The Jimmyjohn Boss, and Other Stories by Owen Wister (the best novels to read TXT) 📗

Perhaps there were ten of them—these galloping dots were hard to count—down in the distant bottom across the river. Their swiftly moving dust hung with them close, thinning to a yellow veil when they halted short. They clustered a moment, then parted like beads, and went wide asunder on the plain. They veered singly over the level, merged in twos and threes, apparently racing, shrank together like elastic, and broke ranks again to swerve over the stretching waste. From this visioned pantomime presently came a sound, a tiny shot. The figures were too far for discerning which fired it. It evidently did no harm, and was repeated at once. A babel of diminutive explosions followed, while the horsemen galloped on in unexpected circles. Soon, for no visible reason, the dots ran together, bunching compactly. The shooting stopped, the dust rose thick again from the crowded hoofs, cloaking the group, and so passed back and was lost among the silent barren hills.

Four emigrants had watched this from the high bleak rim of the Big Bend. They stood where the flat of the desert broke and tilted down in grooves and bulges deep to the lurking Columbia. Empty levels lay opposite, narrowing up into the high country.

“That's the Colville Reservation across the river from us,” said the man.

“Another!” sighed his wife.

“The last Indians we'll strike. Our trail to the Okanagon goes over a corner of it.”

“We're going to those hills?” The mother looked at her little girl and back where the cloud had gone.

“Only a corner, Liza. The ferry puts us over on it, and we've got to go by the ferry or stay this side of the Columbia. You wouldn't want to start a home here?”

They had driven twenty-one hundred miles at a walk. Standing by them were the six horses with the wagon, and its tunneled roof of canvas shone duskily on the empty verge of the wilderness. A dry windless air hung over the table-land of the Big Bend, but a sound rose from somewhere, floating voluminous upon the silence, and sank again.

“Rapids!” The man pointed far up the giant rut of the stream to where a streak of white water twinkled at the foot of the hills. “We've struck the river too high,” he added.

“Then we don't cross here?” said the woman, quickly.

“No. By what they told me the cabin and the ferry ought to be five miles down.”

Her face fell. “Only five miles! I was wondering, John—Wouldn't there be a way round for the children to—”

“Now, mother,” interrupted the husband, “that ain't like you. We've crossed plenty Indian reservations this trip already.”

“I don't want to go round,” the little girl said. “Father, don't make me go round.”

Mart, the boy, with a loose hook of hair hanging down to his eyes from his hat, did not trouble to speak. He had been disappointed in the westward journey to find all the Indians peaceful. He knew which way he should go now, and he went to the wagon to look once again down the clean barrel of his rifle.

“Why, Nancy, you don't like Indians?” said her mother.

“Yes, I do. I like chiefs.”

Mrs. Clallam looked across the river. “It was so strange, John, the way they acted. It seems to get stranger, thinking about it.”

“They didn't see us. They didn't have a notion—”

“But if we're going right over?”

“We're not going over there, Liza. That quick water's the Mahkin Rapids, and our ferry's clear down below from this place.”

“What could they have been after, do you think?”

“Those chaps? Oh, nothing, I guess. They weren't killing anybody.”

“Playing cross-tag,” said Mart.

“I'd like to know, John, how you know they weren't killing anybody. They might have been trying to.”

“Then we're perfectly safe, Liza. We can set and let 'em kill us all day.”

“Well, I don't think it's any kind of way to behave, running around shooting right off your horse.”

“And Fourth of July over too,” said Mart from the wagon. He was putting cartridges into the magazine of his Winchester. His common-sense told him that those horsemen would not cross the river, but the notion of a night attack pleased the imagination of young sixteen.

“It was the children,” said Mrs. Clallam. “And nobody's getting me any wood. How am I going to cook supper? Stir yourselves!”

They had carried water in the wagon, and father and son went for wood. Some way down the hill they came upon a gully with some dead brush, and climbed back with this. Supper was eaten on the ground, the horses were watered, given grain, and turned loose to find what pickings they might in the lean growth; and dusk had not turned to dark when the emigrants were in their beds on the soft dust. The noise of the rapids dominated the air with distant sonority, and the children slept at once, the boy with his rifle along his blanket's edge. John Clallam lay till the moon rose hard and brilliant, and then quietly, lest his wife should hear from her bed by the wagon, went to look across the river. Where the downward slope began he came upon her. She had been watching for some time. They were the only objects in that bald moonlight. No shrub grew anywhere that reached to the waist, and the two figures drew together on the lonely hill. They stood hand in hand and motionless, except that the man bent over the woman and kissed her. When she spoke of Iowa they had left, he talked of the new region of their hopes, the country that lay behind the void hills opposite, where it would not be a struggle to live. He dwelt on the home they would make, and her mood followed his at last, till husband and wife were building distant plans together. The Dipper had swung low when he remarked that they were a couple of fools, and they went back to their beds. Cold came over the ground, and their musings turned to dreams. Next morning both were ashamed of their fears.

By four the wagon was on the move. Inside, Nancy's