Mrs. Colonel Landcraft was not going. Indians made her sick, she said, especially Indians sitting around in the tall grass waiting for the carcasses to be cut up and apportioned out to them in bloody 17 chunks. But there seemed to be another source of her sickness that morning, measuring by the grave glances with which she searched her daughter’s face. She wondered whether the major and Frances had quarreled; and if so, whether Nola Chadron had been the cause.
They were off, with the colonel and a lately-assigned captain in the lead. There was a keener pleasure in this beef day than usual for the colonel, for he had new ground to sow with its wonders, which were beginning to pale in his old eyes which had seen so much of the world.
“Very likely we’ll see the minister’s wife there,” said he, as they rode forward, “and if so, it will be worth your while to take special note of her. St. John Mathews, the Episcopalian minister over there at the mission—those white buildings there among the trees—is a full-blooded Crow. One of the pioneer missionaries took him up and sent him back East to school, where in time he entered the ministry and married this white girl. She was a college girl, I’ve been told, glamoured by the romance of Mathews’ life. Well, it was soon over.”
The colonel sighed, and fell silent. The captain, feeling that it was intended that he should, made polite inquiry.
“The trouble is that Mathews is an Indian out of his place,” the colonel resumed. “He returned here twenty years or so ago, and took up his work among his people. But as he advanced toward civilization, 18 his wife began to slip back. Little by little she adopted the Indian ways and dress, until now you couldn’t tell her from a squaw if you were to meet her for the first time. She presents a curious psychological study—or perhaps biological example of atavism, for I believe there’s more body than soul in the poor creature now. It’s nature maintaining the balance, you see. He goes up; she slips back.
“If she’s there, she’ll be squatting among the squaws, waiting to carry home her husband’s allotment of warm, bloody beef. She doesn’t have to do it, and it shames and humiliates Mathews, too, even though they say she cuts it up and divides it among the poorer Indians. She’s a savage; her eyes sparkle at the sight of red meat.”
They rounded the agency buildings and came upon an open meadow in which the slaughterhouses stood at a distance from the road. Here, in the grassy expanse, the Indians were gathered, waiting the distribution of the meat. The scene was barbarically animated. Groups of women in their bright dresses sat here and there on the grass, and apart from them in gravity waited old men in moccasins and blankets and with feathers in their hair. Spry young men smoked cigarettes and talked volubly, garbed in the worst of civilization and the most useless of savagery.
One and all they turned their backs upon the visitors, the nearest groups and individuals moving away from them with the impassive dignity of their race. There is more scorn in an Indian squaw’s back, 19 turned to an impertinent stranger, than in the faces of six matrons of society’s finest-sifted under similar conditions.
Colonel Landcraft led his party across the meadow, entirely unconscious of the cold disdain of the people whom he looked down upon from his superior heights. He could not have understood if any there had felt the trespass from the Indians’ side—and there was one, very near and dear to the colonel who felt it so—and attempted to explain. The colonel very likely would have puffed up with military consequence almost to the bursting-point.
Feeling, delicacy, in those smeared, smelling creatures! Surliness in excess they might have, but dignity, not at all. Were they not there as beggars to receive bounty from the government’s hand?
“Oh, there’s Mrs. Mathews!” said Nola, with the eagerness of a child who has found a quail’s nest in the grass. She was off at an angle, like a hunter on the scent. Colonel Landcraft and his guest followed with equal rude eagerness, and the others swept after them, Frances alone hanging back. Major King was at Nola’s side. If he noted the lagging of his fiancée he did not heed.
The minister’s wife, a shawl over her head, her braided hair in front of her shoulders like an Indian woman, rose from her place in startled confusion. She looked as if she would have fled if an avenue had been open, or a refuge presented. The embarrassed creature was obliged to stand in their curious eyes, 20 and stammer in a tongue which seemed to be growing strange to her from its uncommon use.
She was a short woman, growing heavy and shapeless now, and there was gray in her black hair. Her skin was browned by sun, wind, and smoke to the hue of her poor neighbors and friends. When she spoke in reply to the questions which poured upon her, she bent her head like a timid girl.
Frances checked her horse and remained behind, out of range of hearing. She was cut to the heart with shame for her companions, and her cheek burned with the indignation that she suffered with the harried woman in their midst. A little Indian girl came flying past, ducking and dashing under the neck of Frances’ horse, in pursuit of a piece of paper which the wind whirled ahead of her. At Frances’ stirrup she caught it, and held it up with a smile.
“Did you lose this, lady?” she asked, in the very best of mission English.
“No,” said Frances, bending over to see what it might be. The little girl placed it in her hand and scurried away again to a beckoning woman, who stood on her knees and scowled over her offspring’s dash into the ways of civilized little girls.
It was a narrow strip of paper that she had rescued from the wind, with the names of several men written on it in pencil, and at the head of the list the name of Alan Macdonald. Opposite that name some crude hand had entered, with pen that had flowed heavily under his pressure, the figures “$500.”
21
Frances turned it round her finger and sat waiting for the others to leave off their persecution of the minister’s wife and come back to her, wondering in abstracted wandering of mind who Alan Macdonald might be, and for what purpose he had subscribed the sum of five hundred dollars.
“I think she’s the most romantic little thing in the world!” Nola was declaring, in her extravagant surface way as they returned to where Frances sat her horse, her wandering eyes on the blue foothills, the strip of paper prominent about her finger. “Oh, honey! what’s the matter? Did you cut your finger?”
“No,” said Frances, her serious young face lighting with a smile, “it’s a little subscription list, or something, that somebody lost. Alan Macdonald heads it for five hundred dollars. Do you know Alan Macdonald, and what his charitable purpose may be?”
Nola tossed her head with a contemptuous sniff.
“They call him the ‘king of the rustlers’ up the river,” said she.
“Oh, he is a man of consequence, then?” said Frances, a quickening of humor in her brown eyes, seeing that Nola was up on her high horse about it.
“We’d better be going down to the slaughter-house if we want to see the fun,” bustled the colonel, wheeling his horse. “I see a movement setting in that way.”
“He’s just a common thief!” declared Nola, with 22 flushed cheek and resentful eye, as Frances fell in beside her for the march against the abattoir.
Frances still carried the paper twisted about her finger, reserving her judgment upon Alan Macdonald, for she knew something of the feuds of that hard-speaking land.
“Anyway, I suppose he’d like to have his paper back,” she suggested. “Will you hand it to him the next time you meet him?”
Frances was entirely grave about it, although it was only a piece of banter which she felt that Nola would appreciate. But Nola was not in an appreciative mood, for she was a full-blooded daughter of the baronial rule. She jerked her head like a vicious bronco and reined hurriedly away from Frances as she extended the paper.