The Basket Woman Part 11

"That," said the Indian, "is the fire of your people. They missed you at afternoon, and have been looking for you. From my station on the hill I saw." Then he took the boy by the shoulders.

"Look you," he said, "no good comes of mixing white and brown, but now that the vow is made, see to the keeping of it." Then he stepped back from them and seemed to melt into the dark. Ahead of them the boys saw the light of the fire flare up with new fuel, and shadows, which they knew for the figures of their friends, moved between them and the flame.

Swiftly as two scared rabbits they ran on toward the glow.

When Walter and Joe had told them the story at the campoodie, the Paiutes made a great deal of it, especially the arrow-maker.

"Without a doubt," he said, "it was Winnedumah who came to you, and not, as some think, a Shoshone who was spying on our land. It is a great mystery. But since you have made a vow of brothers, you should keep it after the ancient use." Then he took a knife of obsidian and cut their arms, and rubbed a little of the blood of each upon the other.

"Now," he said, "you are one fellowship and one blood, and that is as it should be, for you were both nursed at one breast. See that you keep the vow."

"We will," said the boys solemnly, and they went out into the sunlight very proud of the blood upon their bared arms, holding by each other's hands.

II

When Walter was fifteen his father gave him a rifle, as he had promised, and a word of advice with it.

"Learn to shoot quickly and well," he said, "and never ride out from home without it. No one can tell what this trouble with the Indians may come to in the end."

Walter rode straight to the campoodie. He was never happy in any of his gifts until he had showed them to Joe. There was a group of older men at the camp, quartering a deer which they had brought in. One of them, called Scar-Face, looked at Walter with a leering frown.

"See," he said, "they are arming the very children with guns."

"My father promised it to me many years ago," said Walter. "It is my birthday gift."

He could not explain why, and he grew angry at the man's accusing tone, but after it he did not like showing his present to the Indians.

He called Joe, and they went over to a cave in the black rock where they had kept their boyish treasures and planned their plays since they were children. Joe thought the rifle a beauty, and turned it over admiringly in the shadow of the cave. They tried shooting at a mark, and then decided to go up Oak Creek for a shot at the gray squirrels. There they sighted a band of antelope that led them over a tongue of hills into Little Round Valley, where they found themselves at noon twelve miles from home and very hungry. They had no antelope, but four squirrels and a grouse. The two boys made a fire for cooking in a quiet place by a spring of sweet water.

"You may have my rifle to use as often as you like," said Walter, "but you must not lend it to any one in the campoodie, especially to Scar-Face. My father says he is the one who is stirring up all this trouble with the whites."

"The white men do not need any one to help them get into trouble," said Joe. "They can do that for themselves."

"It is the fault of the Indians," said Walter. "If they did not shoot the cattle, the white men would leave them alone."

"But if the white men come first to our lands with noise and trampling and scare away the game, what then will they shoot?" asked the Paiute.

Walter did not make any answer to that. He had often gone hunting with Joe and his father, and he knew what it meant to walk far, and fasting, after game made shy by the rifles of cattlemen, and at last to return empty to the campoodie where there were women and children with hungry eyes.

"Is it true," he said after a while, "that Scar-Face is stirring up all the Indians in the valley?"

"How should I know?" said Joe; "I am only a boy, and have not killed big game. I am not admitted to the counsels of the old men. What does it matter to us whether of old feuds or new? Are we not brothers sworn?"

Then, as the dinner was done, they ate each of the other's kill, for it was the custom of the Paiutes at that time that no youth should eat game of his own killing until he was fully grown. As they walked homeward the boys planned to get permission to go up on Waban for a week, after mountain sheep, before the snows began.

Mr. Baker looked grave when Walter spoke to him.

"My boy," he said, "I wish you would not plan long trips like this without first speaking to me. It is hardly safe in the present state of feeling among the Indians to let you go with them in this fashion. A whole week, too. But as you have already spoken of it, and it has probably been talked over in the campoodie, for me to refuse now would look as if I suspected something, and might bring about the thing I most fear."

"You should not be afraid for me with Joe, father, for we are brothers sworn," said Walter, and he told his father how they had mixed the blood of their arms in the arrow-maker's hut after they had come back from their first journey on Waban.

"Well," said Mr. Baker, who had not heard of this before, "I know that they set great store by these superst.i.tious customs, but I have not much faith in the word of a Paiute when he is dealing with a white man.

However, you had better go on with this hunting trip. Take Hank with you, and Joe's father, and do not be gone more than five days at the outside."

Hank was one of Mr. Baker's vaqueros, and very glad to get off for a few days' hunting on the blunt top of Waban. On the Monday following they left the Baker ranch for the mountain. As the two boys rode up the boulder-strewn slope it set them talking of the first time they had gone that way on their fruitless hunt for arrow points about the foot of Winnedumah, and of all that happened to them at that time. The valley lay below them full of purple mist, and away by the creek of Tres Pinos the brown, wattled huts of the campoodie like great wasps' nests stuck in the sage. Hank and Joe's father, with the pack horses, were ahead of them far up the trail; Joe and Walter let their own ponies lag, and the nose of one touched the flank of the other as they climbed slowly up the steep, and the boys turned their faces to each other, as if they had some vague warning that they would not ride so and talk familiarly again, as if the boiling anger of the tribes in the valley had brewed a sort of mist that rose up and gloomed the pleasant air on the slope of Waban.

"Joe," said Walter, "my father says if it came to a fight between the white settlers and the Paiutes, that you would not hold by the word we have pa.s.sed."

"That is the speech of a white man," said Joe.

"But would you?" the other insisted.

"I am a Paiute," said Joe; "I will hold by my people, also by my word; I will not fight against you."

"Nor I against you, but I would not like to have my father think you had broken your word."

"Have no care," said the Indian, "I will not break it."

Mr. Baker looked anxiously after his son as he rode to the hunting on Waban; he looked anxiously up that trail every hour until the boy came again, and that, as it turned out, was at the end of three days. For the trouble among the Indians had come to something at last,--the wasps were all out of nest by the brown creeks, and with them a flight of stinging arrows. The trouble began at Cottonwood, and the hunting party on Waban the second day out saw a tall, pale column of smoke that rose up from the notch of the hill behind the settlement, and fanned out slowly into the pale blueness of the sky.

It went on evenly, neither more nor less, thick smoke from a fire of green wood steadily tended. Before noon another rose from the mouth of Oak Creek, and a third from Tunawai. They waved and beckoned to one another, calling to counsel.

"Signal fires," said Hank; "that means mischief."

And from that on he went with his rifle half c.o.c.ked, and walked always so that he might keep Joe's father in full view. By night that same day there were seven smoke trees growing up in the long valley, and spreading thin, pale branches to the sky. There was no zest left in the hunt, and in the morning they owned it. Walter was worried by what he knew his father's anxiety must be. Then the party began to ride down again, and always Hank made the Indian go before. Away by the foot of Oppapago rose a black volume of smoke, thick, and lighted underneath by flames. It might be the reek of a burning ranch house. The boys were excited and afraid. They talked softly and crowded their ponies together on the trail.

"Joe," said Walter whisperingly, "if there is battle, you will have to go to it."

"Yes," said Joe.

"And you will fight; otherwise they will call you a coward, and if you run away, they will kill you."

"So I suppose," said Joe.

"Or they will make you wear a woman's dress like To-go-na-tee, the man who got up too late." This was a reminder from one of the arrow-maker's tales. "But you have promised not to fight."

"Look you," said the Indian boy; "if a white man came to kill me, I would kill him. That is right. But I will not fight you nor your father's house. That is my vow."

The white boy put out his hand, and laid it on the flank of the foremost pony. The Indian boy's fingers came behind him, and crept along the pony's back until they reached the other hand. They rode forward without talking.

Toward noon they made out hors.e.m.e.n riding on the trail below them. As it wound in and out around the blind gullies they saw and lost sight of them a dozen times. At last, where the fringe of the tall trees began, they came face to face. It was Mr. Baker and a party of five men; they carried rifles and had set and anxious looks.

"What will you have?" said Indian Joe's father as they drew up before him under a tamarack pine.

"My son," said the cattleman.

"Is there war?" said the Indian.

"There is war. Come, Walter."