CHAPTER X

From the hour Nophaie gave up his sheep to the Pahutes in payment for their care of Gekin Yashi he became a nomad–a wanderer of the sage.

With responsibility removed from his life, he was no longer tied to his lonely upland home–a fact that at first seemed grievous. But he was soon to discover how his loneliness had been a kind of selfishness which had kept him aloof from his people. In the past he had spent only a small part of his time among the Indians, and that upon his rides to Kaidab or to Mesa and return. How little had he really helped them compared with what he might have done! Looked at now, he found this owing to his love of being alone, of wandering with his sheep in the sage, of brooding over his strange life; and also to the sensitiveness with which he realized that, though he could go among his people, he could not become a part of them.

A few rides from hogan to hogan showed Nophaie that his status among the Nopahs had undergone a remarkable change. Not at once did he grasp what it was to which he must attribute this welcome change. At Etenia’s home, however, the subtle fact came out in the jealousy of Etenia’s daughter–she and all the Nopahs had learned of his abduction of Gekin Yashi. Nophaie was much concerned over this discovery, for it augured ill for the seclusion of the Little Beauty of the tribe. Upon consulting the old Indian, he learned that the news had traveled far and wide across the ranges, from rider to rider, from hogan to hogan, from lip to lip. Soon every Nopah on the reservation would become acquainted with the great feat of Nophaie–who had stolen Gekin Yashi from Mesa. Nophaie had been born of chieftains; he was now a chief of wisdom and valor. The spirit of the Nopahs still lived. The glory and the dream were gone, but there still lived a man of the olden time, a master. Etenia swore there was not one Indian in all the tribe who would betray Gekin Yashi. Perhaps some of the sneaking, crawling Nokis, in fear of Morgan and Blucher, would trail Gekin Yashi to her hiding place. But every Nopah gloried in the deed of Nophaie. He was a hero. All the greater Indian now because he had used his white man’s brain to save the maiden of proud Do etin!

“Nophaie will marry Gekin Yashi now,” concluded Etenia, and all his enmity seemed gone. He honored Nophaie and feasted him, and had his braves sit round the hogan fire and sing the beautiful Nopah legends of love and courage. Nophaie was powerless to correct this impression that had gone abroad. All Nopahs, and Pahutes, too, took it for granted that the Little Beauty was destined to be Nophaie’s wife. All in a day, it seemed, his fame had been transformed. Every Indian knew Nophaie’s story, and all the aloofness and scorn and disgust engendered by his white education would be now as if they had never been.

Etenia knew his people. Nophaie had put into actual deed the secret longing of every Indian. In a week of riding over the country Nophaie had impellingly forced upon him the truth of Etenia’s judgment. Indian boy, maiden, brave, chief, medicine man–all revered him. The Nopahs had been warriors. There still survived in them worship of the strong, the courageous, the fighter. The youths of the tribe looked up to him as one whom their elders held to be a master, one whose greatness would one day be told to them.

Nophaie rode far to keep his next appointment with Marian at Mesa, and for the whole hour of their meeting he talked of the change that had come through his taking Gekin Yashi away from the power of the missionary. Telling her seemed to clarify the vague and strange conceptions of what had happened to him. Then her instant joy was uplifting.

“Nophaie, now your great opportunity has come,” she said, with glad and earnest eyes on his. “You can be a power among your people. But keep secret– that their faith is not yours.”

“I will,” he replied. In just those few words she illumined the wondering, brooding subjectiveness of his mind. Whatever he was, opportunity now smiled upon him, and it seemed great. He would be listened to and followed.

“Now let me talk–for soon I must go,” said Marian.

“No one suspects you. All they know at the agency is that Gekin Yashi has disappeared. Blucher did not care. But Morgan was furious. I heard him raving. This will make bad blood between them. And Do etin will suffer. I fear for him. What a grand old Indian! He thrilled me–so calm, so somber and aloof, before those men. He answered every question put to him, yet he seemed not to lie!

“‘Do you think she ran off?’ demanded Morgan.

“‘Yes,’ answered Do etin.

“‘Where?’

“‘Gekin Yashi’s tracks led north off the road to Mesa–and disappeared in the sands.’

“‘You’ll help us find her–get her back?’

“‘No.’

“‘Yes you will!’

“‘Do etin will die before he hunts for Gekin Yashi.’”

“Marian, let me tell you,” returned Nophaie, “Do etin said as much to me,” returned Nophaie.

“Oh, I fear for Do etin,” cried Marian. “They will do him harm. After Do etin left, Morgan ordered me out of the office. ‘Get out, you white-faced cat!’ he shouted. And he pushed me out and slammed the door. I heard him say: ‘Blucher, when we find this Indian hussy you’ve got to enforce that rule. And if Do etin doesn’t put his thumb mark on my paper it’ll go bad for him.–And you’ll get the steam roller!'... Blucher replied, ‘The hell you say?’ And Morgan yelled back: ‘Yes, the hell I say! I’ve put that steam roller under eleven former agents of this reservation and I’m good for a full dozen. Me, and the Old Book back of me, are just that strong!'... Then they quieted down and I could not distinguish what they said, but they were talking for a long time. I think you ought to advise Do etin to move to the very farthest point on the reservation.”

“He would not go a step,” replied Nophaie.

“Then indeed I fear for him,” said Marian. “It was the look of Morgan– the tone of his voice. The terrible nature of the man seemed unmasked. Blucher, too, is growing harder. He is under a strain. I think the war in Europe is on his mind.”

Nophaie returned by way of Red Sandy, where at the trading post he was surrounded by Nopahs he had never seen before and made to realize his importance. The trader there was buying wool at fifty cents a pound and complaining about the scarcity of it. The Indians did not need money. They were not making any blankets. Nophaie was struck with the evidence of prosperity and independence exhibited by these lowland Nopahs. None of their silver trappings were in pawn to the trader–which was an unparalleled sign of good times.

Riding off across the sand to the northward with some of these Indians, Nophaie covered twenty miles and more before he dropped the last horseman at his hogan door. Everywhere the gray-green benches were spotted with flocks of sheep and little bands of mustangs, and cattle. At every hogan the women crowded to the door to peep out at him, smiling and whispering. One old squaw elbowed her way out.

“Nophaie, look at Nadglean nas pah,” she said, with great dignity, “who tended your mother at your birth. Nadglean nas pah washed your eyes. She lives to see you, Nophaie, the Warrior.... Come, feast with us.”

Nophaie stayed there, keen to learn of his mother, grateful to feel stealing over him a closer touch with his people. By nightfall, when the feast was served, the hogan had no room for more Indians. They ate for hours and sang until late in the night. The occasion seemed one of honor and joy to these Indians who delighted in Nophaie’s company. Many a dusky eye shone the brighter for his words.

Next morning he rode on his way, more impressed than ever before with the prosperity and happiness of the Nopahs. It seemed he now could reasonably calculate that all the twenty thousand Nopahs of the reservation were on the high tide of well-being. Almost, his hopes rose to a point of believing what Nadglean nas pah had said; “Now all is well.” Only the wise old men like Etenia and Do etin saw the future. Most of the simple-minded Indians lived on in the present, taking their wealth as a matter of their worthiness, eating, sleeping, riding, shepherding the days away, unmindful of the handwriting of the white man like a shadow on the sage.

Night overtook Nophaie on the crest of the great heaving slope that led to the upland country. He had made a short-cut from Shibbet taa, westward toward Etenia’s range. His horse was weary. Nophaie turned it loose in the sage and made his bed under a thick-branched cedar. For his meal he ate meat and corn given him at the last hogan.

All that was truly Indian in him beat in his blood and stirred in his soul here in the solitude and the loneliness. He was miles from any trail he had ever ridden. Only sight of Nothsis Ahn could give him his bearings. He was lost in the desert, reckoning with a white man’s reason, but the red nature of him whispered he could never be lost. He lay down on cedar boughs, with a saddle under his head, a blanket over him, and peered up at the white stars. The silence was of the desert locking its elements in repose. There was no sound, no life but the breath of nature, the penetrating power of an invisible spirit hovering over all, abiding in the rocks, floating in the fragrance of the sage.

For long Nophaie lay with the absorbed senses of the Indian tranced in their singular capacity of absolute thoughtlessness. He did not think. He felt. He had this Indian inheritance, unknown to the white man. Though he did not realize it in a thinking act, he was unutterably happy while this trance lasted. He saw. The vast star-studded dome of the blue sky arched over him, endless, boundless, only obstructed by the horizon line. He saw the shooting stars gleam across the heavens. He saw through the blue depths to the infinite beyond. He saw the shadow of gahd, the cedar, against the sky; and the gray obscurity of the sage and the dim hills, spectral, like hills in the dawn of the earth. He smelled the dry pine-scented dead and fallen leafage under him, the woody cedar, the taint of gophers in the holes of the dusty ground, the fragrance of the sage, the faint hint of rain wafted on the still air from far- off storm, the horse odor of his saddle, the warmth of his body. He tasted the breath of living things and the death of the desert, all in the bits of cedar and sage he unconsciously chewed. His ears drank in the sounds of the silence– nothing but the vast low thrumming of nature, which might have been the beat of blood in his breast. And he felt all the deathlessness and immortality around him, the link between his living frame and the dust of bones of his simian progenitors, felt life all about him in stones and woods, in the night shadows, in the mystic dim distance, felt the vast earth under him and the measureless void above as parts of his being.

Then across his idle, vacant, opaque mind suddenly shot thought and memory and image. He saw Marian’s beautiful face–the crown of golden hair–the eyes of azure blue. His love surged up, like a flood undammed. And he remembered he was Nophaie, wanderer of the sage, outlaw of his people, an infidel, without home or kin or flock, the poorest of Nopahs, doomed to illusion, beating his life against the bars of alien hate.

Upon reaching the upland pasture under Nothsis Ahn, Nophaie herded his horses into a band and drove them out on the Pahute trail. That night he camped down in the deep canyon with the family who lived there, finding in this remote place that his fame had arrived before him. Welcome was his in every Indian habitation. At sunrise he headed his horses up the overhanging colored slope of earth and rock, out on the cedared flats, down into the monument country where Oljato and the range of his boyhood called with poignant sorrow and regret, and across the red-and-yellow desert to Kaidab.

“Sure I’ll buy your horses,” said Withers, in reply to Nophaie’s query. “What will you take for them?”

Nophaie hesitated a moment, then named a figure.

“That’s not enough,” replied Withers. “I’ll give you five more on each horse. What’ll you take–cash or trade?”

Nophaie took part of the deal in new outfit for himself, which included a gun.

“Reckon you’re going to do what Blucher told Wolterson,–‘ride around,’” said Withers, with a laugh. “You can do some riding here for us. I’m glad you came. Mrs. Withers was about to send for you.”

Nophaie wondered what the trader’s wife could want with him, unless for something in connection with Marian. Also he was curious to see if she had any knowledge of his rise to fame among the Indians through his taking Gekin Yashi from the school. Mrs. Withers was glad to see him and was eager to hear news of Marian, but she had heard nothing of his abducting Do etin’s daughter.

“Nophaie, I would like you to help us here in a little job–our kind of missionary work,” she said, presently. “Do you know this half-crazy Indian we call Shoie?”

“No,” replied Nophaie.

“Well, he claimed to have bewitched a squaw who died. And he has told two other squaws that he means to work his spell upon them. The first one, Nolgoshie, the loping woman, got to thinking about this, and she fell sick. I’m afraid it will kill her. I want you to help me get Shoie to say he will remove his spell. Then ride over to Nolgoshie’s hogan and tell her. The other squaw is the wife of Beleanth do de jodie. He is a rich Nopah and a good man. I’m afraid his wife will also get to brooding about this spell. We want you to tell her that it’s the same thing that you called Morgan’s teaching.”

“What was that?” inquired Nophaie, curiously.

“Bunk!” exclaimed the trader’s wife, with a twinkle in her eyes. “That word has spread all over the reservation. I’ve had a dozen Indians ask me what bunk meant. You see loud-mouthed Jay Lord told it in the trading post at Mesa, before some Indians. That’s how it got out. I wouldn’t commit myself to calling Morgan’s preaching bunk, but that surely describes the talk of Shoie.”

“I thought Jay Lord was one of Morgan’s right-hand men,” observed Nophaie, reflectively.

“No; he’s Blucher’s tool. For that matter, they all hate one another.– Now, will you stay here at the post for a few days and help me to deliver these squaws from Shoie’s spell?”

“Mrs. Withers, do you really believe these Indian women can fall ill and die of such a thing?”

“Believe it? I know it. It happens often. To think evil is to be evil, for an Indian. If you can make any Indian think a thing it is true for him.”

“Yes, I know. But I never heard of a half-crazy Indian casting a spell.”

“Nophaie, it will take years before you learn the superstition of your people. You never will understand wholly. Remember, you have lived your life away from them.”

“I can influence this Shoie,” he replied, and then briefly related what had happened in Wolterson’s yard at Mesa, his interview with Do etin, his taking Gekin Yashi away into hiding, and the strange reaction of his tribe.

Mrs. Withers grew intensely animated, almost excited, and she seemed at the halfway point between elation and anxiety.

“So that was it!” she exclaimed. “I’ve been wondering about this sudden interest in you. Well, Nophaie, there is no other single thing you could have done to establish a great name for yourself among the Indians. That will put you high up. So in one way it is good, for no matter what happens, your name is made. But it is bad in other ways. They will get Gekin Yashi. Some of the Nokis will trail her. If Blucher finds out your part in it he will arrest you.–And when they do find Gekin Yashi I wonder how Do etin will act.”

Thereupon Nophaie told of Do etin’s anger and his stern ultimatum.

“That is very bad,” she said gravely. “Do etin can’t keep Gekin Yashi from going to Morgan’s chapel, once that rule is put into effect. You see, the Indians are really prisoners on this reservation. They have to obey the government. If they don’t they will be forced to.... That is bad. Do etin will never break his word or give in. It means jail for him–or worse.”

Nophaie took some time over the selection of his outfit, especially the gun. He felt himself a novice in the use of firearms, and after considerable deliberation he decided a small weapon he could conceal if desirable, or carry on his belt, would be best for him.

“Here’s your man Shoie,” said Withers, coming into the post.

Nophaie approached this Indian with interest and something of disgust, and yet with a strange, vague reluctance. This last must have emanated from the early mental associations of Nophaie’s boyhood, intimations of which often stirred him to wonder and doubt.

Shoie appeared to be an Indian of perhaps twenty years of age, a big- headed brave with bushy hair, from which he derived his name. His face might have impressed a superstitious squaw, but Nophaie saw it as that of a vain, sullen Indian, lacking in intelligence. Shoie’s garb was not that of a prosperous Nopah.

He was evidently flattered to be singled out of the group of Indians, and showed the same deference for Nophaie that had become universal. Nophaie affected to be impressed with Shoie, bought cigarettes and canned fruit and cakes for him, and spent some time with him before broaching the subject of Shoie’s spell of bewitchment. Then Shoie denied that he had cast a spell upon any squaw. But after some persuasion he confessed it, saying these women were possessed of evil spirits which he wanted to exorcise. Nophaie at length induced him to say that he would remove the spell.

Nophaie decided at once to ride out to the hogans of these Indians and take Shoie with him. When Mrs. Withers had been informed she asked to see Shoie, and conversed with him for a moment.

“Maybe it will work,” she said to Nophaie, “but I have my doubts. Shoie is much impressed. He thinks he’s a big fellow. He sees that he can make himself felt. Now what will happen is this. He’ll do as you want to-day. But to- morrow or some other day he’ll tell the Indians he has put back the spell. You see, he’s just demented enough to make the superstitious Indians afraid of him.”

Nolgoshie, the loping woman, lived out across the desert, in a canyon that opened into the mountain mesa. Hogans were numerous under the looming wall of this upland. Nophaie made rather a ceremonious visit out of this trip, talking with Indians and asking some to accompany him. Nolgoshie owned many sheep. She was an expert blanket weaver. Her husband had gone off to some other part of the reservation. Nophaie found her tended by female relatives or friends. Before he entered the hogan he called these women out and told his errand, indicating Shoie, who stood by, hugely alive to his importance. The women were glad; they cast dark and fearful glances at this Indian possessor of witchcraft. Nophaie thought best not to take Shoie into the hogan with him.

Nolgoshie lay on her blankets, a squaw still young and not uncomely, and for all Nophaie could tell she looked perfectly healthy. But she was sick in her mind.

“Nophaie has brought Shoie. He is outside,” said Nophaie, impressively. “He will take away the spell.”

The squaw stared at Nophaie and then at her attendants, all of whom nodded vehemently and corroborated his statement. The effect on Nolgoshie was magical. Her face lost its set solemn gloom. Her eyes dilated and she sat up. Nophaie talked to her for a few moments, assuring her that the evil spirit had departed and would not return. Nolgoshie grew better even while he was there. Nophaie left, marveling at the effect of thought upon the mind and body of a human being.

He rode with Shoie to the far end of that pasture-land, some ten miles to the westward of Kaidab. Beleanth do de jodie was at home, much concerned about his wife. She was very ill. The medicine man had done her no good. Nophaie had audience with her also, and saw at once that it was precisely the same kind of case as Nolgoshie’s, only this squaw had thought herself into a more dangerous condition. Nophaie was not sure that he reached her understanding. She, at least, showed no sign of improvement. Nophaie went out to find Beleanth do de jodie pressing presents upon Shoie, an unwise proceeding, judged in the light of Mrs. Wither’s words.

Next day a messenger arrived in Kaidab with news that Beleanth do de jodie’s wife had died. This gave Nophaie a profound shock. He exerted himself in every possible way to keep Nolgoshie from finding out. In vain! Her own attendants, in spite of advice and importunity and threats, told her of the death of the other woman who had been under Shoie’s evil spell.

Nolgoshie fell back into the panic of superstitious fears. Nophaie besought her with all the eloquence and persuasion he could command. She only grew worse. Then he galloped off in search of Shoie. At last he found him, on the very moment bragging he had put back the spell upon Beleanth do de jodie’s wife, and intended to do the same for Nolgoshie.

“Come back with me,” demanded Nophaie. “So that Nolgoshie may hear from your own lips the spell is broken.”

“No!” returned Shoie, sullenly, with an uplift of his bushy head.

“You will come,” replied Nophaie, sharply, and he dismounted.

The Indians present, all except Shoie, rose in respect to Nophaie. An old chief, who had evidently been listening, put his head out of a hogan.

“Nophaie is master,” he said. “Shoie is an Indian with twisted mind. He is not a medicine man. His spell is a lie.”

Nophaie knocked Shoie down and beat him, and dragging him to his feet shoved him back to his horse.

“Get up,” he ordered.

Nophaie forced the bleeding and frightened Indian to ride with him to the hogan of Nolgoshie. But they arrived too late to lend any light to that darkened brain. Nolgoshie was raving.

Nophaie drove Shoie off with a threat to kill him if ever again he claimed to cast a spell of witchcraft on an Indian. Upon Nophaie’s return to Kaidab with the news Mrs. Withers expressed sorrow, but not surprise.

“I knew just that would happen,” she added. “Nolgoshie will die.”

And next day came the messenger with news of her death and that none of the Indians would bury her. Nophaie took this duty upon himself.