I Married a Ranger Part 7

Pennsylvania Avenue in August.

Hornet stings.

Spankings sustained in my youth!

It was useless. I couldn't qualify as a Scientist. Maybe I lacked concentration, for between looking out for another avalanche and wondering how soon I could decently ask for another cup of coffee from the thermos bottle, my thoughts wandered.

Perhaps the Chief was cold, too. Anyway, we stopped at Santa Maria Spring and spread out our lunch. The quaint little shelter over the spring was being rapidly covered with Boston ivy. White Mountain said Earl s.h.i.+rley used to ride down there twice a week after a hard day's work to water the newly set plants so they would grow. One is always learning new things about Western men!

It was mighty good to find Ranger Fisk at the top of the trail. He said he thought I would be cold and tired so he brought a flivver to take me the remaining six miles in to Headquarters. He had the house warm and had melted snow for drinking-water. All the water pipes had frozen while we were gone, and I washed my face with cold cream for several days.

I hadn't more than settled down comfortably when the Chief found it necessary to make another trip down. When he mentioned going I played the piano so loud I couldn't hear him. I had no desire to go. Not while I could sit in my warm house and read and sew in my comfortable rocking chair. It was without a single qualm that I waved him a floury adieu from the midst of cookie-making. I closed the door and went back to my baking, which was abruptly terminated by a blazing board falling into the crock of dough. The house was burning over my luckless head. I turned around and around a few times in the same spot, then tried to throw a bucket of water up against the ceiling. Had I been the conflagration it would have ended then and there, for I was thoroughly drenched. Failing to be my own fire engine I ran out and happened to see Ranger Winess crossing the road. He must have been startled at my war whoop, for he came running. By that time the smoke was rolling out through the roof. While he climbed into the loft and tore pieces of blazing boards away, I gave the emergency call by telephone, and soon we had plenty of help. After the fire was conquered, I went to the hotel and stayed until the Chief got back.

The months from Christmas to April are the dullest at Grand Canyon. Of course tourists still come but not in the numbers milder weather brings.

There is little or no automobile travel coming in from the outside world. Very few large groups or conventions come except in June, which seems to be the month for brides and large parties. That left the ranger family more time for play, especially in the evenings, and we had jolly parties in our big living-room. The piano was the drawing card, and combined with Ranger Winess' large guitar manufactured strange music.

When the other rangers joined in and sang they managed to make quite a racket. Perhaps the songs they sang would not have met with enthusiasm in select drawing-rooms, but they had a charm for all that. Cowboy songs, sea chanties, and ballads many years old were often on call.

Kipling's poems, especially "I Learned about Women from Her" were prime favorites.

I soon learned to take my sewing close to the fire and sit there quietly a few minutes in order to be forgotten. There are realms of masculine pleasure into which no mere woman should intrude. Besides that, I never could negotiate the weird crooks and turns they gave to their tunes.

Every time an old favorite was sung, it developed new twists and curves.

Ranger Winess would discover a heretofore unknown chord on his guitar: "Get that one, boys. That's a wicked minor!" Then for the ensuing five minutes, agonizing wails shattered the smoke screen while they were on the trail of that elusive minor. I had one set rule regarding their concerts--positively no lighted cigarettes were to be parked on my piano!

One song Ranger Winess always rendered as a solo, because all the others enjoyed hearing it too much to join in with him:

OLD ROANEY

I was hangin' 'round the town, and I didn't have a dime.

I was out of work and loafin' all the time.

When up stepped a man, and he said, "I suppose You're a bronco-buster. I can tell by your clothes."

Well, I thought that I was, and I told him the same.

I asked him if he had any bad ones to tame?

"I have an old pony what knows how to buck; At stacking up cowboys he has all the luck."'

I asked him what'd he pay if I was to stay And ride his old pony around for a day.

"I'll give you ten dollars;" I said, "That's my chance,"

Throwed my saddle in the buckboard and headed for the ranch.

Got up next morning, and right after chuck Went down to the corral to see that pony buck.

He was standin' in the corner, standin' all alone---- That pig-eyed pony, a strawberry roan!

Little pin ears that were red at the tip; The X-Y-Z was stamped on his hip.

Narrow in the chest, with a scar on his jaw, What all goes with an old outlaw!

First came the bridle, then there was a fight; But I throwed on my saddle and screwed it down tight, Stepped to his middle, feelin' mighty fine, Said: "Out of the way, boys, watch him unwind!"

Well, I guess Old Roaney sure unwound; Didn't spend much of his time on the ground!

Went up in the East, come down in the West---- Stickin' to his middle, I was doin' my best!

He went in the air with his belly to the sun The old sun-fis.h.i.+n' son-of-a-gun!

Lost both the stirrups and I lost my hat Reached for the horn, blinder than a bat.

Then Old Roaney gently slid into high, Left me sittin' on nothin' but the sky.

There ain't no cowboy who is alive Can ride Old Roaney when he makes his high dive!

When the piano player stopped and Frank struck a few soft chords on his guitar I knew they were getting sentimental. Pretty soon someone would begin to hum: "When the dew is on the rose, and the world is all repose." ... Those rangers lived close to danger and hards.h.i.+ps every day, but they had more real sentiment in their makeup than any type of men I know. Maybe it's because women are so scarce around them that they hold all womanhood in high regard. Most of them dreamed of a home and wife and children, but few of them felt they had a right to ask a woman to share their primitive mode of living. They might not jump up to retrieve a dropped handkerchief, or stand at attention when a woman entered a room, but in their hearts they had a deep respect for every woman that showed herself worthy.

Now and then, a certain son of Scotland, Major Hunter Clarkson, dropped in. He was a real musician, and while I sewed and the Chief smoked he treated us to an hour of true melody. He used to play the bagpipes at home with his four brothers, he said, and he admitted that at times the racket they made jarred his mother's china from the shelves!

He had served with the British forces in Egypt, and if he could have known how interested we were in his experiences, he would have given us more than a bare hint of the scenes that were enacted during the defense of the Dardanelles and the entrance into Jerusalem.

One night he was telling us something about the habits of the Turks they fought, when the telephone rang and interrupted the narrative, which was never finished. The Chief had to go and investigate an attempted suicide.

It seemed that a lad under twenty, in Cleveland, had seen on a movie screen a picture of Grand Canyon. He tucked that vision away somewhere in his distorted brain, and when he had his next quarrel with his mother he gathered together all his worldly wealth and invested it in a ticket to Grand Canyon. There he intended to end his troubles, and make his mother sorry she hadn't sewed on a b.u.t.ton the instant he had asked her to! That was a touching scene he pictured to himself--his heart-broken mother weeping with remorse because her son had jumped into the Canyon.

But! When he reached the Rim and looked over, it was a long way to the bottom, and there were sharp rocks there. Perhaps no one would ever find him, and what's the use of killing one's self if n.o.body knows about it?

Something desperate had to be done, however, so he shot himself where he fancied his heart was located (he hit his stomach, which was a pretty close guess) with a cheap pistol he carried, hurled the gun into the Canyon, and started walking back to Headquarters. He met Ranger Winess making a patrol and reported to him that he had committed suicide!

Rangers West and Winess took care of him through the night, with Nurse Catti's supervision, and the next day the Chief took him to Flagstaff, where the bullet was removed and he was returned to his mother a sadder and a wiser boy.

There is some mysterious power about the Canyon that seems to make it impossible for a person to face the gorge and throw himself into it.

A young man, immensely wealthy, brought his fiancee to the Canyon for a day's outing. At Williams, where they had lunch, he proposed that she go on to the Coast with him, but she refused, saying that she thought it was not the thing to do, since her mother expected her back home that night. He laughed and scribbled something on a paper which he tucked carelessly into a pocket of his overcoat. They went on to the Canyon and joined a party that walked out beyond Powell's Monument. He walked up to the Rim and stared into the depths, then turned facing his sweetheart.

"Take my picture," he shouted; and while she bent over the kodak, he uttered a prayer, threw his arms up, and leaped _backward_ into the Canyon. He had not been able to face it and destroy the life G.o.d had given him. Hours later rangers recovered his body, and in his pocket found the paper on which he had written: "You wouldn't go with me to Los Angeles, so it's goodbye!"

Ranger West came in one day and told me that there was a lot of sickness among the children at an Indian encampment a few miles from Headquarters. I rode out with him to see what was the matter and found that whooping-cough was rampant. For some reason, even though it was a very severe winter, the Supai Indians had come up from their home in Havasu Canyon, "Land of the Sky-Blue Water," made famous by Cadman, and were camped among the trees on a hillside. The barefoot women and dirty children were quite friendly, but the lazy, filthy bucks would have been insolent had I been alone. They lolled in the "hewas," brush huts daubed with mud, while the women dragged in wood and the children filled sacks with snow to melt for drinking purposes. To be sure they didn't waste any of it in was.h.i.+ng themselves.

They would not let me doctor the children, and several of them died; but we could never find where they were buried. It is a custom of that tribe to bury its members with the right arm sticking up out of the ground. In case it is a lordly man that has pa.s.sed to the Happy Hunting Ground his pony is shot and propped upright beside the grave with the reins clutched in the dead master's hand.

I thought I might be able to reach a better understanding with the women if the men were not present, so I told them to bring all the baskets they made to my house and I would look at them and buy some of them.

Beautiful baskets were brought by the older squaws, and botched-up shabby ones by the younger generation. Sometimes a sick child would be brought by the mother, but there was little I could do for it outside of giving it nouris.h.i.+ng food. An Indian's cure-all is castor oil. He will drink quarts of that if he can obtain it.

The Supai women are without dignity or appeal, and I never formed the warm friends.h.i.+ps with them that I did with women of other tribes. They begged for everything in sight. One fat old squaw coveted a yellow evening gown she saw in my closet; I gave it to her, also a discarded garden hat with big yellow roses on it. She draped the gown around her bent shoulders and perched the hat on top of her gray tangled hair and went away happier than Punch. In a few minutes a whole delegation of squaws arrived to see what they could salvage.

Wattahomigie, their chief, and Dot, his wife, are far superior to the rest of the tribe, and when it was necessary to have any dealing with their people the Chief acted through Wattahomigie. He had often begged us to visit their Canyon home, and we promised to go when we could. He came strutting into our house one summer day and invited us to accompany him home, as the season of peaches and melons was at its height. He had been so sure we would go that he left orders for members of the tribe to meet us at Hilltop where the steep trail begins. We listened to him.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

_Chapter IX: THE DOOMED TRIBE_[1]

Wattahomigie reminded us the next morning that we had promised to go with him, so we rushed around and in an hour were ready to follow his lead.

It's a long trail, winding through forest and desert, up hill and down, skirting sheer precipices and creeping through tunnels. And at the end of the trail one stumbles upon the tiny, hidden village where the last handful of a once powerful nation has sought refuge. Half-clad, half-fed, half-wild, one might say, they hide away there in their poverty, ignorance, and superst.i.tion. But oh, the road one must travel to reach them! I hadn't antic.i.p.ated Arizona trails when I so blithely announced to White Mountain, "Whither thou goest, I will go." Neither had I slept in an Indian village when I added, "And where thou lodgest, I will lodge."

We loaded our camp equipment into the Ford, tied a canvas bag of water where it would be air-cooled, strapped a road-building shovel on the running-board, and were on our way.