Good Indian by B. M. Bower (best book club books .TXT) 📕

“I'll go up and take a look,” Good Indian offered carelessly.

“Well, I wish you would. I can't keep my mind on m' fishing—just wondering what the deuce he's after. And say! You tell him I'll stand him on his off ear if I catch him doggie' me ag'in. Folks come with yuh?” he remembered to ask as he prepared for another cast into the pool.

“They're down there getting a campfire built, ready to fry what fish they catch,” Good Indian informed him, as he turned to climb the bluff. “They're going to eat dinner under that big ledge by the rapids. You better go on down.”

He stood for a minute, and watched Baumberger make a dexterous cast, which proved fruitless, before he began climbing up the steep slope of jumbled bowlders upon which the bluff itself seemed to rest. He was not particularly interested in his quest, but he was in the mood for purposeless action; he still did not want to think.

He climbed negligently, scattering loose rocks down the hill behind him. He had no expectation of coming upon Peppajee—unless Peppajee deliberately put himself in his way—and so there was no need of caution. He stopped once, and stood long minutes with his head turned to catch the faint sound of high-keyed laughter and talk which drifted up to him. If he went higher, he thought, he might get a glimpse of them—of her, to tell his thought honestly. Whereupon he forgot all about finding and expostulating with Peppajee, and thought only a point of the ridge which would give him a clear view downstream.

To be sure, he might as easily have retraced his steps and joined the group, and seen every changing look in her face. But he did not want to be near her when others were by; he wanted her to himself, or not at all. So he went on, while the sun beat hotly down upon him and the rocks sent up dry waves of heat like an oven.

A rattlesnake buzzed its strident warning between two rocks, but before he turned his attention to the business of killing it, the snake had crawled leisurely away into a cleft, where he could not reach it with the stones he threw. His thoughts, however, were brought back to his surroundings so that he remembered Peppajee. He stood still, and scanned carefully the jumble of rocks and bowlders which sloped steeply down to the river, looking for a betraying bit of color or dirty gray hat-crown.

“But I could look my eyes out and welcome, if he didn't want to be seen,” he concluded, and sat down while he rolled a cigarette. “And I don't know as I want to see him, anyway.” Still, he did not move immediately. He was in the shade, which was a matter for congratulation on such a day. He had a cigarette between his lips, which made for comfort; and he still felt the exhilarating effects of his unpremeditated boldness, without having come to the point of sober thinking. He sat there, and blew occasional mouthfuls of smoke into the quivering heat waves, and stared down at the river rushing over the impeding rocks as if its very existence depended upon reaching as soon as possible the broader sweep of the Snake.

He finished the first cigarette, and rolled another from sheer force of habit rather than because he really wanted one. He lifted one foot, and laid it across his knee, and was drawing a match along the sole of his boot when his eyes chanced to rest for a moment upon a flutter of green, which showed briefly around the corner of a great square rock poised insecurely upon one corner, as if it were about to hurl its great bulk down upon the river it had watched so long. He held the blazing match poised midway to its destination while he looked; then he put it to the use he had meant it for, pulled his hat-brim down over his right eye and ear to shield them from the burn of the sun, and went picking his way idly over to the place.

“HUL-lo!” he greeted, in the manner of one who refuses to acknowledge the seriousness of a situation which confronts him suddenly. “What's the excitement?”

There was no excitement whatever. There was Peppajee, hunched up against the rock in that uncomfortable attitude which permits a man to come at the most intimate relations with the outside of his own ankle, upon which he was scowling in seeming malignity. There was his hunting-knife lying upon a flat stone near to his hand, with a fresh red blotch upon the blade, and there was his little stone pipe clenched between his teeth and glowing red within the bowl. Also there was the ankle, purple and swollen from the ligature above it—for his legging was off and torn into strips which formed a bandage, and a splinter of rock was twisted ingeniously in the wrappings for added tightness. From a crisscross of gashes a sluggish, red stream trickled down to the ankle-bone, and from there drip-dropped into a tiny, red pool in the barren, yellow soil.

“Catchum rattlesnake bite?” queried Good Indian inanely, as is the habit of the onlooker when the scene shouts forth eloquently its explanation, and questions are almost insultingly superfluous.

“Huh!” grunted Peppajee, disdaining further speech upon the subject, and regarded sourly the red drip.

“Want me to suck it?” ventured Good Indian unenthusiastically, eying the wound.

“Huh!” Peppajee removed the pipe, his eyes still upon his ankle. “Plenty blood come, mebbyso.” To make sure, however, he kneaded the swollen flesh about the wound, thus accelerating slightly the red drip.

Then deliberately he took another turn with the rock, sending the buckskin thongs deeper into the flesh, and held the burning pipe against the skin above the wound until Good Indian sickened and turned away his head. When he looked again, Peppajee was sucking hard at the pipe, and gazing impersonally at the place. He bent again, and hid the glow of his pipe against his ankle. His thin lips tightened while he held it there, but the lean, brown fingers were firm as splinters of the rock behind him. When the fire cooled, he fanned it to life again with his breath, and when it winked redly at him he laid it grimly against his flesh.

So, while Good Indian stood and looked on with lips as tightly drawn as the other's, he seared a circle around the wound—a circle which bit deep and drew apart the gashes like lips opened for protest. He regarded critically his handiwork, muttered a “Bueno” under his breath, knocked the ashes from his pipe, and returned it to some mysterious hiding-place beneath his blanket. Then he picked up his moccasin.

“Them damn' snake, him no speakum,” he observed disgustedly. “Heap fool me; him biteum”—he made a stabbing gesture with thumb and finger in the air by way of illustration—“then him go quick.” He began gingerly trying to force the moccasin upon his foot, his mouth drawn down with the look of one who considers that he has been hardly used.

“How you get home?” Good Indian's thoughts swung round to practical things. “You got horse?”

Peppajee shook his head, reached for his knife, and slit the moccasin till it was no more than a wrapping. “Mebbyso heap walk,” he stated simply.

“Mebbyso you won't do anything of the kind,” Good Indian retorted. “You come down and take a horse. What for you all time watchum Baumberger?” he added, remembering then what had brought them both upon the bluff. “Baumberger all time fish—no