The Talking Leaves: An Indian Story, William O. Stoddard [best novels for beginners TXT] 📗

for it among the desolate solitudes of those "sierras."

They did not hear To-la-go-to-de say to some of the red hunters:

"No Tongue great hunter. Bring in more antelope than anybody else. Yellow Head good, too. You beat them? Ugh!"

They would try beyond doubt, but more than one Lipan shook his head. The reputation of Murray as a slayer of game was too high to be questioned, and he had taught Steve Harrison like a father.

"Murray," said Steve, "do you mean that such a gap as that offers me a chance?"

"To get away?"

"Yes. That's what I'm thinking of."

"Can't say about that, my boy. Probably not. I don't believe it comes out on the western slope of the mountains."

"What do you want to try it for, then?"

"I don't exactly know. Game, perhaps. Then I want to teach you something more about mountains and finding your way among them. More than that, I don't want to go the same way with any of the rest."

"I like that, anyhow. Seems as if I had ever so many questions to ask that I never felt like asking before."

"I never cared to answer any, Steve, when you did ask 'em. Not so long as you and I were to be together. Now you're going away from me, pretty soon, I don't mind telling some things."

"Going away? Do you mean to say you won't go too? Shall you stay and be a Lipan?"

"You'll go alone, Steve, when you go. That's all."

"Why won't you go with me?"

"That's one of the questions I don't mean to answer. You've told me all about your family and people. I'll know where to look for you if I ever come out into the settlements."

"I wish you'd come. You're a white man. You're not a Mexican either. You're American."

"No, I'm not."

"Not an American?"

"No, Steve, I'm an Englishman. I never told you that before. One reason I don't want to go back is the very thing that sent me down into Mexico to settle years and years ago."

"I didn't ask about that."

"No good if you did."

"But you've been a sort of father to me ever since you bought me from the Lipans, after they cleaned out my uncle's hunting-party, and I can't bear the thought of leaving you here."

If it had not been for his war-paint, and its contrast with his Saxon hair and eyes, Steve would have been a handsome, pleasant-looking boy—tall and strong for his years, but still a good deal of a boy—and his voice was now trembling in a very un-Indian sort of way. No true Lipan would have dreamed of betraying any emotion at parting from even so good a friend as Murray.

"Yes," said the latter, dryly, "they cleaned out the hunting-party. Your uncle and his men must have run pretty well, for not one of them lost his scalp or drew a bead on a Lipan. That's one reason they didn't knock you on the head. They came home laughing, and sold you to me for six ponies and a pipe."

"I never blamed my uncle. I've always wondered, though, what sort of a story he told my father and mother."

"Guess he doesn't amount to a great deal."

"He's rich enough, and he's fond of hunting, but there isn't a great deal of fight in him. He wouldn't make a good Lipan."

The circumstances of Steve's capture were evidently not very creditable to some of those who were concerned in it, and Murray's tone, in speaking of the "uncle" who had brought him out into the Texas plains to lose him so easily, was bitterly contemptuous.

At that moment they were entering the mouth of the gap, and Murray suddenly dropped all other subjects to exclaim,

"We've struck it, Steve!"

"Struck what?"

"A regular ca�on. See, the walls are almost perpendicular, and the bottom comes down, from ledge to ledge, like a flight of stairs!"

Steve had been among mountains before, but he had never seen anything precisely like that.

In some places the vast chasm before him was hardly more than a hundred feet wide, while its walls of gray granite and glittering white quartz rock arose in varying heights of from three hundred to five hundred feet.

"Come on, Steve!"

"You won't find any game in here. A rabbit couldn't get enough to live on among such rocks as these."

"Come right along! I want to get a look at the ledges up there. There's no telling what we may stumble upon."

Steve's young eyes were fully occupied, as they pushed forward, with the strange beauty and grandeur of the scenery above, beyond, and behind him. The air was clear and almost cool, and there was plenty of light in the shadiest nooks of the chasm.

"What torrents of water must pour down through here at some seasons of the year," he was saying to himself, when his companion suddenly stopped, with a sharp, "Hist! Look there!" and raised his rifle.

Steve looked.

Away up on the edge of the beetling white crag at their right, the first "game" they had seen that day was calmly gazing down upon them.

A "big-horn antelope" has the best nerves in the world, and it is nothing to him how high may be the precipice on the edge of which he is standing. His head never gets dizzy, and his feet never slip, for he was made to live in that kind of country, and feels entirely at home in spots where no other living thing cares to follow him.

That was a splendid specimen of what the first settlers called the "Rocky Mountain sheep," until they found that it was not a sheep at all, but an "antelope." His strong, wide, curling horns were of the largest size, and gave him an expression of dignity and wisdom as he peered down upon the hunters who had intruded upon his solitudes. He would have shown more wisdom by not looking at all, for in a moment more the sharp crack of Murray's rifle awoke the echoes of the ca�on, and then, with a great bound, the big-horn came tumbling down among the rocks, almost at Steve Harrison's feet.

"He's a little battered by his fall," said Murray, "that's a fact. But he'll be just as good eating. Let's hoist him on that bowlder and go ahead."

"He's as much as we'd like to carry in."

"That's so; but we may bag something more, and then we could bring a pony up almost as far as this. I don't mean to do any too much carrying."

His broad, muscular frame looked as if it had been built expressly for that purpose, and he could have picked up at least one big-horn with perfect ease; but he had been among the Indians a good while, and they never lift a pound more than they are compelled to.

"Give me the next shot, Murray."

"I will, if it's all right; but you must use your own eyes. It won't do to throw away any chances."

The game was quickly lifted to the bowlder pointed out by Murray, and he and Steve pressed on up the great beautiful gate-way, deeper and deeper into the secrets of the mountain range.

Every such range has its secrets, and one by one they are found out from time to time; but there seemed to be little use in the discovery of any just then and there. It was a very useless sort of secret.

What was it?

Well, it was one that had been kept by that deep chasm for nobody could guess how many thousands of years, until Steve Harrison stumbled a little as he climbed one of the broken "stairs" of quartz, and came down upon his hands and knees.

Before him the ca�on widened into a sort of table-land, with crags and peaks around it, and Murray saw trees here and there, and a good many other things, but Steve exclaimed,

"Murray! Murray! Gold!"

"What! A vein?"

"I fell right down upon it. Just look there!"

Murray looked, half carelessly at first, like a man who had before that day discovered plenty of such things; but then he sprung forward.

"We're in the gold country," he said; "it's all gold-bearing quartz hereaway. Steve! Steve! I declare I never saw such a vein as that. The metal stands out in nuggets."

So it did. A strip of rock nearly five feet wide was dotted and spangled with bits of dull yellow. It seemed to run right across the ca�on at the edge of that level, and disappear in the solid cliffs on either side.

"Oh, what a vein!"

"It's really gold, then?"

"Gold? Of course it is. But it isn't of any use."

"Why not?"

"Who could mine for it away down here in the Apache country? How could they get machinery down here? Why, a regiment of soldiers couldn't keep off the redskins, and every pound of gold would cost two pounds before you could get it to a mint."

For all that, Murray gazed and gazed at the glittering rock, with its scattered jewels of yellow, and a strange light began to glow in his sunken eyes.

"No, Steve, I'm too old for it now. Gold's nothing to me any more! But that ledge is yours, now you've found it. Some day you may come back for it."

"I will if I live, Murray."

"Well, if you ever do, I'll tell you one thing more."

"What's that?"

"Dig and wash in the sand and gravel of that ca�on below for all the loose gold that's been washed down there from this ledge since the world was made. There must be bushels of it."

CHAPTER V

The lodge of tanned buffalo-skins in which Ni-ha-be and Rita were sitting with Mother Dolores, was large and commodious. It was a round tent, upheld by strong, slender poles, that came together at the top so as to leave a small opening. On the outside the covering was painted in bright colors with a great many rude figures of men and animals. There was no furniture; but some buffalo and bear skins and some blankets were spread upon the ground, and it was a very comfortable lodge for any weather that was likely to come in that region.

In such a bright day as that all the light needed came through the open door, for the "flap" was still thrown back.

The two girls, therefore, could see every change on the dark face of the great chiefs Mexican squaw.

A good many changes came, for Dolores was very busily "remembering," and it was full five minutes before the thoughts brought to her by that picture of the "Way-side Shrine" began to fade away, so that she was again an Indian.

"Rita," whispered Ni-ha-be, "did it say anything to you?"

"Yes. A little. I saw something like it long ago. But I don't know what it means."

"Rita! Ni-ha-be!"

"What is it, Dolores?"

"Go. You will be in my way. I must cook supper for the chief. He is hungry. You must not go beyond the camp."

"What did the talking leaf say to you?" asked Ni-ha-be.

"Nothing. It is a great medicine leaf. I shall keep it. Perhaps it will say more to Rita by-and-by. Go."

The Apaches, like other Indians, know very little about cookery. They can roast meat and broil it, after a fashion, and they have several ways of cooking fish. They know how to boil when they are rich enough to have kettles, and they can make a miserable kind of corn-bread with Indian corn, dried or parched and pounded fine.

The one strong point in the character of Dolores, so far as the good opinion of old Many Bears went, was that she was the best cook in his band. She had not quite forgotten some things of that kind that she had learned before she became a squaw. Nobody else, therefore, was permitted to cook supper for the hungry chief.

It was a source of many jealousies among his other squaws, but then he was almost always hungry, and none of them knew how to cook as she did.

She was proud of it too, and neither Ni-ha-be nor her adopted sister dreamed of disputing with her after she had uttered the word "supper."

They hurried out of the lodge, therefore, and Dolores was left alone. She had no fire to kindle.

That would be lighted in the open air by other female members of the family.

There were no pots and saucepans to be washed, although the one round, shallow,