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Man Size, a novel by William MacLeod Raine |
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Chapter 2. The Amazon |
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_ CHAPTER II. THE AMAZON The dog darted into the bunch grass and turned sharply to the right. One of the men followed it, the others took different directions. Up a gully the hound ran, nosed the ground in a circle of sniffs, and dipped down into a dry watercourse. Tom Morse was at heel scarcely a dozen strides behind. The yelping of the dog told Morse they were close on their quarry. Once or twice he thought he made out the vague outline of a flying figure, but in the night shadows it was lost again almost at once. They breasted the long slope of a low hill and took the decline beyond. The young plainsman had the legs and the wind of a Marathon runner. His was the perfect physical fitness of one who lives a clean, hard life in the dry air of the high lands. The swiftness and the endurance of the fugitive told him that he was in the wake of youth trained to a fine edge. Unexpectedly, in the deeper darkness of a small ravine below the hill spur, the hunted turned upon the hunter. Morse caught the gleam of a knife thrust as he plunged. It was too late to check his dive. A flame of fire scorched through his forearm. The two went down together, rolling over and over as they struggled. Startled, Morse loosened his grip. He had discovered by the feel of the flesh he was handling so roughly that it was a woman with whom he was fighting. She took advantage of his hesitation to shake free and roll away. They faced each other on their feet. The man was amazed at the young Amazon's fury. Her eyes were like live coals, flashing at him hatred and defiance. Beneath the skin smock she wore, her breath came raggedly and deeply. Neither of them spoke, but her gaze did not yield a thousandth part of an inch to his. The girl darted for the knife she had dropped. Morse was upon her instantly. She tried to trip him, but when they struck the ground she was underneath. He struggled to pin down her arms, but she fought with a barbaric fury. Her hard little fist beat upon his face a dozen times before he pegged it down. Lithe as a panther, her body twisted beneath his. Too late the flash of white teeth warned him. She bit into his arm with the abandon of a savage. "You little devil!" he cried between set teeth. He flung away any scruples he might have had and pinned fast her flying arms. The slim, muscular body still writhed in vain contortions till he clamped it fast between knees from which not even an untamed cayuse could free itself. She gave up struggling. They glared at each other, panting from their exertions. Her eyes still flamed defiance, but back of it he read fear, a horrified and paralyzing terror. To the white traders along the border a half-breed girl was a squaw, and a squaw was property just as a horse or a dog was. For the first time she spoke, and in English. Her voice came bell-clear and not in the guttural of the tribes. "Let me up!" It was an imperative, urgent, threatening. He still held her in the vice, his face close to her flaming eyes. "You little devil," he said again. "Let me up!" she repeated wildly. "Let me up, I tell you." "Like blazes I will. You're through biting and knifing me for one night." He had tasted no liquor all day, but there was the note of drunkenness in his voice. The terror in her grew. "If you don't let me up--" "You'll do what?" he jeered. Her furious upheaval took him by surprise. She had unseated him and was scrambling to her feet before he had her by the shoulders. The girl ducked her head in an effort to wrench free. She could as easily have escaped from steel cuffs as from the grip of his brown fingers. "You'd better let me go!" she cried. "You don't know who I am." "Nor care," he flung back. "You're a nitchie, and you smashed our kegs. That's enough for me." "I'm no such thing a nitchie[1]," she denied indignantly. [Footnote 1: In the vernacular of the Northwest Indians were "nitchies." (W.M.R.)] The instinct of self-preservation was moving in her. She had played into the hands of this man and his companions. The traders made their own laws and set their own standards. The value of a squaw of the Blackfeet was no more than that of the liquor she had destroyed. It would be in character for them to keep her as a chattel captured in war. "The daughter of a squaw-man then," he said, and there was in his voice the contempt of the white man for the half-breed. "I'm Jessie McRae," she said proudly. Among the Indians she went by her tribal name of Sleeping Dawn, but always with the whites she used the one her adopted father had given her. It increased their respect for her. Just now she was in desperate need of every ounce that would weigh in the scales. "Daughter of Angus McRae?" he asked, astonished. "Yes." "His woman's a Cree?" "His wife is," the girl corrected. "What you doin' here?" "Father's camp is near. He's hunting hides." "Did he send you to smash our whiskey-barrels?" "Angus McRae never hides behind a woman," she said, her chin up. That was true. Morse knew it, though he had never met McRae. His reputation had gone all over the Northland as a fearless fighting man honest as daylight and stern as the Day of Judgment. If this girl was a daughter of the old Scot, not even a whiskey-trader could safely lay hands on her. For back of Angus was a group of buffalo-hunters related to him by blood over whom he held half-patriarchal sway. "Why did you do it?" Morse demanded. The question struck a spark of spirit from her. "Because you're ruining my people--destroying them with your fire-water." He was taken wholly by surprise. "Do you mean you destroyed our property for that reason?" She nodded, sullenly. "But we don't trade with the Crees," he persisted. It was on the tip of her tongue to tell him that she was of the Blackfoot tribe and not of the Crees, but again for reasons of policy she was less than candid. Till she was safely out of the woods, it was better this man should not know she was only an adopted daughter of Angus McRae. She offered another reason, and with a flare of passion which he was to learn as a characteristic of her. "You make trouble for my brother Fergus. He shot Akokotos (Many Horses) in the leg when the fire-water burned in him. He was stabbed by a Piegan brave who did not know what he was doing. Fergus is good. He minds his own business. But you steal away his brains. Then he runs wild. It was _you_, not Fergus, that shot Akokotos. The Great Spirit knows you whiskey-traders, and not my poor people who destroy each other, are the real murderers." Her logic was feminine and personal, from his viewpoint wholly unfair. Moreover, one of her charges did not happen to be literally true. "We never sold whiskey to your brother--not our outfit. It was Jackson's, maybe. Anyhow, nobody made him buy it. He was free to take it or leave it." "A wolf doesn't have to eat the poisoned meat in a trap, but it eats and dies," she retorted swiftly and bitterly. Adroitly she had put him on the defensive. Her words had the sting of barbed darts. "We're not talking of wolves." "No, but of Blackfeet and Bloods and Sarcees," she burst out, again with that flare of feminine ferocity so out of character in an Indian woman or the daughter of one. "D'you think I don't know how you Americans talk? A good Indian is a dead Indian. No wonder we hate you all. No wonder the tribes fight you to the death." He had no answer for this. It was true. He had been brought up in a land of Indian wars and he had accepted without question the common view that the Sioux, the Crows, and the Cheyennes, with all their blood brothers, were menaces to civilization. The case for the natives he had never studied. How great a part broken pledges and callous injustice had done to drive the tribes to the war-path he did not know. Few of the actual frontiersmen were aware of the wrongs of the red men. The young man's hands fell from her arms. Hard-eyed and grim, he looked her over from head to foot. The short skirt and smock of buckskin, the moccasins of buffalo hide, all dusty and travel-stained, told of life in a primitive country under the simplest and hardest conditions. Yet the voice was clear and vibrant, the words well enunciated. She bloomed like a desert rose, had some quality of vital life that struck a spark from his imagination. What manner of girl was she? Not by any possibility would she fit into the specifications of the cubby-hole his mind had built for Indian women. The daughters even of the boisbrules had much of the heaviness and stolidity of their native mothers. Jessie McRae was graceful as a fawn. Every turn of the dark head, every lift of the hand, expressed spirit and verve. She must, he thought, have inherited almost wholly from her father, though in her lissom youth he could find little of McRae's heavy solidity of mind and body. "Your brother is of the metis[2]. He's not a tribesman. And he's no child. He can look out for himself," Morse said at last. [Footnote 2: The half-breeds were known as "metis." The word means, of course, mongrel. (W.M.R.)] His choice of a word was unfortunate. It applied as much to her as to Fergus. Often it was used contemptuously. "Yes, and the metis doesn't matter," she cried, with the note of bitterness that sat so strangely on her hot-blooded, vital youth. "You can ride over him as though you're lords of the barren lands. You can ruin him for the money you make, even if he's a subject of the Great Mother and not of your country. He's only a breed--a mongrel." He was a man of action. He brushed aside discussion. "We'll be movin' back to camp." Instantly her eyes betrayed the fear she would not put into words. "No--no! I won't go." His lids narrowed. The outthrust of his lean jaw left no room for argument. "You'll go where I say." She knew it would be that way, if he dragged her by the hair of the head. Because she was in such evil case she tamed her pride to sullen pleading. "Don't take me there! Let me go to father. He'll horsewhip me. I'll have him do it for you. Isn't that enough? Won't that satisfy you?" Red spots smoldered like fire in his brown eyes. If he took her back to the traders' camp, he would have to fight Bully West for her. That was certain. All sorts of complications would rise. There would be trouble with McRae. The trade with the Indians of his uncle's firm, of which he was soon to be a partner, would be wrecked by the Scotchman. No, he couldn't take her back to the camp in the coulee. There was too much at stake. "Suits me. I'll take you up on that. He's to horsewhip you for that fool trick you played on us and to make good our loss. Where's his camp?" From the distance of a stone-throw a heavy, raucous voice called, "'Lo, Morse!" The young man turned to the girl, his lips set in a thin, hard line. "Bully West. The dog's gone back and is bringin' him here, I reckon. Like to meet him?" She knew the reputation of Bully West, notorious as a brawler and a libertine. Who in all the North did not know of it? Her heart fluttered a signal of despair. "I--I can get away yet--up the valley," she said in a whisper, eyes quick with fear. He smiled grimly. "You mean _we_ can." "Yes." "Hit the trail." She turned and led the way into the darkness. _ |
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