Part 15

“Yes, daddie dear, I’m safe and sound,” she cried, as she awoke to consciousness, to find that the sun was shining and her father’s familiar voice was calling her name in vigorous tones at the door.

Jean hastily donned her clothing, which, simple as it was, excited the envy of Le-Le. “Mika klosh, cultus potlatch?” she said inquiringly, as she fondled a blue-and-white neck-ribbon, which was not over clean.

“Cultus potlatch?” she asked again.

Although Jean was not certain as to the maiden’s meaning, she gave her the ribbon and tried to think her excusable.

“Did you want it? Was that what you meant?”

“Nowitka! Cultus potlatch! Hy-as klosh!”

Jean tied the ribbon in a double bow-knot around the girl’s tawny neck, and Le-Le, studying its effect in the little mirror on the wall, exclaimed with a low chuckle, “Hi-yu klosh!”

* * * * *

“Oh, daddie darling,” exclaimed Jean, opening the door and springing to his embrace, “did you think your historian was lost?”

“Yes; or worse!” replied her father, his anger displacing anxiety as soon as he saw that she was safe. “This isn’t the first time you’ve lost yourself on this trip. If it happens again, I’ll—”

“Don’t chide or punish the young lady, please!” interposed her obliging host. “If you had seen how badly frightened and anxious she was last night when she found herself left alone among strangers, you’d forgive her without a word.”

“That’s so, daddie,” sobbed Jean.

“I surrendered my country-seat to her, and sent for this little Indian maiden to keep her company.”

There was a touch of humor in his tone, augmented by a kindly smile, which sent the hot blood into the truant’s face and made her heart beat hard.

“Won’t you thank the gentleman, daddie? I might have been murdered but for him.”

“Of course I thank the gentleman; but that doesn’t lessen your offence. You deserve a good thrashing!”

“Which I’ll never get, daddie dear!” Then turning to her host, she added, “Daddie never whips us, but he threatens us sometimes.”

“I think I owe you a little explanation, Captain,” said the host. “I might have risked taking your daughter across the river in a rowboat last night if it had been safe to trust her on the other side after dark. There are Indians camped along the way; and, though they are peaceful enough when they are compelled to be, they are not trustworthy under all circumstances. But my servant, Siwash, has breakfast ready and waiting. I can’t allow you to go on till you have broken your fast.”

The host conducted his guests into the dugout to a table loaded with a bountiful supply of coffee, fish, venison, hot biscuit, beans, and wapatoes,—the last two dishes being deftly exhumed from the depths of a bed of ashes, where they had been cooked to perfection during the night.

“Your servant is an artist in his business,” said the Captain, in praise of the food.

“Yes, Captain. I found him a slave, and, seeing he was superior to most of his class, I purchased him for what you would consider a trifle. Then, as time wore on, I encouraged him to buy his freedom from me. He is now trying to purchase his sister; but he finds it slow work, as her value increases as she gets older and better able to dig camas and tan buffalo hides.”

“It is awful to enslave the Indians!” cried Jean. “The Government ought to stop it!”

“Slavery among the Indians is no worse than among the negroes,” said her host, with an admiring smile.

“Women are not responsible for slavery, sir,” said Jean.

“But women are very ardent defenders of slavery wherever it exists, my daughter,” added her father, gravely.

“That’s because they themselves are servants without wages, daddie. Mother used to say that the worst slave-drivers she ever saw down South were the overseers who were slaves themselves. Women are not angels, but they are doing the best they can without political power.”

“I don’t know but you are right, Miss Ranger. Women ought to have power. My sovereign is a woman, and we have no slavery in England.”

“Thank you for giving me the best of the argument, Mr. Ashleigh. But I see that daddie is impatient, and we must be going.”

“I hope you’ll pardon me for referring to a proposition you made last evening, although you may have changed your mind, Miss Ranger. You proposed writing to my mother. Will you do it?”

“Ask daddie.”

“I have no objection, of course,” said her father, “if it is understood that I shall see the letters.”

“Of course,” responded Jean.

“May I have the pleasure of corresponding with your daughter, sir?”

“Yes, if I can see the correspondence.”

This was a greater concession than Jean had dared to hope for.

“Thank you, Captain Ranger. I am sure my mother will be delighted with the young lady’s letters. She has awakened my dormant sense of filial duty and inspired me with a determination to return to it. I shall not neglect my mother again.”

“Come, Jean! It is high time we were off!”

As her father spoke, the possible termination to this peculiar meeting gave him a heartache.

The last good-byes were spoken, and Captain Ranger heaved a sigh of relief. “It will be out of sight, out of mind, with both of ’em in less than a month!” he said, _sotto voce_.

XXVII

_JEAN TRANSFORMED_

“Where did you spend the night, Jean?” asked Mary.

“In heaven,” answered Jean, her cheeks glowing.

“Nonsense.”

“I mean exactly what I say, Mame. I lodged with an Indian princess, and ate my meals with a member of the British aristocracy. The princess couldn’t speak English, but her brother acted as interpreter, so we got on all right. She is a slave of an old chief of the Seattles. I wish I had the money; I’d buy her, and send her back to her people.”

“You might as well wish you owned the moon!”

“I own the earth,—as much of it as I need. Everybody does.”

“Then the most of us get cheated out of our patrimony,” laughed Sally O’Dowd.

“I wish you could all have had a chance to look in on me and my princess last night; we were as snug as two bugs in a rug. The crickets sang on the hearth, just as they used to do of nights in the old home. The wind roared like a storm at sea, and the rush of the river was grand. I can shut my eyes and live it all over again.”

“You’ve gone stark mad!” laughed Hal.

“As mad as a March hare,” said Sally O’Dowd. “I know the symptoms from sad experience.”

“You ought to be repenting in sackcloth and ashes. Why are you not sorry?” asked Mary.

“Because in losing myself I found my fate.”

“Was it an Indian brave in a breech-cloth, with a bow and arrow, a shirt-collar, and a pair of spurs?” asked Hal.

The roar of laughter that greeted this query made Jean fairly frantic. “You’re worse than a lot of savages yourselves,” she cried. “If I had my way, I’d go back to that lodge in the wilderness and stay there!”

Jean climbed into the wagon, buried her face in her hands, and abandoned herself to a deep, absorbing reverie. “Oh, mother dear,” she said softly, “if you could speak, you would sympathize with me, I am sure. If I only had your love and sympathy, I wouldn’t care what anybody else might think or say,—not even daddie. A new light and a new life have come into my soul. Though a cruel fate may separate us through this life, we shall always be one. But God made us for each other, and we shall surely meet again.”

* * * * *

There was no longer any game to be had for the shooting; the little extra food the company could purchase from the Indians, or from the few white borderers at infrequent trading-posts, was held at almost prohibitive prices. Dead cattle continued to abound at the roadside, filling the air with an intolerable stench through every hour of the day and night. No camping-spot could be found where the surroundings were not thus polluted. Captain Ranger’s teams were giving out from sheer exhaustion, induced by starvation rather than overwork, and two or more of his weaker oxen were dying daily.

“I’ll break the horrible monotony of this diary,” said Jean at last, “or I’ll die trying.” And for many days her jottings were confined to minute, and sometimes glowing, descriptions of snow-capped mountains, bald hills, tree-studded lesser heights, and vast and desolate wastes of sand and sage and rocks. Sterile valleys, verdant banks of little rivers, mighty streams, and running brooks received attention, in their turn, from her pen, the whole making a record surprisingly akin to the journals kept by Lewis and Clark, and left on record half a century earlier, of the existence of which she had no knowledge. There was one theme of which her father enforced daily mention,—a regular account of the scarcity of grass and game and wood and water.

A murder by the roadside, and the consequent trial, conviction, and execution of the murderer by a “provisional government” temporarily organized for the purpose received a painstaking record, as did also a difficulty with some thieving and beggarly Indians, whose hostility was awakened by the rashness of one of a trio of bachelors, who were encamped one night near the Ranger wagons. Captain Ranger made the Indians a pacifying speech, but only by the aid of some trifling present among the women of the tribe, and a gift of a pair of blankets to their chieftain, was the impending danger averted. A double guard was placed outside that night; and, for several nights following, a corral was made of the wagons in the shape of a hollow square, into which the cattle were driven to rest and sleep.

The now famous Soda Springs, known to the commercial world as Idanha, next caught the coloring of Jean’s pen. The different geysers rising from the tops of the gutter-sided mounds of soda-stone were carefully and graphically described. The crater of a long-extinct volcano received special mention. The bad water of alkali-infected streams and swamps, left by slowly evaporating pools and ponds, through which cattle and wagons labored with the greatest difficulty; the dreary wastes of sagebrush, sand, and rock, through which everybody who was able to walk at all was compelled to trudge on foot; the devastations of prairie fires; the endless wastes of stunted sage and greasewood; the struggling aspens on the margins of tiny streams,—all met graphic and detailed delineation, such as nobody can appreciate to the full who to-day traverses these vast and wondrous wilds in a railway coach, or gazes upon them from a Pullman car.

* * * * *

“Captain Ranger,” said Sally O’Dowd one evening, “do you notice that Jean is growing strikingly beautiful?”

They were halting for the night after a day’s hard drive; and the jaded oxen, weak and sick from the combined effects of hard labor, cruel whippings, and an insufficient supply of grass and water, were necessarily the chief objects of his attention and solicitude. A broken wagon-tongue added to his perplexities, as good timber for repairs was not available; and the mileage of the day’s travel had been much shortened by the necessity of stopping to mend the break, or, as the Little Doctor not inaptly said, “to reduce the compound fracture of a most important part of the wagon’s anatomy.”

“All my girls are handsome,” said the Captain, as he tested the strength of a splice on the broken tongue by jumping upon it with both feet.

“But Jean has been transformed, Captain. The change has been growing upon her daily since the date of that Green River episode. The child is hopelessly infatuated with that young Englishman.”

“Much good it’ll do her,” he exclaimed, mopping his brow with a soiled bandanna. “It is painfully evident that three of my girls will soon be women. If their mother were here, it wouldn’t be so hard to manage them. No, Sally, I’ve noticed no particular change in Jean.”

“Because you are too busy for observation, sir. She hasn’t been a particle like herself of late.”

The Captain hurried away to his work, muttering, “Nonsense!”

Jean had seated herself on the most distant wagon-tongue, her battered, ink-bespattered journal in her lap, her pen in one hand, her inkstand in the other, her knitted brows and glowing face expressing deep concentration of thought and feeling.

Captain Ranger, having finished his work of repairs, dropped wearily upon an axle-tree, and, for the first time in several days, prompted doubtless by the words of Sally O’Dowd, took a long and searching look at Jean.

“Yes, indeed; Sally is right,” he soliloquized. “Jean is developing a wonderfully beautiful style of womanhood. What a pity it is that she cannot have her mother at the very time when she needs her most!”

Pangs of anxiety akin to jealousy shot through his heart as he studied her features; her downcast eyes were hidden by the heavy lashes as she bent over her work. “She doesn’t resemble her mother as Mary does, but she must be the almost exact counterpart of what my mother was at her age,” he mused, as he noted for the first time the ripening lips, the rosy and yet transparent hue of her cheeks, and the sunny sheen of her hair. He was surprised that he had not before observed the soft, exquisite contour of her face and neck, the full rounded bust, and the shapely development of her feet and hands.

As he sat watching the lights and shadows of thought and feeling that played upon her features, the remembrance of the girlhood of her mother, whose arduous married years had all been spent in his service, arose before him with startling power. “Dear, patient, tender, self-sacrificing Annie!” he exclaimed, as he arose from his rocking seat and strode away in the gloaming. “I never half appreciated your worth until I lost you for ever!”

“No, not for ever,” softly sung a still, small voice in the depths of his inner consciousness. “Do not reproach yourself. All eternity is yet to be.”

Jean felt, rather than saw, the pressure of his eyes, and half divined his thoughts. She felt the telltale blood as it rushed unbidden to her cheeks, and was seized with a great longing to throw herself into his arms and breathe out the full secret of her great awakening in his ears; but something in his manner repelled her advances, and she withdrew more than ever into herself.

“O Love!” she cried in a tone so low and sweet that none but a messenger from the Unseen might hear, “how ungovernable art thou, and how incomprehensible! The worldly-wise may decry thee; the misanthropic may deride thee; the vulgar may make of thy existence an unholy jest; the selfish and ignorant may trample upon thee; human laws may crush thee; but thou remainest still a thing of life, to fill thy votaries with a holy joy and endow them with the very attributes of God. An imperishable entity art thou, O Love! Thou art interblended with every fibre of my being now, and I accept thee as a sweet fulfilment of my earthly destiny.”

Of course Jean was young and fond and inexperienced and foolish; and these chronicles would offer her rhapsodies as the utterances of no worldly-wise oracle. But her thoughts were fresh and pure; and who shall say they did not emanate from the very fountain of life itself, whose presence she could sense but could not understand?

She wandered off toward the rushing, maddening torrent of Snake River, whose music had for her, in these moods of introspection, but one interpretation.

“Daddie may denounce, Hal and Mame may tease, and Marjorie,—yes, and all the world deride me,” she said, as she sat upon a bowlder and abandoned herself to reverie; “but henceforth there shall be nothing in this world for me to cherish but Love and its handmaiden, Duty.”

Snake River, full at this point of jutting rocky islands, through which the foaming, roaring waters rushed like a thousand mill-races on parade, dashed madly against its banks beneath her feet, and rushing on again, roared and laughed and shrieked and sang. Lichens clung to the uplifted rocks, which, hoary with age and massive in proportions, held vigil in the midst of the eternal grandeur. Mountains clambered over mountains in the dimly lighted distance, and reaching to the red horizon, overlooked the Pacific seas.

“The antelope and elk are gone,” she thought, “and we are lone watchers amid the eternal vastness. But the sage-hen, the lizard, the owl, and the jaybird linger; and yonder, among the everlasting rocks, are the homes of the Indian, the rattlesnake, the badger, and the wolf.”

Rustling footsteps startled her. “Why, it’s daddie!” she exclaimed, her heart beating audibly. “I thought you were an Indian or a bear!”

“You oughtn’t to go off alone, my daughter. There is some hidden danger threatening us; I feel, but cannot divine it. Something is going wrong somewhere or somehow. Let’s hurry back to camp.”

“You’re the last person on earth I’d suspect of giving way to a morbid fancy, daddie dear. You must be very tired.”

“It isn’t that, my daughter. I am sad because you have allowed your heart to stray, and I do need you so much—so much!”

She answered not a word.

XXVIII

_THE STAMPEDE_

The next morning brought unexpected delays. The repairs about the camp and wagons consumed more time than had been anticipated, and it was ten o’clock before the cattle, which had been allowed to stray farther from camp than usual, in search of the dried and scanty herbage that alone staved off starvation, were driven into camp and hurried down to the river-bank to drink. The swiftness, foam, and sudden chill of the water, its depth and roaring, confused and frightened the half-sick and half-starved animals; and one, a patriarchal bull, the master and leader of the herd, who had often before made trouble, gave vent to a deep, sonorous bellow like the roar of an ancient aurochs. Then, with nose in air, he struck out across the stream, the herd following. A small, rocky cape crept out into the water on the opposite bank, affording the only visible landing-place; and up this the panic-stricken creatures scrambled in a mad stampede, which the helpless occupants of the camp surveyed with the calmness of despair.

“I had no idea that the poor creatures had enough life left in them to run a dozen rods on level ground,” said Captain Ranger, after a grim silence. “Boys,” he added in a husky voice, as he swallowed a great lump in his throat, “are any of you able to swim Snake River?”

“I can do it,” answered John Brownson, an obliging young teamster, who had joined the company early in the journey and had made himself useful on many trying occasions.

“And I too,” said John Jordan, another favorite of road and camp. The two intrepid volunteers shook hands with their anxious Captain and plunged boldly into the roaring, swirling, deafening torrent, through which Jordan swam with ease, his head now bobbing out of sight and now rising above the foaming current, to disappear again and again, till at last he was seen to emerge from the water on the opposite steep and ascend the almost sheer acclivity leading to the table-land above. It was a brave and daring feat, but it proved fruitless. The poor, panic-stricken cattle failed to recognize as a friend the stark white apparition, entirely bereft of clothing. It was all in vain that he called the leader of the herd by name; and when the frightened creature turned and charged him, and there was no shelter but some patriarchal sagebrush trees, he took refuge behind the biggest of them till the aurochs changed his mind and turned to follow the stampeding herd.

The panic continued. The stampede was irresistible. The cattle were lost, and most of them were never heard of more, though it is said that Flossie, the companion and patient of Jean during the hours of her vigil on that never-to-be-forgotten night in the Black Hills,—Flossie, the faithful, enduring, and kindly-eyed milch cow whose calf had been killed on the road,—reappeared long afterwards in the sagebrush wilds of Baker County, Oregon, with quite a following of her children, grandchildren, and great-great-grandchildren, all but herself as wild as so many deer. Flossie herself was recognized, they say, by the Ranger brand; and her hide, with the letters J. R. still visible behind the shoulder-blade, is to-day a valued relic of departed years in the mansion of a prominent actor in the drama of that eventful summer.

But what of Brownson? All day the hapless watchers of the camp had strained their eyes and ears for sight or sound of him, in vain.

“He must have been caught with cramps, or been dashed against the rocks by the current, for I saw him drown,” said Jordan, at sundown, as he rejoined the helpless watchers near the wagons.

Meanwhile, the men and women of the camp had not been idle. The lightest wagon-box the train afforded was selected and pressed into service for a ferry-boat; and while the men made oars, rowlocks, and rudder as best they could with the materials at hand, the women skilfully caulked the seams of the wagon-bed with an improvised substitute for oakum, under the supervision of the Little Doctor, making it tolerably water-tight. The wagon-box was then replaced on wheels and hauled upstream about half-a-dozen miles to a little valley where the river was wide, the banks low, and the water comparatively shoal and calm.

It was conjectured by Captain Ranger that the entire force of men in the train might be able, by a concerted effort, to assist the watcher on the upland in his brave attempt to arrest the stampede and secure the cattle’s return. But their united efforts were unavailing; and long before they returned, disheartened, apprehensive, and weary, the helpless watchers at the camp saw the bruised body of Captain Ranger’s favorite mare rolling, tumbling, bumping, and thumping through the roaring waters and among the jagged rocks, near the very spot where Brownson had been drowned.

Noble, faithful, obedient Sukie! In her attempt to swim the river with her devoted master, who was seated in the stern of the novel boat leading her by the halter and encouraging her with kindly words, her strength failed utterly; and when she turned upon her side and Captain Ranger let go his hold upon the halter, she uttered a dying scream, rolled over, and was gone.

“If there isn’t any horse heaven, the creative Force has been derelict in duty,” sadly exclaimed the master, as he watched the lifeless body of his beloved and faithful servant floating down the stream.

Through the silent watches of the awful night that followed, John Ranger pondered, planned, and waited.

His three daughters and three younger children, Sally O’Dowd and her three babies, and Susannah and George Washington, all occupied the family wagon, around which he stalked through the silent hours as one in a dream.

“A formidable array of dependent ones,” he said to himself over and over again. “And what is to become of my Annie’s darlings? Was it for this that she started with me on this terrible journey?”

There was no audible answer to his anxious queries save the roaring of the river as it crashed its way between the rocks that formed its grim and tortuous channel.