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Title:  A Drift from Redwood Camp

Author:  Bret Harte

July, 2001  [Etext #2712]


Project Gutenberg Etext A Drift from Redwood Camp, by Bret Harte
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A Drift from Redwood Camp

by Bret Harte




They had all known him as a shiftless, worthless creature.  From
the time he first entered Redwood Camp, carrying his entire effects
in a red handkerchief on the end of a long-handled shovel, until he
lazily drifted out of it on a plank in the terrible inundation of
'56, they never expected anything better of him.  In a community of
strong men with sullen virtues and charmingly fascinating vices,
he was tolerated as possessing neither--not even rising by any
dominant human weakness or ludicrous quality to the importance of a
butt.  In the dramatis personae of Redwood Camp he was a simple
"super"--who had only passive, speechless roles in those fierce
dramas that were sometimes unrolled beneath its green-curtained
pines.  Nameless and penniless, he was overlooked by the census and
ignored by the tax collector, while in a hotly-contested election
for sheriff, when even the head-boards of the scant cemetery were
consulted to fill the poll-lists, it was discovered that neither
candidate had thought fit to avail himself of his actual vote.  He
was debarred the rude heraldry of a nickname of achievement, and in
a camp made up of "Euchre Bills," "Poker Dicks," "Profane Pete,"
and "Snap-shot Harry," was known vaguely as "him," "Skeesicks," or
"that coot."  It was remembered long after, with a feeling of
superstition, that he had never even met with the dignity of an
accident, nor received the fleeting honor of a chance shot meant
for somebody else in any of the liberal and broadly comprehensive
encounters which distinguished the camp.  And the inundation that
finally carried him out of it was partly anticipated by his passive
incompetency, for while the others escaped--or were drowned in
escaping--he calmly floated off on his plank without an opposing
effort.

For all that, Elijah Martin--which was his real name--was far from
being unamiable or repellent.  That he was cowardly, untruthful,
selfish, and lazy, was undoubtedly the fact; perhaps it was his
peculiar misfortune that, just then, courage, frankness,
generosity, and activity were the dominant factors in the life of
Redwood Camp.  His submissive gentleness, his unquestioned modesty,
his half refinement, and his amiable exterior consequently availed
him nothing against the fact that he was missed during a raid of
the Digger Indians, and lied to account for it; or that he lost his
right to a gold discovery by failing to make it good against a
bully, and selfishly kept this discovery from the knowledge of the
camp.  Yet this weakness awakened no animosity in his companions,
and it is probable that the indifference of the camp to his fate in
this final catastrophe came purely from a simple forgetfulness of
one who at that supreme moment was weakly incapable.

Such was the reputation and such the antecedents of the man who,
on the 15th of March, 1856, found himself adrift in a swollen
tributary of the Minyo.  A spring freshet of unusual volume had
flooded the adjacent river until, bursting its bounds, it escaped
through the narrow, wedge-shaped valley that held Redwood Camp.
For a day and night the surcharged river poured half its waters
through the straggling camp.  At the end of that time every vestige
of the little settlement was swept away; all that was left was
scattered far and wide in the country, caught in the hanging
branches of water-side willows and alders, embayed in sluggish
pools, dragged over submerged meadows, and one fragment--bearing up
Elijah Martin--pursuing the devious courses of an unknown tributary
fifty miles away.  Had he been a rash, impatient man, he would have
been speedily drowned in some earlier desperate attempt to reach
the shore; had he been an ordinary bold man, he would have
succeeded in transferring himself to the branches of some
obstructing tree; but he was neither, and he clung to his broken
raft-like berth with an endurance that was half the paralysis of
terror and half the patience of habitual misfortune.  Eventually he
was caught in a side current, swept to the bank, and cast ashore on
an unexplored wilderness.

His first consciousness was one of hunger that usurped any
sentiment of gratitude for his escape from drowning.  As soon as
his cramped limbs permitted, he crawled out of the bushes in search
of food.  He did not know where he was; there was no sign of
habitation--or even occupation--anywhere.  He had been too
terrified to notice the direction in which he had drifted--even if
he had possessed the ordinary knowledge of a backwoodsman, which he
did not.  He was helpless.  In his bewildered state, seeing a
squirrel cracking a nut on the branch of a hollow tree near him, he
made a half-frenzied dart at the frightened animal, which ran away.
But the same association of ideas in his torpid and confused brain
impelled him to search for the squirrel's hoard in the hollow of
the tree.  He ate the few hazel-nuts he found there, ravenously.
The purely animal instinct satisfied, he seemed to have borrowed
from it a certain strength and intuition.  He limped through the
thicket not unlike some awkward, shy quadrumane, stopping here and
there to peer out through the openings over the marshes that lay
beyond.  His sight, hearing, and even the sense of smell had become
preternaturally acute.  It was the latter which suddenly arrested
his steps with the odor of dried fish.  It had a significance
beyond the mere instincts of hunger--it indicated the contiguity of
some Indian encampment.  And as such--it meant danger, torture, and
death.

He stopped, trembled violently, and tried to collect his scattered
senses.  Redwood Camp had embroiled itself needlessly and brutally
with the surrounding Indians, and only held its own against them by
reckless courage and unerring marksmanship.  The frequent use of a
casual wandering Indian as a target for the practising rifles of
its members had kept up an undying hatred in the heart of the
aborigines and stimulated them to terrible and isolated reprisals.
The scalped and skinned dead body of Jack Trainer, tied on his
horse and held hideously upright by a cross of wood behind his
saddle, had passed, one night, a slow and ghastly apparition, into
camp; the corpse of Dick Ryner had been found anchored on the
river-bed, disembowelled and filled with stone and gravel.  The
solitary and unprotected member of Redwood Camp who fell into the
enemy's hands was doomed.

Elijah Martin remembered this, but his fears gradually began to
subside in a certain apathy of the imagination, which, perhaps,
dulled his apprehensions and allowed the instinct of hunger to
become again uppermost.  He knew that the low bark tents, or
wigwams, of the Indians were hung with strips of dried salmon, and
his whole being was new centered upon an attempt to stealthily
procure a delicious morsel.  As yet he had distinguished no other
sign of life or habitation; a few moments later, however, and grown
bolder with an animal-like trustfulness in his momentary security,
he crept out of the thicket and found himself near a long, low
mound or burrow-like structure of mud and bark on the river-bank.
A single narrow opening, not unlike the entrance of an Esquimau
hut, gave upon the river.  Martin had no difficulty in recognizing
the character of the building.  It was a "sweathouse," an
institution common to nearly all the aboriginal tribes of
California.  Half a religious temple, it was also half a sanitary
asylum, was used as a Russian bath or superheated vault, from which
the braves, sweltering and stifling all night, by smothered fires,
at early dawn plunged, perspiring, into the ice-cold river.  The
heat and smoke were further utilized to dry and cure the long
strips of fish hanging from the roof, and it was through the narrow
aperture that served as a chimney that the odor escaped which
Martin had detected.  He knew that as the bathers only occupied the
house from midnight to early morn, it was now probably empty.  He
advanced confidently toward it.

He was a little surprised to find that the small open space between
it and the river was occupied by a rude scaffolding, like that on
which certain tribes exposed their dead, but in this instance it
only contained the feathered leggings, fringed blanket, and eagle-
plumed head-dress of some brave.  He did not, however, linger in
this plainly visible area, but quickly dropped on all fours and
crept into the interior of the house.  Here he completed his feast
with the fish, and warmed his chilled limbs on the embers of the
still smouldering fires.  It was while drying his tattered clothes
and shoeless feet that he thought of the dead brave's useless
leggings and moccasins, and it occurred to him that he would be
less likely to attract the Indians' attention from a distance and
provoke a ready arrow, if he were disguised as one of them.
Crawling out again, he quickly secured, not only the leggings, but
the blanket and head-dress, and putting them on, cast his own
clothes into the stream.  A bolder, more energetic, or more
provident man would have followed the act by quickly making his way
back to the thicket to reconnoitre, taking with him a supply of
fish for future needs.  But Elijah Martin succumbed again to the
recklessness of inertia; he yielded once more to the animal
instinct of momentary security.  He returned to the interior of the
hut, curled himself again on the ashes, and weakly resolving to
sleep until moonrise, and as weakly hesitating, ended by falling
into uneasy but helpless stupor.

When he awoke, the rising sun, almost level with the low entrance
to the sweat-house, was darting its direct rays into the interior,
as if searching it with fiery spears.  He had slept ten hours.  He
rose tremblingly to his knees.  Everything was quiet without; he
might yet escape.  He crawled to the opening.  The open space
before it was empty, but the scaffolding was gone.  The clear, keen
air revived him.  As he sprang out, erect, a shout that nearly
stunned him seemed to rise from the earth on all sides.  He glanced
around him in a helpless agony of fear.  A dozen concentric circles
of squatting Indians, whose heads were visible above the reeds,
encompassed the banks around the sunken base of the sweat-house
with successive dusky rings.  Every avenue of escape seemed closed.
Perhaps for that reason the attitude of his surrounding captors was
passive rather than aggressive, and the shrewd, half-Hebraic
profiles nearest him expressed only stoical waiting.  There was a
strange similarity of expression in his own immovable apathy of
despair.  His only sense of averting his fate was a confused idea
of explaining his intrusion.  His desperate memory yielded a few
common Indian words.  He pointed automatically to himself and the
stream.  His white lips moved.

"I come--from--the river!"

A guttural cry, as if the whole assembly were clearing their
throats, went round the different circles.  The nearest rocked
themselves to and fro and bent their feathered heads toward him.  A
hollow-cheeked, decrepit old man arose and said, simply:--

"It is he!  The great chief has come!"

        .        .        .        .        .        .

He was saved.  More than that, he was re-created.  For, by signs
and intimations he was quickly made aware that since the death of
their late chief, their medicine-men had prophesied that his
perfect successor should appear miraculously before them, borne
noiselessly on the river FROM THE SEA, in the plumes and insignia
of his predecessor.  This mere coincidence of appearance and
costume might not have been convincing to the braves had not Elijah
Martin's actual deficiencies contributed to their unquestioned
faith in him.  Not only his inert possession of the sweat-house and
his apathetic attitude in their presence, but his utter and
complete unlikeness to the white frontiersmen of their knowledge
and tradition--creatures of fire and sword and malevolent activity--
as well as his manifest dissimilarity to themselves, settled their
conviction of his supernatural origin.  His gentle, submissive
voice, his yielding will, his lazy helplessness, the absence of
strange weapons and fierce explosives in his possession, his
unwonted sobriety--all proved him an exception to his apparent race
that was in itself miraculous.  For it must be confessed that, in
spite of the cherished theories of most romances and all statesmen
and commanders, that FEAR is the great civilizer of the savage
barbarian, and that he is supposed to regard the prowess of the
white man and his mysterious death-dealing weapons as evidence of
his supernatural origin and superior creation, the facts have
generally pointed to the reverse.  Elijah Martin was not long in
discovering that when the Minyo hunter, with his obsolete bow,
dropped dead by a bullet from a viewless and apparently noiseless
space, it was NOT considered the lightnings of an avenging Deity,
but was traced directly to the ambushed rifle of Kansas Joe, swayed
by a viciousness quite as human as their own; the spectacle of
Blizzard Dick, verging on delirium tremens, and riding "amuck" into
an Indian village with a revolver in each hand, did NOT impress
them as a supernatural act, nor excite their respectful awe as much
as the less harmful frenzy of one of their own medicine-men; they
were NOT influenced by implacable white gods, who relaxed only to
drive hard bargains and exchange mildewed flour and shoddy blankets
for their fish and furs.  I am afraid they regarded these raids of
Christian civilization as they looked upon grasshopper plagues,
famines, inundations, and epidemics; while an utterly impassive God
washed his hands of the means he had employed, and even encouraged
the faithful to resist and overcome his emissaries--the white
devils!  Had Elijah Martin been a student of theology, he would
have been struck with the singular resemblance of these theories--
although the application thereof was reversed--to the Christian
faith.  But Elijah Martin had neither the imagination of a
theologian nor the insight of a politician.  He only saw that he,
hitherto ignored and despised in a community of half-barbaric men,
now translated to a community of men wholly savage, was respected
and worshipped!

It might have turned a stronger head than Elijah's.  He was at
first frightened, fearful lest his reception concealed some hidden
irony, or that, like the flower-crowned victim of ancient
sacrifice, he was exalted and sustained to give importance and
majesty to some impending martyrdom.  Then he began to dread that
his innocent deceit--if deceit it was--should be discovered; at
last, partly from meekness and partly from the animal contentment
of present security, he accepted the situation.  Fortunately for
him it was purely passive.  The Great Chief of the Minyo tribe was
simply an expressionless idol of flesh and blood.  The previous
incumbent of that office had been an old man, impotent and
senseless of late years through age and disease.  The chieftains
and braves had consulted in council before him, and perfunctorily
submitted their decisions, like offerings, to his unresponsive
shrine.  In the same way, all material events--expeditions,
trophies, industries--were supposed to pass before the dull,
impassive eyes of the great chief, for direct acceptance.  On the
second day of Elijah's accession, two of the braves brought a
bleeding human scalp before him.  Elijah turned pale, trembled, and
averted his head, and then, remembering the danger of giving way to
his weakness, grew still more ghastly.  The warriors watched him
with impassioned faces.  A grunt--but whether of astonishment,
dissent, or approval, he would not tell--went round the circle.
But the scalp was taken away and never again appeared in his
presence.

An incident still more alarming quickly followed.  Two captives,
white men, securely bound, were one day brought before him on their
way to the stake, followed by a crowd of old and young squaws and
children.  The unhappy Elijah recognized in the prisoners two
packers from a distant settlement who sometimes passed through
Redwood Camp.  An agony of terror, shame, and remorse shook the
pseudo chief to his crest of high feathers, and blanched his face
beneath its paint and yellow ochre.  To interfere to save them from
the torture they were evidently to receive at the hands of those
squaws and children, according to custom, would be exposure and
death to him as well as themselves; while to assist by his passive
presence at the horrible sacrifice of his countrymen was too much
for even his weak selfishness.  Scarcely knowing what he did as the
lugubrious procession passed before him, he hurriedly hid his face
in his blanket and turned his back upon the scene.  There was a
dead silence.  The warriors were evidently unprepared for this
extraordinary conduct of their chief.  What might have been their
action it was impossible to conjecture, for at that moment a little
squaw, perhaps impatient for the sport and partly emboldened by the
fact that she had been selected, only a few days before, as the
betrothed of the new chief, approached him slyly from the other
side.  The horrified eyes of Elijah, momentarily raised from his
blanket, saw and recognized her.  The feebleness of a weak nature,
that dared not measure itself directly with the real cause, vented
its rage on a secondary object.  He darted a quick glance of
indignation and hatred at the young girl.  She ran back in startled
terror to her companions, a hurried consultation followed, and in
another moment the whole bevy of girls, old women, and children
were on the wing, shrieking and crying, to their wigwams.

"You see," said one of the prisoners coolly to the other, in
English, "I was right.  They never intended to do anything to us.
It was only a bluff.  These Minyos are a different sort from the
other tribes.  They never kill anybody if they can help it."

"You're wrong," said the other, excitedly.  "It was that big chief
there, with his head in a blanket, that sent those dogs to the
right about.  Hell! did you see them run at just a look from him?
He's a high and mighty feller, you bet.  Look at his dignity!"

"That's so--he ain't no slouch," said the other, gazing at Elijah's
muffled head, critically.  "D----d if he ain't a born king."

The sudden conflict and utter revulsion of emotion that those
simple words caused in Elijah's breast was almost incredible.  He
had been at first astounded by the revelation of the peaceful
reputation of the unknown tribe he had been called upon to govern;
but even this comforting assurance was as nothing compared to the
greater revelations implied in the speaker's praise of himself.
He, Elijah Martin! the despised, the rejected, the worthless
outcast of Redwood Camp, recognized as a "born king," a leader; his
power felt by the very men who had scorned him!  And he had done
nothing--stop! had he actually done NOTHING?  Was it not possible
that he was REALLY what they thought him?  His brain reeled under
the strong, unaccustomed wine of praise; acting upon his weak
selfishness, it exalted him for a moment to their measure of his
strength, even as their former belief in his inefficiency had kept
him down.  Courage is too often only the memory of past success.
This was his first effort; he forgot he had not earned it, even as
he now ignored the danger of earning it.  The few words of
unconscious praise had fallen like the blade of knighthood on his
cowering shoulders; he had risen ennobled from the contact.  Though
his face was still muffled in his blanket, he stood erect and
seemed to have gained in stature.

The braves had remained standing irresolute, and yet watchful, a
few paces from their captives.  Suddenly, Elijah, still keeping his
back to the prisoners, turned upon the braves, with blazing eyes,
violently throwing out his hands with the gesture of breaking
bonds.  Like all sudden demonstrations of undemonstrative men, it
was extravagant, weird, and theatrical.  But it was more potent
than speech--the speech that, even if effective, would still have
betrayed him to his countrymen.  The braves hurriedly cut the
thongs of the prisoners; another impulsive gesture from Elijah, and
they, too, fled.  When he lifted his eyes cautiously from his
blanket, captors and captives had dispersed in opposite directions,
and he was alone--and triumphant!

From that moment Elijah Martin was another man.  He went to bed
that night in an intoxicating dream of power; he arose a man of
will, of strength.  He read it in the eyes of the braves, albeit at
times averted in wonder.  He understood, now, that although peace
had been their habit and custom, they had nevertheless sought to
test his theories of administration with the offering of the scalps
and the captives, and in this detection of their common weakness he
forgot his own.  Most heroes require the contrast of the unheroic
to set them off; and Elijah actually found himself devising means
for strengthening the defensive and offensive character of the
tribe, and was himself strengthened by it.  Meanwhile the escaped
packers did not fail to heighten the importance of their adventure
by elevating the character and achievements of their deliverer; and
it was presently announced throughout the frontier settlements that
the hitherto insignificant and peaceful tribe of Minyos, who
inhabited a large territory bordering on the Pacific Ocean, had
developed into a powerful nation, only kept from the war-path by a
more powerful but mysterious chief.  The Government sent an Indian
agent to treat with them, in its usual half-paternal, half-
aggressive, and wholly inconsistent policy.  Elijah, who still
retained the imitative sense and adaptability to surroundings which
belong to most lazy, impressible natures, and in striped yellow and
vermilion features looked the chief he personated, met the agent
with silent and becoming gravity.  The council was carried on by
signs.  Never before had an Indian treaty been entered into with
such perfect knowledge of the intentions and designs of the whites
by the Indians, and such profound ignorance of the qualities of the
Indians by the whites.  It need scarcely be said that the treaty
was an unquestionable Indian success.  They did not give up their
arable lands; what they did sell to the agent they refused to
exchange for extravagant-priced shoddy blankets, worthless guns,
damp powder, and mouldy meal.  They took pay in dollars, and were
thus enabled to open more profitable commerce with the traders at
the settlements for better goods and better bargains; they simply
declined beads, whiskey, and Bibles at any price.  The result was
that the traders found it profitable to protect them from their
countrymen, and the chances of wantonly shooting down a possible
valuable customer stopped the old indiscriminate rifle-practice.
The Indians were allowed to cultivate their fields in peace.
Elijah purchased for them a few agricultural implements.  The
catching, curing, and smoking of salmon became an important branch
of trade.  They waxed prosperous and rich; they lost their nomadic
habits--a centralized settlement bearing the external signs of an
Indian village took the place of their old temporary encampments,
but the huts were internally an improvement on the old wigwams.
The dried fish were banished from the tent-poles to long sheds
especially constructed for that purpose.  The sweat-house was no
longer utilized for worldly purposes.  The wise and mighty Elijah
did not attempt to reform their religion, but to preserve it in its
integrity.

That these improvements and changes were due to the influence of
one man was undoubtedly true, but that he was necessarily a
superior man did not follow.  Elijah's success was due partly to
the fact that he had been enabled to impress certain negative
virtues, which were part of his own nature, upon a community
equally constituted to receive them.  Each was strengthened by the
recognition in each other of the unexpected value of those
qualities; each acquired a confidence begotten of their success.
"He-hides-his-face," as Elijah Martin was known to the tribe after
the episode of the released captives, was really not so much of an
autocrat as many constitutional rulers.

        .        .        .        .        .        .

Two years of tranquil prosperity passed.  Elijah Martin, foundling,
outcast, without civilized ties or relationship of any kind,
forgotten by his countrymen, and lifted into alien power, wealth,
security, and respect, became--homesick!

It was near the close of a summer afternoon.  He was sitting at the
door of his lodge, which overlooked, on one side, the far-shining
levels of the Pacific and, on the other, the slow descent to the
cultivated meadows and banks of the Minyo River, that debouched
through a waste of salt-marsh, beach-grass, sand-dunes, and foamy
estuary into the ocean.  The headland, or promontory--the only
eminence of the Minyo territory--had been reserved by him for his
lodge, partly on account of its isolation from the village at its
base, and partly for the view it commanded of his territory.  Yet
his wearying and discontented eyes were more often found on the
ocean, as a possible highway of escape from his irksome position,
than on the plain and the distant range of mountains, so closely
connected with the nearer past and his former detractors.  In his
vague longing he had no desire to return to them, even in triumph
in his present security there still lingered a doubt of his ability
to cope with the old conditions.  It was more like his easy,
indolent nature--which revived in his prosperity--to trust to this
least practical and remote solution of his trouble.  His
homesickness was as vague as his plan for escape from it; he did
not know exactly what he regretted, but it was probably some life
he had not enjoyed, some pleasure that had escaped his former
incompetency and poverty.

He had sat thus a hundred times, as aimlessly blinking at the vast
possibilities of the shining sea beyond, turning his back upon the
nearer and more practicable mountains, lulled by the far-off
beating of monotonous rollers, the lonely cry of the curlew and
plover, the drowsy changes of alternate breaths of cool, fragrant
reeds and warm, spicy sands that blew across his eyelids, and
succumbed to sleep, as he had done a hundred times before.  The
narrow strips of colored cloth, insignia of his dignity, flapped
lazily from his tent-poles, and at last seemed to slumber with him;
the shadows of the leaf-tracery thrown by the bay-tree, on the
ground at his feet, scarcely changed its pattern.  Nothing moved
but the round, restless, berry-like eyes of Wachita, his child-
wife, the former heroine of the incident with the captive packers,
who sat near her lord, armed with a willow wand, watchful of
intruding wasps, sand-flies, and even the more ostentatious advances
of a rotund and clerical-looking humble-bee, with his monotonous
homily.  Content, dumb, submissive, vacant, at such times, Wachita,
debarred her husband's confidences through the native customs and
his own indifferent taciturnity, satisfied herself by gazing at him
with the wondering but ineffectual sympathy of a faithful dog.
Unfortunately for Elijah her purely mechanical ministration could
not prevent a more dangerous intrusion upon his security.

He awoke with a light start, and eyes that gradually fixed upon the
woman a look of returning consciousness.  Wachita pointed timidly
to the village below.

"The Messenger of the Great White Father has come to-day, with his
wagons and horses; he would see the chief of the Minyos, but I
would not disturb my lord."

Elijah's brow contracted.  Relieved of its characteristic metaphor,
he knew that this meant that the new Indian agent had made his
usual official visit, and had exhibited the usual anxiety to see
the famous chieftain.

"Good!" he said.  "White Rabbit [his lieutenant] will see the
Messenger and exchange gifts.  It is enough."

"The white messenger has brought his wangee [white] woman with him.
They would look upon the face of him who hides it," continued
Wachita, dubiously.  "They would that Wachita should bring them
nearer to where my lord is, that they might see him when he knew it
not."

Elijah glanced moodily at his wife, with the half suspicion with
which he still regarded her alien character.  "Then let Wachita go
back to the squaws and old women, and let her hide herself with
them until the wangee strangers are gone," he said curtly.  "I have
spoken.  Go!"

Accustomed to these abrupt dismissals, which did not necessarily
indicate displeasure, Wachita disappeared without a word.  Elijah,
who had risen, remained for a few moments leaning against the tent-
poles, gazing abstractedly toward the sea.  The bees droned
uninterruptedly in his ears, the far-off roll of the breakers came
to him distinctly; but suddenly, with greater distinctness, came
the murmur of a woman's voice.

"He don't look savage a bit!  Why, he's real handsome."

"Hush! you--" said a second voice, in a frightened whisper.

"But if he DID hear he couldn't understand," returned the first
voice.  A suppressed giggle followed.

Luckily, Elijah's natural and acquired habits of repression suited
the emergency.  He did not move, although he felt the quick blood
fly to his face, and the voice of the first speaker had suffused
him with a strange and delicious anticipation.  He restrained
himself, though the words she had naively dropped were filling him
with new and tremulous suggestion.  He was motionless, even while
he felt that the vague longing and yearning which had possessed him
hitherto was now mysteriously taking some unknown form and action.

The murmuring ceased.  The humble-bees' drone again became
ascendant--a sudden fear seized him.  She was GOING; he should
never see her!  While he had stood there a dolt and sluggard, she
had satisfied her curiosity and stolen away.  With a sudden
yielding to impulse, he darted quickly in the direction where he
had heard her voice.  The thicket moved, parted, crackled, and
rustled, and then undulated thirty feet before him in a long wave,
as if from the passage of some lithe, invisible figure.  But at the
same moment a little cry, half of alarm, half of laughter, broke
from his very feet, and a bent manzanito-bush, relaxed by frightened
fingers, flew back against his breast.  Thrusting it hurriedly
aside, his stooping, eager face came almost in contact with the
pink, flushed cheeks and tangled curls of a woman's head.  He was so
near, her moist and laughing eyes almost drowned his eager glance;
her parted lips and white teeth were so close to his that her quick
breath took away his own.

She had dropped on one knee, as her companion fled, expecting he
would overlook her as he passed, but his direct onset had extracted
the feminine outcry.  Yet even then she did not seem greatly
frightened.

"It's only a joke, sir," she said, coolly lifting herself to her
feet by grasping his arm.  "I'm Mrs. Dall, the Indian agent's wife.
They said you wouldn't let anybody see you--and I determined I
would.  That's all!"  She stopped, threw back her tangled curls
behind her ears, shook the briers and thorns from her skirt, and
added: "Well, I reckon you aren't afraid of a woman, are you?  So
no harm's done.  Good-by!"

She drew slightly back as if to retreat, but the elasticity of the
manzanito against which she was leaning threw her forward once
more.  He again inhaled the perfume of her hair; he saw even the
tiny freckles that darkened her upper lip and brought out the
moist, red curve below.  A sudden recollection of a playmate of his
vagabond childhood flashed across his mind; a wild inspiration of
lawlessness, begotten of his past experience, his solitude, his
dictatorial power, and the beauty of the woman before him, mounted
to his brain.  He threw his arms passionately around her, pressed
his lips to hers, and with a half-hysterical laugh drew back and
disappeared in the thicket.

Mrs. Dall remained for an instant dazed and stupefied.  Then she
lifted her arm mechanically, and with her sleeve wiped her bruised
mouth and the ochre-stain that his paint had left, like blood, upon
her cheek.  Her laughing face had become instantly grave, but not
from fear; her dark eyes had clouded, but not entirely with
indignation.  She suddenly brought down her hand sharply against
her side with a gesture of discovery.

"That's no Injun!" she said, with prompt decision.  The next minute
she plunged back into the trail again, and the dense foliage once
more closed around her.  But as she did so the broad, vacant face
and the mutely wondering eyes of Wachita rose, like a placid moon,
between the branches of a tree where they had been hidden, and
shone serenely and impassively after her.

        .        .        .        .        .        .

A month elapsed.  But it was a month filled with more experience to
Elijah than his past two years of exaltation.  In the first few
days following his meeting with Mrs. Dall, he was possessed by
terror, mingled with flashes of desperation, at the remembrance of
his rash imprudence.  His recollection of extravagant frontier
chivalry to womankind, and the swift retribution of the insulted
husband or guardian, alternately filled him with abject fear or
extravagant recklessness.  At times prepared for flight, even to
the desperate abandonment of himself in a canoe to the waters of
the Pacific: at times he was on the point of inciting his braves to
attack the Indian agency and precipitate the war that he felt would
be inevitable.  As the days passed, and there seemed to be no
interruption to his friendly relations with the agency, with that
relief a new, subtle joy crept into Elijah's heart.  The image of
the agent's wife framed in the leafy screen behind his lodge, the
perfume of her hair and breath mingled with the spicing of the bay,
the brief thrill and tantalization of the stolen kiss still haunted
him.  Through his long, shy abstention from society, and his two
years of solitary exile, the fresh beauty of this young Western
wife, in whom the frank artlessness of girlhood still lingered,
appeared to him like a superior creation.  He forgot his vague
longings in the inception of a more tangible but equally
unpractical passion.  He remembered her unconscious and spontaneous
admiration of him; he dared to connect it with her forgiving
silence.  If she had withheld her confidences from her husband,
he could hope--he knew not exactly what!

One afternoon Wachita put into his hand a folded note.  With an
instinctive presentiment of its contents, Elijah turned red and
embarrassed in receiving it from the woman who was recognized as
his wife.  But the impassive, submissive manner of this household
drudge, instead of touching his conscience, seemed to him a vulgar
and brutal acceptance of the situation that dulled whatever
compunction he might have had.  He opened the note and read
hurriedly as follows:--

"You took a great freedom with me the other day, and I am justified
in taking one with you now.  I believe you understand English as
well as I do.  If you want to explain that and your conduct to me,
I will be at the same place this afternoon.  My friend will
accompany me, but she need not hear what you have to say."

Elijah read the letter, which might have been written by an
ordinary school-girl, as if it had conveyed the veiled rendezvous
of a princess.  The reserve, caution, and shyness which had been
the safeguard of his weak nature were swamped in a flow of immature
passion.  He flew to the interview with the eagerness and
inexperience of first love.  He was completely at her mercy.  So
utterly was he subjugated by her presence that she did not even run
the risk of his passion.  Whatever sentiment might have mingled
with her curiosity, she was never conscious of a necessity to guard
herself against it.  At this second meeting she was in full
possession of his secret.  He had told her everything; she had
promised nothing in return--she had not even accepted anything.
Even her actual after-relations to the denouement of his passion
are still shrouded in mystery.

Nevertheless, Elijah lived two weeks on the unsubstantial memory of
this meeting.  What might have followed could not be known, for at
the end of that time an outrage--so atrocious that even the
peaceful Minyos were thrilled with savage indignation--was
committed on the outskirts of the village.  An old chief, who had
been specially selected to deal with the Indian agent, and who kept
a small trading outpost, had been killed and his goods despoiled by
a reckless Redwood packer.  The murderer had coolly said that he
was only "serving out" the tool of a fraudulent imposture on the
Government, and that he dared the arch-impostor himself, the so-
called Minyo chief, to help himself.  A wave of ungovernable fury
surged up to the very tent-poles of Elijah's lodge and demanded
vengeance.  Elijah trembled and hesitated.  In the thraldom of his
selfish passion for Mrs. Dall he dared not contemplate a collision
with her countrymen.  He would have again sought refuge in his
passive, non-committal attitude, but he knew the impersonal
character of Indian retribution and compensation--a sacrifice of
equal value, without reference to the culpability of the victim--
and he dreaded some spontaneous outbreak.  To prevent the enforced
expiation of the crime by some innocent brother packer, he was
obliged to give orders for the pursuit and arrest of the criminal,
secretly hoping for his escape or the interposition of some
circumstance to avert his punishment.  A day of sullen expectancy
to the old men and squaws in camp, of gloomy anxiety to Elijah
alone in his lodge, followed the departure of the braves on the
war-path.  It was midnight when they returned.  Elijah, who from
his habitual reserve and the accepted etiquette of his exalted
station had remained impassive in his tent, only knew from the
guttural rejoicings of the squaws that the expedition had been
successful and the captive was in their hands.  At any other time
he might have thought it an evidence of some growing scepticism of
his infallibility of judgment and a diminution of respect that they
did not confront him with their prisoner.  But he was too glad to
escape from the danger of exposure and possible arraignment of his
past life by the desperate captive, even though it might not have
been understood by the spectators.  He reflected that the omission
might have arisen from their recollection of his previous aversion
to a retaliation on other prisoners.  Enough that they would wait
his signal for the torture and execution at sunrise the next day.

The night passed slowly.  It is more than probable that the selfish
and ignoble torments of the sleepless and vacillating judge were
greater than those of the prisoner who dozed at the stake between
his curses.  Yet it was part of Elijah's fatal weakness that his
kinder and more human instincts were dominated even at that moment
by his lawless passion for the Indian agent's wife, and his
indecision as to the fate of his captive was as much due to this
preoccupation as to a selfish consideration of her relations to the
result.  He hated the prisoner for his infelicitous and untimely
crime, yet he could not make up his mind to his death.  He paced
the ground before his lodge in dishonorable incertitude.  The small
eyes of the submissive Wachita watched him with vague solicitude.

Toward morning he was struck by a shameful inspiration.  He would
creep unperceived to the victim's side, unloose his bonds, and bid
him fly to the Indian agency.  There he was to inform Mrs. Dall
that her husband's safety depended upon his absenting himself for a
few days, but that she was to remain and communicate with Elijah.
She would understand everything, perhaps; at least she would know
that the prisoner's release was to please her, but even if she did
not, no harm would be done, a white man's life would be saved, and
his real motive would not be suspected.  He turned with feverish
eagerness to the lodge.  Wachita had disappeared--probably to join
the other women.  It was well; she would not suspect him.

The tree to which the doomed man was bound was, by custom, selected
nearest the chief's lodge, within its sacred enclosure, with no
other protection than that offered by its reserved seclusion and
the outer semicircle of warriors' tents before it.  To escape, the
captive would therefore have to pass beside the chief's lodge to
the rear and descend the hill toward the shore.  Elijah would show
him the way, and make it appear as if he had escaped unaided.  As
he glided into the shadow of a group of pines, he could dimly
discern the outline of the destined victim, secured against one of
the larger trees in a sitting posture, with his head fallen forward
on his breast as if in sleep.  But at the same moment another
figure glided out from the shadow and approached the fatal tree.
It was Wachita!

He stopped in amazement.  But in another instant a flash of
intelligence made it clear.  He remembered her vague uneasiness and
solicitude at his agitation, her sudden disappearance; she had
fathomed his perplexity, as she had once before.  Of her own accord
she was going to release the prisoner!  The knife to cut his cords
glittered in her hand.  Brave and faithful animal!

He held his breath as he drew nearer.  But, to his horror, the
knife suddenly flashed in the air and darted down, again and again,
upon the body of the helpless man.  There was a convulsive
struggle, but no outcry, and the next moment the body hung limp
and inert in its cords.  Elijah would himself have fallen, half-
fainting, against a tree, but, by a revulsion of feeling, came the
quick revelation that the desperate girl had rightly solved the
problem!  She had done what he ought to have done--and his loyalty
and manhood were preserved.  That conviction and the courage to
act upon it--to have called the sleeping braves to witness his
sacrifice--would have saved him, but it was ordered otherwise.

As the girl rapidly passed him he threw out his hand and seized her
wrist.  "Who did you do this for?" he demanded.

"For you," she said, stupidly.

"And why?"

"Because you no kill him--you love his squaw."

"HIS squaw!"  He staggered back.  A terrible suspicion flashed upon
him.  He dashed Wachita aside and ran to the tree.  It was the body
of the Indian agent!  Aboriginal justice had been satisfied.  The
warriors had not caught the MURDERER, but, true to their idea of
vicarious retribution, had determined upon the expiatory sacrifice
of a life as valuable and innocent as the one they had lost.

        .        .        .        .        .        .

"So the Gov'rment hev at last woke up and wiped out them cussed
Digger Minyos," said Snapshot Harry, as he laid down the newspaper,
in the brand-new saloon of the brand-new town of Redwood.  "I see
they've stampeded both banks of the Minyo River, and sent off a lot
to the reservation.  I reckon the soldiers at Fort Cass got sick o'
sentiment after those hounds killed the Injun agent, and are
beginning to agree with us that the only 'good Injun' is a dead
one."

"And it turns out that that wonderful chief, that them two packers
used to rave about, woz about as big a devil ez any, and tried to
run off with the agent's wife, only the warriors killed her.  I'd
like to know what become of him.  Some says he was killed, others
allow that he got away.  I've heerd tell that he was originally
some kind of Methodist preacher!--a kind o' saint that got a sort
o' spiritooal holt on the old squaws and children."

"Why don't you ask old Skeesicks?  I see he's back here ag'in--and
grubbin' along at a dollar a day on tailin's.  He's been somewhere
up north, they say."

"What, Skeesicks? that shiftless, o'n'ry cuss!  You bet he wusn't
anywhere where there was danger of fighting.  Why, you might as
well hev suspected HIM of being the big chief himself!  There he
comes--ask him."

And the laughter was so general that Elijah Martin--alias
Skeesicks--lounging shyly into the bar-room, joined in it weakly.





End of Project Gutenberg Etext A Drift from Redwood Camp, by Bret Harte