Abandoned: A Tale of the Plains

THE level rays of the morning sun shone in the faces of a man and a woman sitting side by side on the ground. Before them the hillside sloped down to a great sheet of brilliantly blue water, from the midst of which rose two remarkable black pyramids of volcanic rock, to whose prominence in the landscape Pyramid Lake owed its name. From its shores, crowding it closely, rose a succession of verdureless hills, augmented to mountains on the horizon. In the foreground they were dun-colored ; as they receded, they became brown and crimson, blue and purple, under a marvelous play of light and shadow. Not a tree was in sight in all the wide expanse which vision commanded. Nature had drawn this landscape in pastel, laying the crude colors on in patches, without blending, every outline hard and bright. The man was very old, and decrepit with rheumatism ; the woman was much younger and more robust, but stone-blind. She was weeping bitterly, the tears running over her cheeks from her sightless eyes. The man was silent, following with his gaze a ragged troop of men, women, and children who were fast disappearing from his view on the road which wound around the margin of the lake. The men slouched along at their ease, accompanied by their evillooking dogs. The women were mostly bowed under heavy burdens, and led children by the hand or carried them upon their backs. A spavined old horse limped painfully along, bearing tent-poles and miscellaneous dunnage. Nature had colored her humanity vividly with red to match the landscape, for they were Indians.

When the Ishmaelitish group had passed out of sight in the convolutions of the hills, the old man turned to the woman and spoke to her gently. He seemed to be a good deal of a philosopher, and suggested delicately that their fate might have been worse. He recalled to her memory the time, many years before, when they had assisted at the interment of old Kawich : how a white man’s chair had been procured, on which she was seated and bound securely, and borne aloft in procession up the mountain side, ululating her own death-wail as she went; how, still chanting, she had been placed in a cleft of the rocks and walled up carefully, — where doubtless her skeleton sits upright and undisturbed to this day. He reminded her that such a consummation had then seemed quite fitting and proper to them both, and that it was a grace to be thankful for that they at least had air and space in which to make an ending.

But Sinkavata was inconsolable. Circumstances differ so with cases ! Kawich had been old, very old, unreasonably old, and quite helpless; she had neither children nor grandchildren living, and in their pilgrimages who was to carry her about? But had not she, Sinkavata, a daughter of her flesh, able-bodied and capable, and mother of lusty offspring ? Sharper than a serpent’s tooth is the ingratitude of a child, even in savagedom. So the woman wept, not noisily, but with patient, heartbroken sobs, watering with her tears the grave of filial affection.

Some hours passed in this manner, and then old Kobeh rose to his feet with difficulty. “ Come,” he said ; “ the road is before us.” Sinkavata arose also, and her husband assisted her to lift on her shoulders the pack of their small belongings, and adjusted the head-strap around her forehead. Then he handed her her stick, and giving into her hand one end of a rag, of which the other was tied around his wrist, he picked up his own stick, and painfully hobbled down the hillside towards the wagon-road, Sinkavata following. The sun beat down pitilessly, and was reflected with yet more fervent heat from the alkali-seared earth and transparent water ; but these were things to be borne from day to day, and neither of them thought of murmuring. An empty stomach, — that also was a thing to be borne. It was long since either of them had known the fullness of repletion ; and of late their portions had been constantly becoming smaller and smaller. And still, with humanity’s strange persistence, they clung to the Here and Now.

After an hour’s toilsome progress, they reached a place where the road wound around the base of a fantastic mass of black lava which had boiled up in the edge of the water at some period not so long since, geologically considered. Although the sun was now nearly in tlie meridian, on the north side of this solidified bubble of nature’s blowing lay a strip of cool dimness. It was indeed the shadow of a great rock in a weary land, and the wayfarers clambered down to it, the old man heedfully guiding the blind woman’s feet into the clefts which afforded safe foothold.

Here they rested, not speaking themselves, but listening to the water lapping against the face of the rock, and gossiping affably, with a continuous sociable murmur, of cosmic affairs well known to those two old cronies of the ages. Occasionally, an errant waft of air, going by, struck into the conversation and rendered it more animated for a moment; but it immediately lapsed again into its monotonous yet infinitely varied gurgle. However agreeable the shade and coolness and surcease of toil, they were not to be indulged in for any great length of time. The sun, climbing ever higher, momently narrowed the strip of shadow ; and a great thirst took possession of the wayfarers, aggravated in intensity by the lapping and rippling of the water. For notwithstanding the lovely expanse of crystal purity of coloring which spread before them, the thirst must remain unappeased. That inland sea is goodly to look upon, delightful to bathe in, useful to catch fish out of, but not intended for drinking, even by plant life. Around its margin grows no blade of grass or shoot of willow. Like a lidless eye, it lies there in a desert of its own making, radiating hourly into the heated atmosphere the whole volume of a beautiful snow-fed river which pours its priceless limpid treasure into it, and remaining itself always the same, sparkling, alkaline, vividly blue.

“ Come,” said Sinkavata at last; “let us go. I must drink.”

Toilsomely they plodded on another half-hour, when they turned a bend of the shore and came upon a house. In winter-time a stream came down here, through a hollow in the hills, and along its now dry bed grew a few sickly cottonwoods and willows. In front of the house were a well and a watering-trough. Kobeh led his companion to the well, and placed her hands upon the handle of the windlass. She turned with a will, and when the dripping bucket rose to the surface Kobeh steadied it upon the curb, and dipping into it with the tin cup chained to the trough, drank long and deep. Not until his thirst was satisfied did he fill the cup for his mahala, who had waited without a sign of longing or impatience. Then Kobeh led Sinkavata among the willows, where she remained while he went to the woodpile, and with pathetic bent back and weak old arms, barely able to raise the axe to the level of his head, split up an armful of wood. With this as an offering, he hobbled up to the kitchen door, where a sharp-faced but not unkindly-looking little woman was clearing up after the noonday meal. He put the wood in the box and stood in the doorway silently.

The woman looked at him curiously. “ So your folks left you behind ? ” was all she said ; but she put some broken crusts and fragments of fish and potato on a tin plate and handed it to him.

Kobeh was very hungry; he might have sat down on the door-stone and eaten it all himself, but he did not; he limped back into the willows, and shared the feast with Sinkavata with scrupulous fairness.

The two old people remained near the house ; they built themselves a windbreak of willow branches. Sinkavata doing the labor under Kobeh’s direction. Three times a day he carried his offering to the kitchen door, and received the fragments, given more or less grudgingly. The rancher’s wife wanted them for her chickens, — voracious things that came inside the door and snatched the food from the table, if left unguarded ; not so much because they were ill fed as because their gizzards resented the lack of green pasturage and succulent larvæ to which a chicken’s gizzard feels itself entitled. When some of these fishy fowl were killed for the table, Kobeh plucked them for the rancher’s wife; wash-days he led Sinkavata to the door and planted her against a tub, where she rubbed and wrung with right good will. These days they were rewarded with sweetened coffee, delicious beyond all things to the Indian palate. Often the rancher’s wife asked Kobeh why they did not go on to the Reservation. Kobeh’s command of language was insufficient to explain so complicated a matter. Perhaps he did not know himself. But in fact neither he nor Sinkavata had a thought of appealing from Indian custom to Caucasian arbitration. The head man of their clan drew their rations, and if the clan rejected them, what other home or hope had they ? None. On the Reservation they would be outcasts still, and more ignominiously aware of it. So they dwelt among the willows, awaiting fate stolidly.

Sometimes Kobeh looked across wistfully at the Pyramids, miles away in the midst of the lake. He knew that there were goats on the larger of them, and a great spring of pure water, bubbling up from some source below the lake-bottom, — a thing surprising to contemplate, for at the base of the Pyramids the plumbline drops sheer into six hundred feet of water. He thought he could trap the goats in pitfalls, and perhaps sometimes catch fish. Once or twice he had a fleeting notion of making an appeal to the rancher to row them across in his boat, and give them some fishing-tackle, and leave them to their own devices. But the Indian abhors solitude, and worse even than solitude were the snakes ; for the Pyramid with the spring is alive with rattlesnakes, writhing, crawling, sunning themselves, rattling defiance to the goats, who fear them not a whit. There is a tradition to account for the goats being on that lone islet, but there is none to account for the snakes, and the Indians believe that the Spirit of the Underworld has put them there to guard a main doorway of his dominions : they think that through this Pyramid is a passage to the home of the unhappy dead, and from thence wells up the spring, whose waters are enchanted. No, the islets were impracticable ; the idea of their occupation was but a momentary fancy, offspring of desperation.

In the last days of October the rancher gathered up his cattle, — running at large through the dun, sage-covered hills, and putting themselves in prime condition for the market on the nutritious bunch - grass, — and prepared to drive them to his home ranch, within the confines of railroads and civilization.

“ We are going away at sunrise tomorrow,” the rancher’s wife said to old Kobeh. “ Here is bread and meat to do you for two or three days, and I will give you some bottles to carry water.” She was sorry for the old creatures, but they did not weigh upon her conscience. Their plane of being and feeling was too far apart from hers for any magnetic chords of sympathy to thrill from heart to heart.

When the rancher’s wagon, with his family and their movable belongings, disappeared from his sight in a cloud of dust, the man again said, Come. The road is before us.” The woman was weeping once more, silently this time. Kobeh had failed greatly within the past few weeks, and could lead his blind mahala but at a snail’s pace, as he supported himself heavily upon his stick. The Reservation was thirty miles away, and when night fell the forlorn pair had covered but a third of the distance. They huddled and shivered the night through over their little fire of sage-brush, chilled to the marrow by the keen night-wind of those elevated regions. With the dawn they were on their feet and walking to restore warmth to their numbed frames ; but the old man’s breath came in painful gasps, spasms of pain contracted his features, and now and again a groan burst from him, in spite of a self-control attained by a long lifetime of practice. At each such betrayal Sinkavata uttered a sympathetic moan, and the tears coursed down her furrowed cheeks.

Two or three times during the day vehicles met or passed them, but their occupants seldom gave them a second glance, and never a second thought. To them they were but two old Indians on the tramp. And the Indians never dreamed of making any appeal to these strangers of an alien race and tongue. When night fell again, the wayfarers had won but a few miles further on their journey. Kobeh threw himself down upon the ground, too exhausted to gather fuel, aiul the blind woman sat down by his side, and passed her hands over him with pitiful interrogation.

The long night through she sat there and listened to the old man’s raucous breathing and delirious mutterings. He seemed unconscious of her presence. When he moaned “Water,” she put the bottle to his lips and held it until he pushed it away. Had a physician been there to diagnose the case, he would probably have said, “ Pneumonia in its most acute phase.”

But it matters little by what name we call our suffering. Towards morning Kobeh grew quiet, and Sinkavata thought him sleeping. Fainter and fainter came his breath, till the mahala, listening with her ear to his lips, could hear it fluttering no longer. “ Heart failure,” the physician would have said, again. But again it matters little by what name we call our peace. Sinkavata knew that her companion of forty years was gone from her, and she composed his limbs and covered his face.

Perhaps one of the white gulls, swooping and soaring over the lake, as she remembered them in the days of her vision, was already on the way with his spirit to the Happy Hunting Grounds. Evil spirits in the guise of pursuing birds must be frightened away, and she raised the death-wail loud and clear. All day she sat by the stiffening corpse, ululating at regular intervals. Several times people went by on the road; but a squaw howling somewhere in the sage-brush meant nothing to them, any more than the hum of the insect world conveys to man the tragedies of their lives. Sinkavata knew by her bodily sensations when the sun rose, and climbed the meridian, and passed into the western porches of the day. She knew by the sudden chill in the air when it dropped behind the mountains. She knew when it rose again and dispelled the numbing cold of the night. Then she ceased the death-wail: she had performed her last duty to her lord, and insured his spirit a safe passage to its eternal home.

She bent her head and listened intently, until there was borne in upon her ears the soft lisp and prattle of the lake as its mimic wavelets babbled confidentially with the pebbles on the beach. She rose, and, guided by the sound, groped her way towards the shore. She left her pack lying on the ground beside the body. She was done with burdens. When she came to the water’s edge she sat down, and, reaching about her in all directions, gathered up the largest pebbles and put them in her garments wherever she could find lodgment for them ; she ripped the hem of her skirt in places and put them in by handfuls, until she thought herself sufficiently weighted. Then rising, she waded out into the water, slowly but unhesitatingly. Its peculiar softness and buoyancy felt grateful as bed of down to her wearied and chilled frame. A gull called and swooped around her head so closely that she felt the fanning of its wings. That, she knew, was the messenger waiting for her spirit; but who would ululate her death-wail, and keep the foul fiends at bay ? The water was now up to her armpits, and she paused at the thought. Death was nothing, but afterwards ? As she stood sombrely reflecting, there came to her ears across the shimmering, shifting surface, soft and clear, rising, falling, on the wave, with periodic iteration, a weird, low coronach.

To what acoustic mirage, to what play of wind and wave in the caverns of the Pyramids fronting her in the midst of the lake, to what illusion of her own strained senses, the requiem was due, is not to be known. But a radiant smile illumined the bronze mask of her face, and she stepped boldly forward, — into some abyss of the lakebottom, for she went down instantly, the smile fixed on her countenance ; and the water closed over her head with scarce a ripple to mark the spot of her disappearance.

Placidly as before, the great lake dimpled, and sparkled, and lapped, and murmured. Overhead the sea-gulls wheeled and screamed, visitants from an ocean more than three hundred miles away as the gull flies.

Amid the sage-brush the dead man smiled up at the sky, his aquiline features composed in an expression of great peace.

Batterman Lindsay.