Part 15

“Drat politics!” squeaked the little undertaker. “Wisht I’d a-buried ’em all afore now. Cussed if I don’t go right out on that there hill and dig them boxes up!”

The day wore on with an alarming recrudescence of Democracy among the red men (who are not red, but chocolate). In the afternoon, the little undertaker chased White Horse, another leading man of the tribe, into the brush and returned with a broad grin upon his face.

“Beats the devil!” ejaculated the thin politician, “where a body sometimes finds merriment! How’s he votin’, Comfort?”

“Votin’ Democrat—the whole cussed posse of ’em! But I don’t give a cuss—Democrat or Republican money’s all the same to me. I got $15; one of his kids I planted five years ago; died of Cuban itch; four-foot pine box! He, he, he! I don’t give a cuss how they’re votin’.”

That night there was a meeting of Republican politicians at the Agency office. A most alarming landslide had begun that day, bearing disaster to the ranks of the Grand Old Party.

“Some more of those confounded departmental rulings!” exclaimed the Agent to the company present. “It’s this grandmotherly solicitude for the Indian that makes him an irresponsible scamp. Why, if the Government had turned them all loose to sink or swim a decade ago, Natural Law would, by this time, have solved the much mooted Indian question. But what are we to do?” And the Agent stroked his Van Dyke beard in perplexity.

“We’ve got to do something,” said the lean wolf with the body like a question mark; “and there’s only one thing to do—get Meekleman here. You remember how he wheedled them into line four years ago. If there’s a man in the world who can bring them around, it’s Meekleman. And we’d better get McBarty here, too. The two of them may be able to kick up a successful powwow.”

Charles D. Meekleman was a Nebraska politician who was almost a statesman, and had held important positions in Washington official circles. McBarty was the Republican candidate for Congress. It was decided that they should be sent for at once.

It was Friday evening when the two great men arrived; and upon Saturday morning they came forth and allowed themselves to be gazed upon freely. McBarty was a heavy-set, middle-sized man, with an earnest expression of countenance, and the rather bewildered air of a candidate being led forth to sacrifice for the first time. Meekleman was tall, superbly built, clad in the faultless manner and bearing about him that air of refinement which had won him from his rural constituents the name of “Gentleman Charlie.” The manner of his shaking hands with any comer was most consummate flattery; and although it was done with an air of magnanimous condescension, there was something masterful in his eyes, looking down kindly from his heavy brows, as from a battlemented tower, that established the utmost confidence. He had the happy faculty of disposing of a boiled potato at a farmhouse with a refined dignity acquired over many a French dish at the banquets of the distinguished; and the manner in which he addressed a bunch of squaws and bucks as “ladies and gentlemen,” was surpassingly suave.

The two great men strolled leisurely, arm in arm, down the dusty road to the pay station, stopping often to shake hands with the Omahas, and radiating smiles like small human suns. When they had reached the pay station, Mr. Meekleman approached the Agent, busy signing checks, and said in his big, clear, slow voice, that it might be heard by the lounging Indians: “Major, I wish you would announce to the gentlemen that I want to talk to them this evening over at Fire Chief lodge. Tell the gentlemen that I am very much grieved for them, and that I shall endeavour to right their wrongs;” and he raised his heavy brows and condescendingly smiled upon the brown loungers, while the Agent instructed a policeman to make the announcement.

That evening a party consisting of the Agent, Messrs. Meekleman and McBarty, and several local politicians, proceeded on foot to Fire Chief lodge, which is a large octagonal shack placed in a lonesome valley a mile distant from the Agency.

“Brace up, Mac!” said Meekleman, as the two walked along the lonesome prairie road. “To-night I shall have the honour to make a man of you—the Honourable James McBarty! Have a cigar and try to keep cool.”

“Yes, thanks. I was just feeling a little surprised at the lonesome road that seems to lead to Congress—that was all. Do you really suppose we can win them over?”

“Well, you shall see,” returned Meekleman. “Follow my suit and don’t make faces at the soup; for one really must drink soup, you know, to be Congressman from this district. I say, Mac, did you ever smoke killikinick? Well, anyway, I advise you to smoke it to-night till the back of your neck aches. Ha, ha! There is really no royal road to Congress, Mac!” And Meekleman slapped the candidate upon the shoulder and filled the great prairie silence with jovial laughter.

As the party neared the lodge, from which the light of the fire within streamed out through the windows into the moon haze, they heard the sound of the drum and the singing that accompanies an Indian feast; a wild melodious flight of notes, threaded with the snarl of the drum like the beat of a fevered temple, rising in ecstasy, like the wail of a fitful night wind in the scrub oaks of a bluff, and falling suddenly to die in a guttural note like the burr of a wounded rattlesnake. A barbaric music filled with the sounds of Nature and old as the wrinkled prairie!

“This,” said Meekleman, stopping near the entrance to listen to the deep, beautiful voices within, “This, McBarty, is the Indian of romance. Now for the bitter truth—and the soup!”

As they entered the long, narrow passageway leading into the lodge, they saw before them a large octagonal room with a wood fire blazing in the centre. About the dusky walls the huge, perverted shadows of the singers flitted in grotesque dances as they swayed in the ecstasy of song. A circle of brown men sat about the sputtering fire over which a large iron kettle steamed forth the scent of beef. Near the circle sat the smaller circle of drummers about a washtub with a cowhide stretched across it.

Within the larger circle near the fire, sat a squaw, cutting bits of beef from a quantity of ribs that she held conveniently in her lap.

“Shade of Mrs. Rorer!” exclaimed the would-be Congressman in a whisper to his companion; “is _that_ the soup?”

“Hist!” returned Meekleman; “one should be willing to suffer for his country!”

At the entrance of the great men, the singing ceased abruptly, and the singers turned their sullen, brute-like eyes upon their visitors and grunted.

“Are there any of the leading men here?” asked Meekleman of the Agent. Rainwalker and White Horse were both present.

“Ah!” said Meekleman, pointing to an unusually homely old Indian; “who is that black scamp with the big face and the re_mark_ably stupendous nose?”

“Rainwalker,” replied the Agent; “a leader; it would be well to make peace with him first.”

Meekleman approached the old chief with his soft, white hand extended and his face the picture of rapture.

“Well, well, Rainwalker! Here you are! I’m glad to see you, Mr. Rainwalker! How well you look; I needn’t ask about your health; your complexion could scarcely be surpassed!”

Mr. Rainwalker turned a shade lighter with pride and grinned, returning the great man’s salutation with a large bunch of beef-scented silence.

Meekleman sat down cross-legged in the circle and took the circulating stone pipe in his turn, smoked heroically and drank large quantities of hot soup. The sullen faces of the firelit circle brightened. Old Rainwalker began to talk in his own tongue, staring meanwhile meditatively into the fire. For several minutes his deep musical voice ran on with occasional dignified pauses and gestures indicating that he spoke of the great white man beside him. Meekleman gave an Indian youth a coin to act as interpreter.

“He says,” said the youth, “that you all time walk with good people and eat good stuff, but you are not too good, he says, to smoke and eat with us, he says. He likes you pretty much, guess.”

The old chief talked again for some time, and then lapsed into dignified silence.

“He says,” continued the youth, “that you have lived in the same lodge with the Big Father at Washington, and you can get the money for the chil’ns, he guess. That’s what he says.”

“Tell my dear brother,” said Meekleman, “that my heart is warm toward my brown brothers, and that the children shall have their money. Tell him that I played with the Big Father when he was a little boy, and that I know the Big Father would be terribly angry if he knew that the children had been refused their money. Tell him that I will see that they get it.”

This short speech translated, sent a murmur of joy around the circle. White Horse arose from the opposite side of the circle and brought a cup of hot soup to his white brother as a special favour.

“And now,” said Meekleman, arising majestically as befitted the erstwhile playmate of the President, “I shall introduce to you Mr. McBarty. He will go to Washington for you and he will do many good things for the Omahas.”

Mr. McBarty came forth and fell to shaking the brown hands of the grown-up children. He started with Rainwalker, who carefully rubbed his left hand upon his blanket before presenting it to the future saviour of his race. Then after having shaken all the hands, including that of the squaw who stripped beef from the ribs, the potential Congressman fell heroically upon the soup and the killikinick.

An old Indian placed cross-legged near a wood fire with the feel of hot soup in his belly, invariably becomes reminiscent. Old White Horse sat staring into the sputtering flame with his face as expressionless as a stone statue of Buddha, and his voice began in a low, musical tone, rising as his memory quickened, and modulated with great oratorical skill, for which he was noted in the tribe. His words translated ran thus:

“These new times are not like the old times. When we old men were young and the bison still bellowed on the prairies, we were strong and swift and wise. Now we are weak and slow and not wise. I cannot understand. It is all like a day when there is fog everywhere. When we were young and fought the Pawnees and the Sioux, there were no bigger, wiser men than Nuzhee Mona [Rainwalker] and Shonga Ska [White Horse]. Look at us now! We are old and slow and we cannot see far to-day. Once when I was young I found a sick bison bull wandering in the hills. He was weak and half blind and he had lost the trail. We are weak and half blind and we cannot find the old trail. I cannot understand.”

“Ah, ah, ah!” A groan ran about the firelit circle, intent upon the old wise man’s word.

“We cannot find Wakunda [God] any more. He is not in the valleys any more, nor on the hills. We cannot talk to the big white Wakunda. What can we old men say to our foolish people when they need wise words? Every day they are more like badgers. They eat much, drink firewater, and are very foolish. But we have these white brothers and we will listen to them. Their wisdom is the new wisdom; we will listen to them.”

“Ah, ah!” assented the listeners.

For an hour the circle sat staring into the flame, thinking of the old times. Then without a word, Rainwalker and White Horse arose and passed out of the lodge and the others followed.

“Well,” said Meekleman to McBarty, as they walked along the lonesome road toward the Agency, “I have the honour to address the Hon. James McBarty!”

The other did not answer for several minutes.

“Meekleman,” said McBarty at length, “don’t you suppose I _can_ do something for these poor devils?”

“Ah, McBarty,” returned Meekleman, “I am afraid you will never be a politician!”

Upon the following Monday morning when the tribe gathered for the continuation of the big payment, the news began to circulate that the great white man had gone to see the Big Father at Washington about the payment of the money to the minor children. As this news was authenticated by White Horse and Rainwalker themselves, it was readily believed, and in one day four hundred brown votes swung over to the Republican faith again.

On Tuesday, a week before election, there was not a brown Democrat on the reserve. This state of affairs continued on through the week until Friday evening, at which time no word had come from the Big Father.

The Democratic candidate for Congress, Judge Roberts, had arrived at the Agency during the week to battle in person against the impending calamity. All week he and his retainers led the forlorn hope. But on Friday afternoon, when the news so impatiently awaited by the Indians had not yet arrived, the all but lost cause began to gain a foothold in a persistent rumour that hinted that maybe the Indian had been fooled after all. Maybe Meekleman didn’t intend to intercede for the Indians at all; and accordingly, one by one, the brown men wondered, doubted, wavered and lost hope, until by Saturday evening, when the pay station closed, there had begun a restless, slow, and certain movement among the Omahas toward the Democratic ranks.

When Monday morning came, twenty-four hours before the opening of the polls, the political condition of the Omahas could have been summed up in one laconic conversation:

“Well, _cuggie_, [friend] how are you voting?”

“Dimmiticrat, guess!”

McBarty strolled leisurely about among the Omahas with an enigmatical smile upon his face, seeming to be unconscious of the crushing defeat he was, apparently, about to receive. The day wore on and hour by hour grew the triumph of the Judge, who now already felt himself the “Gentleman from Nebraska.”

At five o’clock in the evening the two candidates were seen talking together at the door of the pay station.

“Well, Mac,” said the Judge, “it’s looking a little dark for you. I swear, a week ago I would have sold my chances for a cent!”

McBarty repeatedly looked up the dusty government trail leading north from the station with an expression of anxiety.

“Well,” he said, “allow me to congratulate the Hon. John Roberts of Nebraska!” He smiled gravely as he shook the hand of his rival. “All I regret now,” he added, “is that I drank that soup!”

“Thanks!” replied the Judge. “It really seems a shame, however, that one should go to Congress at the hands of these savages, eh?”

“Yes,” said McBarty, taking a long gaze up the trail; “it is a shame, to be sure!”

At that moment a little farce was being enacted a mile up the road. Within the covering of a wild plum thicket at the side of the trail a saddled and bridled horse was lariated to a stake, and a man sat near by upon a rock, repeatedly tapping the horse on the flanks as it galloped about in a circle.

“Lather up there!” cried the man, as he nipped the horse with the whiplash; “lather up there!” And the horse dashed about the circle until its flanks were dripping and its mouth was white with foam.

At length the man took out his watch, saw that it was 5:30 o’clock, and untying the lariat, he mounted and put the spurs to his already jaded animal, dashing at a furious pace down the dusty old trail toward the Agency.

A few moments later McBarty and the Judge caught sight of a furious rider dashing toward them in a cloud of dust.

“Who do you suppose that can be riding so fast?” said the Judge.

“Oh,” said McBarty, smiling broadly, “that, Judge, is merely my election coming up at the gallop!”

Amid dust and yelling and a general spectacular confusion the horseman dashed up to the door of the pay station, threw his horse on its haunches in stopping, and cried: “A telegram from Washington for the Agent!”

In a few moments a great crowd of Indians had gathered about the horse and rider. The Agent, with a smile upon his face, rushed out of the station and seized a bit of yellow paper that the rider held in his hand. Breathlessly the crowd of Omahas waited.

“Listen!” shouted a crier in the Omaha tongue, standing by the Agent, who was reading the telegram. “The Big Father at Washington sends this word to his brown brothers: ‘The children’s money shall be paid!’”

For a moment following the shout of the crier, there was a great silence. Then a roar went up from the Omahas—a wild, hoarse shout of joy! Judge Roberts turned pale, and extending his hand to McBarty, said: “Well, you have won. Allow me to congratulate the Hon. James McBarty of Nebraska.”

And when the next morning’s sun arose, the polls were besieged by a throng of brown Republicans.

XIX

THE LAST THUNDER SONG

IT is an ancient custom to paint tragedy in blood tints. This is because men were once merely animals, and have not as yet been able to live down their ancestry. Yet the stroke of a dagger is a caress beside the throb of hopeless days.

Life can ache; the living will tell you this. But the dead make no complaint.

There is no greater tragedy than the fall of a dream! Napoleon dreamed; so did a savage. It is the same. I know of the scene of a great tragedy. Very few have recognised it as such; there was so little noise along with it. It happened at the Omaha Agency, which is situated on the Missouri River some seventy miles above Omaha.

The summer of 1900 debilitated all thermal adjectives. It was not hot; it was _Saharical_! It would hardly have been hyperbole to have said that the Old Century lay dying of a fever. The untilled hills of the reservation thrust themselves up in the August sunshine like the emaciated joints of one bedridden. The land lay as yellow as the skin of a fever patient, except in those rare spots where the melancholy corn struggled heartlessly up a hillside, making a blotch like a bedsore!

The blood of the prairie was impoverished, and the sky would give no drink with which to fill the dwindling veins. When one wished to search the horizon for the cloud that was not there, he did it from beneath an arched hand. The small whirlwinds that awoke like sudden fits of madness in the sultry air, rearing yellow columns of dust into the sky—these alone relieved the monotony of dazzle.

Every evening the clouds rolled flashing about the horizon and thundered back into the night. They were merely taunts, like the holding of a cool cup just out of reach of a fevered mouth; and the clear nights passed, bringing dewless dawns, until the ground cracked like a parched lip!

The annual Indian powwow was to be ended prematurely that year, for the sun beat uninvitingly upon the flat bottom where the dances were held, and the Indians found much comfort in the shade of their summer tepees. But when it was noised about that, upon the next day, the old medicine-man Mahowari (Passing Cloud) would dance potent dances and sing a thunder song with which to awaken the lazy thunder spirits to their neglected duty of rain-making, then the argument of the heat became feeble.

So the next morning, the bronze head of every Indian tepeehold took his pony, his dogs, his squaw, and his papooses of indefinite number to the powwow ground. In addition to these, the old men carried with them long memories and an implicit faith.

The young men, who had been away to Indian school, and had succeeded to some extent in stuffing their brown skins with white souls, carried with them curiosity and doubt, which, if properly united, beget derision.

The old men went to a shrine; the young men went to a show. When a shrine becomes a show, the World advances a step. And _that_ is the benevolence of Natural Law!

About the open space in which the dances were held, an oval covering had been built with willow boughs, beneath which the Indians lounged in sweating groups. Slowly about the various small circles went the cumbersome stone pipes.

To one listening, drowsed with the intense sunshine, the _buzzle_ and mutter and snarl of the gossiping Omahas seemed the grotesque echoes from a vanished age. Between the fierce dazzle of the sun and the sharply contrasting blue shade, there was but a line of division; yet a thousand years lay between one gazing in the sun and those dozing in the shadow. It was as if God had flung down a bit of the Young World’s twilight into the midst of the Old World’s noon. Here lounged the masterpiece of the toiling centuries—a Yankee. There sat the remnant of a race as primitive as Israel. Yet the white man looked on with the contempt of superiority.

Before ten o’clock everybody had arrived and his family with him. A little group, composed of the Indian Agent, the Agency Physician, the Mission Preacher, and a newspaper man, down from the city for reportorial purposes, waited and chatted, sitting upon a ragged patch of available shadow.

“These Omahas are an exceptional race,” the preacher was saying in his ministerial tone of voice; “an exceptional race!”

The newspaper man mopped his face, lit a cigarette and nodded assent with a hidden meaning twinkling in his eye.

“Quite exceptional!” he said, tossing his head in the direction of an unusually corpulent bunch of steaming, sweating, bronze men and women. “God, like some lesser master-musicians, has not confined himself to grand opera, it seems!”

He took a long pull at his cigarette, and his next words came out in a cloud of smoke.

“This particular creation savours somewhat of opera bouffe!”

With severe unconcern the preacher mended the broken thread of his discourse. “Quite an exceptional race in many ways. The Omaha is quite as honest as the white man.”

“That is a truism!” The pencil-pusher drove this observation between the minister’s words like a wedge.

“In his natural state he was much more so,” uninterruptedly continued the preacher; he was used to continuous discourse. “I have been told by many of the old men that in the olden times an Indian could leave his tepee for months at a time, and on his return would find his most valuable possessions untouched. I tell you, gentlemen, the Indian is like a prairie flower that has been transplanted from the blue sky and the summer sun and the pure winds into the steaming, artificial atmosphere of the hothouse! A glass roof is not the blue sky! Man’s talent is not God’s genius! That is why you are looking at a perverted growth.

“Look into an Indian’s face and observe the ruins of what was once manly dignity, indomitable energy, masterful prowess! When I look upon one of these faces, I have the same thoughts as, when travelling in Europe, I looked upon the ruins of Rome.

“Everywhere broken arches, fallen columns, tumbled walls! Yet through these as through a mist one can discern the magnificence of the living city. So in looking upon one of these faces, which are merely ruins in another sense. They were once as noble, as beautiful as——”

In his momentary search for an eloquent simile, the minister paused.

“As pumpkin pies!” added the newspaper man with a chuckle; and he whipped out his notebook and pencil to jot down this brilliant thought, for he had conceived a very witty “story” which he would pound out for the Sunday edition.

“Well,” said the Agency Physician, finally sucked into the whirlpool of discussion, “it seems to me that there is no room for crowing on either side. Indians are pretty much like white men; livers and kidneys and lungs, and that sort of thing; slight difference in the pigment under the skin. I’ve looked into the machinery of both species and find just as much room in one as the other for a soul!”

“And both will go upward,” added the minister.

“Like different grades of tobacco,” observed the Indian Agent, “the smoke of each goes up in the same way.”

“Just so,” said the reporter; “but let us cut out the metaphysics. I wonder when this magical _cuggie_ is going to begin his humid evolutions. Lamentable, isn’t it, that, such institutions as rain prayers should exist on the very threshold of the Twentieth Century?”