Her position on the edge of the platform brought her eyes almost on a level with his, and she met his look for a steady, searching, questioning instant. "Lem is waiting for me at the creek," she said, and went down and took her hat from its peg on the wall.
CHAPTER VI
MOSE
Yelm Jim sat brooding in his lodge. He was wrapped in his blanket and an old campaign hat shaded his eyes from the fire, which was kindled on the packed earth floor, and found partial vent through an opening in the roof, around which hung haunches of drying venison and bear. The squaw Clak-la-sum-kah was cooking bread, an unleavened mixture of flour and water, in a frying-pan over the coals. At the same time she watched some fine trout, which were suspended from a rod set in forked stakes above the embers. Mose, who had caught these fish, lounged on a couch that, built of shakes, extended along three sides of the room, and was furnished with woven mats of ribbon grass or the bast of cedar. The wall behind him also was covered with this fabric, which was of the color of ripened maize.
It was one of those intervals when the boy, having incensed his father, sought refuge with his mother's people while Laramie's wrath cooled. At such times the Indian in Mose effaced the white. He bound his head in a crimson handkerchief, and wrapped himself in a blanket, which Clak-la-sum-kah had adorned with many buttons for her grandson's use. He looked a true Klickitat, straight as a young hemlock, lithe as a nearly grown cougar in the woods. His face was a bronze oval, sharply chiseled, and he had the eyes of a hawk. He recalled to the old chief his own youth, when, having a different and much hyphened name, he had been a leader among the young braves of the powerful Yakima nation beyond the Cascades; when, hunting the buffalo, he had crossed the Rockies and skirmished with the Blackfeet, or, exacting tribute from weaker neighbors, had driven home numberless horses to pasture on the vast Palouse plains. He found in the boy an appreciative and tireless listener when he recounted these past glories, and he painted them brilliantly, in sharp contrast to the colorless present. Mose had no brave companions, no followers in the hunt, no tribe.
And the whites were responsible for this; they only were to blame. Not the Hudson Bay men, who, trading for furs, brought guns and many useful things to the Indians, but the "Bostons," who came at the first to rob them of their country. From the beginning the Yakimas had understood and opposed them, and, when at last a thousand warriors had crossed the Cascades to fall on the white settlements of the salt water, Yelm Jim had been among them. They had met defeat, and he, himself, had spent breaking years in the strong house of the "Bostons," and at the end of his captivity he had found himself poor and forgotten and another tyee raised in his place. For this reason the old chief had not returned to his people, but had buried himself in the forest.
But already the white settlers pressed hard on his retreat; axes, the rasp of saws, their shrill voices scattered the deer. He must go farther and farther in search of grouse that once had nested almost at his door; and now, since Slocum had robbed Mose of the musket, the old chief must set laboriously to work and shape the miserable arrow points of agate.
When Yelm Jim thought of this final outrage he drew yet more fiercely at his pipe, and in the shadow of his ragged hatbrim his brows beetled and gloomed. It was not the right moment for young Kingsley to darken the doorway.
One of Laramie's hounds, which had again tracked Mose, sprang up growling, but at a word from the boy settled back whimpering, with his nose between his paws. His mate, snuffing suspiciously, moved to the intruder's feet.
His familiar "Clahowya," said in a big, frank voice, startled the lodge and the first dog belled a note.