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

sheet-iron "fryer," such as soldiers sometimes use in camp, which she dragged from under a buffalo-skin in the corner, would have been none the worse for a little scrubbing.

She brought it out, and then she dropped it and sat down to take another look at that wonderful "talking leaf."

"What made me kneel down and shut my eyes? I could remember then. It is all gone now. It went away as soon as I got up again."

She folded the leaf carefully, and hid it in the folds of her deer-skin dress, but she was evidently a good deal puzzled.

"Maria Santissima—yes, I do remember that. It will all come back to me by-and-by. No! I don't want it to. It makes me afraid. I will cook supper and forget all about it."

A Mexican woman of the lower class, unable to read, ignorant of almost everything but a little plain cookery, has less to forget than have most American children of six years old. But why should it frighten her if the little she knew and had lost began to come back to her mind?

She did not stop to answer any such questions as that, but poured some pounded corn, a coarse, uneven meal, into a battered tin pan. To this was added a little salt, some water was stirred in till a thick paste was made, and then the best cook of the Apaches was ready to carry her batter to the fire. Envious black eyes watched her while she heated her saucepan on the coals she raked out. Then she melted a carefully measured piece of buffalo tallow, and began to fry for her husband and master the cakes no other of his squaws could so well prepare.

When the cakes were done brown, the same fryer and a little water would serve to take the toughness out of some strips of dried venison before she broiled them, and the great chief would be the best-fed man in camp until the hunters should return from the valley below with fresh game.

They were quite likely to do that before night, but Many Bears was a man who never waited long for something to eat after a hard day's march.

If Dolores had been a little alarmed at the prospect of being forced to "remember," a very different feeling had entered the mind of Rita when she and her sister came out of the lodge.

"What shall we do, Ni-ha-be?"

"Red Wolf told me he had something to say to me. There he is now. He beckons me to come. He does not want you."

"I am glad of it. There are trees and bushes down there beyond the corral. I will go and be alone."

"You will tell me all the talking leaves say to you?"

"Yes, but they will talk very slowly, I'm afraid."

Even the harsher sounds of the Apache tongue had a pleasant ring in the sweet, clear voices of the two girls, and the softer syllables, of which there were many, rippled after each other like water in a brook. It seemed, too, as if they said quite as much to each other by signs as by words. That is always so among people who live a great deal out-of-doors, or in narrow quarters, where other people can easily hear ordinary conversation.

The one peculiar thing about the signs used by the American Indians is that they mean so much and express it so clearly. Men of different tribes, not able to understand a word of each other's spoken tongue, will meet and talk together by the hour in "sign language" as intelligently as two well-trained deaf mutes among the whites.

Perhaps one reason more for so much "sign talking" is that there are so many tribes, each with a very rough tongue of its own, that is not easy for other tribes to pick up.

Red Wolf was again beckoning to Ni-ha-be, and there was an impatient look on his dark, self-willed face. It was time for her to make haste, therefore, and Rita put the three magazines under the light folds of her broad antelope-skin cap and tripped away toward the bit of bushy grove just beyond the "corral."

What is that?

In the language of the very "far West" it is any spot or place where horses are gathered and kept, outside of a stable.

The great Apache nation does not own a single stable or barn, although it does own multitudes of horses, ponies, mules, and even horned cattle. All these, therefore, have to be "corralled," except when they are running loose among their unfenced pastures. There are no fences in that part of the world any more than barns.

Immediately on going into camp the long train of pack mules and ponies had been relieved of their burdens, and they and most of the saddle-horses had been sent off, under the care of mounted herders, to pick their dinners for themselves in the rich green grass of the valley.

Chiefs and warriors, however, never walk if they can help it, and so, as some one of them might wish to go here or there at any moment, several dozens of the freshest animals were kept on the spot between the camp and the grove, tethered by long hide lariats, and compelled to wait their turn for something to eat.

There was a warrior on guard at the "corral," as a matter of course, but he hardly gave a glance to the pretty adopted daughter of Many Bears as she tripped hurriedly past him.

It was his business to look out for the horses and not for giddy young squaws who might find "talking leaves."

Rita could not have told him, if he had asked her, why it was that her prizes were making her heart beat so fast, as she held them against it.

She was not frightened. She knew that very well. But she was glad to be alone, without even the company of Ni-ha-be.

The bushes were very thick around the spot where she at last threw herself upon the grass. She had never lived in any lodge where there were doors to shut behind her, or if she had, all those houses and their doors were alike forgotten; but she knew that her quick ears would give her notice of any approaching footsteps.

There they lay now before her, the three magazines, and it seemed to Rita as if they had come on purpose to see her, and were looking at her.

No two of them were alike.

They did not even belong to the same family. She could tell that by their faces.

Slowly and half-timidly she turned the first leaf; it was the cover-leaf of the nearest.

A sharp exclamation sprung to her lips.

"I have seen her! Oh, so long ago! It is me, Rita. I wore a dress like that once. And the tall squaw behind her, with the robe that drags on the ground, I remember her, too. How did they know she was my mother?"

Rita's face had been growing very white, and now she covered it with both her hands and began to cry. The picture was one of a fine-looking lady and a little girl of, it might be, seven or eight years. Not Rita and her mother, surely, for the lady wore a coronet upon her head and carried a sceptre in her hand; but the little girl looked very much as Rita must have looked at her age. It was a picture of some Spanish princess and her daughter, but like many pictures of such people that are printed, it would have served as well for a portrait of almost anybody else—particularly, as it seemed, of Rita and her mother.

"He is not there. Why did they not put him in? I love him best. Oh, he was so good to me! He had plenty of talking leaves, too, and he taught them to speak to me. I will look and see if he is here."

Rita was talking aloud to herself, but her own voice sounded strange to her, with its Indian words and ways of expression. She was listening, without knowing it, for another voice—for several of them—and none of them spoke Apache.

She turned leaf after leaf with fluttering haste, in her eager search for that other face she had spoken of.

In a moment more she paused, as the full-length picture of a man gazed at her from the paper.

"No; not him. He is too old. My father was not old; and he was handsome, and he was not dark at all."

She shut the book for a moment, and her face was full of puzzle and of pain.

"I said it. I was not talking Apache then. And I understood what I was saying."

She had indeed, when she mentioned her father, spoken pretty clearly in English.

Was it her mother-tongue? and had it come back to her?

She turned over the leaves more eagerly than ever now, and she found in that and the two other magazines many pictured faces of men of all ages, but each one brought her a fresh disappointment.

"He is not here," she said, mournfully; "and it was he who taught me to—to—to read—read books."

She had found two words now that were like little windows, for through them she could see a world of wonderful things that she had not seen before.

"Read" and "books."

The three magazines were no longer "talking leaves" to her, although they were really beginning to talk. Her head ached, and her eyes were burning hot, as she gazed so intently at word after word of the page which happened to be open before her. It was not printed like the rest—less closely, and not in such a thronging mass of little black spots of letters. It was a piece of very simple poetry, in short lines and brief stanzas, and Rita was staring at its title.

The letters slowly came to her one by one, bringing behind them the first word of the title; but they seemed to Rita to be in her own brain more than on the paper.

It was a hard moment for Rita.

"He made me say them one word at a time. He was so good to me! Yes, I can say them now! I know what they mean! Oh, so long ago! so long ago!"

There was no longer any doubt about it. Rita could read English.

Not very easily or rapidly at first, and many of the words she came to puzzled her exceedingly. Perhaps some of them also would come back to her after a while. Some of them had always been strangers, for the very brightest little girls of seven or eight, even when they read well and have their fathers to help them, are but at the beginning of their acquaintance with "hard words."

"I shall know what the pictures mean now. But I will not tell anybody a word about it—only Ni-ha-be."

CHAPTER VI

Steve Harrison rose to his feet, and looked curiously along the ledge in both directions.

It was not the first ore he had seen during his three years and more of wandering with Murray and the Lipans, but never before had he tumbled down upon anything precisely like it.

"Mine!" he said to himself, aloud—"mine! But what can I do with it?"

"Do with it? What can you do with it?"

Murray was still kneeling upon the precious quartz, and fingering spot after spot where the yellow metal showed itself; and the strange fire in his eyes was deeper than ever.

"Steve!"

"What, Murray?"

"I thought it was all gone, but it isn't."

"Thought what was all gone?"

"The gold-fever. I used to have it when I was younger. It isn't a love of money. It's just a love of digging up gold."

"Can you feel it now?"

"Dreadfully. It burns all over me every time I touch one of those nuggets."

"Let it burn, then."

"Why? What's the good of it?"

"Maybe it'll get strong enough to keep you from wasting the rest of your days among the Lipans."

"Among the Lipans? You don't know, Steve. Didn't I tell you what keeps me? No, I don't think I did—not all of it. You're only a boy, Steve."

"You're a wonderfully strong man for your age."

"My age? How old do you think I am?"

"I never guessed. Maybe you're not much over sixty."

"Sixty?" He said that with a sort of low laugh.

"Why, my dear boy, I'm hardly turned of forty-five—white