Wild Western Tales 2: 101 Classic Western Stories Vol. 2 (Civitas Library Classics)

by Various

  "And Little Wolf is also a great man," retorted Young Moon, hotly. "He works well in the field, almost as well as the women."

  Little Wolf emitted a puff of smoke from between set teeth for answer.

  "Why does not the great chief answer?" queried Young Moon, sneeringly. "A great man -- a man who sells as much hay as does Little Wolf -- should talk much when the talk is to him."

  Still, Little Wolf gazed stolidly over the fire, apparently mute and deaf.

  "Come, Little Wolf, you do not answer," continued Young Moon, sweetly. "Have the fences of the white man run across our great chief's mouth that he is dead of tongue as well as of heart?"

  Little Wolf took the pipe from his mouth and arose.

  "Listen, boy," said he, solemnly, "to one who saw your father die ere you could speak. Your talk is the talk that all the bucks utter when their years are of a certain number. So have I heard many talk; but all who have done as they talked are dead now. Listen to my speech, Young Moon, and the rest of you, for I know of what I speak. I, too, was once of the age when the thirst for the white man's scalp was strong. But the white man still has his scalp, and I -- I am thankful to raise corn on the land he leaves to me."

  The young men, as they looked, saw only a senile old man gabbling aimlessly, while in Young Moon was their ideal of youthful strength and leadership.

  Then Young Moon threw off all caution. He was wild now -- wild with the old red desire for strife and bloody violence which had become almost atrophied in him -- and he would make the other young men wild also. He threw back his head and gave vent to a cry such as had never in his day echoed through the tepees of the peaceful Crows. With shaking, twisting body he began to lope slowly toward Little Wolf. With a shout he swung out into a semi-circle, and passing before the old men, returned to his starting-point.

  "Young Moon! Young Moon! What is it you do?" cried Little Wolf, in alarm. "It is not the moon of the dance; it is not the time for the feathers. The white man is not a child for boys to make war upon. 'T is better to stay in the camp, where the food and the women are plenty."

  Young Moon was looping toward him again.

  "For you is the tepee made to stay in, Little Wolf," he shouted derisively. "Go there, stay there with the women. You are old; that is your place now."

  He loped back in a slightly more pronounced curve. "You are old, Little Wolf," he called again. "Your time has passed. The old, withered stalk must move to one side when the strong young shoot comes forth."

  Another brave sprang suddenly into his wake. The old squaw squatted herself suddenly and began the ugly, monotonous "Ay-yah, a-anah, ah-ya" of the dance-chant. Young Moon sprang forward as if spurred by some unseen power. His course now became a circle around the fire -- a magic path on the ground for others to follow. One by one the bucks fell in behind. The young women came and chanted; the dance was on.

  The old men deliberately placed their belongings and women in wagons and moved away to a new camp, leaving the old one in possession of the young men and their women.

  Far into the night the fires of the camp showed the weird, dancing figures of Young Moon and his followers. Also, Young Moon, by reason of the knowledge of certain strange things acquired at the school, performed many wonderful miracles, and the young men also hailed him as the great medicine-man, and acknowledged him their leader.

  Early on the morning of the next day they rode to the camp of their elders. Before their tepees they sat mounted, and mocked the old men, voicing their praises of the wonderful medicine of Young Moon.

  "So may it be," muttered one old man. "Good may his medicine be; but bad -- bad for crazy young colts -- will they find the medicine of the white man."

  The young men laughingly turned and rode down the valley toward the Creek of the Rotten Grass, following which they would quickly find the white man -- and strife. The young women, roughly discarded, marched shamefacedly to the new camp; but some who had remained with the bucks, although their husbands were not yet chosen, were driven in disgrace from the tepees they sought to enter. II

  "TEDDY" COLLINS, who rode range for the "2 O & E" Ranch, had come north toward the head-waters of the Creek of the Rotten Grass to head off a bunch of strays that had persisted in running off the range and was wandering far north toward the reservation. Collins had the herd headed southward again, and was driving it with language that was picturesque and vigorous down the river-trail, when Young Moon came with a gallop and a whoop over the ridge.

  Collins was greatly surprised and very little pleased. Threescore fat steers bearing the 2 O & E brand were directly in the path of the redskins, and in the traditions of the range it is told that this is not good for steers. The tough little cow-pony came around on his hind legs to face the Indians.

  One man sat quietly in the middle of the trail with his right hand raised and empty, but the score that came over the ridge swerved to one side and stopped before they came to the one. Collins wondered curiously where the Indians had procured the whisky, for to him it was very evident that they were happily drunk. Young Moon he recognized easily; he had won a lame pony from him at the big poker game after the round-up last fall. But at the poker game Young Moon was attired in a cheap black suit of store clothes instead of a bonnet of feathers and a gaudy apron.

  Young Moon rode up to within easy-speaking distance and dismounted. Collins gathered himself up firmly in the saddle.

  "How," greeted the Indian.

  "How," returned the cow-boy.

  "You better go 'way," said Young Moon, with a decisive sweep of the arm.

  "Go 'way h -- -," replied Collins, laconically. "What yuh driving at, anyhow?"

  "We going down the creek," said Young Moon. "You and your people go away -- back to where you come from."

  "Oh, so that's the game, eh?" said Collins, cheerily. "Well, yuh'd better not do anything rough, ol' pigeon-toe, or they'll have a slue of those stiff-necks from Fort Custer down here an' shoot yuh good an' plenty."

  Young Moon laughed. The poor mortal "stiff-necks" attempting to contend with the Great Spirit -- truly it was amusing. Eloquently and with many gestures he hastened to inform Collins that before long the Indian would pitch his tepee on the parade-ground at the fort. The regime of the white man was at an end in the land; Young Moon, he whom the spirits had rendered invulnerable, said it.

  Collins would have laughed gleefully if Young Moon attired in the ordinary raiment of civilization had given utterance to such fanciful language. But here was Young Moon, more than half naked, entirely sober, and with a score of bucks at his back, calmly saying that the white man was to be driven out of the valley. It was evident that Young Moon and his bucks were not on a drunk, but on the war-path. This sort of thing, Collins felt, was distinctly out of place now. Such things had passed into the school-history stage.

  "Old man, lemme tell yuh something," he said confidingly, leaning over the saddle pommel. "Yuh're trying to run your bluff away too late. Don't yuh go for to buck the brass-buttons now; they're too strong for yuh. Yuh jest mosey 'long back to yer reserve an' act decent. Sabe? I'm only a-telling yuh for yer own good."

  Again Young Moon laughed scornfully.

  "We go down there. Sabe?" he said positively, pointing down the trail behind Collins. Then the flash of savage rage, the wild, blinding desire to slay, came to him, and he whipped the well-worn short-barreled Winchester from beneath his blanket and fired from the hip point-blank into the herd. Collins's six-shooter came out and up with a jerk. He was no longer the suave diplomat and benevolent Indian adviser; this Indian was killing the cattle under his charge.

  "Hol' on there, yuh -- -- -- -- -- low-lived -- -- -, yuh!" he called fiercely. "Don't yuh try any more o' that funny work, or I'll let -- -- -into yuh so quick yuh'll never know what hit yuh. Yuh can go to Fort Custer, or yuh can go to -- -- , if yuh want to; but I tell yuh right here, if yuh ever get past here, it'll be after yuh an' me an' a whole lot of yer friends have cashed in. Sabe?"

 
Young Moon understood fully. The cow-puncher was mad. Mad cow-punchers with big blue six-shooters in their hands are not objects to fuss lightly with. Young Moon hesitated.

  For a moment the two faced each other silently, the Indian and the cow-puncher, the gaudy, picturesque savage and the commonplace utilitarian, the old and the new. Both had much to think of in that moment. Young Moon tried hard to conceive some manner in which he could get a good shot at Collins without danger to himself.

  Collins was thinking of the property under his charge, the herd running wildly back and forth in the trail below, and the new home of Peterson the "newcomer," which lay farther down the valley, the first of the houses in the path of Young Moon and his followers. Collins suddenly remembered that there was a young wife in the home of the newcomer; also a little red-cheeked, yellow-haired baby, who had played in the dooryard when he passed there in the morning on his search for the strays.

  "I suppose these rowdies 'u'd scare -- -- -out o' that little woman if they ever get that far," he thought. "They might even -- No; they'll never get a chance for that; I'm here to see they don't get -- "

  "Here, yuh!" It was Collins who cried out. Young Moon was deliberately throwing the empty shell out of his rifle. "Hol' on the -- "

  The words were cut short in Collins's mouth. Action, swift, sure, terrible, had taken their place. Young Moon was down on his face in the bunch-grass, and dust and a tiny thread of blue smoke wreathed upward from Collins's pistol. A dozen shoulders hunched into shooting position and a dozen black rifle-barrels focused on Collins. But Young Moon began to rise to his feet slowly, hesitatingly, as a drunken man rises. His bonnet was off, the feathers were awry, the hot, stale dust was thick upon a face gray with terror, and a look of awful, unutterable surprise was in his small black eyes. He stretched his arms outward -- the gesture of a chief commanding quiet, peace.

  "You see now that I am the Great Spirit," he said boastfully. "The white man's bullet slays the flesh, but the spirit still lives." He stood up straight and virile in the sunlight and shouted, "I cannot die!"

  Deliberately he turned to take aim at Collins.

  No quick snap-shot this time. Young Moon fell prone on his face, his limbs out-stretched in the rigidity which tells unquestionably of death, sudden and violent.

  His followers waited silently and expectantly for him to rise, and Collins deliberately turned his back on the band and rode down the trail.

  "Oh, Young Moon! Arise, arise, Young Moon!" called the bucks.

  The wind that waved the prairie-grass stirred slightly some of the war-feathers; otherwise there was no motion.

  "Speak! Oh, speak, Great Spirit!" they cried as they rode up to him. But the spirit failed to respond.

  "So, so he is dead," said one who dismounted and turned him on his back.

  The band glanced as one man down the valley, where Collins was driving the herd before him at a gallop. It seemed an easy matter to overtake him, but -- Young Moon, their wonderful medicine-man, the invulnerable, was dead.

  His brother, with the aid of another, silently placed the body securely on a pony, and the band silently followed as the pony turned his nose north toward the reservation.

  "Uh, so only Young Moon is dead?" queried the old men sneeringly when they saw the laden pony.

  The young men said naught, but with hanging heads accepted the sneers due them as stoically as the old men had received the taunts of a few nights ago. The old squaw had the body brought to her tepee, for his kin would not own him, and a breed-dog sat outside and howled long and loud in the night. Otherwise the camp would have slept quite peacefully.

  Collins, as he rode past Peterson's with the herd, saw the woman holding the yellow-haired baby by the hands, while the little one, gurgling with laughter, tottered around in a somewhat uncertain circle.

  "Hallo, Meester Cohlenss!" called the woman, cheerily. "Ai see you got t'ose cows oll right."

  "Oh, yes," said Collins; "yes, I got the cows all right."

  Contents

  THE WHISPERER

  By Gilbert Parker

  "And thou shalt be brought down and shalt speak out of the ground, and thy speech shall be low out of the dust, and thy voice shall be as of one that hath a familiar spirit out of the ground, and thy speech shall whisper out of the dust."

  The harvest was all in, and, as far as eye could observe, nothing remained of the golden sea of wheat which had covered the wide prairie save the yellow stubble, the bed of an ocean of wealth which had been gathered. Here the yellow level was broken by a dark patch of fallow land, there by a covert of trees also tinged with yellow, or deepening to crimson and mauve--the harbinger of autumn. The sun had not the insistent and intensive strength of more southerly climes; it was buoyant, confident, and heartening, and it shone in a turquoise vault which covered and endeared the wide, even world beneath. Now and then a flock of wild ducks whirred past, making for the marshes or the innumerable lakes that vitalized the expanse, or buzzards hunched heavily along, frightened from some far resort by eager sportsmen.

  That was above; but beneath, on a level with the unlifted eye, were houses here and there, looking in the vastness like dolls' habitations. Many of the houses stood blank and staring in the expanse, but some had trees, and others little oases of green. Everywhere prosperity, everywhere the strings of life pulled taut, signs that energy had been straining on the leash.

  Yet there was one spot where it seemed that deadness made encampment. It could not be seen in the sweep of the eye, you must have travelled and looked vigilantly to find it; but it was there--a lake shimmering in the eager sun, washing against a reedy shore, a little river running into the reedy lake at one end and out at the other, a small, dilapidated house half hid in a wood that stretched for half a mile or so upon a rising ground. In front of the house, not far from the lake, a man was lying asleep upon the ground, a rough felt hat drawn over his eyes.

  Like the house, the man seemed dilapidated also: a slovenly, ill-dressed, demoralized figure he looked, even with his face covered. He seemed in a deep sleep. Wild ducks settled on the lake not far from him with a swish and flutter; a coyote ran past, veering as it saw the recumbent figure; a prairie hen rustled by with a shrill cluck, but he seemed oblivious to all. If asleep, he was evidently dreaming, for now and then he started, or his body twitched and a muttering came from beneath the hat.

  The battered house, the absence of barn or stable or garden, or any token of thrift or energy, marked the man as an excrescence in this theatre of hope and fruitful toil. It all belonged to some degenerate land, some exhausted civilization, not to this field of vigor where life rang like silver.

  So the man lay for hour upon hour. He slept as though he had been upon a long journey in which the body was worn to helplessness. Or was it that sleep of the worn-out spirit which, tortured by remembrance and remorse, at last sinks into the depths where the conscious vexes the unconscious--a little of fire, a little of ice, and now and then the turn of the screw?

  The day marched nobly on toward evening, growing out of its blue and silver into a pervasive golden gleam; the bare, grayish houses on the prairie were transformed into miniature palaces of light. Presently a girl came out of the woods behind, looking at the neglected house with a half-pitying curiosity. She carried in one hand a fishing-rod which had been telescoped till it was no bigger than a cane; in the other she carried a small fishing-basket. Her father's shooting and fishing camp was a few miles away by a lake of greater size than this which she approached. She had tired of the gay company in camp, brought up for sport from beyond the American border where she also belonged, and she had come to explore the river running into this reedy lake. She turned from the house and came nearer to the lake, shaking her head, as though compassionating the poor folk who lived there. She was beautiful. Her hair was brown, going to tawny, but in this soft light which enwrapped her she was in a sort of topaz flame. As she came on, suddenly she stopped as though transfixed. She saw the man--and s
aw also a tragedy afoot.

  The man stirred violently in his sleep, cried out, and started up. As he did so, a snake, disturbed in its travel past him, suddenly raised itself in anger. Startled out of sleep by some inner torture, the man heard the sinister rattle he knew so well, and gazed paralyzed.

  The girl had been but a few feet away when she first saw the man and his angry foe. An instant, then, with the instinct of the woods and the plains, and the courage that has habitation everywhere, dropping her basket she sprang forward noiselessly. The short, telescoped fishing-rod she carried swung round her head and completed its next half-circle at the head of the reptile, even as it was about to strike. The blow was sure, and with half-severed head the snake fell dead upon the ground beside the man.

  He was like one who has been projected from one world to another, dazed, stricken, fearful. Presently the look of agonized dismay gave way to such an expression of relief as might come upon the face of a reprieved victim about to be given to the fire or to the knife that flays. The place of dreams from which he had emerged was like hell, and this was some world of peace that he had not known these many years. Always one had been at his elbow--"a familiar spirit out of the ground"--whispering in his ear. He had been down in the abysses of life.

  He glanced again at the girl, and realized what she had done: she had saved his life. Whether it had been worth saving was another question; but he had been near to the brink, had looked in, and the animal in him had shrunk back from the precipice in a confused agony of fear. He staggered to his feet.

  "Where do you come from?" he said, pulling his coat closer to hide the ragged waistcoat underneath, and adjusting his worn and dirty hat--in his youth he had been vain and ambitious, and good-looking also.