by Zane Grey
Old Joe gave a lazy cast of his eye at David.
“Why, boy,” he said, “if they’d been killin’ them varmints since Bunker Hill they couldn’t do no more with ’em than you could with your little popgun out here on the plains. The Indians has druv ’em from the West and the white man’s druv ’em from the East and it don’t make no difference. I knowed Captain Bonneville and he’s told me how he stood on the top of Scotts Bluffs and seen the country black with ’em—millions of ’em. That’s twenty-five years ago and he ain’t seen no more than I have on these plains not two seasons back. Out as far as your eye could reach, crawlin’ with buffalo, till you couldn’t see cow nor bull, but just a black mass of ’em, solid to the horizon.”
David felt abashed and the doctor came to his rescue with a question about Captain Bonneville and Joe forgot his scorn of foolish young men in reminiscences of that hardy pathfinder.
The old trapper seemed to have known everyone of note in the history of the plains and the fur trade, or if he didn’t know them he said he did which was just as good. Lying on a buffalo skin, the firelight gilding the bony ridges of his face, a stub of black pipe gripped between his broken teeth, he told stories of the men who had found civilization too cramped and taken to the wilderness. Some had lived and died there, others come back, old and broken, to rest in a corner of the towns they had known as frontier settlements. Here they could look out to the West they loved, strain their dim eyes over the prairie, where the farmer’s plow was tracing its furrow, to the Medicine Way of The Pale Face that led across the plains and up the long bright river and over the mountains to the place of the trapper’s rendezvous.
He had known Jim Beckwourth, the mulatto who was chief of the Crows, fought their battles and lived in their villages with a Crow wife. Joe described him as “a powerful liar,” but a man without fear. Under his leadership the Crows had become a great nation and the frontiersmen laid it to his door that no Crow had ever attacked a white man except in self-defense. Some said he was still living in California. Joe remembered him well—a tall man, strong and fleet-footed as an Indian, with mighty muscles and a skin like bronze. He always wore round his neck a charm of a perforated bullet set between two glass beads hanging from a thread of sinew.
He had known Rose, another white chief of the Crows, an educated man who kept his past secret and of whom it was said that the lonely places and the Indian trails were safer for him than the populous ways of towns. The old man had been one of the garrison in Fort Union when the terrible Alexander Harvey had killed Isidore, the Mexican, and standing in the courtyard cried to the assembled men: “I, Alexander Harvey, have killed the Spaniard. If there are any of his friends who want to take it up let them come on”; and not a man in the fort dared to go. He had been with Jim Bridger, when, on a wager, he went down Bear River in a skin boat and came out on the waters of the Great Salt Lake.
Susan, who had stopped her talk with the voyageur to listen to this minstrel of the plains, now said:
“Aren’t you lonely in those quiet places where there’s no one else?”
The old man nodded, a gravely assenting eye on hers:
“Powerful lonely, sometimes. There ain’t a mountain man that ain’t felt it, some of ’em often, others of ’em once and so scairt that time they won’t take the risk again. It comes down suddint, like a darkness—then everything round that was so good and fine, the sound of the pines and the bubble of the spring and the wind blowing over the grass, seems like they’d set you crazy. You’d give a year’s peltries for the sound of a man’s voice. Just like when some one’s dead that you set a heap on and you feel you’d give most everything you got to see ’em again for a minute. There ain’t nothin’ you wouldn’t promise if by doin’ it you could hear a feller hail you—just one shout—as he comes ridin’ up the trail.”
“That was how Jim Cockrell felt when he prayed for the dog,” said the tall man.
“Did he get the dog?”
He nodded.
“That’s what he said anyway. He was took with just such a lonesome spell once when he was trapping in the Mandans country. He was a pious critter, great on prayer and communing with the Lord. And he felt—I’ve heard him tell about it—just as if he’d go wild if he didn’t get something for company. What he wanted was a dog and you might just as well want an angel out there with nothin’ but the Indian villages breakin’ the dazzle of the snow and you as far away from them as you could get. But that didn’t stop Jim. He just got down and prayed, and then he waited and prayed some more and ’ud look around for the dog, as certain he’d come as that the sun ’ud set. Bimeby he fell asleep and when he woke there was the dog, a little brown varmint, curled up beside him on the blanket. Jim used to say an angel brought it. I’m not contradictin’, but——”
“Wal,” said old Joe, “he most certainly come back into the fort with a dog. I was there and seen him.”
Leff snickered, even the doctor’s voice showed the incredulous note when he asked:
“Where could it have come from?”
The tall man shrugged.
“Don’t ask me. All I know is that Jim Cockrell swore to it and I’ve heard him tell it drunk and sober and always the same way. He held out for the angel. I’m not saying anything against that, but whatever it was it must have had a pretty powerful pull to get a dog out to a trapper in the dead o’ winter.”
They wondered over the story, offering explanations, and as they talked the fire died low and the moon, a hemisphere clean-halved as though sliced by a sword, rose serene from a cloud bank. Its coming silenced them and for a space they watched the headlands of the solemn landscape blackening against the sky, and the river breaking into silvery disquiet. Separating the current, which girdled it with a sparkling belt, was the dark blue of an island, thick plumed with trees, a black and mysterious oblong. Old Joe pointed to it with his pipe.
“Brady’s Island,” he said. “Ask Hy to tell you about that. He knew Brady.”
The tall man looked thoughtfully at the crested shape.
“That’s it,” he said. “That’s where Brady was murdered.”
And then he told the story:
“It was quite a while back in the 30’s, and the free trappers and mountain men brought their pelts down in bull boats and mackinaws to St. Louis. There were a bunch of men workin’ down the river and when they got to Brady’s Island, that’s out there in the stream, the water was so shallow the boats wouldn’t float, so they camped on the island. Brady was one of ’em, a cross-tempered man, and he and another feller’d been pick-in’ at each other day by day since leavin’ the mountains. They’d got so they couldn’t get on at all. Men do that sometimes on the trail, get to hate the sight and sound of each other. You can’t tell why.
“One day the others went after buffalo and left Brady and the man that hated him alone on the island. When the hunters come home at night Brady was dead by the camp fire, shot through the head and lyin’ stiff in his blood. The other one had a slick story to tell how Brady cleanin’ his gun, discharged it by accident and the bullet struck up and killed him. They didn’t believe it, but it weren’t their business. So they buried Brady there on the island and the next day each man shouldered his pack and struck out to foot it to the Missouri.
“It was somethin’ of a walk and the ones that couldn’t keep up the stride fell behind. They was all strung out along the river bank and some of ’em turned off for ways they thought was shorter, and first thing you know the party was scattered, and the man that hated Brady was left alone, lopin’ along on a side trail that slanted across the prairie to the country of the Loup Fork Pawnees.
“That was the last they saw of him and it was a long time—news traveled slow on the plains in them days—before anybody heard of him for he never come to St. Louis to tell. Some weeks later a party of trappers passin’ near the Pawne
e villages on the Loup Fork was hailed by some Indians and told they had a paleface sick in the chief’s tent. The trappers went there and in the tent found a white man, clear headed, but dyin’ fast.
“It was the man that killed Brady. Lyin’ there on the buffalo skin, he told them all about it—how he done it and the lie he fixed up. Death was comin’, and the way he’d hated so he couldn’t keep his hand from murder was all one now. He wanted to get it off his mind and sorter square himself. When he’d struck out alone he went on for a spell, killin’ enough game and always hopin’ for the sight of the river. Then one day he caught his gun in a willow tree and it went off, sending the charge into his thigh and breaking the bone. He was stunned for a while and then tried to move on, tried to crawl. He crawled for six days and at the end of the sixth found a place with water and knowed he’d come to the end of his rope. He tore a strip off his blanket and tied it to the barrel of his rifle and stuck it end up. The Pawnees found him there and treated him kind, as them Indians will do sometimes. They took him to their village and cared for him, but it was too late. He wanted to see a white man and tell and then die peaceful, and that’s what he done. While the trappers was with him he died and they buried him there decent outside the village.”
The speaker’s voice ceased and in the silence the others turned to look at the black shape of the island riding the gleaming waters like a funeral barge. In its dark isolation, cut off from the land by the quiet current, it seemed a fitting theater for the grim tragedy. They gazed at it, chilled into dumbness, thinking of the murderer moving to freedom under the protection of his lie, then overtaken, and in his anguish, alone in the silence, meeting the question of his conscience.
Once more the words came back to David: “Behold, He that keepeth Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep.”
Susan pressed against her father, awed and cold, and from old Joe, stretched in his blanket, came a deep and peaceful snore.
CHAPTER III
Susan was riding alone on the top of the bluffs. The evening before, three men returning from the Oregon country to the States, had bivouacked with them and told them that the New York Company was a day’s march ahead, so she had gone to the highlands to reconnoiter.
Just here the bluffs swept inward toward the river, contracting the bottom to a valley only a few miles in width. Through it the road lay, a well-worn path crossed as with black stripes by the buffalo runs. Susan’s glance, questing ahead for the New York train, ran to the distance where the crystal glaze of the stream shrunk to a silver thread imbedded in green velvet. There was a final point where green and silver converged in a blinding dazzle, and over this the sun hung, emerging from a nebulous glare to a slowly defining sphere.
Turning to the left her gaze lost itself in the endlessness of the plains. It was like looking over the sea, especially at the horizon where the land was drawn in a straight, purplish line. She could almost see sails there, small sails dark against a sky that was so remote its color had faded to an aerial pallor. As the journey had advanced the influence of these spacious areas had crept upon her. In the beginning there had been times when they woke in her an unexplained sadness. Now that was gone and she loved to ride onward, the one item of life in the silence, held in a new correspondence with the solemn immensity. It affected her as prayer does the devotee. Under its inspiration she wondered at old worries and felt herself impervious to new ones.
With eyes on the purple horizon her thoughts went back to her home in Rochester with the green shutters and the brasses on the door. How far away it seemed! Incidents in its peaceful routine were like the resurgences of memory from a previous incarnation. There was no tenderness in her thoughts of the past, no sentiment clung to her recollections of what was now a dead phase of her life. She was slightly impatient of its contented smallness, of her satisfaction with such things as her sewing, her cake making, her childish conferences with girl friends on the vine-grown porch. They seemed strangely trivial and unmeaning compared to the exhilarating present. She was living now, feeling the force of a rising growth, her horizon widening to suit that which her eyes sought, the dependence of her sheltered girlhood gone from her as the great adventure called upon untouched energies and untried forces. It was like looking back on another girl, or like a woman looking back on a child.
She had often spoken to David of these past days, and saw that her descriptions charmed him. He had asked her questions about it and been surprised that she did not miss the old existence more. To him it had seemed ideal, and he told her that that was the way he should like to live and some day would, with just such a servant as Daddy John, and a few real friends, and a library of good books. His enthusiasm made her dimly realize the gulf between them—the gulf between the idealist and the materialist—that neither had yet recognized and that only she, of the two, instinctively felt. The roughness of the journey irked David. The toil of the days wore on his nerves. She could see that it pained him to urge the tired animals forward, to lash them up the stream banks and drive them past the springs. And only half understanding his character—fine where she was obtuse, sensitive where she was invulnerable, she felt the continued withdrawal from him, the instinctive shrinking from the man who was not her mate.
She had silently acquiesced in the idea, entertained by all the train, that she would marry him. The doctor had intimated to her that he wished it and from her childhood her only real religion had been to please her father. Yet half a dozen times she had stopped the proposal on the lover’s lips. And not from coquetry either. Loth and reluctant she clung to her independence. A rival might have warmed her to a more coming-on mood, but there was no rival. When by silence or raillery she had shut off the avowal she was relieved and yet half despised him for permitting her to take the lead. Why had he not forced her to listen? Why had he not seized her and even if she struggled, held her and made her hear him? She knew little of men, nothing of love, but she felt, without putting her thoughts even to herself, that to a man who showed her he was master she would have listened and surrendered.
Riding back to the camp she felt a trifle remorseful about her behavior. Some day she would marry him—she had got far enough to admit that—and perhaps it was unkind of her not to let the matter be settled. And at that she gave a petulant wriggle of her shoulders under her cotton blouse. Wasn’t that his business? Wasn’t he the one to end it, not wait on her pleasure? Were all men so easily governed, she wondered.
Looking ahead across the grassed bottom land, she saw that the train had halted and the camp was pitched. She could see David’s tall stooping figure, moving with long strides between the tents and the wagons. She laid a wager with herself that he would do certain things and brought her horse to a walk that she might come upon him noiselessly and watch. Of course he did them, built up her fire and kindled it, arranged her skillets beside it and had a fresh pail of water standing close by. It only remained for him to turn as he heard the sound of her horse’s hoofs and run to help her dismount. This, for some reason, he did not do and she was forced to attract his attention by saying in a loud voice:
“There was nothing to be seen. Not a sign of a wagon from here to the horizon.”
He looked up from his cooking and said: “Oh, you’re back, Susan,” and returned to the pan of buffalo tallow.
This was a strange remissness in the slave and she was piqued. Contrary to precedent it was her father who helped her off. She slid into his arms laughing, trying to kiss him as she slipped down, then standing with her hands on his shoulders told him of her ride. She was very pretty just then, her hair loose on her sunburned brow, her face all love and smiles. But David bent over his fire, did not raise his eyes to the charming tableau, that had its own delightfulness to the two participants, and that one of the participants intended should show him how sweet Susan Gillespie could be when she wanted.
All of which trivial matter combined to the mak
ing of momentous matter, momentous in the future for Susan and David. Shaken in her confidence in the subjugation of her slave, Susan agreed to his suggestion to ride to the bluffs after supper and see the plains under the full moon. So salutary had been his momentary neglect of her that she went in a chastened spirit, a tamed and gentle maiden. They had orders not to pass out of sight of the twin fires whose light followed them like the beams of two, watchful, unwinking eyes.
They rode across the bottom to where the bluffs rose, a broken bulwark. That afternoon Susan had found a ravine up which they could pass. She knew it by a dwarfed tree, a landmark in the naked country. The moonlight lay white on the barrier indented with gulfs of darkness, from each of which ran the narrow path of the buffalo. The line of hills, silver-washed and black-caverned, was like a rampart thrown across the entrance to the land of mystery, and they like the pygmy men of fairyland come to gain an entry. It was David who thought of this. It reminded him of Jack and the Beanstalk, where Jack, reaching the top of the vine, found himself in a strange country. Susan did not remember much about Jack. She was engrossed in recognizing the ravine, scanning the darkling hollows for the dwarf tree.
It was a steep, winding cut, the tree, halfway up its length, spreading skeleton arms against a sky clear as a blue diamond. They turned into it and began a scrambling ascent, the horses’ hoofs slipping into the gutter that the buffaloes had trodden out. It was black dark in the depths with the moonlight slanting white on the walls.
“We’re going now to find the giants,” David called over his shoulder. “Doesn’t this seem as if it ought to lead us up right in front of Blunderbore’s Castle?”
“The buffalo runs are like trenches,” she answered. “If you don’t look out your horse may fall.”
