Sun Road

by Owen Wister

 

Sun Road

A Short Story—The First in Years—

By Owen Wister

Who Delighted Half a Million Americans When
He Wrote “The Virginian”

 

ALL dust had been washed from my body in the hot pool. A blessing could hardly be more disguised than that bath, with its forbidding look and smell out in the wide sage-brush. Except for a huge sluggish bubble rising and bursting now and then, the water welled up without a ripple or a sound from near the fiery bowels of the earth; it lay in our upper air a placid, glassy flat of turquoise, veiled with haunting steam; it looked as if its depths might hide some special sort of monster with lungs that could not thrive in cool, clear, natural water; but a blessing it was. It dissolved fatigue away and softened and smoothed the human skin to satin.

Towel in one hand, I slid the other from shoulder to wrist and up and down me in pleasure at my riddance of three days’ sleeping-car degradation and thirty-six hours of stage journey; to be purged from sin could not possibly equal the comfort of this. While I dressed in clean fresh clothes, I moved and stood at the door of the little bathing hut built for the officers of the post and their guests. There the ambulance waited for me, and there lay Wyoming. One way, nothing at all till eyesight ended at some ridges ribbed with strange daubs of red; the other way, the toy shapes of houses and sheds in a clump at the post; beyond these, the far-off gold of the opens and blue of the pines high up along the mountain slopes; and moving in between, blanketed Indians on their ponies, dotting across the distance.

One was riding my way; and keeping pace with him bobbed a little boy whose legs did not reach half down his pony’s side. With a slow gesture the Indian’s right arm now and then lifted a little as it hung slack and came down again as he lightly used his quirt. I recognized Sun Road.

Sun Road was the eldest son of a chief, and heir to nothing any more save the extinction of his race because it lay in the path of my own. A small herd of horses was his worldly goods, and when the chance came he was glad to earn fifty dollars a month for taking tenderfeet like me where big game could be found. We tenderfeet were not many then; no beaten paths yet led into this world of unspoiled wonder; we came a long way to be in it for a little while, and went back to our needlessly excited cities, homesick for the serenity of the hills.

“How!” said Sun Road, and greeted me with a grave smile.

“How!” I answered.

He sat his pony with a curious stillness, not like white men. The little boy stared at me, just as young wild things that you come upon in a wood will fix you with bright eyes for a moment before they vanish.

“Mr. King tell me you go hunting,” said Sun Road. Mr. King was the post trader. I had written him to make arrangements.

“Yes. All same like last year. You come?”

“Yes. Can go tomorrow. Mr. King tell me you want mountain sheep.”

I nodded. “Sheep, elk, bear, everything!”

“We get him,” said Sun Road. “George going?” George was a white man, my cook, packer and horse-wrangler.

“George going all same like last year. We go up Wind River. Fish. We go over Towogetee Pass, maybe shoot. We go up Snake, over to Yellowstone Lake, see Cañon, see Mam- moth Hot Springs, come back by Geysers and Sheridan Trail, plenty fish, plenty shoot.”

Sun Road looked straight ahead of him. “I don’t know Park,” he muttered.

“I know Park and so does George. We'll not lose you.”

“We camp in Park?” asked the Indian. He still muttered it.

“We camp, we fish in Yellowstone River, we see big Mammoth Hotel, we come back Sheridan Trail, hunt in mountains.”

A little silence followed, and behind me a liquid gulp sounded as one of the big bubbles rose with an influx from the depths of the pool and broke.

Sun Road made a gesture. “This my son Dick.”

I stepped forward to shake hands, but the child shrank from me.

Sun Road spoke quickly. “He never go school yet. Go soon, maybe one snow, maybe two snows.”

I nodded to the little fellow in as friendly a fashion as I knew, but he would not look at me; his eyes were upon his father.

“He big boy pretty soon,” continued his father. “Go school, learn heap books, come back, take you hunting. I got new boy now. My wife die when he born.”

Having stated this fact, and without a good-by or any form of words or sign used by the white man, Sun Road turned his pony and was gone, his little boy Dick bobbing close at his side.

I slung my cast-off garments into the ambulance, locked the bathing hut, climbed up beside the soldier who was driving, and the mules started for the post, Fort Washakie, at a brisk gallop.

Somewhat later I strolled out of the parade ground to the post trader’s store to look over the purchases I had made for my trip. Hitched to the long rail in front of the building were two Indian ponies, and by the counter inside stood Sun Road with little Dick. George, my cook, and King, the post trader, stood there too, and I perceived that this was a conclave.

At once I became aware that some sort of uneasiness or doubt had been sown in me during my talk with Sun Road at the turquoise pool. The men had been saying something as I came in, and upon my entrance their voices had dropped away. Each waited for some other to speak, and I grew plainly aware of the doubt I had not known was in my mind till now. “What’s the matter?” I began.

“Sun Road says he can’t go with us,” said George Tews.

So this was what my inmost self had seen at the pool, seen when the Indian first averted his eyes and said that he was not acquainted with the Yellowstone Park—seen, but withheld from my conscious brain. I was not going to say it out to him in their presence, his reason for his change of mind. Perhaps they guessed it as well as I did, or perhaps he had told them. I should know this in a minute; what I clearly knew now was that when Sun Road had greeted me as I stood putting on my clean clothes he fully intended to go hunting with me, and that by the time he had said, somewhat irrelevantly, “This my son Dick,” he was resolved not to go.

I looked at him. “Sun Road,” I said, “what am I to do?”

“You get some other man easy.”

“But I want you. You know that. I write long time back Mr. King; he tell me yes you go; I come long way, see you today, you say you go; now you say you not go.”

No change touched the Indian’s great face and he repeated quietly:

“Plenty other men take you hunting.”

“Who?”

“Tighee know that country.” He was another Shoshone Indian, well-known to me.

“Tighee,” interposed George Tews, “has got a job at the post.”

“Paul La Rose take you,” said Sun Road. He was a half-breed whom I also knew well.

But Paul La Rose was already engaged to guide another party up the North Fork of Wind River. There really was no one else available. I had come about two thousand miles for this month of holiday, and in desperation I spoke.

“Sun Road, you know that when you met me this afternoon you intended to go. What is the matter?”

“I promise Colonel Saunderson break good pony his little girl. Must stay.”

“But you promised me long ago.”

“Mr. Lord come hunt sheep pretty soon. He always hire me.”

“I shall be back before he needs you. I fixed that with Mr. Lord in New York.”

“My son Dick go school pretty soon. Long way. I not see him maybe two snows, maybe three snows. He little boy now. I stay see him now.”

The child had been watching us with his bright wild eyes, and on hearing his name in a conversation of which he understood nothing he made a little movement, always with his hand in his father’s, and I saw the father’s close upon it gently. Having no more to say, the Indian with his son beside him walked out of the store in his soft moccasins, and we three stood looking at each other among the hanging hides and pelts.

“Let’s you and me go, anyway,” suggested George Tews.

“I suppose you understand the reason?” said Mr. King. He spoke for the first time.

I nodded. “But I don’t see why some of them are afraid of the Yellowstone Park while others are not. Those two he mentioned, Tighee and Paul La Rose, go there with parties.”

“A superstition takes a long while to die,” said the post trader. “In Jim Bridger’s time none of them would go near. it. They said it was the home of devils and believed that the geysers were the open doors that let the devils out on earth.”

“Well, then, what converted Tighee?”

“You can’t be sure he is wholly converted. But he’ll go on beaten paths in white men’s company. I don’t believe he’d go alone.”

“What made him venture the first time?”

“What made the first man eat the first oyster? They’re just as different in character as white men. Tighee has always had an intelligence which helps him to be in the lead, but Sun Road has nothing but his native force that makes him respected. He is simple—you saw how badly he lied—and in his heart he holds closer to the old things, for all that he has been to school and wants his boy to go.”

“Let’s you and me go alone,” repeated George Tews. “I’m a pretty good hunter myself and you’re a pretty good packer. We'll make it all right.”

“Yes. But I hate to be defeated. I suppose,” I meditated aloud, “I could give up going to the Park and just hunt in the country south of it.”

“That wouldn’t change him now, I think,” said King. ‘Not after our talk. There’s one chance. Sun Road failed to sell his horses this year and he is very poor.”

“Oh, if it’s money,” I exclaimed, “send for him! I'll be glad to help him.”

Mr. King shook his head. “Would you mind leaving it to me? I don’t think either of us could get him back now. The surest way is through the Indian agent. I’ll get hold of him and if he sends for Sun Road he’ll come.”

And so next morning it was arranged, and Sun Road came, having first seen the agent and undergone whatever influence the agent could exert upon him; and listened, I suppose, to arguments and advice about this exceptional chance to earn large pay. Nothing of this was said between Sun Road and me. George Tews and I had got the packs ready to start and they were assembled in front of the post trader’s store when the Indian and his son came riding across the sage-brush from their tepee. A meek pack animal followed them, led by a rope. Inside the store I paid into Sun Road’s hand more than half of the liberal sum I should owe him at the end of our expedition. This had been a notion of my own, and Mr. King thought well of it.

“That will go far to reconciling him,” said King; “and he’ll feel bound to do his best for you, for there’s no more honest Indian on the reservation, and their word is more sacred to them than ours to us.”

Sun Road did not understand money very quickly, and he let the bills lie in his hand without any comment while King explained it to him in the Indian language. He did not thank me—they never did, it was not their way. Still standing quietly he began looking about the store, and when his eye lighted upon a large glass jar marked “candy,” which he recognized by its contents, he pointed to it and asked: “How much?”

A pound of it was weighed out and put in a bag and he gave it to Dick, who received it mechanically and held it unopened. Sun Road handed Mr. King the change with all the rest of his money to be put in safe keeping, but the post trader made him take some of it with him.

“Money pretty good, Sun Road,” said George Tews; “maybe buy something in Park.”

And then we got on our horses and rounded up the struggling packs, while Mr. King and his clerk and the various loungers and soldiers watched our departure. Away from these and near his pony stood little Dick, gazing after his father, motionless, quite alone, the unopened bag of candy in his brown hand.

We got away from Fort Washakie in time to make Bull Lake that first night. It was warm, we needed no big fire, but merely one for our supper; and after this meal we sat near the quiet little blaze while the long dusk of summer filtered its violet into the cañons of the mountains and night hawks dipped and sped through the silent air. Bull-Lake, concealed among foot-hills, lay perhaps half a mile above our camp by the stream that flowed from the lake and emptied into Wind River some few hundred yards below us. Whenever I had made my camp here I had listened for the mysterious sounds which people said arose at times from the waters of Bull Lake. From these it derived its name, but I had never heard them.

“What do you know about them?” I asked George Tews.

“Only what they claim.”

“Yes; but there must be actually something. It can’t be merely an invention for the benefit of innocent persons like me.”

Tews relighted his pipe. “Tell us, Sun Road. You know.”

Sun Road sat near us, but separate by a little space, and he was also smoking.

“I know what?” He spoke without turning his head.

George looked at me and in his face was small belief that he could bring the Indian to say more. But he. was a friend of many among the Shoshones and Arapahoes who lived on the reservation and so he did not allow the Indian’s gruff brevity to stop him.

“Some folks say that big fish in Bull Lake make noise.”

Sun Road remained as he sat, without a gesture or a turn of his head. He might have been something carved. But he spoke, after waiting. “Maybe some fish can talk. I never catch fish like that.”

George persisted. With the idea of perhaps enticing Sun Road to come out of his reticence, he now went over all the stories about Bull Lake that were told in the Wind River country.

“I never caught fish like that either. Only fish I know up here are trout and whitefish. None of ’em ever said a word to me, and they’ve had lots of chances.” He paused to see if so far he had made any impression upon the Indian; but there was no sign of it. ‘No, I don’t believe it’s any fish,” he resumed, as if he were arguing. “Somebody would have seen one. If you were to ask me I’d say that it was wind, big wind somewhere in the mountains, making noise in rocks of cañon, all same thunder far away. Only, why does it seem to come from the water? But I don’t believe that about those buffalo.”

George stopped again, but his trick was not succeeding. He now presented the original legend, found by white men when they first came.

“I heard one long time ago—heap snows come and go since that time—Indians make buffalo hunt up here. They ride their horses after herd all same like big cattle round-up. They chase cows, calves, bulls long way over hills in this country, and buffalo run away all time quick. Buffalo run away from Indians so quick they not see trail where they go, and they come high up on hill by lake where steep rocks are so they can’t stop. They see water too late, they want to stop but other buffalo behind not see water, only want to run away from Indians; so those big bull buffalo that lead the herd they get pushed and they go over edge and fall in water deep down. They never come out again. Can’t get on top of water any more. Can’t see daylight any more. So big bull buffalo all blind in bottom lake they mourn for daylight some time. When they do that you hear noise come out of lake.”

George Tews finished, and Sun Road did not move; he continued to smoke. “How about that, Sun Road?” asked George. “You think old bull make that noise?”

The Indian got up. “I don’t know about that. I go see after my horses.” He walked away.

We watched him go like some exhalation of the dusk. Soon the bushes and a bend of the creek hid him.

“Until you know them,” said Tews, “you’d never think how little their schooling with white teachers changes them.”

“Until you know them,” I repeated. “When does that happen?”

He laughed. “Never, in a way. But does anybody know anybody?”

“Oh, well, you needn’t draw it so fine! You and I are more like each other than we’re like him.”

“I guess we’re not so unlike him when it comes to feelings. It’s our reasons for our feelings that are different from his. Did you ever want to kill a man?”

“Several times.”

“Did you ever do it?”

“Not so far!”

“Neither have I. My reasons stop me. Sun Road hasn’t got some of those. When he was about twenty he went on a hunt for winter meat with some other Indians, and one of them was careless with his gun, pointing it around promiscuous in camp. Sun Road spoke to him. Spoke to him twice. One day the fellow accidentally shot Sun Road in the leg while he was dressing an elk. Sun Road jumped up and put a bullet through his heart.”

“What did they do to him?”

“The other Indians who saw it would have acted the same. They never told. It was off the reservation up on the head of Green River and no white man’s law was around the corner. I may say that I saw the incident. They used to let me go along at times. Well now, take this Bull Lake story. You saw that he wouldn’t talk about that before you. You can’t tell how much he believes it—but he will not say he doesn’t. Not out loud anyway. Not even in his mind, most likely. He would consider it ‘bad medicine.’ He’d have the fear that invisible powers might hear it and come out of these mountains and get him. That’s my guess, knowing Indians some—and knowing myself some. I have feelings like that, only I’ve reasons that stop me—generally!” George broke off with a brief laugh of confession. “Aren’t you more or less that way yourself? Aren’t pretty near all men?”

I nodded in silence.

“Maybe it’s thirteen at table,” pursued George. “Or it’s touching wood. Or walking under a ladder. Some private craziness for most everybody.” Again he laughed abruptly because he was confessing, and again I nodded. But he made me confess too.

“I believe I don’t like a person who has none of that in him. George, you’re quite a philosopher.”

“No, I’m not,” he returned vigorously. “I don’t say these things, I don’t think ’em, until you come out here and start me off.”

“Well then, it’s inside you.”

“But there,” said George suddenly, “is the difference. I couldn’t start Sun Road off. Yes, there’s the difference.” He pondered over this for a moment. “All the same, deep down at the bottom, they’re the same as us,” he declared.

“George, what did he tell you and Mr. King?”

“About why he wouldn’t go? Whatever he said was before I came into the store. But I know just as well as if I’d been there that he didn’t say the real why. You’ve had a sample of him tonight.”

“But money made him drop his ideas.”

“Oh, he has brought his ideas along!”

The night had wholly come and we sat saying nothing. That huge sense of what had been here before the beginning of things, and was here still, aware of man but indifferent to him, laid its might upon us even more in the dark than in the day, and day was filled with it.

I rose to go to bed and saw beyond the fire the figure of Sun Road standing. How long had he been there? Had he heard us? Nothing in him showed it. The few good night words we exchanged revealed nothing. Then, as so often, what I subtly felt was the social space that in spite of his friendliness he set between himself and us, his race and ours. I don’t know how. We were his conquerors, his mental superiors—but we were interlopers. We could dispossess him of his land, his power, his birth-right, but not of that invisible thing which he held aloof in every tone of his voice, in every gesture of his hand.

Sun Road was gorgeous with paint in the morning, and his long black hair had been washed and bound freshly and shone where you could see it beneath the broad rim of his hat.

“He has been making medicine,” said George as our outfit rode slowly on its way up Wind River.

“That’s beginning soon. What for?”

“I can’t tell you that. If there’s a white man on this reservation. whom they’ve let in to that part of their life, I’ve yet to meet him.”

“Did you hear him get up?”

“I never hear him.”

“I suppose it’s his way of saying his prayers.”

“That’s about it. It’s a fair long while since I’ve said mine every morning—or any other time.”

“Same here,” I said.

I looked along over the backs of the horses walking slowly ahead of me in single file on the trail through the sage-brush. Sun Road led our train. He took his place there by right, it was not disputed; had I put myself at the head of the outfit it would have been held a liberty, if not an affront.

“Does he say his prayers every morning?” I asked George presently.

“Guess so. Stop that Calico from drinking. Drive her out of the water.”

The pack-horse Calico was one of my responsibilities. She had frivolously stopped at Meadow Creek, which was but very little beyond Bull Lake Creek where all had drunk their fill when we started. So I galloped on and chased the trifling Calico out of the water and into her place in our line of march.

“But he doesn’t paint himself every morning,” I resumed.

“Every so often he does, though he’d never say why or when, or speak of it. When I get up to go after the horses, he’s always out of camp already. He makes it seem as if he had been catching up his own horse. And it’s true he always does that. But that’s not all of it.”

We wound onward through the stones and the sage-brush, while the sun shone high over the pale open distance across Wind River.

We nooned beside the cool torrent of Dinwiddie, and while George and I were throwing off the packs—Sun Road never touched any but his own—my thought reverted to the Indian.

“I wonder if he’s glad he came,” I said to George.

“What makes you say that?”

“He didn’t talk much by the fire last night.”

“Haven't I seen you ride all day long without a word to anybody?”

“Well, that’s true, too. You don’t think you made him angry about Bull Lake?”

“Angry, no! He’ll say something when he has it to say. He’s just enjoying life now—only he does it more like a tree than you and I know how to.”

“Sun Road,” said I as we sat on the ground at_our luncheon, “is it too far to make camp on the river below Red Cañon and the Blue Holes?”

“Yes, that’s good camp. We make it.”

“Because I want to fish this evening.”

“That’s good.”

“And tomorrow we'll ford above there because it’s easier fishing on the other bank. I'll start ahead and have trout fried for your luncheon at our nooning place. I guess I'll ford back and wait for you outside the woods beyond Torrey Creek.”

“Fish better up there,” assented Sun Road. “You not go up North Fork and take high trail?”

“No, I want to keep down on the river for the trout. We couldn’t make Horse Creek tomorrow?”

“Pretty far. Pack-horses maybe get sore backs. We make Horse Creek in two drives.”

When the saddles were on again and we were ready to start, Sun Road said this: “You take lead now. You know trail.”

His face and voice were very friendly, it was like a dignity conferred, and I flushed with pleasure; but next day as we journeyed on after our nooning beyond Torrey Creek I was careful to resume my customary place behind the feeble-minded Calico. No one spoke for several miles; then George Tews imparted to me a flattering fact.

“Sun Road paid you a compliment when you rode off alone this morning.”

“That makes two,” said I.

“He watched you start, and then he said in his own language, ‘We shall not have to find him.’”

“I don’t very well see,” I replied, “how even a child could get lost following up this river.”

“Sun Road has had to find lost Easterners who were not children,” said George. “He spoke of your choosing the right fords. Now don’t fall off your horse and burst with pride.”

I felt like it, but instead I burst into loud song:

“Sick man, well man, live man, dead man,
Set ’em up another, make ’em happy as you can——”

and the contemptible Calico instantly dashed up a hill. “She’s temperance!” I yelled as I made after her.

This was our only commotion that afternoon or next day, but it or my song had set Sun Road to singing himself. From where he ambled in the lead I could catch casual pieces of his strange melodies; it was more as if nature were chanting.

The feel of the mountains was coming in the air. “He’ll be making medicine for elk some morning now,” said George.

“I’m in no hurry to get up on the Divide,” I answered. “It’s pleasure enough not to be sure what day it is and have no engagements to be late for.”

“You can forget if it’s Tuesday just as easy on top of the Divide—but if you’re in no hurry to get an elk, you’ve never seen the natural bridge up Warm Springs Creek, and you’ve never seen the old geyser.”

“I’ll see them both. They’re not far?”

“Just a short ride back in the foot-hills.”

Sun Road’s chanting quickly filled the silence following.

“Can you hear what it’s about?” I asked George.

“I know it well. It’s one~of their songs about spring.” He translated some of it.

“Has he any song about that battle before the white men came?”

“The battle up Warm Springs Creek? Sure he has! He is a chief, and all that his people have done has been taught to him in tales and songs.”

“Do you suppose he’d be willing to sing that?”

“Sure he would! That’s not private like Bull Lake. Ask him in camp tonight—ask him with a little of your whisky. And you and I will listen all the better for a drop of it.”

I thought that I would—but at some later camp, when I should perhaps have won further approval from Sun Road and was on more familiar terms with him. But during the next hour these terms were promoted; I made a joke at which he laughed much longer than any white man would. His Indian humor was like his tunes, mostly alien to ours, but touching it in primitive spots; and my joke was of this kind. At the last cabin but one on Wind River—there were only three in the seventy-five miles after you left Fort Washakie—lived two notoriously idle men. They had a mine and when we passed them, both were sitting by the trail amidst a half cut patch of extremely feeble, scanty grass. They mustered strength enough to say it wasn’t likely to rain and we left them behind us, still resting.

“Brigham and Carson had begun to mow that when I went down the river to meet you six days ago,” said George.

Sun Road made his own joke. “They pretty busy. Finish before snow come.”

Beside the trail not far beyond this lay a very thin dry dead horse.

“Sun Road,” I called out, “see that horse. He eat Brigham and Carson’s hay.”

The success of this mild pleasantry was far beyond its merits. Hours later in camp at night Sun Road repeated it suddenly. “He eat Brigham and Carson’s hay.” And again he shook with unboisterous laughter.

So I burrowed in my pack and brought the whisky out and distributed a judicious modicum of it and began to talk of Warm Springs Creek and tomorrow. Then I sang my own songs, and Sun Road listened with curious attention, nodding approval after each one. Now and then George translated a verse.

“I teach you one song,” I said to him, after a time.

“There was a man lived in the West—
⁠ Bow down, bow down.”

But the Indian shook his head, smiling.

“Pretty good. I can’t learn. But I sing one for you.’

That was the easy way we led into it, and George Tews begged in the Shoshone language for the song about the ancient battle.

Then Sun Road stood up by the fire and began to beat his knee rhythmically. After his hand had struck his leg a few times, his voice joined in the cadence with a series of slow syllables, “ho-o-ho, ho-o-ho,” a wild prelude before the words. These followed, and in the heart of the stillness the voice of Sun Road sang in this land which had been his own, and near the place where his fathers had triumphed over their enemies. I knew that if we had been red men listening to him, he would have let loose his feelings more, because the passion which he held in leash filled his utterance. But violent he did not once become, his presence lost no jot of its dignity. To see him and hear him with the fire half lighting his quiet wild form, and the night half hiding it, conjured visions of the dead chiefs that had sung this ballad of war by the fires of old, not to us their conquerors and exterminators, but to spirits of their own blood, lying massed in war camps to listen, their bows and arrows by their sides, their bodies painted, and in their hair the feathers of the eagle.

In Sun Road’s chanted tones I could hear vibrating all the tradition and all the faith of his race. Beside it, our national songs were faint and bloodless. I could think of nothing we had, except the whistle of the locomotive; and there passed through me a desire never to hear that again, never to go back to my own age, but to keep out of it here, among the sagebrush and the mountains. The song of Sun Road came to an end and I thanked him. He said a word in Shoshone to George.

“He wants me to tell you in English what he has been singing.” George thought over it. “Some of the stuff is pretty good poetry to me, but I can’t make it sound that way. It sums up about like this. The Blackfeet had left their own country and they came hunting in the land of the Shoshones. But they took more than elk and buffalo away, they carried children whose fathers they had killed. Must these boys grow to men and raise enemies to their people, must these girls be slaves and tan the deer hide for their masters and bear their seed? The Shoshones waited, making believe they had no more warriors. Then the Blackfeet returned. Up among the hills of Warm Springs the Shoshones jumped from hiding and surrounded the enemy, and soon the last few fell back, and fell back, and hid in the geyser cave. Did they think any Shoshone would be afraid to go in there, when Blackfeet had no such fear? When all in the cave were dead, the Shoshones went to the camp of the enemy and brought their children back to their own people.”

“That is a good song, Sun Road,” said I; and I wondered if the Indian piety that in him was so living, was already as strong in little Dick, his son. “Can Dick sing that?” I inquired.

“Dick?” Sun Road repeated, at a loss. “My boy Dick?”

“Yes.”

“I not teach Dick songs. He go school pretty soon. Learn white man songs.”

If all of Sun Road’s generation were letting it die thus with themselves—well, that was best. The sons would all the more readily accept the whistle of the locomotive instead.

But for me the thought of it held a pang, and it was in my mind still as we rode up next day to visit the old geyser in the cool beauty of the morning. “Latin isn’t popular,” I observed to George Tews. “But a Latin man once said three words that mean ‘There are tears in things.’ Three true words.”

But the wholesome nature of George had no room for sentiments like that. My expatiations upon the plight of the Indian elicited from him only this:

“They have got to keep step or fall out.”

“Oh, they have got to do that!” I assented, without enthusiasm.

Sun Road had been riding ahead of us and presently he drew rein and surprised us both.

“Which way now?” he asked George.

George pointed.

“You go,” said Sun Road; and George became our guide. The Indian followed last.

“Does that mean he has never been here before?” I asked.

“Don’t know.” George was always short when he was puzzled. We crossed a few yards of hollow sounding stone. In a little while he said, “And I’m not going to ask him.”

The place was in the side of the bare steep hill, not far below its ridge and not far above the tops of pines which grew thick down to the narrow cleft—just the place to hem in an enemy. We left our horses and descended. Why had Sun Road made George lead? Did he really not know the way? He had not been afraid to sing about it. His people had not been afraid of it in war time. Perhaps in peace time he wanted to see it, but preferred to approach it in the company of others, and that one of them should go first.

It was evidently a road untrodden to a place not often visited. At length all three of us stood contemplating it. There was a pool, not very large, filling the extinct crater, and out of it oozed a steady trickle down the hill. A yard or so down in a crevice were lodged white fragments of encrusted stone. I stooped and touched the water with needless precaution, for it was hardly hotter than tepid.

“That’s where you can feel the heat still,” said George; and in the bank behind he showed us a hole which thick grass almost concealed. I thrust my hand in, but at arm’s length quickly drew it out. It was as if steam had stung me. Sun Road essayed it more carefully, and then we both stooped over the clear tepid pool to wash off the sticky, clinging mud. A current, a wave of the subterranean influx which fed the pool, quietly welled upward, with bubbles disturbing the surface a little; and it caused Sun Road to draw back. But I knelt down and was continuing to move my hand and arm about in the warm water when the current set stirring gently one of the broken white stones balanced in the crevice.

I reached down full arm and turned it, and saw grinning at me the encrusted half of a skull. Tilted by my touch into a more unstable equilibrium, it rocked back and forth a quivering hair’s breadth, a nod slight and ceaseless. Spellbound, I stared down at its persisting movement and its white unearthly look and felt the damp of the wet margin soak through to my flesh. I don’t know if some exclamation which I may have given, or my very stillness as I knelt riveted by the sight, brought them to see what it was.

As they leaned over each side of me I heard the oath which George Tews slowly and quietly uttered. Sun Road made no sound, yet without looking up at him I was aware that he had grown rigid from head to foot.

The relic of the ancient battle of Blackfeet and Shoshones held us in silence for I do not know how long; someone must have finally spoken, but I remember next our climbing back up the steep hill to our horses, and that at once Sun Road urged his animal and left us to return to camp at a more leisurely pace. I did not attend much to what George Tews said on the way down, or what I answered. He—outwardly at any rate—had thrown off with his single muttered oath of exclamation the shock which the skull had certainly given him. We had gone away from that lonely spot, leaving the white apparition in its cave to nod on continually beneath the water.

“I wonder if we shall find him?”

That is the first word of George’s which I recall, and I did not at once see what he meant. Then it came to me.

“Would he go home because of that?”

“We shall know when we get to camp.”

“I don’t believe he will go home,” I said.

“I’ll believe what I see,” said George. “That thing gave his superstition an awful jolt.”

“Well,” I surmised, “little Dick will be glad to see his father, anyhow. Do you remember him at the store when we started? I looked back once and he was watching us still. Hadn’t moved.”

“I wonder how soon he ate his candy?”

“That was the first and only money Sun Road spent,” I commented.

“Don’t I keep telling you they’re humans like us?” exclaimed George. “But he considers that business up there”—George jerked his head in the direction of the cave—“bad medicine.”

He spoke of it so, he was evading more explicit mention of the cave; its somber impression was still working even upon this matter-of-fact American.

“He’s not gone!” he stated after we had descended a little lower on the foot-hill.

George’s keen eye had read the fact from far off, but I looked across Wind River in vain. Our camp was not visible from this point, nor could I see Sun Road anywhere down in the valley below us.

“Don’t you see our horses in that swale?” said George. “His are with the bunch, He’s going to stick with us.”

I was not good enough at Western ways to read the messages of the country so readily; but George was right. We found Sun Road in camp, occupied with his weapons, cleaning his knife, looking through the bore of his Winchester. He sat easy and usual, as if nothing had happened to him. But as we went on to new camps I gradually and imperceptibly learned that something had happened to us all. None of us ever referred to the cave. The last word last word, spoken about it was George’s word to me, coming down the hill when we had feared that Sun Road might have given in to his superstition. and gone back to Fort Washakie.

We had traveled far from that, over the Divide, down to Snake River; yet still to myself I was reconciling my weakness in avoiding the subject. I told myself that it was on account of Sun Road. But why need I feel obliged to grope for justifications? Later adventures, later pictures, of killing an elk, of killing a bear, of herds of antelope across Snake, of beaver on Buffalo Fork, of the Teton Peaks, sublime and blue—these should have obliterated that pool from my mind; through them and behind them, uneffaced, nodded the white encrusted skull in the water. Its glare, blind and mocking, would reach me unexpectedly, even in the bright safe noons, and haunt them with premonition.

Yet to meet us, anybody would have said that we were cheerful and no one could have guessed that our journey was overcast.

My nerves were out of gear; and if mine were, what was the poison of that experience on the hill doing to Sun Road?

I could not have guessed that the sight and voice of new human beings would prove such a comfort. Jackson’s Hole was in that day without an inhabitant; and since leaving Wind River we had seen no faces but our own until we met the soldiers. Two of these with a sergeant lived in a cabin on the Sheridan Trail, not far above where it crossed to the west bank of Snake. They patrolled the south boundary of the Park; they were there to keep a watch upon such lawless persons as might come in to shoot wild animals in its forbidden ground. According to the military regulation, they took our names and sealed our rifles; and we went on again, crossing a little tepid creek from which rose a faint breath of steam and in whose shallow waters lived multitudes of craw-fish.

The thin layer of vapor on the creek brought back into my mind the skull. I saw its white shape nodding in the pool, and I thought of how it had been doing that, alone there beneath the hood of rock on the steep hillside, in the day and in the dark, whenever the influx from below set it in motion and those great bubbles rose and broke upon the surface. Its dwelling place lay far behind us, but its element flowed here, the tepid water fed by springs which came from the proximity of subterranean fires. These ran like veins and arteries beneath all this region, weaving the meshes of evil in which Sun Road and his forefathers dreaded to be entangled.

The fantastic notion came to me that through these hot unseen channels underground the skull might come like a fish, swimming after us and rising through any funnel that gave it outlet. I was twisting this fancy about as we got among jack-pines, growing thickly over high ground above the Snake. While we steered the pack-horses through and over the wretched net of cross timber that lay like traps and puzzles upon the Sheridan Trail, I suggested the idea to George. What if we should meet the skull watching us from the limb of a tree? Though it had lived so long under water, it might still be able to breathe air. These inventions did not interest George; he merely remarked that Sun Road seemed less scared since our halt at the soldiers’ cabin.

“I might tell him,” I said, “that I’m the one it would come after. Then he wouldn’t be scared at all.”

“Why would it pick on you?”

“Because I meddled with it.”

George gave a short laugh. “Better let the subject alone. He’d not care for jokes about it.”

At length we swung away from the Sheridan Trail and recrossed the Divide to the thumb of the Yellowstone Lake. This place was a luncheon station for the tourists on their route through the Park. Two stage loads of them came while we were there, and we distracted their attention from the volcanic wonders of the place. The women called out to each other in shrill tones to look at the cowboy, to look at the live Indian; and they came where we were sitting at luncheon and stood round us in a ring, pointing and snapping their cameras at us. One loud-voiced girl asked Sun Road what his name was, and when he took no notice of her she burst into laughter and screamed out to her party that he didn't know English. As Sun Road continued imperturbably at his meal she shrieked that she could make him understand her and began to croak jargon at him.

Then I looked up and answered for Sun Road. “He understands English better than you understand how to be a lady.”

“Well, and it’s not you could teach me!” she retorted.

“I’m quite sure of that. Nobody could.”

Irrepressible groans of mirth were now uttered by George Tews. The girl stood dumb, scowling at us, and then stamped furiously away; but Sun Road noticed neither her coming nor her going.

She and her friends went off to see the natural sights, where we could hear her screams and see her busy with her camera. Sun Road now watched the party curiously. When they had left, he astonished us; he walked over to the place.

“That’s good!” said George. We watched him; the Indian was plainly sightseeing. “He’s not afraid any more,” George continued.

Sun Road inspected the spitting holes.

“We’re out of our trouble at last,” said George. “We ought to thank those fool women.”

The Indian moved from one hole to another, staring at the spouts of lilac and crimson mud which leaped thickly from a mass of painted slime and fell back into the heaving surface.

“Yes,” George commented, “he wouldn’t let the women shame him.”

The women were now over at the lake, catching trout in its cold waters and cooking them in bubbling craters that boiled in little cones which jutted from the margin where they stood.

Sun Road came back to us, borrowed my rod, and when the tourists had gone on in the stage-coach and the coast was clear, he did the same. He laughed aloud.

“Plenty fish, plenty kitchen! Pretty good!”

We waited while he caught several trout. He did not want to stop; he was as absorbed as a child. “I bring Dick here,” he said. “He catch fish. Boil him. Pretty good.”

But on this day he would take the lead no longer; he brought up the rear.

“You go first, George,” he said as we started away from the Thumb, “You know road.”

“Now what does that mean?” I inquired of George.

“Guess he hates the tourists.”

Of these there was no getting rid; they came amid clouds of dust along the road, they filled the hotels; but though their reassuring noise had been good for Sun Road, it could not reconcile our horses to the various hissing holes. The deplorable Calico would have lost her mind had she possessed one. The most insignificant jet of steam invariably cost me yards of chasing her; and tourists would stop and watch and cheer the show. George and I told them as many lies as possible; we raced to see which could lie the worst and get away with it; while Sun Road held himself apart and stared at the sights.

“I bring Dick,” he repeated at the Mud Geyser, which is a gruesome gaping hole where the tormented mass heaves and struggles in huge bursts of effort, like something straining to break from prison.

At the Cañon he looked a long while at the falls, at the sublime miracle of depth and hue, where citadels and minarets of rose and yellow build a sight which causes speech to die away. He sat there a very long while and when he spoke he said again: “I bring Dick here.”

Was it to show the boy such wonders? Or was it to wean him from ancestral fears and faiths, just as he would not teach him the battle song?

But the sight of him seated there in such a setting caused a lady to exclaim: “How beautiful! What a splendid-looking man! He belongs to all this glory!”

Sun Road did not move; but when we went on from the Cañon next day he took the lead.

Not every tourist screamed and stole snapshots of us in our faces. At the Mammoth Hot Springs, Sun Road posed for a young girl, charming and beautiful. She approached him, she smiled, she was courteous, she asked his permission. He talked with her and asked her to send him some of the pictures.

“If he was a white man,” said George, “he’d beat us among the petticoats.”

Sun Road saw me answering a great packet of letters I had received here.

“I write my son Dick,” he said.

It took an afternoon. He could not write his own language, and the boy knew no English. George did it for him, taking his Indian words down phonetically for Mr. King to read to Dick. George stamped and mailed it for him.

“Any father would be proud of writing his son a letter like that,” said George rather quietly.

Sun Road found a counter with souvenirs and Western odds and ends for sale. There were no post-cards yet. He bought some little figures of soldiers and cowboys and ponies, carved in wood and painted. “I take them Dick,” he explained. “Pretty good.”

George was going to send them by post.

“No, I take them,” said Sun Road. He tied them in a red bandanna handkerchief. He kept them with him, and new and then at noon or in camp at night we saw him untie the red handkerchief to see if they were safe.

After those photographs and that young girl he dressed in all the splendor he had brought with him and hid no longer from tourists. Through Kingman Pass, by Obsidian Cliff, at Norris Basin, through the Gibbon Meadows and up the Fire Hole River, wherever we passed camping parties or stages, the screams and cameras now made him sit straighter. He rode imperturbable by the steam and the pools and strange formations which increased as we drew nearer to the Upper Geyser Basin.

Through this belt the earth grew unearthly. The ground sounded hollow when we crossed the channels beneath the crusty surface, posts of warning stood here and there on the crust where it was thin, cracks went down to hot shaking surfaces of blue water, columns of steam rose white among the green pine woods, mangy mounds of bald chemical formation thrust their shapes out of the trees and slopes. So, when the sun was high and hot on the bare white ground of the Upper Geyser Basin, our line of horses rode slowly among the cones and terraces, where steam poured out.

None of the well-known geysers with names was active as we passed them on our way to Old Faithful. Some of them would be likely to play before we left. Meanwhile, quiet steam alone issued from the broken masonry of the Castle, the Grotto was silent, and the Beehive and the rest; nothing but the restless Sawmill vibrated with its puny sputtering blasts of water and steam.

Scattered among the cones and craters which marked the blazing white of the place were the tourists; and the pink and blue of parasols made spots of color. Our arrival gave them something new to look at. Our pack-horses walked in a slow line on the road across the formation, I came in the middle, George behind us, while Sun Road led, his form making among the cameras and parasols the daily sensation which no longer displeased him. As the cameras approached and converged, he rode slowly along and took us beyond the hotel to a place where we dismounted.

From the pillared vent of Old Faithful were coming the signs which preceded by a few minutes its eruption. A puff of steam rose from it, followed by quietness; next another puff; then a spurt of water. The sight was old to George and me and we stayed to remove the packs and saddles for our nooning. Sun Road strolled toward the awakening geyser, while cameras and parasols followed to profit by the chance he intentionally gave them. He walked over the white crust of the formation, which years of the water’s flow and sediment had built up. He wore his buckskin shirt, his fringed trousers of buckskin, his beaded moccasins. He needed only the war bonnet of eagle feathers to complete his stately and barbaric appearance. He carried his hat in hand and the sun shone upon his coal-black hair and haughty face.

He walked about to choose a spot favorable for photography. As the cameras fixed him with their aim, he stood still, near the clouds of steam which now whirled up from Old Faithful. Then the water rose and the roar increased. The boiling column fountained, gloriously rising, rushing far above the earth, and above the roar a wild scream broke. Confusion mingled the cameras and the blue and pink parasols; and voices shouted in warning.

The apparition of the geyser’s boiling column had sent Sun Road backing away from it, his eyes staring at it, his hands spread out as if to shield him from it. Figures gesticulated and cried out to him. He was beyond comprehension of them, the posts marking danger in the thin crust meant nothing to him.

I rushed forward and heard a rending crack. The formation to which he had fled broke in and he sank from sight amid a burst of steam. Everyone there stood still, benumbed, and one woman gave a long wild cry. We stood, and at length, carefully, we approached the edge. Old Faithful had died down, the last water was streaming down its sides, its roar was ended. I looked over into the new pool revealed by the caving in of the crust. Ledges filled its bottom, recesses where the body must have been drawn; but upon the quivering clear blue surface of the water floated a red bandanna handkerchief and some little wooden soldiers, cowboys and ponies.