He wheeled upon his heel and was gone.
XXII
THE SQUAW MAN
Captain Ranger overtook his train at a late hour, still nursing his towering wrath. His face was livid, and his breathing stertorous. Snatching the ox-whip from the hands of Jean and frightening the discouraged cattle into the semblance of an attempt at hurry by the cruel vehemence with which he belabored their lash-beflecked hides, he urged them forward, never once relaxing his attacks with the whip till he had rushed them over the uneven road and rocks for six or seven miles.
“Daddie is in a terrible tantrum over something very unusual,” said Jean. “Do you know what is the matter?” she asked aside, addressing Sally O’Dowd.
“No, Jean; unless he had some hot words with that post-trader. I know he thought ten dollars a hundred for flour was robbery. And think of a dollar a pound for dried peaches!”
“Daddie’s not idiot enough to work himself into a fever over a trifle like that,” answered Jean. “But suppose he has been thrown into a passion by anybody, the poor half-sick and half-famished oxen ought not to be punished for it. He reminds me of an old Kentucky slave-owner who got so mad because one of his sons failed to pass his first exams at West Point that he went out, as soon as he heard about it, and cruelly whipped a nigger.” And falling back to the family team, beside which Hal was trudging, whip in hand, striving to keep the jaded cattle close behind his father’s oxen, she dropped hastily on one knee on the wagon-tongue and climbed nimbly to a seat.
“That trader is still sitting by the roadside,” she cried to Sally, who was trudging through the sand. “He’s digging the earth with a jack-knife or dirk, or some other sharp implement, and seems quite as savage and out of humor as daddie. Wonder what daddie said to him.”
One by one the wagons passed the solitary trader, who had climbed to a low ledge of rocks, where he sat as silent as the sun. His knife had fallen to the ground and lay glittering at his feet. His broad sombrero shaded his face.
The sudden rebound from the great happiness that had been his when first informed that he was not a murderer and an outlaw, to the abject position of a spurned and degraded “squaw man” seemed more than he could bear. “I am not a murderer, though, and that’s some comfort,” he moaned. “But I am still a Pariah,—an outcast from my own people. What will my dear mother think of me when John acquaints her with the facts? What will my father say or do?”
It is well that Mother Nature, in her wisdom and mercy, has provided a limit to human suffering, else everybody in this world would at times become insane.