HERE were three people in the group on the station platform at Humboldt. The two who were standing were a white man and a white woman.
The man was tall, with breadth in his shoulders, five-and-thirty, and rather good looking. His dress evidenced prosperity, and his manner betokened long residence in a city—one of the cities east of the Mississippi.
The woman also was tall; and graceful, and very pretty, and not over twenty-five years of age. She was, without doubt, a bride, and—equally without doubt—a fit mate for the man. She carried her chin high (a trick common to those wearing eye-glasses) and moved with an air of being quite sure of her social position. She was inconspicuously dressed, but her gown, when she walked, rustled in the way that speaks of silken linings. She looked like a woman whose boots were always made to order, and who, each night, had an hour spent upon brushing her hair.
The third person in the group was an Indian. A Paiute fifty years old, but who looked twenty years older. Old George. His little withered brown face was puckered into a whimsical smile as with head aslant he looked up from where he sat on the bench that was built round a tree-box. This was his frequent seat when the trains came in, and here he came daily to answer the inquisitive questions of people who deem themselves well bred.
He was old, and much dirtier than even the others of his race. But he afforded entertainment for the travelers whose pleasure it was to put questions.
“Yep, me old. ‘Forty?’ I guess so. ‘One hundred?’ Maybe so; I no know.” He chuckled. It was the same thing over and over again that they—on the trains—asked him every day. Not a whit cared he what they asked, nor was it worth while telling the truth. When they asked he answered; saying the things they wanted to hear. And sometimes they gave him nickels. That was all there was about it.
“Where did he live?” “What did he eat?” “Did he work?” his inquisitors queried. “Was he married?” and “Had he any children?” “Had he ever killed any white men?” Then they would note his maimed, misshapen limbs. “How long ago had his leg been broken?” “In what way had he crippled his hands?” But to all there were the same replies:
“I no know. Maybe so. I guess so.”
What did it matter? They were satisfied. And meddlers they were. Yet——generally he got the waited-for nickel.
So today he answered even as they questioned. Then the woman (pretty, and with an unmistakable air of good breeding) nodded and said: “Good-by!” and the man (well-mannered, well-groomed and self-complacent) gave him a silver quarter as he went back to the “Pullman.”
“Henry, dear,” she asked, after they had settled themselves comfortably again in their compartment of the sleeping-car, “how do such creatures exist? Do they work, or only sit idly in the sun waiting for someone to give them one or two nickels?”
“Oh, he is a confirmed beggar, one can see! They never work—these Paiutes. Mere animals are they, eating, drinking and sleeping as animals,” her husband replied. “So degenerate have they become since the days when they were a wild tribe and warriors that they go through life now in docile stupidity, without anything rousing them to what we would call a live interest in their surroundings. I doubt very much if, in the life of any one of them, there ever occurs any stirring event. Perhaps it is just as well, for at least it gives them a peaceful old age, and they can have no harassing recollections.”
“And no happy ones, either,” the woman said. “Think what it must be to live out one’s allotted time of physical existence without ever experiencing the faintest romance—without even a gleam of what love means! I presume that the sense of attachment is unknown to them; such affection as——”
“As ours?” he interrupted laughingly. “Well, rather unknown I should say.”
The man looked with fond eyes into the eyes of the woman; then, as the train pulled out of the station, they saw the old Indian limping away toward his camp.
Are the individual histories of Indians—even Paiutes—even the “degenerate tribes”—uneventful or wholly devoid of human interest? Let us see.
Old George can tell you a different story, it may be. From his point of view there is perhaps love; perhaps even romance. Much depends upon the standpoint one takes. The hills that look high from the valley, seem low looking down from the mountain.
When I first knew George (he was “Young George” then), he was married and had children. Four; two boys and two girls. More than other Indians, he aped the Whites in their ways, and was reckoned (for a Paiute) a decent fellow. His camp was the best, his food the most plentiful, and his children the best kept and cleanest. The mother sewed well, and neither she nor the children ever went ragged. Among Indians they were as the hard-working, temperate laborer’s family is among the white men who work—work with their hands for a living.
George had money laid by—joint earnings of his own and of Susan, his wife. He worked at the settlers’ wood-piles in winter, chopping wood; and in summer he worked in the hay fields. She washed and ironed for the white families. Wage was high in those days, and George and Susan prospered. That was a contented little camp built there in the tall sagebrush, and they were happy as needs be.
And then——
There happened that which is not always confined to the camp of the red man. It was the old story— another woman. Well, has not the world seen such things before? There are women—even those without the dower of beauty—of whose strange power no explanation can be given save that they can, and do, “charm men.” And in no less measure was this brown-skinned woman a charmer. She had already parted more than one husband and wife—had destroyed the peace and quiet of more than one home, when she and George stood where the ways met.
If this had happened some three thousand years ago, and she had lived on the banks of the Nile, and if you were a poet, or a recorder of history, no doubt you would have written her down a siren—a dark-eyed charmer of men—a sorceress of Egypt; but she lived on the Humboldt river instead, and all this happened within the last four decades, and she was only a squaw of one of our North American tribes. Neither was she a pretty squaw judged by our cañons of beauty. Yet are not such things matters of geography governed by traditions? And when a man is bewitched by a man, brown-skinned or white, he is very apt to see charms where another cannot discover them.
Sophy, the siren, came into the camp, and with her coming fled peace. Poor Susan, unloved and deserted, sat apart and cried her heart out—as many a white woman has done before her, and since—when powerless to prevent, or right the wrong that was done her. So, bewitched and befooled, George gave himself up to the madness that was his undoing. The money which had been laid by went like water held in the hand. The camp was neglected; the stores were wasted. The children, from whom the mother had been banished, went ragged and oftentimes hungry.
It took George a long time to awake from his delirium, but he did awaken finally—after many months. All things come—some day—to the writing of “finis.” And no joy falls so soon and so completely as the joy built on an unsound foundation. One day George came to his senses. Then he cast the woman out; cast her out, and forever. He brought back to his home the mother of his children, and she foregave him. Well, what would you?—she was his wife, and a woman forgives much for the sake of the children she has held to her breast. So the camp was made tidy again and the children cared for as of old, and there were new stores gathered, and money was again saved.
Now George—being an Indian, being a Paiute—had never heard of Colley Cibber, else he might have been reminded that “we shall find no fiend in hell can match the fury of a disappointed woman—scorned! slighted! dismissed without a parting pang.” Neither did George—being a Paiute Indian—know the meaning of the word “Nemesis.”
That was more than twenty years ago; and for more than twenty years the woman, Sophy, made his life a series of persecutions. If he builded aught at the camp, it was torn down; what he raised in his garden was destroyed; what he bought, was quickly broken. Horses were driven far astray; and his favorite dogs were poisoned. Then, when she had exhausted all her ingenuity in these and a hundred other ways of making his life a torment, she turned her wiles on Doctor Jim, one of the great medicine men of the tribe, married to Susan’s mother, and an inmate of George’s camp. Doctor Jim’s long residence in the house had given to George a certain enviable status among the Indians, and this prestige the woman now meant to destroy. On Doctor Jim were bestowed her blandishments, and—like George before him—he was fain to follow whither she led. With the medicine man’s going, departed the glory of the house. And it left, in the person of the deserted wife, another mouth for George to feed; while at the same time the assisting support which Doctor Jim had given the household was taken away.
Troubles came thick and fast to Old George. He had begun to be called “Old” George now. One day while he was handling a cartridge it accidentally exploded and tore away part of his hand. This hampered him in what work he got to do; and sometimes because of it he was refused employment. Then the evil fate that had chosen him for a plaything, threw him from a train running at full speed, and left him lying on the track with broken legs, and pitifully crippled. He got well after many weary months while Susan nursed him, and between whiles of nursing earned the living for the dwellers within the camp. When Spring came, Susan died.
On George fell the care of the four children. It was harder for him to work now, and there was less to be earned; yet he worked the harder for his four. Another year; and there were but two for him to shelter and to feed. The great White Plague stops not at the camps of the White man, but has hunted out the Red man in his wick-i-up, and is fast decreasing the number of the tribe; so two—the older two—of the children had gone to answer its call, and George was alone with the two that were hardly more than babies. Mourning for his dead, he must yet work for the living.
We give our sympathy to the woman left widowed who has little children looking to her for support. But she seldom fails in her trust, for the world is usually kind to a woman and ready to lend her aid. Rather give of your pity to the father who has babes to provide for when there is no woman to take up the burden with him. He must care for the home, and must go out in the world, as well, to work. Remember the burden is no less hard for him to bear even so be he is an Indian. It may not seem so to you, a white man, but you must recollect that the Indian takes a different point of view.
Long, long after his children were grown, and the old grandmother was dead, and George was living in his camp with grandchildren about him, the woman came again—she, Sophy, came to him—trying to win him back now that the woman he cared most for was dead. Sophy at last had tired of her revenge, had tired of jealousy and strife; had tired of everything in life but the one man who had once cast her off. Doctor Jim was dead—had died many years before. And so she came to the one she cared for still—as even she had cared most for. For George she cared always; so she came and stood at his door. Many snows had come and gone since his blood had moved at her will; and now it was too late for her influence to weigh with him. He was old; and when he sat before the campfire and saw a woman’s face move to and fro in the the smoke wreaths, it was the face of the woman who best loved him, always—not the face of the one he had loved for a time—that he saw.
So she went away, and at last there was peace between them. She died the other day. But George—Old George—lives still, and alone. He goes to the station day after day, as is his habit, and watches the trains as they come in, and answers the questions of the inquisitive travelers.
If my characters were white you might call this a love story with a bit of romance threaded in. Perhaps you will, anyway. For it all depends upon how you look at it. It is just a little story of what is happening all the while everywhere in the world. Love and jealousy; hatred and revenge. It does not very much matter whether they live on the water side of Beacon street (as they do who stood talking to Old George yesterday); or whether it is in the wick-i-ups of the sagebrush out on the great Nevada plains. These things come into the lives of all races alike.
George paid for the folly of his youth, as the transgressor usually does have to pay. If you live by the sea in the East, you will perhaps call this a punishment for George laid upon him as a rebuke by the “hand of divine Providence.” But if your home is by the Western sea, and you have knocked about a bit on the rough trails in the West, you will mayhap see in it only the workings of “natural law.”
That is all. It is a little story, but quite true. It might very easily have been made a White man’s story; but it isn’t, it is only the true story of a Paiute.
George is an Indian; but one in a whole tribe—each having his own story. And the tribe is but one of the race. And the race——
Are we not brothers?
For, the world over, under white skin or skin of bronze-brown, the human heart throbs the same; for we are brothers—ay! brothers all.
Yet, even so, there is still the point of view.
