The Way of a Man Part 19

"Yet it is sweet," she said.

"But for you, I see that you have changed again."

She spread her leather skirt down with her hands, as though to make it longer, and looked contemplatively at the fringed leggins below.

"You were four different women," I mused, "and now you are another, quite another."

At this she frowned a bit, and rose. "You are not to talk," she said, "nor to think that you are well; because you are not. I must go and see the others."

I lay back against the wagon bed, wondering in which garb she had been most beautiful--the filmy ball dress and the mocking mask, the gray gown and veil of the day after, the thin drapery of her hasty flight in the night, her half conventional costume of the day before--or this, the garb of some primeval woman. I knew I could never forget her again. The thought gave me pain, and perhaps this showed on my face, for my eyes followed her so that presently she turned and came back to me.

"Does the wound hurt you?" she asked. "Are you in pain?"

"Yes, Ellen Meriwether," I said, "I am in pain. I am in very great pain."

"Oh," she cried, "I am sorry! What can we do? What do you wish? But perhaps it will not be so bad after a while--it will be over soon."

"No, Ellen Meriwether," I said, "it will not be over soon. It will not go away at all."

CHAPTER XX

GORDON ORME, MAGICIAN

We lay in our hot camp on the sandy valley for some days, and buried two more of our men who finally succ.u.mbed to their wounds. Gloom sat on us all, for fever now raged among our wounded. Pests of flies by day and mosquitoes by night became almost unbearable. The sun blistered us, the night froze us. Still not a sign of any white-topped wagon from the east, nor any dust-cloud of troopers from the west served to break the monotony of the shimmering waste that lay about us on every hand. We were growing gaunt now and haggard; but still we lay, waiting for our men to grow strong enough to travel, or to lose all strength and so be laid away.

We had no touch with the civilization of the outer world. At that time the first threads of the white man's occupancy were just beginning to cross the midway deserts. Near by our camp ran the recently erected line of telegraph, its shining cedar poles, stripped of their bark, offering wonder for savage and civilized man alike, for hundreds of miles across an uninhabited country. We could see the poles rubbed smooth at their base by the shoulders of the buffalo. Here and there a little tuft of hair clung to some untrimmed knot. High up in some of the naked poles we could see still sticking, the iron shod arrows of contemptuous tribesmen, who had thus sought to a.s.sail the "great medicine" of the white man. We heard the wires above us humming mysteriously in the wind, but if they bore messages east or west, we might not read them, nor might we send any message of our own.

At times old Auberry growled at this new feature of the landscape. "That was not here when I first came West," he said, "and I don't like its looks. The old ways were good enough. Now they are even talkin' of runnin' a railroad up the valley--as though horses couldn't carry in everything the West needs or bring out everything the East may want. No, the old ways were good enough for me."

Orme smiled at the old man.

"None the less," said he, "you will see the day before long, when not one railroad, but many, will cross these plains. As for the telegraph, if only we had a way of tapping these wires, we might find it extremely useful to us all right now."

"The old ways were good enough," insisted Auberry. "As fur telegraphin', it ain't new on these plains. The Injuns could always telegraph, and they didn't need no poles nor wires. The Sioux may be at both ends of this bend, for all we know. They may have cleaned up all the wagons coming west. They have planned for a general wipin' out of the whites, and you can be plumb certain that what has happened here is knowed all acrost this country to-day, clean to the big bend of the Missouri, and on the Yellowstone, and west to the Rockies."

"How could that be?" asked Orme, suddenly, with interest. "You talk as if there were something in this country like the old 'secret mail' of East India, where I once lived."

"I don't know what you mean by that," said Auberry, "but I do know that the Injuns in this country have ways of talkin' at long range. Why, onct a bunch of us had five men killed up on the Powder River by the Crows. That was ten o'clock in the morning. By two in the afternoon everyone in the Crow village, two hundred miles away, knowed all about the fight--how many whites was killed, how many Injuns--the whole shootin'-match. How they done it, I don't know, but they sh.o.r.e done it.

Any Western man knows that much about Injun ways."

"That is rather extraordinary," commented Orme.

"Nothin' extraordinary about it," said Auberry, "it's just common. Maybe they done it by lookin'-gla.s.ses and smokes--fact is, I know that's one way they use a heap. But they've got other ways of talkin'. Looks like a Injun could set right down on a hill, and think good and hard, and some other Injun a hundred miles away'd know what he was thinkin' about. You talk about a prairie fire runnin' fast--it ain't nothin' to the way news travels amongst the tribes."

Belknap expressed his contempt for all this sort of thing, but the old man a.s.sured him he would know more of this sort of thing when he had been longer in the West. "I know they do telegraph," reiterated the plainsman.

"I can well believe that," remarked Orme, quietly.

"Whether you do or not," said Auberry, "Injuns is strange critters. A few of us has married among Injuns and lived among them, and we have seen things you wouldn't believe if I told you."

"Tell some of them," said Orme. "I, for one, might believe them."

"Well, now," said the plainsman, "I will tell you some things I have seen their medicine men do, and ye can believe me or not, the way ye feel about it."

"I have seen 'em hold a pow-wow for two or three days at a time, some of 'em settin' 'round, dreamin', as they call it all of 'em starvin', whole camp howlin', everybody eatin' medicine herbs. Then after while, they all come and set down just like it was right out here in the open.

Somebody pulls a naked Injun boy right out in the middle of them. Old Mr. Medicine Man, he stands up in the plain daylight, and he draws his bow and shoots a arrer plum through that boy. Boy squirms a heap and Mr.

Medicine Man socks another arrer through him, cool as you please--I have seen that done. Then the medicine man steps up, cuts off the boy's head with his knife--holds it up plain, so everybody can see it. That looked pretty hard to me first time I ever seen it. But now the old medicine man takes a blanket and throws it over this dead boy. He lifts up a corner of the blanket, chucks the boy's head under it, and pulls down the edges of the blanket and puts rocks on them. Then he begins to sing, and the whole bunch gets up and dances 'round the blanket. After while, say a few minutes, medicine man pulls off the blanket--and thar gets up the boy, good as new, his head growed on good and tight as ever, and not a sign of an arrer on him 'cept the scars where the wounds has plumb healed up!"

Belknap laughed long and hard at this old trapper's yarn, and weak as I was myself, I was disposed to join him. Orme was the only one who did not ridicule the story. Auberry himself was disgusted at the merriment.

"I knowed you wouldn't believe it," he said. "There is no use tellin' a pa.s.sel of tenderfeet anything they hain't seed for theirselves. But I could tell you a heap more things. Why, I have seen their buffalo callers call a thousand buffalo right in from the plains, and over the edge of a cut bank, where they'd pitch down and bust theirselves to pieces. I can show you bones Of a hundred such places. Buffalo don't do that when they are alone--thay have got to be _called_, I tell you.

"Injuns can talk with other animals--they can call them others, too. I have seed an old medicine man, right out on the plain ground in the middle of the village, go to dancin', and I have seed him call three full-sized beavers right up out'n the ground--seed them with my own _eyes_, I tell you! Yes, and I have seed them three old beavers standin'

right there, turn into full-growed old men, gray haired. I have seed 'em sit down at a fire and smoke, too, and finally get up when they got through, and clean out--just disappear back into the ground. Now, how you all explain them there things, I don't pretend to say; but there can't no man call me a liar, fur I seed 'em and seed 'em unmistakable."

Belknap and the others only smiled, but Orme turned soberly toward Auberry. "I don't call you a liar, my man," said he. "On the contrary, what you say is very interesting. I quite believe it, although I never knew before that your natives in this country were possessed of these powers."

"It ain't all of 'em can do it," said Auberry, "only a few men of a few tribes can do them things; but them that can sh.o.r.e can, and that's all I know about it."

"Quite so," said Orme. "Now, as it chances, I have traveled a bit in my time in the old countries of the East. I have seen some wonderful things done there."

"I have read about the East Indian jugglers," said Belknap, interested.

"Tell me, have you seen those feats? are they feats, or simply lies?"

"They are actual occurrences," said Orme. "I have seen them with my own eyes, just as Auberry has seen the things he describes; and it is no more right to accuse the one than the other of us of untruthfulness.

"For instance, I have seen an Indian juggler take a plain bowl, such as they use for rice, and hold it out in his hand in the open sunlight; and then I have seen a little bamboo tree start in it and grow two feet high, right in the middle of the bowl, within the s.p.a.ce of a minute or so.

"You talk about the old story of 'Jack and the Bean Stalk'; I have seen an old fakir take a bamboo stick, no thicker than his finger, and thrust it down in the ground and start and climb up it, as if it were a tree, and keep on climbing till he was out of sight; and then there would come falling down out of the sky, legs and arms, his head, pieces of his body. When these struck the ground, they would rea.s.semble and make the man all over again--just like Auberry's dead boy, you know.

"These tricks are so common in Asia that they do not excite any wonder.

As to tribal telegraph, they have got it there. Time and again, when our forces were marching against the hill tribes of northwestern India, we found they knew all of our plans a hundred miles ahead of us--how, none of us could tell--only the fact was there, plain and unmistakable."

"They never do tell," broke in Auberry. "You couldn't get a red to explain any of this to you--not even a squaw you have lived with for years. They certainly do stand pat for keeps."

"Yet once in a while," smiled Orme, in his easy way, "a white man does pick up some of these tricks. I believe I could do a few of them myself, if I liked--in fact, I have sometimes learned some of the simpler ones for my own amus.e.m.e.nt."

General exclamations of surprise and doubt greeted him from our little circle, and this seemed to nettle him somewhat. "By Jove!" he went on, "if you doubt it, I don't mind trying a hand at it right now. Perhaps I have forgotten something of my old skill, but we'll see. Come, hen."

All arose now and gathered about him on the ground there in the full sunlight. He evinced no uneasiness or surprise, and he employed no mechanism or deception which we could detect.

"My good man," said he to Auberry, "let me take your knife." Auberry loosed the long hunting-knife at his belt and handed it to him. Taking it, Orme seated himself cross-legged on a white blanket, which he spread out on the sandy soil.

All at once Orme looked up with an expression of surprise on his face.

"This was not the knife I wanted," he said. "I asked for a plain American hunting-knife, not this one. See, you have given me a Malay kris! I have not the slightest idea where you got it."