Following the Grass

by Harry Sinclair Drago

  And yet they triumphed. Eventually, in July it was, they crossed the Humboldt for the last time. They were just south of Winnemucca Mountain at about the spot where the town of Winnemucca now stands.

  Here the Little Humboldt joins the big river. Due to some miraculous urge of fortune, they chose to follow the smaller stream. It was a happy choice, for surely they never would have been suffered to cross the Tuscaroras.

  Almost immediately the country began to change. Small, fertile valleys opened before them. The grass grew green in the creek bottoms; in the distance low, friendly, grayish-green hills, fringed with stunted cedars, arose. Water was always to hand; the creeks were heading in those hills ahead—Willow Creek, Rebel Creek, Martin Creek and a score of small streams as yet unnamed.

  Martin Creek was the largest. Soon they came to the spot where it flows into the Little Humboldt. The river bore away to the northeast; the creek’s course lay to the north, its promise unmistakable. It was not to be denied!

  Angel’s party turned to the north. Unknowingly, they were entering the garden spot of northern Nevada—Paradise Valley, so named, ten years before, by a cavalry lieutenant who left his bones to whiten there.

  Angel, his five days’ old daughter in his arms, was the first of his party across the Martin. He was not aware of a tall, sinewy, sullen-faced man and a boy, a lad of nine, who sat in their saddles upon the opposite bank staring at them as they forced the sheep across the shallow ford.

  The man and boy were father and son. A trader had opened a store on Cottonwood Creek (destined to become the town of Paradise), and they had been on their way there when they caught sight of the Basque caravan. Open hostility had flashed in the man’s eyes. He was a cowman, a Kentuckian named David Gault. Sheep were as little to his liking as they were to the big outfits in the Basin.

  The boy, Joseph, shared his father’s anger. In silence, they waited for the strangers to draw near.

  “Hit’s greasers, all right,” the boy said at last, his mouth hard. “Reckon they air comin’ to stay!”

  The man shook his head. “Ain’t no room fer sheep ner greasers in this yere country, Joseph. We fit the lnjuns fer hit; hit’s ourn. Ain’t no furriners goin’ ter take hit from us. Let ’em come with their sheep—they won’t stay long!”

  Gault was mistaken. Not only were the Basques to cling tenaciously to Paradise Valley, they were to prosper there, raise their families, draw reinforcements from distant valleys in the Pyrenees and, in the end, become American citizens. And this despite the fact that they were to be reviled, scorned, cheated and warred on for twenty years. Later, the term “greaser” was to be unheard; throughout Nevada and Idaho they were to be just “boscos,” and the word was to be uttered with such bitterness as the Mexican had never drawn.

  Early in those twenty years the Central Pacific was to be completed. Prosperity was to follow; towns were to be built—Winnemucca, Golconda, Tuscarora. New settlers were to come, bringing banks, schools and churches.

  Among the newcomers there were to be impartial men, but even these were to regard the Basques as a sullen, clannish, not-understandable race. They were to trust them at their banks; for no man could say but what they were honest, prompt in the paying of their debts; but it was only the banker who was to accept the Basque as a proud, thrifty, hard-working man, and therefore a good risk.

  And the Basques were to repay their enemies in their own coin. They were, indeed, to become a sullen people, but they had ever been lovers of solitude, dependent on their family life for social pleasures. So, driven in on themselves, they were to become clannish to a degree the Basque had never known in his own land. They knew how to hate and bear a grudge, and, Indian-like, they would not forget.

  Twenty years were to bring Basque saloons, inns, stores and forwarding-agents to Winnemucca and Golconda. Paradise was to become a Basque town. What a Basque wanted, he bought from a Basque. Let these gringos keep to themselves! They wanted nothing of them. If sheep were killed, cattle could be killed, too; and it often happened that they were.

  Angel Irosabal was to foster this spirit. He was to become rich; the father of many children, although none was to take the place of the little Margarida, who had been born in a covered wagon. To those of the rising generation to whom he was not bound by blood, he became padrino (godfather), a tie as binding as the blood strain.

  His ahijados were to be counted by the score. And between himself and the fathers of these children was to exist a bond known only to com-padres. It was to make him supreme among the Basques.

  He was to be the fount of wisdom. For ten years, and for twice ten years, they were to follow him, and he was to rule not only wisely, but well, instilling pride of race in the young—preaching and convincing them of the enormity of their sin should they take to husband or wife one of an alien race. And yet, in the richest years of his life he was to hold himself shamed, betrayed; and the dimpling, black-eyed babe whom he held in his arms to-day, was to be the cause of it.

  No hint of that distant shadow rested upon Angel as he pulled his horse to a stop beside the cattleman and his son. A pleasant word was on his tongue as he bowed with Old World courtesy to Gault.

  Gault’s answer was a sneering grunt: “I don’t know where yo’re from, stranger, and hit” don’t matter, nohow; but I’m a-tellin’ ye yuh’ve toted yore stuff a long ways fer nuthin’. Yo’re a-goin’ back—way back! This is white folks’ country. Ain’t no sheepmen a-comin’ in yere! I Don’t yuh bother ’bout unloadin’ them waggins. I’m tellin’ yuh—git ’em turned about by ter-morrow! Yuh can’t stay here!”

  Gault was not bluffing; and if time was to prove him mistaken, it was only to be after years of violence and bloodshed. So it was with an angry clanking of spur-chains that he wheeled his horse and galloped away, the boy at his heels.

  Half an hour later they pulled their horses to a walk. Gault glanced at his son.

  “Yore face is white, Joseph,“ he drawled. “The trouble yore mammy saw in her cup is a-comin’. Ye ain’t skeered, be yuh?”

  “I ain’t skeered a nuthin’,” the lad answered bravely. “I reckon I kin shoot straight.”

  “Well, hit’ll git to shootin’, if they try ter stay. Yore mammy an’ me ain’t a-goin’ ter move again; we’re too old. Other folks round hyar is like us. Ain’t no one a-goin’ ter take away what’s ourn by right.”

  “But the man had a baby in his arms. What’s a-goin’ ter become of hit if thar’s shootin’?”

  “Humph I Don’t ye go worryin” bout no greaser kid, Joseph. Ain’t nuthin’ could mean less ter yuh.”

  And now score one for Fate! David Gault and Angel Irosabal were to be laid low by the same blow; for no less a thing was to occur than that the son of one was to woo and win the daughter of the other; and defying prejudice, ostracism and religious as well as racial barriers, they were to wed—the boy to be held no better than a squaw-man by his people, and the girl an outcast by her race.

  But their love for each other was to sustain them. And it is with the second Joseph, the fruit of their marriage, that this story is chiefty concerned.

  CHAPTER I.

  THE STORM.

  THE days of that August had been sunless. At rare intervals, and then for only an hour or two, would the leaden skies part for a reassuring glimpse of the blue heavens beyond. The air was heavy with silence, and although the weather was warm, that stillness which hung over mesa and valley was not unlike the hush which ushers in the violent storms of winter.

  The woman in the herder’s cabin, far up the side of Buckskin Mountain, busy with her bread-making, paused to glance down at the wide valley which stretched away from the base of the mountain to the Timbered Buttes far to the west. Even at the distance from which she observed it, it took definite shape; the fringes of green willows and buckthorn clearly defining the course Martin Creek took as it zigzagged across the valley. Likewise, the never-failing willows marked where the smaller streams cut through to the Martin.
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br />   Moving smudges of color she recognized for cattle. The same sense told her that they were not grazing; they were moving too rapidly. Subconsciously, she wondered if they, too, had been made uneasy by this stillness which hung so heavily in the air. She was a Basque, and therefore superstitious enough to believe that it portended some evil.

  And yet, the face, which she pressed to the window to-day seemed marked with something deeper than mere transient apprehension. It was a singularly beautiful face—serious, delicate—the skin a pale olive tint. Her hair was as black as night, and her eyes blacker than any night. But although her eyes—lonely, wistful—arrested the attention, it was her mouth—patient, contented—hinting of suffering and the conquering of suffering—that was unforgettable.

  There were no other cabins on Buckskin. Often for weeks on end no one passed the door. The few who did were prospectors or Indians. They never tarried, and so there was no one to carry the tale of that face so often pressed to the window.

  On clear days, the woman — she was only twenty-five — could see the town of Paradise. There were no other settlements within forty miles. What supplies they needed, her husband either carried or hauled from there.

  If her eyes sought to pierce the haze that hung over the valley to-day for a glimpse of Paradise, it was only because her husband was there, or by now returning from there. Oftenest, her eyes sought the white-washed house and ranch buildings to the north and east of the little town which even distance could not rob of an air of prosperity. Angel Irosabal, the headman of the Basques, lived there.

  She was that mighty man’s daughter !—and yet, for eight full years she had not entered there, nor in all that time—through sickness, the birth of her son—had one of her own blood exchanged a word with her. There were brothers and sisters of hers in that big house, a mother, too; but if they wondered about her, or hoped that the stem father would relent, Margarida Gault, the herder’s wife, had no sign of it.

  Eight years is a long time for a father to bear a grudge; it is an equally long time to keep hope of forgiveness alive. Joe Gault’s wife had come to believe that the years would never be so many that her father would open his arms to her.

  Always she told her husband it didn’t matter; that she no longer cared. Often she whispered as much to herself; but on the days when Gault went to town, or when he was away on the mountain, some mad impulse drove her to the window. She believed it to be only habit, and she tried to fight it; but when once the desire had planted itself in her brain, torturing hours of restlessness always followed, and often defeated her.

  At the window, she found peace, of a sort; and she never left it without breathing a prayer that God might soften her father’s heart; for surely in His eyes no sin was hers. She had but married the man she loved.

  That he was of another religion, and of a breed of men who had persecuted her people, was her only transgression. That thought sustained her. . . . She was not a penitent.

  If her husband never mentioned her father’s name, it was not because he failed to read the message in her eyes. He understood. And much of the business which took him over the mountain was only invented so that the bitterness in his heart could be voiced unheard by her.

  There were other Gaults in the valley, kinsmen of his—the old Cross-K outfit—but he never mentioned them. In fact he had long since forgotten them; but he had never been able to forget the man who had put that hungry look in his wife’s eyes.

  Daily, in countless ways, he tried to make up for what marrying him had cost her, and he came as near to succeeding as love, and patience, and unfailing kindness can come. But some few there were who pitied Margarida Gault. They wondered how she withstood the loneliness of that little cabin perched high upon the mountainside.

  Gault, so they said, was a cowman ; how could he expect to have luck with sheep—and on Buckskin Mountain of all places! If the cattle-outfits and the big sheepmen kept their hands off Buckskin it was because the range was so poor that even the jack-rabbits refused it.

  And yet for all their talk, Gault’s sheep grew fat. There was timber-clover in those little parks of stunted cedars and junipers on the mountain-top. Valley men said it was bad for sheep and cattle; it bloated them and they often died. But Gault found that his sheep thrived on it if they cropped it for only two or three days at a time.

  So if his industry fell short of making him a prosperous man, it at least provided the essential things of life, and that pitying few in Paradise Valley would have been surprised had they known that the snug wee cabin on Buckskin often echoed to happy laughter. It was the abiding place of love, the shrine of an infant god who held the hearts of Joseph and Margarida Gault in his pudgy little hands.

  He was called Joseph, too—a manly lad of seven, with his father’s reddish-brown hair and his Basque mother’s finely chiseled features. He was old for his years, and already self-reliant; in his eyes was a wisdom as of the aged. It was a baffling look. To his parents it seemed as if he were reading their souls, and not their lips.

  Margarida had first noticed it one day as she turned from the window her eyes filled with tears. She had smiled and kissed him, but his expression had not changed. It seemed that he saw through her pretense and understood the grief which ate at her heart. It had left her with an uncanny feeling, and she was careful to see that the child’s questioning eyes never found tears in her own again.

  He had been in the kitchen with her to-day, but the angry cawing of a flock of crows had drawn him outside. She had heard him calling to them as they circled about the cabin scolding the laggard leader of the flock. Joseph often talked to the crows and the magpies.

  This was disquieting to Margarida; for it brought home so poignantly his loneliness. Even Indian boys played and romped with other children. No wonder then, that Joseph turned to the wild for companionship. He was only answering a primitive instinct which had come down to him through many generations of roving fathers.

  It was, however, in a self-accusing frame of mind that Margarida went on with her work. The afternoon was well along, and by the time she had finished her baking it was dark in the kitchen. She. had not known it was so late. A glance at the clock, however, showed that twilight should still be an hour away. Alarmed, she ran to the door and called :

  “Joseph! Jo-o-seph!”

  The air had grown so cool that she shivered as she stood in the doorway waiting for the boy’s answer. Uneasy, she called again, and when her second call went unanswered, she rolled up her apron and started off toward the coulee where the dogs were holding the herd for the night.

  She stopped, when she had gone a hundred yards from the cabin, and called again. As she waited, the stillness, which had settled heavier than ever over the mountain, seemed to clutch at her. Not a leaf was stirring, and although it was the time of evening when the whippoorwills sail over the sage-brush, there was not a wing in the air, nor could she catch sound of their plaintive, mocking call. She crossed herself nervously, and turned an anxious eye toward the road which led up from the valley, wishing that her husband was home, but knowing that he would not come for another hour at least.

  Joseph had not answered, so she picked up her skirts, and half ran to the coulee. The shadows were deepening, but she could see the flock standing uneasily, apparently loath to bed down for the night. The dogs were running back and forth, grumbling to themselves, as if by this show of authority they hoped to make the flock lie down. They paused only for a second on catching sight of Margarida, for they sensed even better than the sheep that something was amiss. Their mistress’s excitement was quickly communicated to them, too, and they barked sharply.

  Margarida had expected to find Joseph with the dogs, but a hurried glance told her that they were alone. Her throat went dry with fear as she realized the truth. What could have happened to him ? Her hands shook as she raised them to her mouth. “Jovencito!” she cried. “where are you? Answer me!”

  She stopped suddenly as she caught sight of the mil
ling sheep in the center ·of the flock. They were kicking up a great dust. A moment later, from out the dust-cloud, rode Joseph, astraddle a snorting ram !

  Margarida could only hold her breath. She was afraid to call to him, for if the ram bucked him off before he got to the edge of the flock, the sheep would be panic-stricken immediately. Once upon the ground, the child would be ground to death by their sharp hoofs.

  What had tempted him to do this thing? Was he without any sense of fear? She knew it was remarkable that the animal permitted Joseph to ride him at all. This particular ram had been running wild on the range all summer, and he was possessed of a fiendish temper and a dangerous sense of dignity.

  And yet as she watched, Joseph caught sight of her, and, although he called and waved his hands, the ram did not buck. In five minutes, he had ridden clear of the flock. The dogs tried to turn the ram, but Joseph urged him on, and not until he was within a few feet of his mother did the boy slip to the ground. The animal waited to have his ears scratched and then, with lowered head, he dashed back into the flock.

  Margarida ran to the child and caught him up. “Joseph!” she murmured, “you frightened me so. I’ve been calling and calling for you, muchachito. What if you had fallen?”

  “Grandpa wouldn’t throw me, mother,” the child answered stoutly.

  “Grandpa—you call him Grandpa?” Margarida exclaimed, aghast.

  “Well, he looks mean like grandpas look,” Joseph declared naïvely.

  “Hush—hush—Joseph!” Margarida crooned as she pressed her cheek to his. “Cállate, jovencito. Maybe to-morrow we can find a better name for the ram. But we must go, it is night. Let me have your hand, niño!”

  Even though they hurried along, it was black night before they reached the little draw in which the cabin sat. A thin, piercing scream—far—off and ever rising—struck their ears. With each step they took, it grew. Margarida clutched Joseph’s hand. The air about them seemed to tremble.