Above the range

Contents

CHAP. PAGE.

I. The Bunch-grass Party . 9

II. A White Captive.23

Chapter I. The Bunch-grass Party

(( TT is not as it used to be,” said Inez, looking 1 down upon the range with discontented eyes. “ To-morrow will be Sunday, and next day will be rations. If the agency had not been moved they would be setting up so many tents down there this afternoon. Hundreds of them. And our people would be there.”

The dark-eyed girls and boys who sat with Inez in a semicircle on the bunch-grass by the mission stile turned their gaze upon the herdland, seeing in their mind’s eye an alluring picture of the tented village that had come and gone as often as the new moon when the agency was but a mile away.

It was a charming fall day on the South Dakota plains. The round red sun was showering the range with mellow light. A blue mist hung above the distant buttes and drifted through the draws and coulees. The Missouri River bent and strag¬ gled in its shifting channel with its floating bars of

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quicksand on the north and east, its muddy waters tinged with sapphire gleams. A narrow fringe of gold and scarlet foliage lay along the nearer side, and on the further side arose the bare black gumbo hills, a startling blot upon the scene, unsoftened by a vestige of the autumn glory lavished elsewhere.

“We should see our little sisters and our little brothers,” Hester mused. “Round the camp should I be walking just now with the baby on my back.”

“ I should not be carrying a baby, for we have none,” Nancy said; “I should have a puppy in my shawl. Maybe four or two, for we have always many puppies.”

There was a quaint, soft accent in the speech of these Dakota children. They expressed them¬ selves with much precision, yet with animation, and there was a loving stress upon their words as they alluded to the bygone days.

“My grandmother Three Braids would be there,” said little Polly. “ She would have a cowboy hat, and she would wear a soldier over¬ coat ’with very lots of buttons. Beeg and leetle, and so deeferent colors. Every time she find a button she sew it on her overcoat. She have a hundred when I came to school, one moon ago. They make it very preety, and so hard to leeft — thees way.” Polly proudly gripped her hands and

THE BUNCH-GRASS PARTY.

II tugged with labored breath, as if to raise a heavy weight.

There was a peal of laughter from the school girls as they thought of wrinkled Three Braids in the cowboy hat and army overcoat bedecked with countless buttons, sweltering in the balmy weather. Polly hung her head, chagrined at her mistake.

Lilian put her arm around the little girl, who sat beside her on the stile, and hugged her closely.

“Three Braids likes to save the buttons, and she knows just where they are when she has sewed them on her coat. The grandmother does nice beadwork, and she makes such splendid In¬ dian dolls to give to little girls.”

Polly raised her head and smiled, patting Lilian’s hand in gratitude for her defense of the good grandmother. Then she slipped away to join the children playing teepe by the woodpile.

Lilian was a fair, slight girl with hazel eyes, long lashes, and a wealth of red-brown hair that curled in little rings upon her forehead. She showed no trace of Indian lineage, yet she was called a Sioux girl, and her Indian name was Miniwanca Swift Bird. The English name Lil¬ ian had been given her when she came to school nine years before, at about six years of age. She had but little of the Teton accent, though

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Lilian wore a brown hat and a short blue jacket, while the hats and jackets of the other girls were lying in their laps or scattered on the grass. Her linsey-woolsey frock of plaided red and blue displayed no spot nor darn in contrast to the dresses of her mates, and every button was in place upon her neat kid shoes with patent leather tips.

“ Ponies there would be for us to ride,” dreamed Inez, longingly reverting to the joys of ration time.

“ There would be a horse-race, and I should be winning knives and pistols with my bronco,” said her brother Mario.

“Kee!” exclaimed a number of the girls in chorus, looking doubtfully at one another.

“That would be against the rule,” objected Katy, “ and you would be punished. Mr. Greely would not let you keep the knives and pistols, and would make you chop wood, after school, on ration day.”

Mario raised a fist, then opened it, and sent his fingers flying toward the government school upon another hill, a mile or so away, in token of his disapproval of the discipline enforced by Superin¬ tendent Greely.

“There would be dogs — dogs — more dogs than ponies,” said Baptiste. “What dog fights there would be ! ”

Lilian shuddered at the thought. “The Indian dogs are all so hideous, I cannot bear to look at them. Their legs are very short, and they have long, lean bodies, and are black and fierce. They have big heads and snarly hair that dangles in their eyes and makes them walk like blind dogs. When they mean to steal, they crouch down low and wriggle through the grass like snakes. They eat so much, the Indians don’t have enough themselves.”

“ Tokee ! ” was the astonished cry, while many flashes from the bright black eyes were cast at Lilian.

“ Hark to that! ” exclaimed Inez. “ Lilian thinks she is a white girl, and she thinks the Indians should have white dogs. She thinks that we should all be white. We are so hideous that she cannot bear to look at us. Ee-ah ! what crooked eyes I have, and what a long nose, and such frightful teeth.”

Inez was a fiery little beauty of fifteen. Her father had been a handsome Spaniard, and her Indian mother was noted for her comeliness in early youth.

Lilian laughed and tossed a plum at Inez as a peace-offering.

“ I wish the Indians had such dogs as Mr.

Averill. They are so sleek and handsome, and they run like deer. See, they are coming from the fort with him — all ten of them. He has been to get the mail.”

All eyes were turned upon the young superin¬ tendent of the mission, riding up the range upon a fine black horse. His dogs were coursing far ahead, a splendid greyhound leading.

“ Ee ! but they are swift,” said Mario, sharing Lilian’s admiration for the high-bred dogs. “ Look

— they are after something. To my eyes it is a beast much larger than a jack-rabbitt.”

All were instantly observant of the game which had aroused the mettle of the dogs. It was a slouching creature with a swinging gait, though swift of foot.

“A coyote,” presently descried Baptiste, who was full Indian, and could stretch his eyes beyond the outlook of the Spanish-Indian boy.

“ Tokee ! ” cried Mario, “ the dogs — how fast

— they are the north wind in a blizzard. Mr. Averill is after them. He has his gun.”

The bunch-grass party sprang upon its feet to watch the chase. The hunting instinct of the Indian had leaped to life in all. Lilian kept her seat, but felt a vivid interest in the hunt. “ Hyre ! hyu ! hyu ! ” was the excited cry. The girls outcheered the boys.

The black horse caught the spirit of the chase, and sped with wondrous nerve.

The dogs pursued the animal across a reach of level prairie, gaining on it meanwhile. Crowded by the dogs, it darted up a rise and skimmed the margin of a coulee for some distance.

“Now they have it. It has dropped into the coulee, and the dogs have gone down after it,” cried Mario. “They will catch it in the brush.”

But presently the animal was seen upon the further margin. It had climbed the steep side, which the dogs could not attempt, and thus eluded them.

Mr. Averill was now within range of it, but pity for the struggling creature caused him to refrain from firing. He called his dogs and turned upon the track for home.

The group set up the Indian cry of defeat, “ He-he-he-he! ” (Alas! alas! alas! alas!) and Mario supplemented the lament by flinging the derisive shout in Mr. Averill’s direction, “ Ho'wo ! Ho'wo ! E'-ya-ha-he ! E'-ya-ha-he ! ” (Come on ! Come on ! How brave you are ! How brave you are !)

“Poor thing!” said Lilian, with a fluttering breath. “I’m glad he didn’t shoot it, though coyotes are so mean. They sometimes chase the cattle on the range, and bite their hind legs till

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they break the sinews. Then the cattle drop dead and the coyotes eat them.”

“ It is not as it used to be with coyotes,” rumi¬ nated Baptiste when the bunch-grass party had resumed the semicircle. “Most of them the sol¬ diers and the boys have killed or scared away.”

“ They will come back in great packs when the fort and boys’ school are moved,” predicted Mario. “You girls will hear them barking in the night. Even one will sound like many, for a coyote whirls round very fast and throws a bark all ways. And you will see them down there thick as buzzards when a blizzard there has been, feasting on the frozen cattle.”

The girls looked down upon the sunlit range, thinking of its desolation when the snow was deep, and shrinking from the loneliness when there would be no brothers, cousins, and special friends upon the other hill.

“ Glad am I that they have not begun to build the new schoolhouse at the agency,” said Inez. “ They will not move the boys this year.”

“ I hope the soldiers won’t go, either,” Lilian said. “ There are such lovely ladies at the fort.”

“ Because they notice her, she thinks they are so lovely,” tilted Inez, with a laugh. “ She is always going to the fort with Mrs. Averill to get petted. And she holds her head up high, and talks so brave, just like she never was afraid.”

“ You would not let the soldier ladies pet you,” Katy said.

“ No ; I should do this way.” Inez hid her face behind her hands, then peeped out coyly between her fingers.

“ I should turn my back,” feared Hester.

“ I should hang my head,” quaked Nancy.

44 I should hold my head up,” Katy braced her nerves to hope, 44 and say yes, ma’am, and no, ma’am, if they talked to me, but I should feel very scared and want to run and hide.”

Katy had spent five years at Hampton, and was next to Lilian in the line of self-possession.

44 Lieutenant Frisbie has been married, and his bride is coming to the fort,” said Lilian, heedless of the little missile shied at her by Inez. 44 She is young and beautiful, they say. I hope I shall see her often, even if she doesn’t talk to me.”

Lilian cast a wistful look upon the little army post four miles away. She saw the long, white guardhouse and the commissary store quite plainly through the haze. Then she sent her eyes still further, gazing dreamily at the horizon.

44 She has been in the great cities, New York and Washington, and she has been across the ocean. I have only been there and here.”

l8 ABOVE THE RANGE.

Lilian looked toward the buttes, beyond which was the Indian camp where she had lived in early childhood with her foster parents. They had brought her to their log house on returning from a roving expedition in the autumn, thirteen years before, but in what way they obtained her was a mystery. They had adopted her to fill the place of their little daughter who had died not long before.

The Indian foster parents had been fond of Lilian, and had come to visit her quite often at the mission, camping in their teepe, and until her twelfth year she had spent a part of every summer in their cabin on the reservation. But the foster parents had both died, and now the mission was her constant home.

“ I was in the great city of New York last summer, when I came from Hampton,” Katy said. “ I rode in a street car up above the top windows of the houses. And I hallooed into a little hole and held a funny thing up to my ear, and they heard me as far away as a two weeks’ ride horse¬ back, and they hallooed to me and I heard them.”

“ Kee! ” exclaimed the girls and boys in con¬ cert.

They had heard before about the Hampton girl’s experience with the elevated railway and the telephone, but they could not believe the wondrous story.

“ You are just cheating,” Nancy said.

“No, I am very true. It cost nine dollars for all the Indian girls to halloo that dared to, but a rich white man paid for it. He wanted us to tell our people what great things the white men could find out how to do. But Irene Turtle Shell — she was a Crow Indian — turned her back to the little hole, for she thought it was bad medicine.

“And I saw the — Statue of—Liberty. She stands on an island near New York, with the water very far all around. She is the color of an Indian woman, and so-o ta-a-11! If she was lying down out there, her feet would reach to the wood pile, and her head to the dog corral,” was the wild guess.

“You said the chicken house when last you talked of her,” corrected Inez.

“ I cannot quite tell — there is not much differ¬ ence. I climbed up, up the twisted stairs inside of her, till I was very scared, to the tip-top of her brains, and looked out through a hole in her crown. Many people can stand in her head and not get pushed.”

“ How grand she is,” said Lilian, with eyes and cheeks aglow. “She holds a scroll in one hand, and a splendid torchlight in the other. Miss

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Hartford says the hand that holds the scroll looks soft and dimpled, and the other very strong, as if it never would get tired of holding up the torch to light the world.”

“ Yes,” said Katy; “and the forefinger of the strong hand is as long as a porch post, and she could not squeeze the thumb into a post hole.”

“ Tokee ! ” was the surprised rejoinder from the interested audience on the bunch-grass.

“The great city was very far down,” pursued the sight-seer, “ and the big stores looked so-o little, like the dog house. And the ships down on the water looked as if they did not move, when they were going very fast. I have sailed in a ship, and—I have been seasick.”

She dropped her voice mysteriously.

“ What is it to be seasick?” questioned Nancy, looking at the traveler with awed eyes, as if she gazed on one miraculously snatched from the jaws of death.

“You walk on the deck this way.” Katy struggled to her feet and tottered on the sward. “ And you try to get downstairs to lie down. But you are very sl-o-o-w ” — she blindly clutched the air—“and you are sorry that you came.” She said no more, but locked her hands despairingly, and showed her white teeth with a squeamish smile.

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Katy had an Irish father, and a deal of mimicry was mingled with her Indian traits.

“ When I went to Hampton I was nine birth¬ days, ” went on the brisk narrator, cheered by the attention of her hearers. “ There was not a very little girl’s class at the Indian school, so I went to a white children’s school. The white boys were not polite to me. They pinched me with pins, and ran back of me and called me little redskin. There was an old soldier. He was drunk and he ran crooked, but he chased the boys and made them stop. I was crying when I came where my sister was, and I said I did not like to be at Hamp¬ ton, and I wanted to go home very fast. But she said we must stay five years.”

“Was your sister a long girl or a short girl?” Nancy asked.

“ She was two moons after fourteen birthdays. Just my age last Christmas tree.”

There was a sudden stir among the group, and every eye was turned toward a draw upon the west into which three horseback riders had de¬ scended. Shortly they emerged and rode along the level range in single file.

The girls and boys kept watch of them with keen, far-seeing eyes.

“Policemen!” Baptiste soon discovered, start¬ ing up.

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All were now alert.

“ Yes,” said Inez. “ I can see their uniforms.”

“ The one that rides first, on the white horse, is my father,” Hester found ere long.

“ And Peter Poor Shot’s uncle is the one that rides last,” Mario said.

“ And who rides in the middle? Just like I am very blind,” groped Nancy, who was suffering from a sty in aggravated form and had one eye tied up.

“Not a policeman, nor a man. One shorter,” Mario perceived.

“ Clark McKeag,” said Inez in another minute.

“Clark?” said Lilian, springing from the stile. She held her hand above her eyes, looking down the range in some excitement.

.“Back to school have the policemen brought him?” wondered Nancy.

CHAPTER II. HE Indian policemen and their charge were

1 riding rather swiftly, but their horses slack¬ ened speed as they came nearer, and before they reached the outposts of the mission grounds they dropped into a walk and scaled the hillside in a solemn line.

Upon arriving at the cattle gate some rods below the stile, the rear guard turned into the grounds and rode toward the dog corral, where Mr. Averill was shutting in the dogs.

As if to emphasize the grave occasion and convey a lesson to the watchful party at the stile, the policeman left in charge fell back and seized the bridle of the captive’s pony, leading him a pace or two behind his own. The Indian did not turn his head nor move a muscle of his face as he ap¬ proached the stile. He passed the party like a mounted statue, glancing neither to the right nor left.

The white boy whom he had in tow preserved a similar demeanor, imitating with remarkable fidelity the rigid aspect of his Indian captor.

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This he did till he was close beside the stile, then suddenly he gave himself a fling and struck the ground, and with a bound or two was side by side with Lilian, who had fluttered back upon her perch.

“ Kee! you must not do that,” Hester warned in undertone. “ My father thinks he has you on the pony.”

Clark fired a wink from his audacious blue eye at the grim red deputy of law and order, who pursued the forced march toward the boys’ school, apparently unconscious that his captive had es¬ caped.

He rode on several rods, then broke into a trot. All at once he turned and looked upon the empty saddle; then he drew the reins and stopped as if in great bewilderment.

He wheeled about and rode back at a furious rate. The girls and boys who stood upon the grass fell back to clear the way. Lilian held her breath, but Clark was unconcerned.

As the Indian bore down upon the stile, he checked his horse so suddenly he threw him back upon his haunches, drew a pistol from his belt, and whirled it with a frightful scowl.

He fired it into the air, and quietly dismounted and began to shake hands with the girls and boys.

“ How! ” he said to each in cordial tones.

He grasped Clark’s hand, and wrung it with special fervor.

“ Be good boy. Go school. Study hard like Indian,” was his gentle admonition.

Thereupon he left Clark to his own devices and followed Peter Poor Shot’s uncle to the dog corral.

Clark turned to Lilian with a laugh.

“ How ! ” exclaimed he, stretching out his hand.

She shook it somewhat gravely, but there was friendship in the grasp.

He then descended from the stile and went the rounds among the boys and girls, in emulation of the sociable policeman.

The girls were rather shy of him, but they cast admiring glances at the jaunty cowboy rig in which he had been captured on the range.

A light, soft hat, with marvelous rim, slouched gracefully upon his golden locks. A gray silk handkerchief with scarlet edge was knotted at his sunburnt throat. His flannel shirt of navy blue, which sagged upon the hips in genuine cow¬ boy style, was girded with a leather belt, and leather leggings, with a row of fringe along the sides, incased his legs. He was a well-developed, prepossessing youth of sixteen years. He had stayed from school to join the cowboys in the great fall round-up of beef cattle, and participate in the

2 6

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exciting work of cutting out his uncle’s cattle from the general herd and driving them to sale.

Clark was a Wisconsin boy, who had been brought among the Indians by a strange turn in the wheel of fortune.

His eccentric uncle, Seth McKeag, had drifted to the reservation many years before, and had married Mother Swift Bird’s sister. He had been a man of education, and in some degree he still retained his love of knowledge, being known among the Indians as the man with many books. He had grown wealthy in the cattle business, and had built a good-sized ranch house, which was looked upon with wonder by his Indian neigh¬ bors.

Three years previously McKeag had heard a rumor that his brother, who had been a poor in¬ ventor with unlimited hope, had died and left a young son motherless and homeless. Thereupon McKeag had gone back to Wisconsin to investi¬ gate, and having found the rumor to be true, had brought the boy to the Dakota plains. By permis¬ sion from the Indian agent, he had placed Clark in the government school, where he had shared to some extent the fare and discipline of the Indian boys.

From the tangle of one Indian sister being Clark’s aunt, and the other Lilian’s foster mother, the boy and girl were looked upon as cousins, and in many ways they were congenial comrades.

The bunch-grass party settled down a third time, for the boys had come to while away the Saturday afternoon in visiting the girls, and all were on their native heath when lounging on the grass.

“ You fellows missed the fun,” said Clark, when he was back upon the stile. “We scoured the country to the Rosebud and the Black Hills. We bunched five thousand cattle in one place, and all the owners had their beeves cut out; then we turned the cattle loose and bunched another lot. Every cowboy but one, in this part of South Da¬ kota, seemed to be in the lasso gang.”

“ Who was that one?” Mario asked.

There was a little pause.

“ Your brother, Alphonso.”

“Why was not Alphonso there?” demanded Inez, quickly.

Clark hesitated somewhat longer.

“ Other business, I suppose, ” he said evasively.

It must, indeed, have been important business that had kept Alphonso, the intrepid cowboy, from engaging in the great fall round-up of the beeves.

Inez gave a startled glance at Mario, but the handsome dark face of the Spanish-Indian boy ex¬ pressed no wonder nor concern. He lay back lazily upon the grass, and clasped his hands be-

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neath his head, and looked at Clark with halfclosed eyes, as if awaiting further news of the events upon the range.

“The cowboys were divided into messes, and there was a chuck wagon, and a cook, and horse-wrangler for every mess — you know the way,” proceeded Clark. “ We fared first rate in our mess until the cook and the horse-wrangler had some trouble, and the cook got hurt, then I had to superintend the chuck for several days. , Uncle Seth was sharp enough to turn me to account that way.”

“ I hope you made good biscuit and didn’t burn the meat,” said Lilian.

She remembered certain adverse rumors as to Clark’s ability as a cook, which had floated in from the other school.

Clark shrugged his shoulders but did not com¬ mit himself.

“ Did you shoot a deer? ” she asked, seeing that a rolled-up skin was strapped before the saddle on his pony, which the Indian had fastened to a post.

“Yes,” said he, “ out near the Black Hills. You girls can dress and tan the skin, and divide it for your beadwork.”

“ I don’t do nice beadwork,” Lilian said, “ but I will help the others dress the skin. It will be lovely for their work.”

A WHITE CAPTIVE.

2 9

There was a murmur of delight from all the girls but Inez, who had lapsed into a dreary mood. The beautiful soft deerskin which their mothers had in such abundance in their girlhood, for all sorts of fancy work, and even for whole dresses, had become an almost unknown article, owing to the scarcity of deer. The girls were forced to be content with meager portions of the skins from small wild creatures and domestic animals, which they helped their mothers dress and scrape till they were thin and pliable.

“ We thank you very much,” said Katy. “ We will bead some hat bands for the boys, and hang them on the Christmas tree.”

And Clark was the hero of the day.

“ It is not as it used to be,” repeated Mario, open¬ ing his eyes to fix them jealously on the skin. “ It used to be that Indian boys went hunting, and white boys stayed in school.”

“ Yes,” said Clark, “ times are changing every which way. Funny for a white boy to be brought to school by Indian policemen,” and he leaned back on the stile and laughed. “ I had an argu¬ ment with Uncle Seth about not coming back this year, and he spoke to the policemen.”

“ You are needed,” Mario said maliciously. “ There is much hair to be cut. The points have long been growing.”

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Clark straightened up and groaned.

In an ill-starred moment he had made it known that he possessed a natural genius for the art of trimming hair, and thus he had become, perforce, the barber of the school.

“ Ho-ke-la will come first,” said Mario, and he rolled his eyes in the direction of a new full Indian boy sitting separate from the rest. He had taken no part in the conversation, as he could not speak English, and the pupils of the schools were not allowed to speak Dakota save on Sunday. Most of them observed the rule with care, although they loved to speak their native language.

The wild boy, Ho-ke-la, was the namesake of the man in the moon, because he was short and had a large body and large legs. He was enrolled as Stephen, but the civilized name had not begun to cling to him as yet. He had put on the garments of the schoolboy, but his long, wild tresses, reaching to his shoulders and besmeared with beaver oil, had not been tampered with.

“I’ll shear him closer than a monk,” Clark threatened recklessly.

“ He will fight you when he catches you alone,” said Mario.

“Not till he’s laid off his mourning. ^ ’T wouldn’t be the custom.”

“ Will he mourn, I wonder — and his family — and give away their things and ponies ? ” Katy said.

The rite of cutting hair was something very serious with the uncivilized Sioux. It was a sign of mourning, and was frequently attended with disastrous results. If the family went into mourn¬ ing, they must scatter their possessions here and there as presents to their friends.

Hence the superintendents of the schools dreaded the enrolment of a long-haired boy, and post¬ poned the evil day of shearing him till he was somewhat wonted to his new surroundings. Now and then the wild boy shed his locks from choice, to follow the example of the civilized boys.

‘ 4 I don’t know why the Indians are so strange,” said Lilian, looking at the boy, who sat apart, in passive ignorance of what was going on. “ Some¬ times it seems all new and far away, as if I’d only read about it in a book.”

Her eyes grew dreamy, and she gazed at the expanse of sky and herdland in a puzzled way. The mystery of how she came to be among the strange red people weighed upon her more and more as she grew older.

Girls of partial Indian lineage as fair as she were sometimes to be seen, but Lilian had no traits in common with her mates. Although she had a warm affection for these bright, weird children of