The Basket Woman Part 12

The boys were still and scared. Slowly Hank and Walter drew their horses out of the path and joined the men. Indian Joe and his father pa.s.sed forward on the trail.

"Do them no harm," said Joe Baker to those that were with him.

"Good-by, Joe," said Walter half aloud.

The other did not turn his head, but as he went they noticed that he had bared his right arm from the hunting shirt, and an inch above the elbow showed a thin, white scar. Walter had the twin of that mark under his flannels.

Mr. Baker did not mind fighting Indians; he thought it a good thing to have their troubles settled all at once in this way, but he did not want his son mixed up in it. The first thing he did when he got home was to send him off secretly by night to the fort, and from there he pa.s.sed over the mountains with other of the settlers' families under strong escort, and finally went to his mother's people in the East, and was put to school. As it turned out he never came back to Tres Pinos, he does not come into this story any more.

When the first smoke rose up that showed where the fierce hate of the Paiutes had broken into flame, the Indians took their women and children away from the pleasant open slopes, and hid them in deep canons in secret places of the rocks. There they feathered arrows, and twisted bowstrings of the sinew of deer. And because there were so many grave things done, and it was not the custom for boys to question their elders, Joe never heard how Walter had been sent away. He thought him still at the ranch with his father, and it is because of this mistake that there is any more story at all.

You may be sure that, of those two boys, Joe's was the deeper loving, for, besides having grown up together, Walter was white, therefore thinking himself, and making the other believe it, the better of the two. But for this Walter made no difference in his behavior; had Joe to eat at his table, and would have him sleep in his bed, but Joe laughed, and lay on the floor. All this was counted a kindness and a great honor in the campoodie. Walter could find out things by looking in a book, which was sheer magic, and had taught Joe to write a little, so that he could send word by means of a piece of paper, which was cleverer than the tricks Joe had taught him, of reading the signs of antelope and elk and deer. The white boy was to the Indian a little of all the heroes and bright ones of the arrow-maker's tales come alive again. Therefore he quaked in his heart when he heard the rumors that ran about the camp.

The war began about Cottonwood, and ran like wildfire that licked up all the ranches in its course. Then the whites came strongly against the Paiutes at the Stone Corral, and made an end of the best of their fighting men. Then the Indians broke out in the north, and at last it came to such a pa.s.s that the very boys must do fighting, and the women make bowstrings. The cattlemen turned in to Baker's ranch as a centre, and all the northern campoodies gathered together to attack them. They had not much to hope for, only to do as much killing as possible before the winter set in with the hunger and the deep snows.

By this time Joe's father was dead, and his mother had brought the boy a quiver full of arrows and a new bowstring, and sent him down to the battle.

And Joe went hotly enough to join the men of the other village, nursing his bow with great care, remembering his father, but when he came to counsel and found where the fight must be, his heart turned again, for he remembered his friend. The braves camped by Little Round Valley, and he thought of the talk he and Walter had there; the war party went over the tongue of hills, and Joe saw Winnedumah shining whitely on Waban, and remembered his boyish errand, the mystery of the tall, strange warrior that came upon them in the night, their talk in the hut of the arrow-maker, and the vow that came afterward.

The Indians came down a ravine toward Tres Pinos, and there met a band of horses which some of their party had run in from the ranches; among them was a pinto pony which Walter had used to ride, and it came to Joe's hand when he called. Then the boy wondered if Walter might be dead, and leaned his head against the pony's mane; it turned its head and nickered softly at his ear.

The war party stayed in the ravine until it grew dark, and Joe watched how Winnedumah swam in a mist above the hills long after the sun had gone quite down, as if in his faithfulness he would out.w.a.tch the dark; and then the boy's heart was lifted up to the great chief standing still by Tinnemaha. "I will not forget," he said. "I, too, will be faithful."

Perhaps at this moment he expected a miracle to help him in his vow as it had helped Winnedumah.

In the dusk the mounted Indians rode down by the Creek of Tres Pinos.

When they came by the ruined hut where his father had lived, Joe's heart grew hot again, and when he pa.s.sed the arrow-maker's, he remembered his vow. Suddenly he wheeled his pony in the trail, hardly knowing what he would do. The man next to him laid an arrow across his bow and pointed it at the boy's breast.

"Coward," he whispered, but an older Indian laid his hand on the man's arm.

"Save your arrows," he said. Then the ponies swept forward in the charge, but Joe knew in an instant how it would be with him. He would be called false and a coward, killed for it, driven from the tribe, but he would not fight against his sworn brother. He would keep his vow.

A sudden rain of arrows flew from the advancing Paiutes; Joe fumbled his and dropped it on the ground. He was wondering if one of the many aimed would find his brother. Bullets answered the arrow flight. He saw the braves pitch forward, and heard the scream of wounded ponies.

He hoped he would be shot; he would not have minded that; it would be better than being called a coward. And then it occurred to him, if Walter and his father came out and found him when the fight was done, they would think that he had broken his word. The Paiutes began to seek cover, but Joe drove out wildly from them, and rode back in the friendly dark, and past the ruined campoodie, to the black rocks. There he crept into the cave which only he and Walter knew, and lay on his face and cried, for though he was an Indian he was only a boy, and he had seen his first fight. He was sick with the thought of his vow. He lay in the black rocks all the night and the day, and watched the cattlemen and the soldiers ranging all that county for the stragglers of his people, and guessed that the Paiutes had made the last stand. Then in the second night he began to work back by secret paths to the mountain camp. It never occurred to him not to go. He had the courage to meet what waited for him there, but he had not the heart to go to it in the full light of day. He came in by his mother's place, and she spat upon him, for she had heard how he had carried himself in the fight.

"No son of mine," said she.

He went by the women and children and heard their jeers. His heart was very sick. He went apart and sat down and waited what the men would say.

There were few of them left about the dying fire. They had washed off their war paint, and their bows were broken. When they spoke at last, it was with mocking and sad scorn.

"We have enough of killing," said the one called Scar-Face. "Let him have a woman's dress and stay to mend the fire."

So it was done in the presence of all the camp; and because he was a boy, and because he was an Indian, he said nothing of his vow, nor opened his mouth in his defense, though his heart quaked and his knees shook. He had the courage to wear the badge of being afraid all his life. They brought him a woman's dress, though they were all too sad for much laughter, and in the morning he set to bringing the wood for the fire.

Afterward there was a treaty made between the Paiutes and the settlers, and the remnant went back to the campoodie of Tres Pinos, and Joe learned how Walter had been sent out of the valley in the beginning of the war, but that did not make any difference about the woman's dress.

He and Walter never met again. He continued to go about in dresses, though in time he was allowed to do a man's work, and his knowledge of English helped to restore a friendly footing with the cattlemen. The valley filled very rapidly with settlers after that, and under the slack usage of the tribe, Mahala Joe, as he came to be known, might have thrown aside his woman's gear without offense, but he had the courage to wear it to his life's end. He kept his sentence as he kept his vow, and yet it is certain that Walter never knew.