Homepage
Login
Profile
BookClubs
dmBox
Read Ebook: The Land of Content by Delano Edith Barnard Henry J Illustrator
Font size:
Background color:
Text color:
Add to tbrJar First Page Next Page
Ebook has 1444 lines and 76050 words, and 29 pages
PAGE
LITTLE BIG HORN MEDICINE 3
SPECIMEN JONES 36
THE SERENADE AT SISKIYOU 64
THE GENERAL'S BLUFF 82
SALVATION GAP 115
THE SECOND MISSOURI COMPROMISE 131
LA TINAJA BONITA 159
A PILGRIM ON THE GILA 211
"HIS HORSE DREW CLOSE, SHOVING THE HORSE OF THE MEDICINE-MAN" " 14
"THE HEAD LAY IN THE WATER" " 34
AN APACHE " 38
CUMNOR'S AWAKENING " 52
"'AIN'T Y'U GOT SOMETHING TO SELL?'" " 90
THE CHARGE " 102
"HE HESITATED TO KILL THE WOMAN" " 112
THE SHOT-GUN MESSENGER " 122
"'I'D LIKE TO HAVE IT OVER'" " 128
"HIS PLAN WAS TO WALK AND KEEP QUIET" " 148
"'DON'T NOBODY HURT ANYBODY,' SAID SPECIMEN JONES" " 156
"'YOU DON'T WANT TO TALK THIS WAY. YOU'RE ALONE'" " 204
"EACH BLACK-HAIRED DESERT FIGURE" " 238
RED MEN AND WHITE
LITTLE BIG HORN MEDICINE
Something new was happening among the Crow Indians. A young pretender had appeared in the tribe. What this might lead to was unknown alike to white man and to red; but the old Crow chiefs discussed it in their councils, and the soldiers at Fort Custer, and the civilians at the agency twelve miles up the river, and all the white settlers in the valley discussed it also. Lieutenants Stirling and Haines, of the First Cavalry, were speculating upon it as they rode one afternoon.
"Can't tell about Indians," said Stirling. "But I think the Crows are too reasonable to go on the war-path."
"Reasonable!" said Haines. He was young, and new to Indians.
"Logical!" echoed Haines again. He held the regulation Eastern view that the Indian knows nothing but the three blind appetites.
"You'd know better," remarked Stirling, "if you'd been fighting 'em for fifteen years. They're as shrewd as AEsop's fables."
Just then two Indians appeared round a bluff--one old and shabby, the other young and very gaudy--riding side by side.
"That's Cheschapah," said Stirling. "That's the agitator in all his feathers. His father, you see, dresses more conservatively."
The feathered dandy now did a singular thing. He galloped towards the two officers almost as if to bear them down, and, steering much too close, flashed by yelling, amid a clatter of gravel.
"Nice manners," commented Haines. "Seems to have a chip on his shoulder."
But Stirling looked thoughtful. "Yes," he muttered, "he has a chip."
Meanwhile the shabby father was approaching. His face was mild and sad, and he might be seventy. He made a gesture of greeting. "How!" he said, pleasantly, and ambled on his way.
"Now there you have an object-lesson," said Stirling. "Old Pounded Meat has no chip. The question is, are the fathers or the sons going to run the Crow Nation?"
"Why did the young chap have a dog on his saddle?" inquired Haines.
"I didn't notice it. For his supper, probably--probably he's getting up a dance. He is scheming to be a chief. Says he is a medicine-man, and can make water boil without fire; but the big men of the tribe take no stock in him--not yet. They've seen soda-water before. But I'm told this water-boiling astonishes the young."
"Ah, that's the puzzle. I told you just now Indians could reason."
"And I was amused."
"Because you're an Eastern man. I tell you, Haines, if it wasn't my business to shoot Indians I'd study them."
"You're a crank," said Haines.
But Stirling was not a crank. He knew that so far from being a mere animal, the Indian is of a subtlety more ancient than the Sphinx. In his primal brain--nearer nature than our own--the directness of a child mingles with the profoundest cunning. He believes easily in powers of light and darkness, yet is a sceptic all the while. Stirling knew this; but he could not know just when, if ever, the young charlatan Cheschapah would succeed in cheating the older chiefs; just when, if ever, he would strike the chord of their superstition. Till then they would reason that the white man was more comfortable as a friend than as a foe, that rations and gifts of clothes and farming implements were better than battles and prisons. Once their superstition was set alight, these three thousand Crows might suddenly follow Cheschapah to burn and kill and destroy.
"How does he manage his soda-water, do you suppose?" inquired Haines.
"That's mysterious. He has never been known to buy drugs, and he's careful where he does his trick. He's still a little afraid of his father. All Indians are. It's queer where he was going with that dog."
Hard galloping sounded behind them, and a courier from the Indian agency overtook and passed them, hurrying to Fort Custer. The officers hurried too, and, arriving, received news and orders. Forty Sioux were reported up the river coming to visit the Crows. It was peaceable, but untimely. The Sioux agent over at Pine Ridge had given these forty permission to go, without first finding out if it would be convenient to the Crow agent to have them come. It is a rule of the Indian Bureau that if one tribe desire to visit another, the agents of both must consent. Now, most of the Crows were farming and quiet, and it was not wise that a visit from the Sioux and a season of feasting should tempt their hearts and minds away from the tilling of the soil. The visitors must be taken charge of and sent home.
"Very awkward, though," said Stirling to Haines. He had been ordered to take two troops and arrest th in uniform, horseback and afoot, imperturbably calm, lords and rulers and receivers of tribute; the sidewalks swarmed with people, lines of men and women swinging northward and southward, some buoyantly conscious of new-fashioned raiment, their eyes apparently unaware of the jostling crowd, some with tiny dogs under their arms, some looking at the passing faces, or bowing to people in motor cars, a few glancing into the brilliant windows of the shops, a few chatting and laughing with companions.
Benson Flood, returned from Virginia the day before, was one of those who, marching northward, looked searchingly into the faces of the people he passed, and frequently glanced into the automobiles on his right. No one in all that army was more aware than he of the vivid beauty of the moving scene. For three years he had watched the Avenue burst into life and color under the recurring influence of Spring; but he had lost none of the keenness of his first perception of it, none of his delight in its unique splendor, none of the thrill of having achieved the right to be a part of it.
Achievement, indeed, was what Benson Flood stood for. Beginning life in a Western town, his subsequent history was one of those spectacular dramas common enough in American progress, yet always thrilling in their exhibition of daring and courage, in their apparent forcing of opportunity, their making and taking of chances, their final conquest of power and wealth. Flood's career differed from many another only in two particulars: as early as the age of forty he had reached that point where he could afford to lay aside his more public pursuits; and at the same time, perhaps because he had grown no older in the cult, the mere accumulation of wealth ceased to be the first object in life for him. He was the offspring of one of the curious mixtures of race that distinguish America; and doubtless from some ancestor of an older civilization he inherited a taste and longing for that to which, in his youth and early manhood, he had been an absolute stranger. When he left his West behind him, he faced towards those gentler things which, in his fine imagination and the perception trained by the exigencies of his career, he felt to be more desirable than anything he had yet attained to. Certainly they had become to him, untasted though they were at the time, of greater importance. He valued his experiences, his labors, his millions; but they were not enough. However unaccustomed to it he might be, he knew very definitely what he now wanted; and a winter in New York, with a year or two in Europe, had put him in a fair way of adding the fulfillment of his later ambition to his earlier achievements. A race-winning yacht, a few introductions among people who welcome the owners of mines and large fortunes, these gave a social background which, with the excellent foundation of his millions, served very well in New York, and taught him much about those things which he was now so sure of wanting. It was not strange that he believed them to be summed up, embodied, realized to the utmost, in one woman.
He was looking for her as he walked up the Avenue on this April afternoon; she loved its life and color and change, and was apt to pass over some part of it as often as she could. So Flood watched the passing women for the face that could so magically quicken his pulses. Many sought his recognition, yet he was oblivious of their number, ignoring the various half-invitations that were tentatively made him--the leaning forward of one in a limousine, the slight pause or lingering look of another.
His thoughts were still full of his journey, and Spring on the Avenue only brought up memories--so lately realities--of the breath of the woods, the wind in the tree-tops, the brown and green of fields so lately seen; and Flood had reached that state of mind where all that was sweet in memory, all that was beautiful in the present, all that he desired from the future, only reminded him of the one woman.
Add to tbrJar First Page Next Page