The Plow-Woman Part 12

The Indian nodded.

"Dakota?"

Swiftly, the pariah's whole aspect altered. A moment before, satisfied as to food, happy and comfortable, he had squatted down in his blanket.

But, now, his shoulders bent, his chin sank to his breast, his eyes grew dull and sullen.

"Were you in the Mauvaises Terres?" queried the evangelist.

Squaw Charley shook his head.

"On the Powder?"

There was a silent a.s.sent.

"The soldiers pursued; maybe they surprised you--which?"

To answer, the Indian rose slowly. With one of Lancaster's crutches he raked out some ashes and levelled them upon the hearth-stones. Next, across them, stooping and using a finger, he drew a varying line that showed the trend of a stream. Far up toward its source, in a bend, he placed bits of bread from the table to indicate the lodges of his tribesmen. Slivers from a stick showed that the tepees had been set thickly in a grove of tall cottonwoods. White beans, from a filled pan on the floor near by him, stood for the warriors that had fought. His fingers moved more quickly as, by means of a handful of corn that Dallas had put in his leather pouch, he planted the United States troops on three sides of the Indian campground, and moved them forward to the attack.

Adroitly he manoeuvred the opposing forces, with advancing here and retreating there, groans when the white men felt the fight too keenly, low whoops to picture an Indian gain, little puffs of the breath to betoken flying bullets. The onlookers saw the battle as it had raged about the tepees. And the flickering lantern, as Squaw Charley moved it in a semicircle, told them that the firing began at daybreak and continued until dark.

All at once he changed the picture. Twelve beans were rapidly counted out and laid in rows, and he mourned softly over these to show that they were slain warriors. Five kernels of corn--a line of pale-faced dead--were placed beside the bean rows. This done, he covered the lantern with the grain-sack and leaned back against the logs.

"Aye, aye," cried David Bond, sadly. "Twelve braves and five troopers perished! Seventeen souls went to their Maker to mark the greed of the white man and the yearning to harry off the red! Why do the Indians not stay in peace and quiet upon the lands set apart for them, and not go abroad stealing and slaughtering? Why do my own people not give back to their brothers the country that is rightly theirs?"

Once more Squaw Charley stooped forward and, resting his weight on one hand, traced the return march of the troopers to a crossing of the Missouri, where the command had buried its dead; from there he drew the route southward, to the ferry and Fort Brannon. Here, he stuck the splinters in a circle to picture the stockade below the barracks. At last, rising, he drew his blanket close about him, put the grain-sack over his tangled hair and, with a parting look toward Dallas and the evangelist, went slowly out.

Perfect quiet followed the pariah's going. His recital of the conflict, dumb though it was, had powerfully stirred the little audience. For, as he had proceeded with his crude mimicry, the imagination of the others had filled in the scenes he could not sketch.

The section-boss spoke first. Not incapable of feeling, yet disliking to show emotion because it might be counted a weakness, he hastened to clear the air. "Say, Dallas," he drawled, with a survey of the battle-field, "he ought t' had some red Mexican beans fer his Injuns."

But the remark failed to appeal.

David Bond made a shake-down for himself beside Lancaster's bunk, using an armful of hay and the robes and quilts from his pung. However, the fact that he needed rest, or that his couch was ready, did not tempt him from the fire. Long after his host disappeared behind the swinging Navajo blankets, he sat by the hearth. And Dallas stayed with him, Marylyn's sleepy head pillowed in her lap.

The elder girl felt strangely drawn to him. He returned the interest he inspired. Like Lounsbury, he marked the unusual character of this woman of the far frontier. But he saw further than had the younger man: With her father and sister, she was all firmness and strength, as if she held herself to be the mainstay of the family; yet, now and then, unwittingly, she betrayed qualities that were distinctly opposite. Like Lounsbury, too, when he touched upon the subject of her life it was to inquire if she had spent any of its years in a town. He felt certain that she had not; at the same time, his belief was curiously contradicted by her bearing.

"I'll always live on the plains," she said, having told him of the _mesa_ and their migration north; "if I left 'em for a while, I'd learn things I don't know now; and when I came back, maybe I wouldn't be satisfied with the shack, or with dad and Marylyn."

"Child, where did you get that thought?" he asked, astonished.

"I don't know--only my mother would 'a' been happy in Texas if she'd been born there. But she wasn't, and she wanted her old home till she died."

She wanted her old home till she died--it was only a sentence, yet the quiet pathos of it bared to him the tragedy of that mother's exile.

"Never a great city, daughter," he advised. "Stay here, menaced by Indians, among rough men and women, with storms and toil besetting you, but never go to a great city. It is close and dirty and paved, and in it no man may fill his lungs with pure air, or touch his feet to G.o.d's green earth."

"In cities," questioned Dallas, but in a low tone, as if she wished no one to overhear; "in cities, do--do the women dress like me?" She raised herself a little, though without disturbing Marylyn, so that he might see her plain, collarless waist and straight, scant skirt.

He gave her a smile--a smile as rare and transforming as her own. She had allowed him a glimpse of her suppressed girlishness. "Would that they did, my daughter," he answered.

"I mean in cities like--like--Bismarck," she said, a trifle consciously.

"Perhaps--some--eh--let me see." He was perplexed. He saw the eager light in her face; saw that, for some reason, she was striving to compare herself with the women of the settled districts--and to learn from him the very things she had feared might bring dissatisfaction with her life. He did not wish to teach discontent. He would not tell an untruth. So he created a diversion by taking up his ulster and searching in a capacious pocket.

"But they--they--don't plow."

David Bond brought forth a limp and battered Bible. "No," he said; "no, they--they don't plow."

"Ah!" She looked into the fire. Of a sudden, two memories had returned--one, of the pa.s.sing musicians, with their nudging and insolent smirks; the other, of a man who had leaned back in his saddle and laughed--after all, perhaps, _not_ at her name.

"I--I suppose they're more like Marylyn," she faltered.

The evangelist adjusted his silver-bowed spectacles and smiled down at her. "And if they are, would it worry you, daughter?"

She shook her head slowly, and looked away.

He turned his back, so that both lantern-and firelight could reach his pages, and, opening the Book at random, began to read. The chapter done, he turned round and glanced at her again. Her face was still averted.

He rose to retire. She put Marylyn gently aside and rose with him.

Then, and not till then, did Dallas think of their dilemma of the morning. The evangelist's coming and their talk together had caused her entirely to forget about the trip to the land-office. However, swift on its remembrance, came a comforting certainty in David Bond's sympathy and aid. At once she told him of the necessity of her father's going.

"Shadrach and I will start with him to-morrow," was his ready response.

He put out a hand to part the Navajo blankets. But an unshaped thought made him pause. "You will be alone."

"Why, we're not afraid."

"Brave girl!" he said. Her confident answer drove away the moment's vague uneasiness without its having taken the form or the connection he might have given it.

"Good-night," she called softly.

"Good-night, daughter," he answered, and the swinging blankets met behind him.

CHAPTER VIII

BEFORE THE WARPED DOOR

The section-boss was thoroughly surprised and not altogether delighted at being roused early the following morning with the news that he could start at once for Bismarck. As Dallas' voice penetrated the part.i.tion, he returned the only reply his ice-bound moustache and goatee would permit--a m.u.f.fled growl. She did not hear it, yet she knew how he felt.

The previous day, though a casual observer might have been misled by his garrulous fretting over Ben's lameness, she was quick to note, and with a pang, that, secretly, he was relieved. But her pain at his laxity and indifference was not unmixed with pity. For to her crippled father, whose crutches, in the snow, hindered rather than helped him, she guessed how long and lonely and bitter cold seemed the way to the land-office.

Yet it was something more than these aspects of the journey that caused Lancaster to view it unfavourably. He knew that in another thirty-six hours, when the original applicant's half-year was up, he, and not the other, would have the clearer right to the quarter-section. Therefore, he regarded the proposed declaration of abandonment, the cancelling of the old entry and the filing of a new, as forms which need not be gone through with hurriedly (since the first claimant had undoubtedly disappeared for good and all), but which might be attended to quite as well the coming spring, when the roads would be open and the days warm.

Confident of his perfect security on the peninsula, and possessed by a sneaking, but denied, abhorrence for rush and discomfort, he rejoiced at delay. So, having left his snug bed to fumble about in the dark for his clothes, and, these donned, having loosed his speech before the grateful blaze in the fireplace, he did not argue fatigue or freezing as an excuse for procrastination; he pa.s.sed over these rather too briefly and enlarged upon his safe status as a settler.

"All bosh," he a.s.serted as he watched Dallas and Marylyn busy with preparations for breakfast. "A hull regiment of soldiers couldn' put us offen this lan', t' say nothin' of a man thet ain't done a thing on it sence he took it up. Ah might _jes'_ as well stay home."

But he found that Dallas was firm on the question of his going--"haidstrong," he termed it--and would not even pause for a discussion. She had risen early to feed the occupants of the lean-to--Shadrach in particular; next, with a promise of rest later on, she had awaked Marylyn. Formerly, the younger girl would have persisted in questioning her about the proposed journey, and in knowing its purpose. Now, however, her interest in it, like that in most things, was so small that she appeared totally indifferent, and went about her work silently. Despite the fact that this somewhat revived Dallas' anxiety over her sister, the elder girl felt freshly strengthened in spirit. In all her twenty years of life no other morning had, like this one, promised her so much happiness.