Book: The Rainbow Trail

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Then a few lights twinkled in the darkness that enveloped the cabins;
a woman's laugh strangely broke the silence, profaning it, giving the
lie to that somber yoke which seemed to consist of the very shadows;
the voices of men were heard, and then the slow clip-clop of trotting
horses on the hard trail.

Shefford saw the Mormons file out into the paling starlight, ride down
the valley, and vanish in the gray gloom. He was aware that the Indian
sat up to watch the procession ride by, and that Joe turned over, as
if disturbed.

One by one the stars went out. The valley became a place of gray
shadows. In the east a light glowed. Shefford sat there, haggard and
worn, watching the coming of the dawn, the kindling of the light; and
had the power been his the dawn would never have broken and the rose
and gold never have tipped the lofty peaks.

. . . . . . . . . . .

Shefford attended to his camp chores as usual. Several times he was
aware of Joe's close scrutiny, and finally, without looking at him,
Shefford told of the visit of the Mormons. A violent expulsion of
breath was Joe's answer and it might have been a curse. Straightway
Joe ceased his cheery whistling and became as somber as the Indian.
The camp was silent; the men did not look at one another. While they
sat at breakfast Shefford's back was turned toward the village--he had
not looked in that direction since dawn.

"Ugh!" suddenly exclaimed Nas Ta Bega.

Joe Lake muttered low and deep, and this time there was no mistake
about the nature of his speech. Shefford did not have the courage to
turn to see what had caused these exclamations. He knew since today
had dawned that there was calamity in the air.

"Shefford, I reckon if I know women there's a little hell coming to
you," said the Mormon, significantly.

Shefford wheeled as if a powerful force had turned him on a pivot. He
saw Fay Larkin. She seemed to be almost running. She was unhooded and
her bright hair streamed down. Her swift, lithe action was without its
usual grace. She looked wild, and she almost fell crossing the
stepping-stones of the brook.

Joe hurried to meet her, took hold of her arm and spoke, but she did
not seem to hear him. She drew him along with her, up the little bench
under the cedars straight toward Shefford. Her face held a white, mute
agony, as if in the hour of strife it had hardened into marble. But
her eyes were dark-purple fire--windows of an extraordinarily intense
and vital life. In one night the girl had become a woman. But the
blight Shefford had dreaded to see--the withering of the exquisite
soul and spirit and purity he had considered inevitable, just as
inevitable as the death of something similar in the flower she
resembled, when it was broken and defiled--nothing of this was
manifest in her. Straight and swiftly she came to him back in the
shade of the cedars and took hold of his hands.

"Last night--HE CAME!" she said.

"Yes--Fay--I--I know," replied Shefford, haltingly.

He was tremblingly conscious of amaze at her--of something wonderful
in her. She did not heed Joe, who stepped aside a little; she did
not see Nas Ta Bega, who sat motionless on a log, apparently oblivious
to her presence.

"You knew he came?"

"Yes, Fay. I was awake when--they rode in. I watched them. I sat up
all night. I saw them ride away."

"If you knew when he came why didn't you run to me--to get to me before
he did?"

Her question was unanswerable. It had the force of a blow. It
stunned him. Its sharp, frank directness sprang from a simplicity
and a strength that had not been nurtured in the life he had lived.
So far men had wandered from truth and nature!

"I came to you as soon as I was able," she went on. "I must have
fainted. I just had to drag myself around. . . . And now I can tell
you."

He was powerless to reply, as if she had put another unanswerable
question. What did she mean to tell him? What might she not tell him?
She loosed her hands from his and lifted them to his shoulders, and
that was the first conscious action of feeling, of intimacy, which she
had ever shown. It quite robbed Shefford of strength, and in spite
of his sorrow there was an indefinable thrill in her touch. He looked
at her, saw the white-and-gold beauty that was hers yesterday and
seemed changed to-day, and he recognized Fay Larkin in a woman he
did not know.

"Listen! He came--"

"Fay, don't--tell me," interrupted Shefford.

"I WILL tell you," she said.

Did the instinct of love teach her how to mitigate his pain? Shefford
felt that, as he felt the new-born strength in her.

"Listen," she went on. "He came when I was undressing for bed. I
heard the horse. He knocked on the door. Something terrible happened
to me then. I felt sick and my head wasn't clear. I remember next--
his being in the room--the lamp was out--I couldn't see very well. He
thought I was sick and he gave me a drink and let the air blow in on
me through the window. I remember I lay back in the chair and I
thought. And I listened. When would you come? I didn't feel that
you could leave me there alone with him. For his coming was different
this time. That pain like a blade in my side! . . . When it came I
was not the same. I loved you. I understood then. I belonged to
you. I couldn't let him touch me. I had never been his wife. When
I realized this--that he was there, that you might suffer for it--I
cried right out.

"He thought I was sick. He worked over me. He gave me medicine. And
then he prayed. I saw him, in the dark, on his knees, praying for me.
That seemed strange. Yet he was kind, so kind that I begged him to
let me go. I was not a Mormon. I couldn't marry him. I begged him
to let me go.

"Then he thought I had been deceiving him. He fell into a fury. He
talked for a long time. He called upon God to visit my sins upon me.
He tried to make me pray. But I wouldn't. And then I fought him.
I'd have screamed for you had he not smothered me. I got weak. . . .
And you never came. I know I thought you would come. But you didn't.
Then I--I gave out. And after--some time--I must have fainted."

"Fay! For Heaven's sake, how could I come to you?" burst out Shefford,
hoarse and white with remorse, passion, pain.

"If I'm any man's wife I'm yours. It's a thing you FEEL, isn't it? I
know that now. . . . But I want to know what to do?"

"Fay!" he cried, huskily.

"I'm sick of it all. If it weren't for you I'd climb the wall and
throw myself off. That would be easy for me. I'd love to die that
way. All my life I've been high up on the walls. To fall would be
nothing!"

"Oh, you mustn't talk like that!"

"Do you love me?" she asked, with a low and deathless sweetness.

"Love you? With all my heart! Nothing can change that!"

"Do you want me--as you used to want the Fay Larkin lost in Surprise
Valley? Do you love me that way? I understand things better than
before, but still--not all. I AM Fay Larkin. I think I must have
dreamed of you all my life. I was glad when you came here. I've been
happy lately. I forgot--till last night. Maybe it needed that to
make me see I've loved you all the time. . . . And I fought him like
a wildcat! . . . Tell me the truth. I feel I'm yours. Is that true?
If I'm not--I'll not live another hour. Something holds me up. I am
the same. . . . Do you want me?"

"Yes, Fay Larkin, I want you," replied Shefford, steadily, with his
grip on her arms.

"Then take me away. I don't want to live here another hour."

"Fay, I'll take you. But it can't be done at once. We must plan. I
need help. There are Lassiter and Jane to get out of Surprise Valley.
Give me time, dear--give me time. It'll be a hard job. And we must
plan so we can positively get away. Give me time, Fay."

"Suppose HE comes back?" she queried, with a singular depth of voice.

"We'll have to risk that," replied Shefford, miserably. "But--he
won't come soon."

"He said he would," she flashed.

Shefford seemed to freeze inwardly with her words. Love had made her
a woman and now the woman in her was speaking. She saw the truth as
he could not see it. And the truth was nature. She had been hidden
all her life from the world, from knowledge as he had it, yet when
love betrayed her womanhood to her she acquired all its subtlety.

"If I wait and he DOES come will you keep me from him?" she asked.

"How can I? I'm staking all on the chance of his not coming soon.
. . . But, Fay, if he DOES come and I don't give up our secret--how
on earth can I keep you from him?" demanded Shefford.

"If you love me you will do it," she said, as simply as if she were
fate.

"But how?" cried Shefford, almost beside himself.

"You are a man. Any man would save the woman who loves him from--from
--Oh, from a beast! . . . How would Lassiter do it?"

"Lassiter!"

"YOU CAN KILL HIM!"

It was there, deep and full in her voice, the strength of the elemental
forces that had surrounded her, primitive passion and hate and love, as
they were in woman in the beginning.

"My God!" Shefford cried aloud with his spirit when all that was red
in him sprang again into a flame of hell. That was what had been wrong
with him last night. He could kill this stealthy night-rider, and now,
face to face with Fay, who had never been so beautiful and wonderful
as in this hour when she made love the only and the sacred thing of
life, now he had it in him to kill. Yet, murder--even to kill a brute
--that was not for John Shefford, not the way for him to save a woman.
Reason and wisdom still fought the passion in him. If he could but
cling to them--have them with him in the dark and contending hour!

She leaned against him now, exhausted, her soul in her eyes, and they
saw only him. Shefford was all but powerless to resist the longing to
take her into his arms, to hold her to his heart, to let himself go.
Did not her love give her to him? Shefford gazed helplessly at the
stricken Joe Lake, at the somber Indian, as if from them he expected
help.

"I know him now," said Fay, breaking the silence with startling
suddenness.

"What!"

"I've seen him in the light. I flashed a candle in his face. I saw
it. I know him now. He was there at Stonebridge with us, and I never
knew him. But I know him now. His name is--"

"For God's sake don't tell me who he is!" implored Shefford.

Ignorance was Shefford's safeguard against himself. To make a name of
this heretofore intangible man, to give him an identity apart from the
crowd, to be able to recognize him--that for Shefford would be fatal.

"Fay--tell me--no more," he said, brokenly. "I love you and I will
give you my life. Trust me. I swear I'll save you."

"Will you take me away soon?"

"Yes."

She appeared satisfied with that and dropped her hands and moved back
from him. A light flitted over her white face, and her eyes grew dark
and humid, losing their fire in changing, shadowing thought of
submission, of trust, of hope.

"I can lead you to Surprise Valley," she said. "I feel the way. It's
there!" And she pointed to the west.

"Fay, we'll go--soon. I must plan. I'll see you to-night. Then we'll
talk. Run home now, before some of the women see you here."

She said good-by and started away under the cedars, out into the open
where her hair shone like gold in the sunlight, and she took the
stepping-stones with her old free grace, and strode down the path
swift and lithe as an Indian. Once she turned to wave a hand.

Shefford watched her with a torture of pride, love, hope, and fear
contending within him.




XIV. THE NAVAJO


That morning a Piute rode into the valley.

Shefford recognized him as the brave who had been in love with Glen
Naspa. The moment Nas Ta Bega saw this visitor he made a singular
motion with his hands--a motion that somehow to Shefford suggested
despair--and then he waited, somber and statuesque, for the messenger
to come to him. It was the Piute who did all the talking, and that
was brief. Then the Navajo stood motionless, with his hands crossed
over his breast. Shefford drew near and waited.

"Bi Nai," said the Navajo, "Nas Ta Bega said his sister would come
home some day. . . . Glen Naspa is in the hogan of her grandfather."

He spoke in his usual slow, guttural voice, and he might have been
bronze for all the emotion he expressed; yet Shefford instinctively
felt the despair that had been hinted to him, and he put his hand on
the Indian's shoulder.

"If I am the Navajo's brother, then I am brother to Glen Naspa," he
said. "I will go with you to the hogan of Hosteen Doetin."

Nas Ta Bega went away into the valley for the horses. Shefford
hurried to the village, made his excuses at the school, and then
called to explain to Fay that trouble of some kind had come to
the Indian.

Soon afterward he was riding Nack-yal on the rough and winding trail
up through the broken country of cliffs and canyon to the great league
-long sage and cedar slope of the mountain. It was weeks since he had
ridden the mustang. Nack-yal was fat and lazy. He loved his master,
but he did not like the climb, and so fell far behind the lean and
wiry pony that carried Nas Ta Bega. The sage levels were as purple
as the haze of the distance, and there was a bitter-sweet tang on the
strong, cool wind. The sun was gold behind the dark line of fringe on
the mountain-top. A flock of sheep swept down one of the sage levels,
looking like a narrow stream of white and black and brown. It was
always amazing for Shefford to see how swiftly these Navajo sheep
grazed along. Wild mustangs plunged out of the cedar clumps and
stood upon the ridges, whistling defiance or curiosity, and their
manes and tails waved in the wind.

Shefford mounted slowly to the cedar bench in the midst of which were
hidden the few hogans. And he halted at the edge to dismount and take
a look at that downward-sweeping world of color, of wide space, at the
wild desert upland which from there unrolled its magnificent panorama.

Then he passed on into the cedars. How strange to hear the lambs
bleating again! Lambing-time had come early, but still spring was
there in the new green of grass, in the bright upland flower. He
led his mustang out of the cedars into the cleared circle. It was
full of colts and lambs, and there were the shepherd-dogs and a few
old rams and ewes. But the circle was a quiet place this day. There
were no Indians in sight. Shefford loosened the saddle-girths on
Nack-yal and, leaving him to graze, went toward the hogan of Hosteen
Doetin. A blanket was hung across the door. Shefford heard a low
chanting. He waited beside the door till the covering was pulled in,
then he entered.

Hosteen Doetin met him, clasped his hand. The old Navajo could not
speak; his fine face was working in grief; tears streamed from his
dim old eyes and rolled down his wrinkled cheeks. His sorrow was no
different from a white man's sorrow. Beyond him Shefford saw Nas
Ta Bega standing with folded arms, somehow terrible in his somber
impassiveness. At his feet crouched the old woman, Hosteen Doetin's
wife, and beside her, prone and quiet, half covered with a blanket,
lay Glen Naspa.

She was dead. To Shefford she seemed older than when he had last seen
her. And she was beautiful. Calm, cold, dark, with only bitter lips
to give the lie to peace! There was a story in those lips.

At her side, half hidden under the fold of blanket, lay a tiny bundle.
Its human shape startled Shefford. Then he did not need to be told
the tragedy. When he looked again at Glen Naspa's face he seemed
to understand all that had made her older, to feel the pain that
had lined and set her lips.

She was dead, and she was the last of Nas Ta Bega's family. In the old
grandfather's agony, in the wild chant of the stricken grandmother, in
the brother's stern and terrible calmness Shefford felt more than the
death of a loved one. The shadow of ruin, of doom, of death hovered
over the girl and her family and her tribe and her race. There was
no consolation to offer these relatives of Glen Naspa. Shefford took
one more fascinated gaze at her dark, eloquent, prophetic face, at
the tragic tiny shape by her side, and then with bowed head he left
the hogan.

. . . . . . . . . . .

Outside he paced to and fro, with an aching heart for Nas Ta Bega,
with something of the white man's burden of crime toward the Indian
weighing upon his soul.

Old Hosteen Doetin came to him with shaking hands and words memorable
of the time Glen Naspa left his hogan.

"Me no savvy Jesus Christ. Me hungry. Me no eat Jesus Christ!"

That seemed to be all of his trouble that he could express to Shefford.
He could not understand the religion of the missionary, this Jesus
Christ who had called his granddaughter away. And the great fear of
an old Indian was not death, but hunger. Shefford remembered a custom
of the Navajos, a thing barbarous looked at with a white man's mind.
If an old Indian failed on a long march he was inclosed by a wall of
stones, given plenty to eat and drink, and left there to die in the
desert. Not death did he fear, but hunger! Old Hosteen Doetin
expected to starve, now that the young and strong squaw of his
family was gone.

Shefford spoke in his halting Navajo and assured the old Indian that
Nas Ta Bega would never let him starve.

At sunset Shefford stood with Nas Ta Bega facing the west. The Indian
was magnificent in repose. He watched the sun go down upon the day
that had seen the burial of the last of his family. He resembled an
impassive destiny, upon which no shocks fell. He had the light of that
flaring golden sky in his face, the majesty of the mountain in his
mien, the silence of the great gulf below on his lips. This educated
Navajo, who had reverted to the life of his ancestors, found in the
wildness and loneliness of his environment a strength no white
teaching could ever have given him. Shefford sensed in him a
measureless grief, an impenetrable gloom, a tragic acceptance of the
meaning of Glen Naspa's ruin and death--the vanishing of his race from
the earth. Death had written the law of such bitter truth round Glen
Naspa's lips, and the same truth was here in the grandeur and gloom
of the Navajo.

"Bi Nai," he said, with the beautiful sonorous roll in his voice,
"Glen Naspa is in her grave and there are no paths to the place of
her sleep. Glen Naspa is gone."

"Gone! Where? Nas Ta Bega, remember I lost my own faith, and I have
not yet learned yours."

"The Navajo has one mother--the earth. Her body has gone to the earth
and it will become dust. But her spirit is in the air. It shall
whisper to me from the wind. I shall hear it on running waters. It
will hide in the morning music of a mocking-bird and in the lonely
night cry of the canyon hawk. Her blood will go to make the red of
the Indian flowers and her soul will rest at midnight in the lily
that opens only to the moon. She will wait in the shadow for me, and
live in the great mountain that is my home, and for ever step behind
me on the trail."

"You will kill Willetts?" demanded Shefford.

"The Navajo will not seek the missionary."

"But if you meet him you'll kill him?"

"Bi Nai, would Nas Ta Bega kill after it is too late? What good could
come? The Navajo is above revenge."

"If he crosses my trail I think I couldn't help but kill him,"
muttered Shefford in a passion that wrung the threat from him.

The Indian put his arm round the white man's shoulders.

"Bi Nai, long ago I made you my brother. And now you make me your
brother. Is it not so? Glen Naspa's spirit calls for wisdom, not
revenge. Willetts must be a bad man. But we'll let him live. Life
will punish him. Who knows if he was all to blame? Glen Naspa was
only one pretty Indian girl. There are many white men in the desert.
She loved a white man when she was a baby. The thing was a curse.
. . . Listen, Bi Nai, and the Navajo will talk.

"Many years ago the Spanish padres, the first white men, came into the
land of the Indian. Their search was for gold. But they were not
wicked men. They did not steal and kill. They taught the Indian many
useful things. They brought him horses. But when they went away they
left him unsatisfied with his life and his god.

"Then came the pioneers. They crossed the great river and took the
pasture-lands and the hunting-grounds of the Indian. They drove him
backward, and the Indian grew sullen. He began to fight. The white
man's government made treaties with the Indian, and these were broken.
Then war came--fierce and bloody war. The Indian was driven to the
waste places. The stream of pioneers, like a march of ants, spread on
into the desert. Every valley where grass grew, every river, became
a place for farms and towns. Cattle choked the water-holes where the
buffalo and deer had once gone to drink. The forests in the hills
were cut and the springs dried up. And the pioneers followed to the
edge of the desert.

"Then came the prospectors, mad, like the padres for the gleam of
gold. The day was not long enough for them to dig in the creeks and
the canyon; they worked in the night. And they brought weapons and
rum to the Indian, to buy from him the secret of the places where the
shining gold lay hidden.

"Then came the traders. And they traded with the Indian. They gave
him little for much, and that little changed his life. He learned a
taste for the sweet foods of the white man. Because he could trade
for a sack of flour he worked less in the field. And the very fiber
of his bones softened.

"Then came the missionaries. They were proselytizers for converts to
their religion. The missionaries are good men. There may be a bad
missionary, like Willetts, the same as there are bad men in other
callings, or bad Indians. They say Shadd is a half-breed. But the
Piutes can tell you he is a full-blood, and he, like me, was sent to
a white man's school. In the beginning the missionaries did well for
the Indian. They taught him cleaner ways of living, better farming,
useful work with tools--many good things. But the wrong to the Indian
was the undermining of his faith. It was not humanity that sent the
missionary to the Indian. Humanity would have helped the Indian in
his ignorance of sickness and work, and left him his god. For to
trouble the Indian about his god worked at the roots of his nature.

"The beauty of the Indian's life is in his love of the open, of all
that is nature, of silence, freedom, wildness. It is a beauty of mind
and soul. The Indian would have been content to watch and feel. To
a white man he might be dirty and lazy--content to dream life away
without trouble or what the white man calls evolution. The Indian
might seem cruel because he leaves his old father out in the desert to
die. But the old man wants to die that way, alone with his spirits and
the sunset. And the white man's medicine keeps his old father alive
days and days after he ought to be dead. Which is more cruel? The
Navajos used to fight with other tribes, and then they were stronger
men than they are to-day.

"But leaving religion, greed, and war out of the question, contact
with the white man would alone have ruined the Indian. The Indian and
the white man cannot mix. The Indian brave learns the habits of the
white man, acquires his diseases, and has not the mind or body to
withstand them. The Indian girl learns to love the white man--and
that is death of her Indian soul, if not of life.

"So the red man is passing. Tribes once powerful have died in the life
of Nas Ta Bega. The curse of the white man is already heavy upon my
race in the south. Here in the north, in the wildest corner of the
desert, chased here by the great soldier, Carson, the Navajo has made
his last stand.

"Bi Nai, you have seen the shadow in the hogan of Hosteen Doetin. Glen
Naspa has gone to her grave, and no sisters, no children, will make
paths to the place of her sleep. Nas Ta Bega will never have a wife--
a child. He sees the end. It is the sunset of the Navajo. . . . Bi
Nai, the Navajo is dying--dying--dying!"




XV. WILD JUSTICE


A crescent moon hung above the lofty peak over the valley and a train
of white stars ran along the bold rim of the western wall. A few young
frogs peeped plaintively. The night was cool, yet had a touch of balmy
spring, and a sweeter fragrance, as if the cedars and pinyons had
freshened in the warm sun of that day.

Shefford and Fay were walking in the aisles of moonlight and the
patches of shade, and Nas Ta Bega, more than ever a shadow of his
white brother, followed them silently.

"Fay, it's growing late. Feel the dew?" said Shefford. "Come, I
must take you back."

"But the time's so short. I have said nothing that I wanted to say,"
she replied.

"Say it quickly, then, as we go."

"After all, it's only--will you take me away soon?"

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