by Zane Grey
Beyond these sitting Indians lay a blanketed form close to the hogan wall. It suggested the inanimate nature of stone. Snow had drifted in through the open framework of the hogan upon the folds of blanket. Behind Marian on the other side next the wall lay a slighter form, not wholly covered. Marian saw raven- black hair and shape of head she thought she recognized.
“Nophaie,” she whispered. “This–this one must be Gekin Yashi.”
“Yes,” replied Nophaie, and rising he stripped back the blanket from the dead girl.
At once Marian recognized Gekin Yashi and yet did not know her. Could this be the face of a sixteen-year-old girl? Disease and death had distorted and blackened it, but this change was not alone what Marian imagined she saw. Gekin Yashi’s songs and dreams and ideals had died before her flesh. She looked a matured, settled Indian wife. She had gone back to the Indian way of thought and feeling, somber, mystic, without bitterness or hope, pagan or barbarian now, infinitely worse off for her contact with civilization.
Marian fled out of the hogan, back to the fire under the cedar. A horror possessed her–of she knew not what. Her own religion and faith rocked on its foundation. Plague and death were terrible, but not so terrible to contemplate as human nature, passion, hate, and life. Gekin Yashi had passed away. It was better so. Bruised, trampled flower of the desert! Had she not cried out to Marian, “No one ever tells me beautiful things!” What was that cry of the soul? How great had been the potentiality of that awakening mind?
Marian’s poignant reflections were interrupted by the voice of Withers inside the hogan.
“Nophaie, the baby is dead. Make Beeteia give it up. We’ve got to bury these Indians and beat it out of here pronto.”
Marian spread her cold and trembling hands to the fire. Somehow the trenchant words of the practical trader roused her out of the depths. Such men as Withers bore the greater burdens. He had kindness, sympathy, but he dealt with the cold hard facts. He was making himself a poor man for this Nopah tribe and working like a galley slave and risking his life. Through him Marian saw more of the truth. And it roused a revolt in her–against weakness and a too great leaning toward idealism and altruism–and for the moment against this stark and awful plague of influenza.
Nophaie might be taken. He would be if he kept riding the range day and night, exposing himself to both bitter weather and the disease. The fear struck at Marian’s heart. It did not pass. It shook her and stormed her. If there were lioness instinct in her it raged then.
Withers strode out of the hogan, accompanied by the Indians.
“Get the tools,” he said, pointing to the pack he had brought.
Nophaie remained beside the hogan door where Beeteia leaned, a tragic and strangely striking figure. He seemed a groper in the dark. Trouble and grief burdened him, like weights. He did not seem to hear the earnest words of Nophaie or see the tall form before him. Marian sensed a terrible revolt in him.
Beyond the hogan, in a level patch of sage half-circled by cedars, Withers set the two Indians to digging graves. Then the trader approached the hogan and, wielding an ax began to chop a hole through the earthen covering and interlaced poles beneath. Marian remembered that the dead bodies of Indians should not be taken out at the door. Manifestly, where it was possible Withers did not spare himself in observing the customs of these people of the desert.
Beeteia turned away from Nophaie and went back to his dead. Marian called Nophaie to her, and she led him behind the clump of cedars, where the horses were nibbling at the sage. Nophaie’s mind seemed clouded. She held his hand, endeavoring to quell her mounting excitation. The sun had come out momentarily, crowning the towers with gold. How deeply purple bloomed the sage!
“Benow di cleash, you should not have come,” said Nophaie, regretfully.
“I’m glad. It has hurt me–done something more than that,” she replied. “I was sick–sick deep in my soul. But I’m over it, I think... and now I want to talk.”
“Why–you’re white–you’re shaking!” he exclaimed.
“Is it any wonder? Nophaie, I love you–and I’m terror- stricken.... This awful plague!”
He did not reply, but his hands pressed hers closely and his eyes dilated. Marian had learned to sense in him the mystic, the Indian, when it stirred. She wrenched her hands free and then threw her arms around his neck. The action liberated and augmented the storm in her breast. What she had meant to express utterly, in her frenzy to save Nophaie and make him take her out of the desert, burst all bounds of woman’s subtlety and deliberation. What she said or did in this mad moment of self- preservation she never realized. But she awakened to a terrifying consciousness that she had inflamed the savage in Nophaie.
He crushed her in his arms and bent to her face with eyes of black fire. He did not kiss her. That was not the Indian way. Tenderness, gentleness, love had no part in this response to her woman’s allurement. His mastery was that of the primal man denied; his brutality went to the verge of serious injury to her. But for the glory of it–the sheer backward step to the uttermost thrill of the senses–deep in the marrow of her bones–she would have screamed out in her pain. For he handled her, bent her, swung and lifted her, and flattened her body as might have a savage in sudden possession of a hitherto unconquerable and unattainable woman of the wilds.
Like a sack he threw her across her saddle, head and feet hanging. But Marian, once partially free of his iron arms, struggled and rose, and got into better position on her horse. She reeled against Nophaie. She could scarcely see. But she felt release from his grip. Something checked him, and his blurred face began to grow distinct–to come closer–until it pressed against her bosom.
“White woman–you’ll make–an Indian of me,” he panted, in husky, spent passion.
It pierced Marian. What more strange, incomprehensible appeal could he have made? Yet how deep it struck! She–who had loved the nobility of him–to drag him from the heights! To use her physical charm, her power in supreme selfishness! It was damnable. It showed the inherent nature of the female. She abhorred it. Then came her struggle. Only the tragedy of this Indian man could ever have mastered the woman at that moment. Gekin Yashi, the poor demented Shoie, Beeteia and his unquenchable sense of loss, Do etin and Maahesenie– these strange figures loomed beside Nophaie’s. That was a terrible moment. She could work her will with Nophaie. Nature had made the man stronger, but the ultimate victory was woman’s. But what of the soul? Could she deny it, crush it, repudiate it?
“Nophaie–forgive!” she whispered, encircling his head with her arms, and pressing it closer to her breast. “I’ve been–beside myself. This plague–this death has made me a coward. And I tried to make you–”
“Benow di cleash, that’ll be about all,” he said, raising his face, and he smiled through tears.
An hour later Withers’s melancholy task had been completed. Beeteia refused to leave with the party. Marian’s last sight of him was one she could never forget–the dark-faced Indian standing before the hogan he could never enter again, peering across the graves of his mother and wife, and the ill- gotten baby he had meant to father–across the gray sage flat to the blank walls of stone. What did he see? What did he hear? Whence came his strength?
Withers grumbled as he rode past Marian, to take the lead.
“I can’t do more. He wouldn’t come. That Nopah is going to do something terrible. He worries me.... Well, it’ll be a hard ride back. Rustle along. Get-up, Buckskin!”
Snow began to fall and the canyon grew gray as twilight. Marian followed the others at a brisk trot. The air had grown colder. When they rode up into the open reach of the main canyon a driving wind made riding against it something to endure. Gray, dull, somber, and dreary wound the Nugi, with palls of snow swooping low down, roaring through the cedars. The snow was wet. It adhered to Marian’s clothes, and grew thicker as she rode on. She could scarcely see where to guide her horse. And she suffered with the cold.
That snow-squall p
assed to permit wider prospect of gloomy canyon, obscured towers, white mantled rims, dark caverns, and forlorn barren benches. Another storm, with long gray veils sweeping the cliffs, came up the canyon. The wind and snow made a sweeping whine through the cedars. As fast as Marian shook off the white covering it returned, until, too weak and frozen to try any longer, she gave up. Branches of cedar stung her cold face. When at last she reached the end of that ride she was indeed glad to let Nophaie lift her off the horse.
The car ploughed homeward through snow and mud, down out of the pass into level valley. Again the gray masses of clouds spread and rolled away.
Marian saw the great tilted ledges, mountains in themselves, the tip of the lonely black sentinel above the red north wall, the round- knobbed horizon line to the east, and the gray cold wet waste of the desert.
CHAPTER XXI
Three thousand Nopahs died of the plague, and from one end of the reservation to the other a stricken, bewildered, and crushed people bowed their heads. The exceedingly malignant form of the influenza and the superstitious convictions of the fatalistic Indians united to create a deadly medium. When spring came, with its warm sun, dissipating the strange wind of death, the Indians believed that the eating of horseflesh had saved them.
Slowly the clutch of fear loosed its possession of Marian’s heart. Slowly the long spell of gloom yielded to a hope inspired by sunshine and a steady decline in the death-rate of Nopahs. Yet not wholly did her old spirit return. There was something ineradicable–vague, tenacious, inscrutable–something she felt every time Nophaie smiled at her.
They all worked to alleviate the sufferings of the Indians. If the trader had ever saved any money, he lost it all and more that winter. Marian’s means had shrunken to almost nothing. Civilization seemed far away, absorbed in its own problems. The affairs of the reservation moved on as always. And the little circle of white people at Kaidab lived true to something the Indians had inspired in them, forgotten by the outside world.
March with its last icy breath of winter yielded to April with its sandstorms. The wind blew a gale one day and the next was calm, warm, with spring in the air. Only a few cases of influenza were reported, and deaths but seldom.
Yet Marian could not quite feel free. The tentacles of a deep-seated emotion, stranger than love, still were fastened in her heart.
Nophaie had ridden to Oljato, and when he did not return the following day the nameless thing that was neither thought nor feeling laid its cold hand on Marian’s soul.
She worked on Withers’s accounts that day; she wrote long-neglected letters; she busied herself for an hour over a sadly depleted and worn wardrobe; she rode horseback, out to the rocky ridge above Kaidab, and strained her eyes on the trail of Oljato.
But these energies did not allay her nervousness or quell the woman’s sixth sense. She tried the trading post, which of late had been hard to bear. Hungry, gaunt Indians would come in and stand around, staring with great dark eyes until Withers or Colman gave them something to eat. It was a starved tribe now.
Marian saw Indians carrying bows and arrows, a custom long past, which had been resumed because the hunters had sold their guns or could not buy ammunition. Wool had practically ceased its use as a means of trade. The Indians would not shear sheep for the price offered. A few goatskins and an occasional blanket were bartered over the counter. It was distressing to watch an Indian woman come in with a blanket, often a poorly made one that Withers did not want and could not sell, and haggle over a price which was ruinous for the trader to offer. In this way Withers kept alive the Nopahs of his district. They did not thank him, for none of them understood.
This day Marian encountered Shoie again, and despite the feeling almost of horror that he incited she resolutely stood her ground and watched him. Shoie’s companion was a young Nopah, very dark and wild looking, ragged and unkempt, with a crippled foot. Something about this second Indian impelled Marian’s sensitiveness even more than Shoie. He was watching Shoie’s signs and the contortions of his lacerated lips as he tried to convey some meaning. Withers observed Marian’s perplexity and gave her his interpretation.
“That crippled Nopah is one of the few criminals of the tribe. He’s the Indian who assaulted one of Etenia’s little daughters. They caught him and held his foot in the fire until it was burned to a crisp. That was his punishment and he is now an outcast. I reckon Shoie is trying to say that he’ll cast an evil spell over him.”
Marian earned her momentary forgetfulness of self then in contemplation of these two Indians. Extremes as they were, they fixed her mind on the mystery of life. A monstrosity she had seen at Copenwashie, a Noki albino Indian, white- haired and pink-eyed, hideous to behold, had not affected her as either of these two Nopahs. She compared them with Ba ho zohnie and Nophaie. But when thought of Nophaie recurred she could no longer stay in the store.
Outside it was growing cool. The sun had set, and there shone a ruddy effulgence over the tilted sections of wall in the west. Coyotes were wailing. Marian walked in the twilight. It seemed an immense and living thing, moving up out of the desert. An oppression weighed upon her. How dark and lonely the empty space out beyond! The stone-walled confines of the wasteland flung their menace at her thinking mind.
Withers appeared unusually quiet that night. His wife talked a little, in her low voice, grown like an Indian’s. But the trader had not much to say. Marian sat beside the hearth, with eyes on the glowing white and gold embers. Suddenly she was startled out of her reveries.
“What was that?” she asked.
“Horse. Must be Nophaie,” replied the trader, as if relieved.
Marian sat still, listening. But she heard on a strange knocking at her heart. At length the door opened with a sweep. Nophaie! His eyes were those of an Indian, but his face seemed that of a white man. He staggered slightly as he closed the door behind him and leaned back against it. His whole body was in vibration, strung, like that of an athlete about to leap. His piercing gaze left Marian’s face to search the trader’s.
“John–give me a room to die in!”
Withers gasped and sank back limp. His wife uttered a frightened and compassionate cry.
“It’s got me!” whispered Nophaie.
Marian’s terror voiced its divination of her nameless instinct.
“Oh, my God–Nophaie!” she screamed, and ran to him.
Nophaie reeled over her. Intense and terrible seemed the strain of spirit over body. He clasped her shoulders–held her away from him.
“Benow di cleash, I should have been dead–hours ago.... But I had to see you.... I had to die as–a white man!”
Marian shuddered under the strange clasp of his hands. They burned through her blouse.
“White woman–savior of Nophaie–go back to your people.... All–is– well!”
Then he collapsed against her and was caught by the trader. They half carried him to his room and laid him on the bed. Then began frantic ministrations in his behalf. The fire of his face, the marble pallor, the hurried pulse, the congested lungs, the laboring heart all proclaimed the dread plague.
Once in the dim lamplight, as Marian knelt beside the bed in agony, calling, “Nophaie–Nophaie!” he opened his eyes–somber, terrible, no longer piercing with his unquenchable spirit; and it seemed to her that a fleeting smile, the old beautiful light, veiled for an instant his tragic soul and blessed her.
Then it seemed to Marian that a foul black fiend began to thrust the life of Nophaie from her. It became a battle, all unconscious on the part of the victim. Poison fires sucked at his life’s blood. This was not an illness–not a disease–but a wind of death that drove out the spirit and loosed devastating corruption upon the living flesh. Yet the vitality of the Indian held it at bay.
The trader entreated her to leave the bedside and at length dragged her back to the sitting room. There Marian huddled down before the fire, racked with pangs. Oh! must this end in the futility of Nophaie’s life and of her love! Mr
s. Withers came and went, softly stepping, tender of hand, but she did not speak. The night wore on. Outside the wind rose, to mourn into the dead silence. The vines under the eaves rustled.
Sometime in the late hours Withers came to her and touched her gently.
“Marian,” he said, huskily.
“Nophaie–he–is–gone?” whispered Marian, rising.
“No. Unconscious, but he’s stronger–or I’m crazy.... I must tell you the strangest thing. Many of these Nopahs who died of this plague turned black.... Nophaie talked of turning white. He’s out of his head. I was shocked. It’s as strange as what he said, ‘John, give me a room to die in!’–Marian, it must mean he is true at the last–to the mind–the soul developed in him. Yet his life here was one endless struggle to be true to his birthright. But I don’t believe Nophaie will die. He’s past the crisis that kills so many. I never saw such strife of spirit against disease. It just can’t kill him.”
Marian wrapped a blanket round her and went out into the night. The cold desert wind fanned her face and whipped her hair. Dawn was not far away. The stars were paling and the blackest hour was at hand. Desert and sky, the shadows, the mournful wind, the silence,–all kept their secret. But life was here, and there, only a step away was death. “All–is–well!” she breathed Nophaie’s words. Her soul seemed flooded with infinite thankfulness. Perhaps the tremendous conflict in Nophaie was for more than life. Her belief in God told her so. She stood once more with Nophaie on the heights above the Marching Rocks! Had this dark proximity to death illumined his unbelief?
The desert was to be her home, in spirit and dream. Always it must be an irresistible influence for thought, for good, for the clarifying of life. She quivered with happiness to divine that always she was to see the upland sage of purple, the golden-crowned monuments asleep in the sunlight, the long green sweep and slope, the shadows of the silent walls–and somewhere against that background, the Indian Nophaie.
