carried with them long memories and an implicit faith.

The young men, who had been away to Indian school, and had succeeded to some extent in stuffing their brown skins with white souls, carried with them curiosity and doubt, which, if properly united, beget derision.

The old men went to a shrine; the young men went to a show. When a shrine becomes a show, the World advances a step. And _that_ is the benevolence of Natural Law!

About the open space in which the dances were held, an oval covering had been built with willow boughs, beneath which the Indians lounged in sweating groups. Slowly about the various small circles went the cumbersome stone pipes.

To one listening, drowsed with the intense sunshine, the _buzzle_ and mutter and snarl of the gossiping Omahas seemed the grotesque echoes from a vanished age. Between the fierce dazzle of the sun and the sharply contrasting blue shade, there was but a line of division; yet a thousand years lay between one gazing in the sun and those dozing in the shadow. It was as if God had flung down a bit of the Young World’s twilight into the midst of the Old World’s noon. Here lounged the masterpiece of the toiling centuries—a Yankee. There sat the remnant of a race as primitive as Israel. Yet the white man looked on with the contempt of superiority.

Before ten o’clock everybody had arrived and his family with him. A little group, composed of the Indian Agent, the Agency Physician, the Mission Preacher, and a newspaper man, down from the city for reportorial purposes, waited and chatted, sitting upon a ragged patch of available shadow.

“These Omahas are an exceptional race,” the preacher was saying in his ministerial tone of voice; “an exceptional race!”

The newspaper man mopped his face, lit a cigarette and nodded assent with a hidden meaning twinkling in his eye.

“Quite exceptional!” he said, tossing his head in the direction of an unusually corpulent bunch of steaming, sweating, bronze men and women. “God, like some lesser master-musicians, has not confined himself to grand opera, it seems!”

He took a long pull at his cigarette, and his next words came out in a cloud of smoke.

“This particular creation savours somewhat of opera bouffe!”

With severe unconcern the preacher mended the broken thread of his discourse. “Quite an exceptional race in many ways. The Omaha is quite as honest as the white man.”

“That is a truism!” The pencil-pusher drove this observation between the minister’s words like a wedge.

“In his natural state he was much more so,” uninterruptedly continued the preacher; he was used to continuous discourse. “I have been told by many of the old men that in the olden times an Indian could leave his tepee for months at a time, and on his return would find his most valuable possessions untouched. I tell you, gentlemen, the Indian is like a prairie flower that has been transplanted from the blue sky and the summer sun and the pure winds into the steaming, artificial atmosphere of the hothouse! A glass roof is not the blue sky! Man’s talent is not God’s genius! That is why you are looking at a perverted growth.

“Look into an Indian’s face and observe the ruins of what was once manly dignity, indomitable energy, masterful prowess! When I look upon one of these faces, I have the same thoughts as, when travelling in Europe, I looked upon the ruins of Rome.

“Everywhere broken arches, fallen columns, tumbled walls! Yet through these as through a mist one can discern the magnificence of the living city. So in looking upon one of these faces, which are merely ruins in another sense. They were once as noble, as beautiful as——”

In his momentary search for an eloquent simile, the minister paused.

“As pumpkin pies!” added the newspaper man with a chuckle; and he whipped out his notebook and pencil to jot down this brilliant thought, for he had conceived a very witty “story” which he would pound out for the Sunday edition.

“Well,” said the Agency Physician, finally sucked into the whirlpool of discussion, “it seems to me that there is no room for crowing on either side. Indians are pretty much like white men; livers and kidneys and lungs, and that sort of thing; slight difference in the pigment under the skin. I’ve looked into the machinery of both species and find just as much room in one as the other for a soul!”

“And both will go upward,” added the minister.

“Like different grades of tobacco,” observed the Indian Agent, “the smoke of each goes up in the same way.”

“Just so,” said the reporter; “but let us cut out the metaphysics. I wonder when this magical _cuggie_ is going to begin his humid evolutions. Lamentable, isn’t it, that, such institutions as rain prayers should exist on the very threshold of the Twentieth Century?”

“I think,” returned the minister, “that the Twentieth Century has no intention of eliminating God! This medicine-man’s prayer, in my belief, is as sacred as the prayer of any churchman. The difference between Wakunda and God is merely orthographical.”

“But,” insisted the cynical young man from the city, “I had not been taught to think of God as of one who forgets! Do you know what I would do if I had no confidence in the executive ability of my God?”

Taking the subsequent silence as a question, the young man answered: “Why, I would take a day off and whittle one out of wood!”

“A youth’s way is the wind’s way,” quoted the preacher, with a paternal air.

“And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts; but what is all this noise about?” returned the reporter.

A buzz of expectant voices had grown at one end of the oval, and had spread contagiously throughout the elliptical strip of shade. For with slow, majestic step the medicine-man, Mahowari, entered the enclosure and walked toward the centre. The fierce sun emphasised the brilliancy of the old man’s garments and glittered upon the profusion of trinkets, the magic heirlooms of the medicine-man. It was not the robe nor the dazzling trinkets that caught the eye of one acquainted with Mahowari. It was the erectness of his figure, for he had been bowed with years, and many vertical suns had shone upon the old man’s back since his face had been turned toward the ground. But now with firm step and form rigidly erect he walked.

Any sympathetic eye could easily read the thoughts that passed through the old man’s being like an elixir infusing youth. Now in his feeble years would come his greatest triumph! To-day he would sing with greater power than ever he had sung. Wakunda would hear the cry. The rains would come! Then the white men would be stricken with belief!

Already his heart sang before his lips. In spite of the hideous painting of his face, the light of triumph shone there like the reflection of a great fire.

Slowly he approached the circle of drummers who sat in the glaring centre of the ellipse of sunlight. It was all as though the First Century had awakened like a ghost and stood in the very doorway of the Twentieth!

When Mahowari had approached within a yard of the drums, he stopped, and raising his arms and his eyes to the cloudless sky, uttered a low cry like a wail of supplication. Then the drums began to throb with that barbaric music as old as the world; a sound like the pounding of a fever temple, with a recurring snarl like the warning of a rattlesnake.

Every sound of the rejoicing and suffering prairie echoes in the Indian’s drum.

With a slow, majestic bending of the knees and an alternate lifting of his feet, the medicine-man danced in a circle about the snarling drums. Then like a faint wail of winds toiling up a wooded bluff, his thunder song began.

The drone and whine of the mysterious, untranslatable words pierced the drowse of the day, lived for a moment with the echoes of the drums among the surrounding hills, and languished from a whisper into silence. At intervals the old man raised his face, radiant with fanatic ecstasy, to the meridian glare of the sun, and the song swelled to a supplicating shout.

Faster and faster the old man moved about the circle; louder and wilder grew the song. Those who watched from the shade were absorbed in an intense silence, which, with the drowse of the sultry day, made every sound a paradox! The old men forgot their pipes and sat motionless.

Suddenly, at one end of the covering, came the sound of laughter! At first an indefinite sound like the spirit of merriment entering a capricious dream of sacred things; then it grew and spread until it was no longer merriment, but a loud jeer of derision! It startled the old men from the intenseness of their watching. They looked up and were stricken with awe. The young men were jeering this, the holiest rite of their fathers!

Slower and slower the medicine-man danced; fainter and fainter grew the song and ceased abruptly. With one quick glance, Mahowari saw the shattering of his hopes. He glanced at the sky; but saw no swarm of black spirits to avenge such sacrilege. Only the blaze of the sun, the glitter of the arid zenith!

In that one moment, the temporary youth of the old man died out. His shoulders drooped to their wonted position. His limbs tottered. He was old again.

It was the Night stricken heart-sick with the laughter of the Dawn. It was the audacious Present jeering at the Past, tottering with years. At that moment, the impudent, cruel, brilliant youth called Civilisation snatched the halo from the grey hairs of patriarchal Ignorance. Light flouted the rags of Night. A clarion challenge shrilled across the years.

Never before in all the myriad moons had such a thing occurred. It was too great a cause to produce an effect of grief or anger. It stupefied. The old men and women sat motionless. They could not understand.

With uneven step and with eyes that saw nothing, Mahowari passed from among his kinsmen and tottered up the valley toward his lonesome shack and tepee upon the hillside. It was far past noon when the last of the older Omahas left the scene of the dance.

The greater number of the white men who had witnessed the last thunder dance of the Omahas went homeward much pleased. The show had turned out quite funny indeed. “Ha, ha, ha! Did you see how surprised the old _cuggy_ looked? He, he, he!” Life, being necessarily selfish, argues from its own standpoint.

But as the minister rode slowly toward his home there was no laughter in his heart. He was saying to himself: “If the whole fabric of my belief should suddenly be wrenched from me, what then?” Even this question was born of selfishness, but it brought pity.

In the cool of the evening the minister mounted his horse and rode to the home of Mahowari, which was a shack in the winter and a tepee in the summer. Dismounting, he threw the bridle reins upon the ground, and raised the door flap of the tepee. Mahowari sat cross-legged upon the ground, staring steadily before him with unseeing eyes.

“How!” said the minister.

The old Indian did not answer. There was no expression of grief or anger or despair upon his face. He sat like a statue. Yet, the irregularity of his breathing showed where the pain lay. An Indian suffers in his breast. His face is a mask.

The minister sat down in front of the silent old man and, after the immemorial manner of ministers, talked of a better world, of a pitying Christ, and of God, the Great Father. For the first time the Indian raised his face and spoke briefly in English:

“God? He dead, guess!”

Then he was silent again for some time.

Suddenly his eyes lit up with a light that was not the light of age. The heart of his youth had awakened. The old memories came back and he spoke fluently in his own tongue, which the minister understood.

“These times are not like the old times. The young men have caught some of the wisdom of the white man. Nothing is sure. It is not good. I cannot understand. Everything is young and new. All old things are dead. Many moons ago, the wisdom of Mahowari was great. I can remember how my father said to me one day when I was yet young and all things lay new before me: ‘Let my son go to a high hill and dream a great dream’; and I went up in the evening and cried out to Wakunda and I slept and dreamed.

“I saw a great cloud sweeping up from under the horizon, and it was terrible with lightning and loud thunder. Then it passed over me and rumbled down the sky and disappeared. And when I awoke and told my people of my dream, they rejoiced and said: ‘Great things are in store for this youth. We shall call him the Passing Cloud, and he shall be a thunder man, keen and quick of thought, with the keenness and quickness of the lightning; and his name shall be as thunder in the ears of men.’ And I grew and believed in these sayings and I was strong. But now I can see the meaning of the dream—a great light and a great noise and a passing.”

The old man sighed, and the light passed out of his eyes. Then he looked searchingly into the face of the minister and said, speaking in English:

“You white medicine-man. You pray?”

The minister nodded.

Mahowari turned his gaze to the ground and said wearily:

“White God dead too, guess.”

XX

THE NEMESIS OF THE DEUCES

FRENCHY called for two cards and reached for a glass and the bottle. His head swam dizzily. The clinking of glasses at the bar smote upon his ears like gongs. He was about to risk upon one “show-down” the realisation of a five-years’ dream. He felt certain of losing; that was the strange thing about it. Yet somewhere in the buzzing back of his head a compelling little devil whispered and he obeyed.

He drank three big ones straight, and for a moment things stood still and the buzzing ceased; but in the sudden silence the hissing of the little devil increased to a roaring like the river’s in the June rise. “_All on the deuces! All on the deuces! Every damned cent!_” That is what the little devil in the back of his head was howling now.

“But if I lose it all—and wanting to go back home in the spring?” That was the question his pounding heart hurled at the insistent little devil.

“You won _once_—didn’t you—_didn’t you_?—DIDN’T YOU?” howled back the little devil jeeringly.

“Five hundred,” said Frenchy quietly. His bronze face had grown livid; his black eyes narrowed and glittered with a steady stare. With a hand that betrayed the least perceptible tremor, he pushed the chips to the centre.

The next man tossed his hand into the discards. The next hesitated, carefully studying the face of Frenchy with a furtive lifting of the eyes under his hat brim; he too laid down his hand.

“Raise you two hundred,” said the next with quiet cheerfulness.

“Two hundred more,” said the next nonchalantly, drumming a devil’s tattoo with his fingers on the table.

The fifth drew a long breath, grinned nervously, showing his teeth like a hungry wolf—and tossed his hand into the discards.

It was now up to Frenchy.

“Pardon me,” said he, “but did you call me?”

His face had turned a dull, ghastly green, but his voice was quiet and clear.

“Raised it.”

“Oh, certainly,” said he, smiling. “Thinking of something else—trip home, I guess.” His voice lowered until it was almost inaudible. This absent-mindedness was unusual for Frenchy.

An oppressive silence had fallen in the barroom of the “Big 6.” There was no longer any clinking of glasses or hum of maudlin voices. The loungers drew up in a hushed circle about the table and stared with fascinated eyes. A “big game” was on—and it was up to Frenchy. Frenchy was no quitter; he was a gambler to his finger-tips. “Frenchy? He’d bet on which’d be the last breath of his dying mother!” That was the way the popular legend ran, and the man lived up to it.

“Stake it all—stake it all on the deuces—_the deuces_—THE DEUCES!” The little devil in the back of his head was shrieking now and stamping red-hot heels into Frenchy’s brain.

“But the trip home—I’ve planned five years——” urged his pounding heart.

“You won on them _once_—didn’t you?—_didn’t you_?—DIDN’T YOU?” reiterated the little devil.

Frenchy quietly poured out another glass and downed it. Then he pulled off his boots, produced a bunch of bills from the bottom of each, put on his boots again and looked at his hand.

“Come two thousand more!” he whispered.

A sound of deeper breathing grew up about the fascinated circle of on-lookers. Frenchy had gone into his boots—they knew what that meant. Would the others stay? _Would_ they?

The place became uncanny with stillness. Nothing moved in the room. The circle of eyes stared steadily upon the three who sat with expressionless faces blanched with the pitiless struggle that was going on. For a minute that seemed endless the soundless battle continued. Psychic forces exchanged invisible sword-thrusts across the table. Nerve wrestled with nerve that cowered but still fought on.

The whole scene vanished for Frenchy. It seemed to him that he was the centre of a silent hollowness; only a voice, that was rather an ache felt than a sound heard, kept up a pitiless jeering.

“They’ll stay—they’ll stay,” shrieked the little devil; “your bluff won’t work—you’re a dead horse and they’re crows—crows—crows!”

“They’re weakening!” beat the heart of Frenchy.

“Deuces—ha, ha! Deuces! And they’ve both got face cards—deuces—ho, ho!—going home, eh?—win on deuces?—ho, ho, ho—deuces!” The insistent devil laughed spitefully.

“Raise you five hundred more!”

The words echoed and re-echoed in the lonesome hollowness. Frenchy stared at his cards.

“Five hundred more!”

Frenchy winced and shivered. It seemed to him that a long, thin-bladed knife had reached out of the silent hollow that surrounded him and stabbed him twice in the breast.

“Ho, ho, ho!” went the little devil at the back of his head. “Stay with ’em! Put up the horses—everything on the deuces—ho, ho, ho!”

“But I can lay down now and save the horses,” urged the sick heart of Frenchy.

“You won on the deuces _once_!” shrieked the little devil; “didn’t you—DIDN’T YOU?”

Frenchy now heard his own voice growing up out of the hollow. “Taken: my five horses and outfit are good for it.”

Then he emerged from the soundless hollow and was aware of the circle of glittering eyes staring down on the field whereon he had just staked five years of his life and his last cherished dream.

“Full house—aces on queens.”

Frenchy heard the words and grinned exultantly. The little spiteful devil was silent.

“Four kings!”

Frenchy dropped his cards face up and reached for the bottle. “Ho, ho, ho!” went the little devil, dancing all over his brain; “everything lost on the deuces—dead horse for the crows to pick!—he, he, he!”

A ripple of exclamations ran about the circle of loungers as they leaned forward to see the hand upon which Frenchy had staked all that he owned.

“Deuces! By the jumping—four dirty deuces!”

“_Deuces?_”

“Four of ’em.”

“How’s that for a bluff?”

“Fool play!”

A buzzing undertone of comment filled the room and steadily grew into a chattering as of crows about a spot where something has just died. Frenchy seemed not to hear; he was busy filling and refilling glasses. The man with the four kings quietly raked in his winnings. “And the horses——?” he suggested.

Frenchy set the drained glass down with a bang, and with a snake-like forward thrusting of the head leered hideously at the winner. “_Can’t you shut up about the horses?_” He forced the words menacingly through his shut teeth.

A hush fell upon the loungers as they looked upon the pinched, malignant face with the upper lip lifted quiveringly and the close-set teeth showing beneath. This was no longer the Frenchy of legend; that Frenchy had always been known as one who lost or won large sums with the utter nervelessness of a machine. This was no longer the face of Frenchy—the gay, careless, haughty face of him who flirted with Fortune. This was a new Frenchy—a terrible Frenchy; with a coiled snake lurking just behind each glittering eyeball. This face sent a shiver through the crowd—like the sight of an ugly knife unsheathed in anger.

The loungers with affected carelessness began to move away. With a lightning sweep of the hands Frenchy drew his guns and banged them down violently on the table before him. “Stay where you are, gentlemen!” he said; “I’m going to talk and I want an audience. When I’m done talking, I’m off on the long trail and the first man that moves goes with me!”

There had always been a winsome something in the voice of the man. It was now commanding, irresistible. The loungers stood still and stared dumbfounded upon this terrible new version of an old legend.

Frenchy picked up four cards from his hand and held them up fanwise before his enforced listeners. “Look at ’em!” he shouted hoarsely. “Look at ’em! Let ’em burn through your hides into your souls! Oh, you don’t see anything, eh? Don’t one of you dare to grin!”

One hand fumbled nervously with the guns.

“What do you see? I say, what do you see? Four deuces? That all? I’ll tell you what _I_ see. I see the red, warm hearts of two friends! I see diamonds that are cheap beside such hearts! I see a club—a black, brutal, treacherous club—that struck down a friend! And I see the devil’s spades that dug his grave! That’s what I see! Look hard!”

Frenchy seemed to exercise an uncanny influence over his hearers. Not one moved—all stared upon the four upheld deuces.

“It’s the devil’s story, gentlemen,” he continued in a low, husky voice. “It’s hung by me for three bloody years—it haunts me! I’ve got to tell it.”

He passed his free hand over his forehead beaded with sweat. Then he whispered a question to the spellbound audience:

“Did any of you know the Kid—Kid Smith?”

A momentary expression of infinite kindness softened the face of Frenchy, only to give way immediately to deep quivering lines of anguish. He continued tremulously.

“I knew him—the Kid. Had the biggest, bravest heart that ever beat in the God-forsaken white spaces of a map. One of that breed of fellows that the world nails to its crosses—the Kid was. And we were friends; that is, he was a friend. He gave and I took, and he was happier in the giving than I in the taking. That’s the way it always goes: one gives and one takes—and God pity the man that only takes!

“Why did I bet on the deuces? Oh, the damned, dirty deuces! Don’t I know the game? By God, I know every card like a kid knows his mother’s face! Didn’t I know it was the last ditch for me and no hope? I tell you, gentlemen, I didn’t play ’em. The Devil played ’em for me—the black Devil of the dirty deuces with the fiery feet that have been kicking me hellward for three aching years!

“Look at the cards! Look at ’em! There’s blood on every one of ’em, and they stink with the writhing flesh of a friend in the flames!”

Frenchy took another drink and his manner changed. The violence of his delirious outburst gave way to quietness. He spoke in a low, penetrating voice, and the black flame of his eyes held his hearers.

“The Kid and I had been riding across a big stretch of brown grass for two days, and our tongues were thick with thirst. I remember how he gave me the last drops of water we had with us, cussing and damning a man who got thirsty. ‘I can go without water with the biggest camel that ever stuck a hoof into the sand,’ said he. And I took the water; I always took and the Kid was always giving.

“And along in the evening we struck a little water hole and camped. How the Kid did drink when he thought I wasn’t looking! Oh, he wasn’t such a camel for carrying water with him! It was his big heart that carried the water—the sweet, pure, sparkling waters of friendship.

“Along about sundown a dull grey cloud grew up in the west—smoke! But the wind was against it, blowing soft and dry from the east where the river lay thirty miles away. ‘Think we’d better ride on?’ says the Kid. But I was tired and wanted sleep, and the Kid gave in. Says he, ‘Horses need a rest, I guess’; didn’t lay it onto me, you know. Giving again, and I taking.

“So we lariated the horses and rolled in. Do you know how a man sleeps after he’s been burning dry for days and fills up at last? I plunged into ten thousand fathoms of soft, soft sleep—deep, deep down, where the cool sweet dreams bloom in worlds of crystal. And everywhere in my sleep there were bubbling springs and I drank and drank and drank, and every gulp was sweeter than the last.

“Then the dreams changed and the many bubbling water holes of sleep went dry, and fine hot dust sprayed up out of the chinks where the water had flowed. Then the wind of sleep grew hot and hotter. It scorched my face and sent thin needles of fire into my brain. And then I was standing up coughing and rubbing my eyes and the Kid was beside me. What did we see?

“The wind had veered about while we slept. All hell was climbing up the west and a booming wind swept howling devils through the smoky twilight. Above the unnatural dawn, long black ragged arms reached out into the zenith and cloaked the stars. I heard a horse snorting and tugging at his lariat.

“‘Good God, Kid!’ I wheezed; ‘let’s be off!’

“The Kid turned his face upon me and smiled—that slow, brave smile haunts me night and day.

“‘Your horse is gone——’ He waved his hand toward the miles of dark that stretched toward the river. ‘Pulled his stake just before you woke up; heard him go.’ The Kid’s voice didn’t even tremble.

“‘Quick!’ I yelled; ‘the matches! Start a back fire!’

“Then a big, cold hand gripped my heart; the Kid had given me the last match that day; I had wanted to smoke.

“All hell behind us and a horse for two! A thirty-mile heat with the mustangs of the Devil, and double weight to carry! It made me sick—dizzy sick. I forgot everything. Oh, gentlemen, when you face hell fire you’ll know if your mother bore a coward.

“For a minute we stared into the west—a minute years long. Big pink waves of smoke rolled into gulfs of purple and disappeared into holes of murk. Above, the blood-red surf frothed and sparkled and fell in yellow showers! Great blankets of dense gloom dropped from the sky and smothered out the hellish morning, hurling momentary night down the howling wind! Then keen zigzag blades of fire ripped through the belly of the night!

“I felt the Kid’s hand grasp mine. O God! the feel of his hand! ‘One horse for two, Frenchy,’ he said, quiet as a man who proposes another drink at the bar. ‘One of us makes a run for his life; and the other——’ He motioned carelessly toward Hell. ‘One more deal of the cards, Frenchy, and the last for one of us. High hand takes the horse; low hand—produce the deck.’

“I produced the deck—greasy and dog-eared; for many’s the social game the Kid and I had played with ’em together. We squatted on the prairie in the red twilight, and the Kid dealt. Not a tremor of his perfect gambler’s hands! Cool as though it was a game of penny ante.

“I drew three deuces! _Deuces!_ Oh, the damned, dirty deuces!

“‘How many?’ says the Kid pleasantly. For the first time in my life I forgot to guard my hand. A deep rolling thunder had grown up out of the burning west. It seemed I could feel the prairies tremble like a bridge under a drove of sheep. ‘Listen!’ I gasped. ‘It’s the critters coming,’ said the Kid; ‘cattle and buffalo and elk and deer and wolves—the whole posse. How many cards did you call for?—_two_, wasn’t it?’

“He thrust two cards into my hand. One of ’em was the deuce of hearts! O God! It wasn’t only the printed heart he gave me; it was the warm, red, beating heart of a friend.”

Frenchy dropped his head into his arms on the table and groaned. When he lifted his face again his eyes were wet.

“Four deuces—and they burn holes in the dark whenever I shut my eyes! And all day I see four pairs of devils dancing in the sunlight till my head swims!”

Frenchy dropped his head upon his chest and breathed deep, uneven breaths for a space.

“The Kid had only a pair of face-cards,” he continued; “a dinky little pair of face-cards. And for a second the man in me came to the surface, and I threw the four hand down and stamped on it and said I wouldn’t leave him. And what did the Kid do? Began with all the blackguard adjectives of the language and ended with ‘coward’ and threw the bunch in my teeth. ‘You’re the first man that ever called me a quitter, Frenchy,’ he said. ‘I played my hand, didn’t I? What would you do to a man who’d ask you to take your money back when you’d lost? If I’d won, do you think I wouldn’t leave your carcass here to stew, you cussed fool?’

“And then something in the back of my head woke up and howled: ‘You won—it’s yours—a chance for life—fair play—he’d go if you lost—he’d go!’ And there was a roaring in my head and the flaming night whirled ’round, and the bitter words stung me, and my heart hardened—and—I—went.

“I found the Kid’s horse saddled and bridled. I cut the lariat and leaped astride. I jabbed the spike spurs into the frightened brute till he roared with pain. I had forgotten everything. I was a Fear without a body flying through a darkness that coughed smoke and spit light. And then at last things quit whirling, and I felt the steady _lift, lift, lift_ of the good brute racing with all the devils down a heart-breaking stretch for the river.

“I turned about in the saddle. Half the sky had turned into an open furnace! Above me a great stormy ocean of blood rolled on into the twilight of the east! Blood!—a seething, billowy sea of red blood, with great, red, purring cat-tongues lapping it greedily! Gaudy giant flowers—purple, yellow, red, green—bloomed for a moment in a strange garden of dreams, and nodded in the wind and fell and bloomed again and fell! The infernal beauty of the thing fascinated me for a moment. Then I heard the rumbling—the unceasing thunder. It was louder than before. I thought of the ten thousand sharp hoofs gaining, gaining, with whips of fire lashing them in the rear. And then I thought of the Kid back there.

“My heart sickened. The hot wind that scorched my face accused me; the choking air accused me. I could see him lying on his face even then with the mad hoofs beating him into a pulp; I could see the writhing of his body as the heat increased; I could smell the stench of his sizzling flesh!