Part 12

“There is no place,” answered the trader, “where the white men have not traveled, and none of them can find buffalo.”

“That being the case,” said the chief with a deep sigh, “misery and death are at hand for me and mine.”

The Indians were compelled to strip the plains of every living creature, the Blackfeet, despite their religion, to eat fish and birds. Then came the winter; Schultz and his wife rode at dusk to the camp of Lodge-Pole chief.

“Hurry,” he commanded his women, “cook a meal for our friends. They must be hungry after their long ride.”

His wives brought out three small potatoes and two little trout, which they boiled. “’Tis all we have,” said one of them, brushing the tears from her eyes, and then the chief broke down.

“We have nothing,” he said haltingly. “There are no more buffalo. The Great Father sends us but a little food, gone in a day. We are very hungry. There are fish, to be sure, forbidden by the Gods, unclean. We eat them, but they do not give us any strength, and I doubt not we will be punished for eating them. It seems as if our gods had forsaken us.”

Mrs. Schultz went out and brought back a sack of food, and they made a feast, merry as in the days of plenty, which were gone forever.

Schultz came from the starving camps to write a letter to a New York paper, but it was never printed--a matter of politics. Then he advised the Indians to kill their agent, but they remembered Colonel Baker’s visit.

In his next annual report the agent wrote much about the Blackfeet, whose “heathenish rites were most deplorable.” And then came the Winter of Death, when a chief, Almost-a-dog, checked off daily the fate of a starving people. Women crowded round the windows of the agent’s office, holding out skinny children. “Go,” he would say; “go away! I have nothing for you!”

The thirty thousand dollars provided for their food had all been stolen, but there was plenty of corn to fatten fifty chickens, some geese and ducks.

Wolf Head, once known as Wolverine, rode south to Schultz’s trading post where he and his partner were feeding hosts of people, but when they heard his story of death after death, one by one they stole away out into the darkness, sitting upon the frozen ground where they wailed for their dead.

That night Schultz wrote to a friend of his in New York, known to the Indians as Fisher Cap. Then he rode hard and far to consult with Father Prando, a Jesuit priest, who had also been writing letters. Thanks to Fisher Cap, perhaps, or to Father Prando, the government sent an inspector, and one day he drove into the agency. “Where is that chicken house?” he yelled, and when he found the place, kicked it open. “Here you!” he called to the Indians, and they did the rest.

Next, he kicked open the agent’s office. “You -------- ----,” said he.

Since then some agents have been honest, but the Piegan tribe has never recovered from the Winter of Death, for in their weakness, they fell a prey to disease, and only a remnant is left of that ruined people. But for Schultz, the despised squaw-man, not one would be left alive.

XXIV

A. D. 1885

GORDON

During the Crimean war, when our men in the trenches before Sebastopol crowded under their earthworks to escape the Russian fire, one of the subalterns showed fear unbecoming an officer. The young chap meant no harm, but as he had to be taught manners, a lieutenant slightly his senior, invited him up upon the ramparts. There, arm in arm, the two walked up and down, the senior making amusing remarks about the weather, while the storm of lead swept round them, and the Tommies watched horror-struck, expecting both to fall. That officer who gave lessons in courage, was Charles George Gordon.

After eight years of varied service in many lands, Major Gordon came to Shanghai, where the British officer commanding had need of such a man. The Taiping rebels at war with the Chinese government numbered one million five hundred thousand, holding impregnable cities, and threatening the British merchants of Shanghai. These had raised a force of four thousand Chinese with white officers, known as the Ever Victorious Army because they were always thrashed, and Gordon took over the command. He was helped by Li Hung Chang, commander-in-chief of the Chinese armies, but no great impression had as yet been made upon fifteen hundred thousand rebels, trenched in the impregnable rock cities, which stood as islands over flat lands laced with canals. Those channels made the land impassable for troops, but Gordon brought steamers, and where a city fronted him with hundreds of guns and tier upon tier of unscalable walls, he steamed round the canals, cut off the line of communications, then dropped in, unexpected, in the rear. His attack was always a most unpleasant surprise to the rebels, beginning with gunnery that battered down the walls, until up a slope of ruins the storming party charged. The Taipings, led by white adventurers, defended the breach with desperation, and Gordon would weep because of the slaughter, his gentle spirit shocked at the streams of blood. “Two men,” he says, “of the Thirty-first Regiment were on the breach at Fort San, as Taiping leaders for the defense. One was killed, the other, struck by a shell splinter, was taken prisoner. ‘Mr. Gordon, Mr. Gordon, you will not let me be killed!’

“‘Take him down to the river and shoot him!’ And aside: ‘Put him in my boat, let the doctor attend him, and send him down to Shankhai.’”

Gordon not only saved the poor adventurers, but where he captured garrisons of Taipings, he would arm his prisoners, drill them, and lead them on to attack fresh cities in the march of the Ever Victorious Army. The odds were slightly against him, three hundred and seventy-five to one--an army against three hundred and seventy-five armies--but his third siege reduced the rebel capital, which he starved into surrender. The Taiping generals laid down their arms to Gordon because he gave them their lives. Then Li Hung Chang jumped in and murdered the whole gang of generals, and Gordon, sorely annoyed, for the only time in his life carried a gun. For a whole day, revolver in hand, he hunted the Chinese commander-in-chief through the streets of Soo Chow, but Li was too sly for him, and hid under some matting in a boat until Gordon’s rage cooled down.

This Scotchman who, with forty men in a steamer, destroyed a Taiping army near Quin San, had only one weapon for his personal use--a little bamboo swagger cane, such as Tommy carries in the street. It was known to the Chinese as his Magic Wand of Victory, with which he had overthrown an army seven times as big as that of Great Britain.

The Chinese emperor sent an imperial decree conferring four thousand pounds and all sorts of honors. Gordon wrote on the back of the parchment: “Regret that owing to the circumstances which occurred since the capture of Soo Chow, I am unable to receive any mark of his majesty the emperor’s recognition.” So he sent the thing back--a slap in the face for China. The emperor sent a gold medal, but Gordon, scratching out the inscription, gave it to a charity bazaar. The emperor made him a prince of the Chinese empire, and with the uniform of that rank as a curio in his trunk, he returned to England.

In China he was prince and conqueror; in Gravesend Major Gordon did garrison duty and kept ducks, which he delighted to squirt with the garden syringe.

He was a Sunday-school teacher, and reared slum boys to manhood, he was lady bountiful in the parish, he was cranky as an old maid, full of odd whims, a little man, with tender gray eyes, and a voice like a peal of bells. For six years he rotted in Gravesend, then served a couple of years as British commissioner on the Danube, and then in 1874 was borrowed by Egypt to be viceroy of the equatorial provinces. There he made history.

The Turkish empire got its supply of slaves from this big Soudan, a tract the size of Europe, whose only trade was the sale of human flesh. If Gordon stopped the selling of slaves, the savages ate them. But the Egyptian government wanted money, so Gordon’s work was to stop the slave trade, get the people prosperous, and tax them. To aid him he had Egyptian officials, whose only interest in the job was the collecting of bribes, plunder and slaves for their private use; also a staff of Europeans, all of whom died of fever within the first few months. Moreover, the whole native population was, more or less, at war with the Egyptian government.

Gordon had a swift camel, and a reputation for sorcery, because leaving his escort days astern in the desert, he would ride alone into the midst of a hostile nation, dressed in a diplomatic uniform consisting of gold lace and trousers, quite unarmed, but compelling everybody to obey his orders. He was so tired that he wanted to die, and when the tribes disobeyed he merely cut off their whole supply of water until they learned to behave. So for five years, the only honest man in all that region fought the Soudanese, the Egyptian government and the British ministry, to put an end to slavery. He failed.

Long chapters would be required for the story of Gordon’s work in Bessarabia, Armenia, India, South Africa, or the second period in China.

In 1884, England, having taken charge of Egypt, was responsible for the peace of Soudan. But the Arabs, united for once, and led by their prophet--the Mahdi--had declared a holy war against everybody, and wiped out an Egyptian army. So England said, “This is very awkward; let us pray”; and the government made up its mind to scuttle, to abandon the whole Soudan. Of course the Egyptians in the Soudan, officials, troops and people, would all get their throats cut, so our government had a qualm of conscience. Instead of sending an army to their rescue, they sent Gordon, with orders to bring the Egyptians to the coast. With a view to further economies they then let the Arabs cut off Gordon’s retreat to the coast. England folded her hands and left him to perish.

As soon as Gordon reached Khartoum, he began to send away the more helpless of the Egyptian people, and before the siege closed down some two thousand five hundred women, children and servants escaped from the coming death. At the last moment he managed to send the Englishmen, the Europeans and forty-five soldiers down the Nile. They were saved, and he remained to die with his soldiers. “May our Lord,” he wrote, “not visit us as a nation for our sins; but may His wrath fall on me.”

He could not believe in England’s cowardice, but walled his city with ramp and bastion, planned mines and raids, kept discipline while his troops were starving to death, and the Union Jack afloat above the palace, praying for his country in abasement, waiting for the army which had been sent too late. So for nine months the greatest of all England’s engineers held at bay an army of seventy-five thousand fighting Arabs. And when the city fell, rallying the last fifty men of his garrison, he went to his death, glad that he was not doomed to outlive England’s honor.

Year after year our army fought through the burning deserts, to win back England’s honor, to make amends for the death of her hero-saint, the knightliest of modern men, the very pattern of all chivalry. And then his grave was found, a heap of bloodstained ashes, which once had been Khartoum.

Now, in Trafalgar Square, men lay wreaths at the base of his statue, where with his Magic Wand of Victory, that Prince of the Chinese Empire and Viceroy of the African Equatorial Provinces, stands looking sorrowfully on a people who were not worthy to be his countrymen. But there is a greater monument to Gordon, a new Soudan, where men live at peace under the Union Jack, and slavery is at an end forever.

XXV

A. D. 1896

THE OUTLAW

Dawn was breaking of a summer’s day in 1896, when Green-Grass-growing-in-the-water, a red Indian scout, came trotting into Fort MacLeod with a despatch from Standoff for Superintendent Steele, of the Mounted Police. He brought news that the body of a Blood warrior, Medicine-Pipe-Stem, shot through the skull, and three weeks dead, had been found in an empty cabin.

The Blood tribe knew how Bad-Young-Man, known to the whites as Charcoal, had three weeks before come home from a hunting trip to his little cabin where his wife, the Marmot, lived. He had found his wife in the arms of Medicine-Pipe-Stem, and by his warrior’s right to defend his own honor, had shot the intruder down. Charcoal had done justice, and the tribe was ready to take his part, whatever the agent might say or the Mounted Police might do for the white man’s law.

A week had passed of close inquiry, when one of the scouts rode up to the ration house, where the people were drawing their supplies of beef, and gave warning that Charcoal was betrayed to the Mounted Police. Charcoal demanded the name of his betrayer, and learned that Mr. Wilson, the agent, was his enemy. That evening Charcoal waited outside the agent’s house, watching the lighted windows, where, on the yellow blinds there were passing shadows cast by the lamp within, as various members of the household went about their business. At last he saw Mr. Wilson’s shadow on the blind, fired and shot the agent through the thigh. The household covered the lamps, closed the shutters, sent for help and hid the wounded man on a couch behind the front door, well out of range from the windows. Next morning, in broad daylight, Charcoal went up to the house with a rifle to finish Wilson, walked in and looked about him, but failed to discover his victim behind the open door. He turned away and rode for the hills. The Mounted Police, turned out for the pursuit, were misled by a hundred rumors.

D Troop at the time numbered one hundred seventy men, the pick of the regiment, including some of the greatest riders and teamsters in North America, and led by Colonel S. B. Steele, the most distinguished of all Canadian frontiersmen. After he had posted men to guard all passes through the Rocky Mountains, he had a district about ninety miles square combed over incessantly by strong patrols, so that Charcoal’s escape seemed nearly impossible. The district however, was one of foothills, bush, winding gorges, tracts of boulders, and to the eastward prairie, where the whole Blood and Piegan tribes were using every subtlety of Indian craft to hide the fugitive.

Inspector Jervis, with twenty police and some scouts, had been seventy hours in the saddle, and camped at Big Bend exhausted, when a rider came flying in reporting Charcoal as seen at Kootenai. The white men rallied for the twenty-eight-mile march, but the Indians lay, and were kicked, done for, refusing to move. The white men scrambled to their saddles, and reeled off on the trail, unconquerable.

One day a Mormon settler brought news to Mr. Jervis that while cutting fence rails, he had seen Charcoal creep out from the bush and make off with his coat. So this Mormon led them to a little meadow, where they found and surrounded a tent. Then Mr. Jervis took two men and pulled aside the door, while they covered the place with their revolvers. Two Mormons were brought out, shaking with fright, from the tent.

Further on in the gray dawn, they came to another clearing, and a second tent, which they surrounded. Some noise disturbed the Marmot, who crept sleepily to the door, looked out, then with a scream, warned her husband. Charcoal slashed with his knife through the back of the tent, crept into the bush, and thence fired, his bullet knocking the cap from the officer’s head; but a volley failed to reach the Indian. The tent was Charcoal’s winter quarters, stored with a carcass of beef, five sacks of flour, bacon, sugar and deerskin for his shoes, and there the Marmot was taken, with a grown daughter, and a little son called Running Bear, aged eight.

So far, in many weeks of the great hunt Charcoal had his loyal wife to ride with him, and they used to follow the police patrols in order to be sure of rest when the pursuers camped. Two police horses, left half dead, were taken up and ridden by this couple an extra forty miles. An officer and a buck were feeding at Boundary Creek detachment when Mr. and Mrs. Charcoal stole their chargers out of the stable. But now Charcoal had to face the prospect of a lone fight, and with the loss of his family, fell into blind despair. Then all his kinsfolk to the number of thirty-seven, were arrested and lodged in prison.

Since his raid on the horses at Boundary Creek, all police stables were locked, and visited frequently at night. Corporal Armour, at Lee’s Creek came out swinging his lantern, sniffing at the night, bound for the stable, when he saw a sudden blaze revealing an Indian face behind the horse trough, while a bullet whisked through his sleeve. He bolted for the house, grabbed his gun and returned, only to hear a horse galloping away into the night. Charcoal for once, had failed to get a remount. Sergeant Wilde was universally loved by the tribes. The same feeling caused his old regiment, the Blues, at Windsor, to beg for Black Prince, his charger, after his death, and sent the whole body of the Northwest Mounted Police into mourning when he fell. Tradition made him a great aristocrat under an assumed name, and I remember well how we recruits, in the olden times, were impressed by his unusual physical beauty, his stature, horsemanship and singular personal distinction. Ambrose attended him when he rode out for the last time on Black Prince, followed by an interpreter and a body of Indian scouts. They were in deep snow on a plain where there stands a line of boulders, gigantic rocks, the subject of weird legends among the tribes. Far off against the sky was seen riding fast, an Indian who swerved at the sight of the pursuit and was recognized for Charcoal. Wilde ordered Ambrose to gallop the twenty miles to Pincher Creek, turn the people out in the queen’s name, send a despatch to Fort Macleod, and return at once. The Indians tried for Charcoal at long range, but their new rifles were clogged with factory grease hard frozen, so that the pin failed of its impact, and they all missed fire. Wilde’s great horse was drawing ahead of the ponies, and he called back:--

“Don’t fire, or you’ll hit me by mistake!”

As he overtook Charcoal he drew his revolver, the orders being to fire at sight, then laid the weapon before him, wanting for the sake of a great tradition, to make the usual arrest--the taking of live outlaws by hand. Charcoal’s rifle lay across the saddle, and he held the reins Indian fashion with the right hand, but when Wilde grabbed at his shoulder, he swerved, touching the trigger with his left. The bullet went through Wilde’s body, then deflecting on the bone of the right arm, traversed the forearm, came out of the palm, and dropped into his gauntlet where it was found.

Wilde rolled slowly from the saddle while Black Prince went on and Charcoal also, but then the outlaw turned, galloped back and fired straight downward into the dying man. Black Prince had stopped at a little distance snorting, and when the Indian came grabbing at his loose rein, he struck with his forefeet in rage at his master’s murderer. Charcoal had fired to disable Wilde as the only way left him of escaping “slavery”; now he had to conquer the dead man’s horse to make his escape from the trackers.

Some three weeks ago, Charcoal’s brothers, Left Hand and Bear Paw, had been released from jail, with the offer of forty pounds from the government and ten pounds from the officer commanding, if they could capture the outlaw. The tribes had decided that Charcoal’s body belonged of right to the police, and after Wilde’s death he could expect no mercy on earth, no help or succor from any living man. From the slaying, like a wounded beast to his lair, he rode direct for home, came to the little cabin, tied Black Prince to a bush and staggered toward the door. Out of the house came Left Hand, who ran toward him, while the outlaw, moved by some brute instinct, fled for the horse. But Left Hand, overtaking his brother, threw his arms about him, kissing him upon both cheeks, and Bear Paw, following, cast his rope over the helpless man, throwing him down, a prisoner. The brothers carried Charcoal into the cabin, pitched him down in a corner, then Left Hand rode for the police while Bear Paw stayed on guard.

It was Sergeant Macleod who came first to the cabin where Bear Paw squatted waiting, and Charcoal lay to all appearance dead in a great pool of blood upon the earthen floor. He had found a cobbler’s awl used in mending skin shoes, and opened the arteries of his arm, that he might take refuge from treachery in death. From ankle to groin his legs were skinned with incessant riding, and never again was he able to stand upon his feet.

For four months Charcoal had been hunted as an enemy by D Troop, now for a like time he was nursed in the guard-room at Fort Macleod, and, though he lay chained to the floor in mortal pain, his brothers of the guard did their best. As he had been terrible in the field, so this poor hero was brave in suffering--humble, and of so sweet a disposition that he won all men’s hearts. Once he choked himself with a blanket; once poisoned himself with a month’s collection of cigarette stubs; each time nearly achieving his purpose, but he never flinched, never gave utterance even to a sigh, except for the moaning in his sleep.

At the trial his counsel called no witnesses, but read the man’s own defense, a document so sad, so wonderfully beautiful in expression, that the court appealed to the crown for mercy, where mercy had become impossible.

When he was taken out to die, the troop was on guard surrounding the barracks, the whole of the tribes being assembled outside the fence. The prisoner sat in a wagon face to face with the executioner, who wore a mask of black silk, and beside him was the priest. Charcoal began to sing his death song.

“Stay,” said the priest, “make no cry. You’re far too brave a man for that.” The song ceased, and Charcoal died as he had lived.

XXVI

A. D. 1898

A KING AT TWENTY-FIVE

When a boy has the sea in his blood, when he prays in church for plague, pestilence and famine, for battle and murder and sudden death, his parents will do well to thrash him tame. For then if he can be tamed he may turn out well as a respectable clerk; but if he has the force of character to get what he wants he will prove himself and be, perhaps, like John Boyes, of Hull, a king at twenty-five.

Boyes ran away to sea, and out of the tame humdrum life of the modern merchant service made for himself a world of high adventure. As a seaman he landed at Durban, then earned his way up-country in all sorts of trades until he enlisted in the Matabeleland Mounted Police, then fought his way through the second Matabele war. Afterward he was a trader, then an actor, next at sea again, and at Zanzibar joined an Arab trading dhow. When the dhow was wrecked, and the crew appealed to Allah, Boyes took command, so coming to Mombasa. From here the crown colony was building a railway to Uganda, a difficult job because the lions ate all the laborers they could catch, and had even the cheek to gobble up white officials. Up-country, the black troops were enjoying a mutiny, the native tribes were prickly, the roads were impossible and there was no food to be had. Boyes was very soon at the head of a big transport company, working with donkey carts and native carriers to carry food for the authorities.