It seemed as fantastic as a troubled dream. To be lying there helpless, to look across and see Johnny Buffalo staring grimly up at the ceiling, his face set stoically to hide the pain that burned beneath the white bandage, held no semblance of reality. Was it that morning only, that they had left the car and started out to walk to the “great and high mountain”? Perhaps several days had passed in oblivion. He did not know. To Rawley the shock of drifting back from unconsciousness to these surroundings had been as great as the shock of incredulous slipping down and down into blackness. He moved his head a half-inch. The pain brought his eyebrows together, but he made no sound. Johnny Buffalo must not be worried.
“All right again, are you?” Peter moved into Rawley’s range of vision. “You had a close squeak. The thickness of your skull between you and death—that was all. The bullet skinned along on the outside instead of the inside.”
“I’ll be all right then,” Rawley muttered thickly. “Don’t mean to be a nuisance. Soon as this grogginess lets up—”
“You’ll be less trouble where you are,” Peter interrupted him bluntly. “I’ve done all I can for you now, so I’ll go back to my work. The Injun’s making out all right, too. Head clear as a bell, near as I can judge. I’ll see you this evening, and if there’s anything you want, either of you, just pound that toy drum beside you. That will bring one of the women.”
Rawley looked up at him, though the movement of his eyeballs was excruciatingly painful. Again that sense of familiarity came to tantalize him. What was it? Peter’s great, square shoulders, his eyes? He made another effort to look more closely and failed altogether. His vision blurred; things went black again. Perhaps he slept, after that. When he opened his eyes again a cool wind was blowing; the intolerable glare outside the window had softened.
He was conscious of a definite feeling of satisfaction when Nevada appeared with a tray of food such as fever patients may have; tea, toast, a bit of fruit—mostly juice. Behind her waddled her grandmother; Rawley could not yet believe in the reality of the relationship between this high-bred white girl and the old squaw. In the back of his mind he thought there must be some joke; or at least, he told himself, looking at the two closely, Nevada must be one of the tribe by adoption. He had heard of such things.
And there was her Uncle Peter, who was a white man in looks, in personality, everything. Yet Uncle Peter had flared proudly, “We may be breeds—but we aren’t brutes.” He could only have meant himself and Nevada. He looked at her, his eyes going again to the squaw with her gray bangs, the red kerchief, her squat shapelessness.
Her fear of him seemed to have evaporated upon reflection. Her curiosity concerning him had not, evidently. She set down the tray and stared at him with a frank fixity that reminded Rawley of the solemn regard of the sloe-eyed baby riding astride Aunt Gladys’ slatternly hip.
“You feed Johnny Buffalo, Grandmother,” Nevada directed. “He used to live in this country when he was a boy. You can’t tell—you might be old acquaintances.” She smiled, patted the old woman on a cushiony shoulder and approached Rawley, who was suddenly resigned to his helplessness.
“Grandmother rather holds herself above full-blood Indians,” she whispered. “She’s only half Indian, herself. I don’t want her to snub your partner; he looks so lonely, somehow. What is it?”
“He’s grieving over my grandfather’s death,” Rawley told her, his own voice dropped to an undertone that would not carry. “Until I proposed this trip he didn’t want to live. He’s better, out here.”
“I do hope—”
A shrill ejaculation from the squaw brought Nevada’s head around. “What is it, Grandmother?”
The old woman started a singsong Indian explanation, and Nevada smiled. “She says they do know each other. She remembers him when he was a boy and was lost. So that’s fine. He can hear about all his old playmates and his family.” She turned her back on them as if the duties of hostess sat more lightly on her shoulders, since one of the patients could visit with her grandmother.
“I’m wondering what happened, up the trail.”
Nevada thoughtfully cooled the tea with the spoon and looked at him speculatively. “Uncle Peter can tell you better than I can—since I was not permitted to go along. Besides, the less talking you do now, I believe, the less danger there is of complications. Neither wound is so bad of itself, Uncle Peter says. It’s having your head hurt, along with the broken bone in the arm. Unless you are very quiet for a day or two, there may be fever; and fevered blood makes slow healing. That’s Uncle Peter’s theory, and it must be correct. He has books and studies all the time—when he isn’t working. Then, of course, there’s the danger of infection from the outside; but he has been very careful in the dressings. Johnny Buffalo,” she added after a minute, “is worse off than you are. His shoulder blade is badly smashed. And then he’s so much older.”
She was talking, he knew, to prevent him from doing so. And since his head felt like a nest of crickets, all performing at once, he was content to let her have her way. Across the room he could hear the intermittent murmur of the two Indians, the voice of the grandmother droning musically, with sliding, minor inflections as she recounted, no doubt, the history of the old man’s family and friends.
He watched Nevada pour and sweeten a second cup of tea and did a swift mental calculation in genealogy. Jess Cramer, he knew, was a white man. The husband of Gladys, bearing the name of Grandfather King’s enemy, must be a son of the old man and of this half-breed squaw. Very well, then, old Jess Cramer’s children would be one quarter Indian—Peter, Jess and Nevada’s mother (granting that Nevada was a blood relative). Nevada’s father must have been white,—a Scotchman, by the name, and by Nevada’s clear skin and coppery hair. Well, then, Nevada was—A knife thrust of pain stabbed through his brain, and he could not think. Nevada set down the cup hastily and laid cool fingers on his temple. He lifted his right hand and held her fingers there. The throbbing agony lessened, grew fainter and fainter. After all, what did it matter—the blood in those fingers? They were cool and sweet and soothing—
He thought Nevada had lifted her hand and was gently removing the bandage from his head. But it was Uncle Peter, and Nevada was not there, and it was dark outside. In another room a clock began to strike the hour. He counted nine. It was strange; he could not remember going to sleep with her fingers pressed against the pulse beat in his temple. Yet he must have slept for hours. He closed his eyes and then opened them again, staring up with a child-like candor into the man’s bent face.
“I know. You look like Grandfather,” he said thickly. And when Peter’s eyes met his, “It’s your eyes. Grandfather had eyes exactly like yours. And there’s something about the mouth—a bitterness. Gameness, too. Grandfather had his legs off at the knees, for fifty years. Called himself a hunk of meat in a wheel chair. God, it must be awful—a thing like that, when the rest of you is big and strong—but you’re not crippled that way. Oh, Johnny! Are you awake?” He heard a grunt. “I’ve got it—what you meant at first, about seeing your sergeant. Uncle Peter looks like—”
A hand went over his mouth quite unexpectedly and effectually. He looked up into the eyes like Grandfather King’s and found them very terrible.
“Fool! Never whisper it. Am I not the son of Jess Cramer? It had better be so! Better not see that I am like his enemy—and rival.” He leaned close, his eyes boring into the eyes so like his own. “One word to any one that would slur my mother, and—” he pressed his lips together, his meaning told by his eyes. “She came to me to-day, chattering her fear. Old Jess Cramer lives with other thoughts, and his eyes are dim at close range. Never come close to him, boy. Never recall the past to him. It would mean—God knows what it would mean. My mother’s life, maybe. And then his own, for I’d kill him, of course, if he touched her.”
Rawley blinked, trying to make sense of the riddle. Then his good hand went out and rested on Peter’s arm, that was trembling under the thin shirt sleeve.
“Uncle Peter!” His lips barely moved to form the words, and afterward they smiled. “The blood of the Kings! I’m glad—”
“Are you?” Peter bent over him fiercely. “Proud of a man who went away and left my mother—”
“He had to go,” Rawley defended hastily. “He meant to come back in a month’s time. But he was shot through the legs, and in hospital for months, and then sent home a cripple. After that he lost his legs altogether. How could he come back? Johnny can tell you.”
Peter pulled himself together and redressed the long, angry gash on Rawley’s head. Johnny Buffalo, having slowly squirmed his body to a position that gave him a view of Rawley’s cot, watched them unblinkingly, his wise old eyes gravely inscrutable. When he had finished, Peter strode to the door and stood there looking out. Rawley had a queer feeling that he was looking for eavesdroppers.
“What you say will make my mother happier,” he told Rawley, coming back and speaking in his usual calm tone of immutable reserve. “She seemed very bitter to-day when she talked with me. She has always thought your grandfather went away knowing he would never come back. And she has proud, Spanish blood in her veins—”
“Anita, by ——!” Rawley’s jaw dropped in sheer, crestfallen amazement.
“Did he tell you?” Peter eyed him queerly.
“It’s the diary. The beautiful, half-Spanish girl, all fire and life—he described her like that. And—”
“Well, they change as they grow old.” Peter’s lips twitched in a grin. “The beautiful Spanish señoritas get fat and ugly, and the Indian women are more so. Your grandfather’s fiery Spanish girl had nothing to pull her up the hill. Monotony, hardships—one can’t wonder if the recidivous influences surrounding her all these years pulled her down to the dead level of her mother’s people. Take this Indian here—” he tilted his head toward Johnny Buffalo—“he was taken out of it when he was a kid. Now, aside from certain traits of dignity and repression, I imagine he’s more white than Indian.”
Rawley nodded. “Lived right with Grandfather all his life and has studied and read everything he could get his hands on. He’s better educated than lots of college men; aren’t you, Johnny?”
“Yes. I think very much, of many things which Indians do not know. I do not talk very much. And that is wisdom also.”
“Mother had nothing from books. When her youth went and she began to take on weight, she dropped her pretty ways and became like the squaws. I remember, and it used to hurt my pride to see her slip into their ways. I was—white.” His mouth shut grimly.
Rawley lay looking into his face, trying to realize the full significance of this amazing truth. His grandfather’s son, and Anita’s. His own uncle. With Indian blood, but his uncle nevertheless. If Grandfather King had known—
“He’d have been proud,” he said aloud, “to have a son like you. He always wanted—and my father was a weakling, physically, I mean. He died when I was just a kid. Grandfather called him a damned milksop, because he wanted to work in a bank. Johnny can tell you a lot about Grandfather—your—father.” He lowered his voice, mindful of Peter’s warning. And then, “Does Nev—does your niece know about it?”
“She does not. The fewer who know it, the better for all concerned. There will be four of us, as it is. There mustn’t be five. Why make the lives of two old people bitter? Old Jess—I’ve a brother, Young Jess—thinks I am his son. He needs me, and Nevada needs me. We’ve hung together, in spite of the mixed breed you see us. Jess is Injun in looks and ways. Nevada’s mother was all white. Jess married a mission half-breed girl, and their kids are Injun to the bone. Belle, Nevada’s mother, married a Scotchman—good blood, I always thought, from his looks and actions. Nevada’s—Nevada.”
He said it proudly, and Rawley felt his blood tingle with something of the same pride.
From the other bed Johnny Buffalo spoke suddenly. “Anita, your mother, is my cousin. The daughter of my aunt. My blood is mingled with the blood of my sergeant’s son. My heart is now alive again and life is good. My sergeant has gone where he can walk on two feet, and I am left to care for his son and his grandson. I now see that God is very wise.”
“He is?” Peter pulled down his heavy, black brows and the corners of his lips. “I’ve spent a good deal of time wondering about that. There’s Nevada—and one-eighth Indian. Is that—”
“Oh, what the devil difference does that make?” Rawley gave a flounce that made him groan. But in the midst of it he managed to growl, “You said it yourself; Nevada’s—Nevada.”