A Drift from Redwood Camp

B >> Bret Harte >> A Drift from Redwood Camp


He had sat thus a hundred times, as aimlessly blinking at the vast
possibilities of the shining sea beyond, turning his back upon the
nearer and more practicable mountains, lulled by the far-off beating of
monotonous rollers, the lonely cry of the curlew and plover, the drowsy
changes of alternate breaths of cool, fragrant reeds and warm, spicy
sands that blew across his eyelids, and succumbed to sleep, as he
had done a hundred times before. The narrow strips of colored cloth,
insignia of his dignity, flapped lazily from his tent-poles, and at last
seemed to slumber with him; the shadows of the leaf-tracery thrown by
the bay-tree, on the ground at his feet, scarcely changed its pattern.
Nothing moved but the round, restless, berry-like eyes of Wachita, his
child-wife, the former heroine of the incident with the captive packers,
who sat near her lord, armed with a willow wand, watchful of intruding
wasps, sand-flies, and even the more ostentatious advances of a rotund
and clerical-looking humble-bee, with his monotonous homily. Content,
dumb, submissive, vacant, at such times, Wachita, debarred her
husband's confidences through the native customs and his own indifferent
taciturnity, satisfied herself by gazing at him with the wondering but
ineffectual sympathy of a faithful dog. Unfortunately for Elijah her
purely mechanical ministration could not prevent a more dangerous
intrusion upon his security.

He awoke with a light start, and eyes that gradually fixed upon the
woman a look of returning consciousness. Wachita pointed timidly to the
village below.

"The Messenger of the Great White Father has come to-day, with his
wagons and horses; he would see the chief of the Minyos, but I would not
disturb my lord."

Elijah's brow contracted. Relieved of its characteristic metaphor,
he knew that this meant that the new Indian agent had made his usual
official visit, and had exhibited the usual anxiety to see the famous
chieftain.

"Good!" he said. "White Rabbit [his lieutenant] will see the Messenger
and exchange gifts. It is enough."

"The white messenger has brought his wangee [white] woman with him.
They would look upon the face of him who hides it," continued Wachita,
dubiously. "They would that Wachita should bring them nearer to where my
lord is, that they might see him when he knew it not."

Elijah glanced moodily at his wife, with the half suspicion with which
he still regarded her alien character. "Then let Wachita go back to
the squaws and old women, and let her hide herself with them until the
wangee strangers are gone," he said curtly. "I have spoken. Go!"

Accustomed to these abrupt dismissals, which did not necessarily
indicate displeasure, Wachita disappeared without a word. Elijah, who
had risen, remained for a few moments leaning against the tent-poles,
gazing abstractedly toward the sea. The bees droned uninterruptedly in
his ears, the far-off roll of the breakers came to him distinctly; but
suddenly, with greater distinctness, came the murmur of a woman's voice.

"He don't look savage a bit! Why, he's real handsome."

"Hush! you--" said a second voice, in a frightened whisper.

"But if he DID hear he couldn't understand," returned the first voice. A
suppressed giggle followed.

Luckily, Elijah's natural and acquired habits of repression suited the
emergency. He did not move, although he felt the quick blood fly to his
face, and the voice of the first speaker had suffused him with a strange
and delicious anticipation. He restrained himself, though the words she
had naively dropped were filling him with new and tremulous suggestion.
He was motionless, even while he felt that the vague longing and
yearning which had possessed him hitherto was now mysteriously taking
some unknown form and action.

The murmuring ceased. The humble-bees' drone again became ascendant--a
sudden fear seized him. She was GOING; he should never see her! While he
had stood there a dolt and sluggard, she had satisfied her curiosity and
stolen away. With a sudden yielding to impulse, he darted quickly in
the direction where he had heard her voice. The thicket moved, parted,
crackled, and rustled, and then undulated thirty feet before him in a
long wave, as if from the passage of some lithe, invisible figure. But
at the same moment a little cry, half of alarm, half of laughter, broke
from his very feet, and a bent manzanito-bush, relaxed by frightened
fingers, flew back against his breast. Thrusting it hurriedly aside,
his stooping, eager face came almost in contact with the pink, flushed
cheeks and tangled curls of a woman's head. He was so near, her moist
and laughing eyes almost drowned his eager glance; her parted lips and
white teeth were so close to his that her quick breath took away his
own.

She had dropped on one knee, as her companion fled, expecting he would
overlook her as he passed, but his direct onset had extracted the
feminine outcry. Yet even then she did not seem greatly frightened.

"It's only a joke, sir," she said, coolly lifting herself to her feet by
grasping his arm. "I'm Mrs. Dall, the Indian agent's wife. They said you
wouldn't let anybody see you--and I determined I would. That's all!" She
stopped, threw back her tangled curls behind her ears, shook the briers
and thorns from her skirt, and added: "Well, I reckon you aren't afraid
of a woman, are you? So no harm's done. Good-by!"

She drew slightly back as if to retreat, but the elasticity of the
manzanito against which she was leaning threw her forward once more.
He again inhaled the perfume of her hair; he saw even the tiny freckles
that darkened her upper lip and brought out the moist, red curve below.
A sudden recollection of a playmate of his vagabond childhood flashed
across his mind; a wild inspiration of lawlessness, begotten of his past
experience, his solitude, his dictatorial power, and the beauty of the
woman before him, mounted to his brain. He threw his arms passionately
around her, pressed his lips to hers, and with a half-hysterical laugh
drew back and disappeared in the thicket.

Mrs. Dall remained for an instant dazed and stupefied. Then she lifted
her arm mechanically, and with her sleeve wiped her bruised mouth and
the ochre-stain that his paint had left, like blood, upon her cheek. Her
laughing face had become instantly grave, but not from fear; her dark
eyes had clouded, but not entirely with indignation. She suddenly
brought down her hand sharply against her side with a gesture of
discovery.

"That's no Injun!" she said, with prompt decision. The next minute
she plunged back into the trail again, and the dense foliage once more
closed around her. But as she did so the broad, vacant face and the
mutely wondering eyes of Wachita rose, like a placid moon, between the
branches of a tree where they had been hidden, and shone serenely and
impassively after her.

*****

A month elapsed. But it was a month filled with more experience to
Elijah than his past two years of exaltation. In the first few days
following his meeting with Mrs. Dall, he was possessed by terror,
mingled with flashes of desperation, at the remembrance of his rash
imprudence. His recollection of extravagant frontier chivalry to
womankind, and the swift retribution of the insulted husband or
guardian, alternately filled him with abject fear or extravagant
recklessness. At times prepared for flight, even to the desperate
abandonment of himself in a canoe to the waters of the Pacific: at times
he was on the point of inciting his braves to attack the Indian agency
and precipitate the war that he felt would be inevitable. As the days
passed, and there seemed to be no interruption to his friendly relations
with the agency, with that relief a new, subtle joy crept into Elijah's
heart. The image of the agent's wife framed in the leafy screen behind
his lodge, the perfume of her hair and breath mingled with the spicing
of the bay, the brief thrill and tantalization of the stolen kiss still
haunted him. Through his long, shy abstention from society, and his two
years of solitary exile, the fresh beauty of this young Western wife, in
whom the frank artlessness of girlhood still lingered, appeared to him
like a superior creation. He forgot his vague longings in the inception
of a more tangible but equally unpractical passion. He remembered her
unconscious and spontaneous admiration of him; he dared to connect it
with her forgiving silence. If she had withheld her confidences from her
husband, he could hope--he knew not exactly what!

One afternoon Wachita put into his hand a folded note. With an
instinctive presentiment of its contents, Elijah turned red and
embarrassed in receiving it from the woman who was recognized as his
wife. But the impassive, submissive manner of this household drudge,
instead of touching his conscience, seemed to him a vulgar and brutal
acceptance of the situation that dulled whatever compunction he might
have had. He opened the note and read hurriedly as follows:--

"You took a great freedom with me the other day, and I am justified in
taking one with you now. I believe you understand English as well as I
do. If you want to explain that and your conduct to me, I will be at the
same place this afternoon. My friend will accompany me, but she need not
hear what you have to say."

Elijah read the letter, which might have been written by an ordinary
school-girl, as if it had conveyed the veiled rendezvous of a princess.
The reserve, caution, and shyness which had been the safeguard of his
weak nature were swamped in a flow of immature passion. He flew to the
interview with the eagerness and inexperience of first love. He was
completely at her mercy. So utterly was he subjugated by her presence
that she did not even run the risk of his passion. Whatever sentiment
might have mingled with her curiosity, she was never conscious of a
necessity to guard herself against it. At this second meeting she was
in full possession of his secret. He had told her everything; she had
promised nothing in return--she had not even accepted anything. Even
her actual after-relations to the denouement of his passion are still
shrouded in mystery.

Nevertheless, Elijah lived two weeks on the unsubstantial memory of this
meeting. What might have followed could not be known, for at the end of
that time an outrage--so atrocious that even the peaceful Minyos were
thrilled with savage indignation--was committed on the outskirts of the
village. An old chief, who had been specially selected to deal with the
Indian agent, and who kept a small trading outpost, had been killed
and his goods despoiled by a reckless Redwood packer. The murderer had
coolly said that he was only "serving out" the tool of a fraudulent
imposture on the Government, and that he dared the arch-impostor
himself, the so-called Minyo chief, to help himself. A wave of
ungovernable fury surged up to the very tent-poles of Elijah's lodge and
demanded vengeance. Elijah trembled and hesitated. In the thraldom of
his selfish passion for Mrs. Dall he dared not contemplate a collision
with her countrymen. He would have again sought refuge in his passive,
non-committal attitude, but he knew the impersonal character of Indian
retribution and compensation--a sacrifice of equal value, without
reference to the culpability of the victim--and he dreaded some
spontaneous outbreak. To prevent the enforced expiation of the crime
by some innocent brother packer, he was obliged to give orders for the
pursuit and arrest of the criminal, secretly hoping for his escape or
the interposition of some circumstance to avert his punishment. A day of
sullen expectancy to the old men and squaws in camp, of gloomy anxiety
to Elijah alone in his lodge, followed the departure of the braves on
the war-path. It was midnight when they returned. Elijah, who from his
habitual reserve and the accepted etiquette of his exalted station had
remained impassive in his tent, only knew from the guttural rejoicings
of the squaws that the expedition had been successful and the captive
was in their hands. At any other time he might have thought it an
evidence of some growing scepticism of his infallibility of judgment
and a diminution of respect that they did not confront him with their
prisoner. But he was too glad to escape from the danger of exposure and
possible arraignment of his past life by the desperate captive, even
though it might not have been understood by the spectators. He reflected
that the omission might have arisen from their recollection of his
previous aversion to a retaliation on other prisoners. Enough that they
would wait his signal for the torture and execution at sunrise the next
day.

The night passed slowly. It is more than probable that the selfish and
ignoble torments of the sleepless and vacillating judge were greater
than those of the prisoner who dozed at the stake between his curses.
Yet it was part of Elijah's fatal weakness that his kinder and more
human instincts were dominated even at that moment by his lawless
passion for the Indian agent's wife, and his indecision as to the fate
of his captive was as much due to this preoccupation as to a selfish
consideration of her relations to the result. He hated the prisoner for
his infelicitous and untimely crime, yet he could not make up his mind
to his death. He paced the ground before his lodge in dishonorable
incertitude. The small eyes of the submissive Wachita watched him with
vague solicitude.

Toward morning he was struck by a shameful inspiration. He would creep
unperceived to the victim's side, unloose his bonds, and bid him fly to
the Indian agency. There he was to inform Mrs. Dall that her husband's
safety depended upon his absenting himself for a few days, but that
she was to remain and communicate with Elijah. She would understand
everything, perhaps; at least she would know that the prisoner's release
was to please her, but even if she did not, no harm would be done,
a white man's life would be saved, and his real motive would not be
suspected. He turned with feverish eagerness to the lodge. Wachita had
disappeared--probably to join the other women. It was well; she would
not suspect him.

The tree to which the doomed man was bound was, by custom, selected
nearest the chief's lodge, within its sacred enclosure, with no other
protection than that offered by its reserved seclusion and the outer
semicircle of warriors' tents before it. To escape, the captive would
therefore have to pass beside the chief's lodge to the rear and descend
the hill toward the shore. Elijah would show him the way, and make it
appear as if he had escaped unaided. As he glided into the shadow of
a group of pines, he could dimly discern the outline of the destined
victim, secured against one of the larger trees in a sitting posture,
with his head fallen forward on his breast as if in sleep. But at the
same moment another figure glided out from the shadow and approached the
fatal tree. It was Wachita!

He stopped in amazement. But in another instant a flash of intelligence
made it clear. He remembered her vague uneasiness and solicitude at his
agitation, her sudden disappearance; she had fathomed his perplexity,
as she had once before. Of her own accord she was going to release the
prisoner! The knife to cut his cords glittered in her hand. Brave and
faithful animal!

He held his breath as he drew nearer. But, to his horror, the knife
suddenly flashed in the air and darted down, again and again, upon
the body of the helpless man. There was a convulsive struggle, but no
outcry, and the next moment the body hung limp and inert in its cords.
Elijah would himself have fallen, half-fainting, against a tree, but,
by a revulsion of feeling, came the quick revelation that the desperate
girl had rightly solved the problem! She had done what he ought to have
done--and his loyalty and manhood were preserved. That conviction
and the courage to act upon it--to have called the sleeping braves
to witness his sacrifice--would have saved him, but it was ordered
otherwise.

As the girl rapidly passed him he threw out his hand and seized her
wrist. "Who did you do this for?" he demanded.

"For you," she said, stupidly.

"And why?"

"Because you no kill him--you love his squaw."

"HIS squaw!" He staggered back. A terrible suspicion flashed upon him.
He dashed Wachita aside and ran to the tree. It was the body of the
Indian agent! Aboriginal justice had been satisfied. The warriors
had not caught the MURDERER, but, true to their idea of vicarious
retribution, had determined upon the expiatory sacrifice of a life as
valuable and innocent as the one they had lost.

*****

"So the Gov'rment hev at last woke up and wiped out them cussed Digger
Minyos," said Snapshot Harry, as he laid down the newspaper, in the
brand-new saloon of the brand-new town of Redwood. "I see they've
stampeded both banks of the Minyo River, and sent off a lot to the
reservation. I reckon the soldiers at Fort Cass got sick o' sentiment
after those hounds killed the Injun agent, and are beginning to agree
with us that the only 'good Injun' is a dead one."

"And it turns out that that wonderful chief, that them two packers used
to rave about, woz about as big a devil ez any, and tried to run off
with the agent's wife, only the warriors killed her. I'd like to know
what become of him. Some says he was killed, others allow that he got
away. I've heerd tell that he was originally some kind of Methodist
preacher!--a kind o' saint that got a sort o' spiritooal holt on the old
squaws and children."

"Why don't you ask old Skeesicks? I see he's back here ag'in--and
grubbin' along at a dollar a day on tailin's. He's been somewhere up
north, they say."

"What, Skeesicks? that shiftless, o'n'ry cuss! You bet he wusn't
anywhere where there was danger of fighting. Why, you might as well hev
suspected HIM of being the big chief himself! There he comes--ask him."

And the laughter was so general that Elijah Martin--alias
Skeesicks--lounging shyly into the bar-room, joined in it weakly.