"You deserve killing yourself," said Clallam.
"That's been attended to," replied Jake, and he reeled, for during his fire some Indian had shot once more.
Clallam supported him to the room where his wife and Nancy had passed the night, and laid him on the bed. "I'll get Mrs. Clallam," said he.
"If she'll be willin' to see me," said the wounded man, humbly.
She came, dazed beyond feeling any horror, or even any joy, and she did what she could.
"It was seein' 'em hit Andy," said Jake. "Is Andy gone? Yes, I kin tell he's gone from your face." He shut his eyes, and lay still so long a time that they thought he might be dying now; but he moved at length, and looked slowly round the wall till he saw the print of the village among the elms and the covered bridge. His hand lifted to show them this. "That's the road," said he. "Andy and me used to go fishin' acrosst that bridge. Did you ever see the Housatonic River? I've fished a lot there. Cornwall, Connecticut. The hills are pretty there. Then Andy got worse. You look in that drawer." John remembered, and when he got out the tintype, Jake stretched for it eagerly. "His mother and him, age ten," he explained to Elizabeth, and held it for her to see, then studied the faces in silence. "You kin tell it's Andy, can't yu'?" She told him yes. "That was before we knowed he weren't—weren't goin' to grow up like the other boys he played with. So after a while, when she was gone, I got ashamed seein' Andy's friends makin' their way when he couldn't seem to, and so I took him away where nobody hed ever been acquainted with us. I was layin' money by to get him the best doctor in Europe. I 'ain't been a good man."
A faintness mastered him, and Elizabeth would have put the picture on the table, but his hand closed round it. They let him lie so, and Elizabeth sat there, while John, with Mart, kept Nancy away till the horror in the outer room was made invisible. They came and went quietly, and Jake seemed in a deepening torpor, once only rousing suddenly to call his son's name, and then, upon looking from one to the other, he recollected, and his eyes closed again. His mind wandered, but very little, for torpor seemed to be overcoming him. The squaw had stolen in, and sat cowering and useless. Towards sundown John's heart sickened at the sound of more horsemen; but it was only two white men, a sheriff and his deputy.
"Go easy," said John. "He's not going to resist."
"What's up here, anyway? Who are you?"
Clallam explained, and was evidently not so much as half believed.
"If there are Indians killed," said the sheriff, "there's still another matter for the law to settle with him. We're sent to search for whiskey. The county's about tired of him."
"You'll find him pretty sick," said John.
"People I find always are pretty sick," said the sheriff, and pushed his way in, stopping at sight of Mrs. Clallam and the figure on the bed. "I'm arresting that man, madam," he said, with a shade of apology. "The county court wants him."
Jake sat up and knew the sheriff. "You're a little late, Proctor," said he. "The Supreme Court's a-goin' to call my case." Then he fell back, for his case had been called.
Hank's Woman
I
Many fish were still in the pool; and though luck seemed to have left me, still I stood at the end of the point, casting and casting my vain line, while the Virginian lay and watched. Noonday's extreme brightness had left the river and the plain in cooling shadow, but spread and glowed over the yet undimmed mountains. Westward, the Tetons lifted their peaks pale and keen as steel through the high, radiant air. Deep down between the blue gashes of their canons the sun sank long shafts of light, and the glazed laps of their snow-fields shone separate and white upon their lofty vastness, like handkerchiefs laid out to dry. Opposite, above the valley, rose that other range, the Continental Divide, not sharp, but long and ample. It was bare in some high places, and below these it stretched everywhere, high and low, in brown and yellow parks, or in purple miles of pine a world of serene undulations, a great sweet country of silence.
A passing band of antelope stood herded suddenly together at sight of us; then a little breeze blew for a moment from us to them, and they drifted like phantoms away, and were lost in the levels of the sage-brush.
"If humans could do like that," said the Virginian, watching them go.
"Run, you mean?" said I.
"Tell a foe by the smell of him," explained the cow-puncher; "at fifty yards—or a mile."
"Yes," I said; "men would be hard to catch."
"A woman needs it most," he murmured. He lay down again in his lounging sprawl, with his grave eyes intently fixed upon my fly-casting.
The gradual day mounted up the hills farther from the floor of earth. Warm airs eddied in its wake slowly, stirring the scents of the plain together. I looked at the Southerner; and there was no guessing what his thoughts might be at work upon behind that drowsy glance. Then for a moment a trout rose, but only to look and whip down again into the pool that wedged its calm into the riffle from below.
"Second thoughts," mused the Virginian; and as the trout came no more, "Second thoughts," he repeated; "and even a fish will have them sooner than folks has them in this mighty hasty country." And he rolled over into a new position of ease.
At whom or what was he aiming these shafts of truth? Or did he moralize merely because health and the weather had steeped him in that serenity which lifts us among the spheres? Well, sometimes he went on from these beginnings and told me wonderful things.
"I reckon," said he, presently, "that knowing when to change your mind would be pretty near knowledge enough for plain people."
Since my acquaintance with him—this was the second summer of it—I had come to understand him enough to know that he was unfathomable. Still, for a moment it crossed my thoughts that perhaps now he was discoursing about himself. He had allowed a jealous foreman to fall out with him at Sunk Creek ranch in the spring, during Judge Henry's absence. The man, having a brief authority, parted with him. The Southerner had chosen that this should be the means of ultimately getting the foreman dismissed and himself recalled. It was strategic. As he put it to me: "When I am gone, it will be right easy for the Judge to see which of us two he wants. And I'll not have done any talking." All of which duly befell in the autumn as he had planned: the foreman was sent off, his assistant promoted, and the Virginian again hired. But this was meanwhile. He was indulging himself in a several months' drifting, and while thus drifting he had written to me. That is how we two came to be on our way from the railroad to hunt the elk and the mountain-sheep, and were pausing to fish where Buffalo Fork joins its waters with Snake River. In those days the antelope still ran there in hundreds, the Yellowstone Park was a new thing, and mankind lived very far away. Since meeting me with the horses in Idaho the Virginian had been silent, even for him. So now I stood casting my fly, and trusting that he was not troubled with second thoughts over his strategy.
"Have yu' studded much about marriage?" he now inquired. His serious eyes met mine as he lay stretched along the ground.
"Not much," I said; "not very much."
"Let's swim," he said. "They have changed their minds."
Forthwith we shook off our boots and dropped our few clothes, and heedless of what fish we might now drive away, we went into the cool, slow, deep breadth of backwater which the bend makes just there. As he came up near me, shaking his head of black hair, the cowpuncher was smiling a little.
"Not that any number of baths," he remarked, "would conceal a man's objectionableness from an antelope—not even a she-one."
Then he went under water, and came up again a long way off.
We dried before the fire, without haste. To need no clothes is better than purple and fine linen. Then he tossed the flap-jacks, and I served the trout, and after this we lay on our backs upon a buffalo-hide to smoke and watch the Tetons grow more solemn, as the large stars opened out over the sky.