As we brought arm chairs about the fire-place on our first snow-bound evening, moved possibly by the Red Nosed Gentleman’s burgundy, which that florid person had urged upon his attention, the Jolly Doctor set the little community a good story-telling example.
“This story, I should premise,” said the Jolly Doctor, mollifying certain rawnesses of his throat with a final glass of the Red Nosed Gentleman’s burgundy, “belongs to no experience of my own. I shall tell it as it was given me. It speaks broadly of the west and of the folk of cows and the Indians, and was set uppermost in my memory by the presence of our western friends.” Here the Jolly Doctor indicated the Old Cattleman and that product of the French fur trader and his Indian wife, Sioux Sam, by a polite wave of his glass. Then tossing off the last of his burgundy he, without tedious preliminary, struck into his little history.
CHAPTER II.—THE WINNING OF SAUCY PAOLI.
Gray Wolf sits within the shadow of the agency cottonwood and puffs unhappy kinnikinic from his red stone pipe. Heavy, dull and hot lies the August afternoon; heavy, dull and hot lies the heart of Gray Wolf. There is a profound grief at his soul’s roots. The Indian’s is not a mobile face. In full expression it is capable only of apathy or rage. If your Indian would show you mirth or woe, he must eke out the dim and half-told story with streaks of paint. But so deep is the present sorrow of Gray Wolf that, even without the aid of graphic ochre, one reads some shadow of it in the wrinkled brows and brooding eyes.
What is this to so beat upon our dismal Osage? There is a dab of mud in his hair; his blanket is rags, and his moccasins are rusty and worn. These be weeds of mourning. Death has crept to the tepee of Gray Wolf and taken a prey. It was Catbird, the squaw of Gray Wolf.
However, his to-day’s sadness is not for the departed Catbird. He married her without laughter, and saw her pass without tears, as became a man and an Osage. When her breath was gone, the women combed her hair and dressed her in new, gay clothes, and burned the sacred cedar. Gray Wolf, after the usage of his fathers, seated her—knees to chin—on yonder hilltop, wrapped her in rawhides, and, as against the curiosity of coyotes and other prowling vermin of the night, budded her solidly about and over with heavy stones. You may see the rude mausole, like some tumbledown chimney, from the agency door. That was a moon ago. Another will go by; Gray Wolf will lay off his rags and tatters, comb the clay from his hair, and give a dance to show that he mourns no more. No, it is not the lost Catbird—good squaw though she was—that embitters the tobacco and haunts the moods of Gray Wolf. It is something more awful than death—that merest savage commonplace; something to touch the important fiber of pride.
Gray Wolf is proud, as indeed he has concern to be. Not alone is he eminent as an Osage; he is likewise an eminent Indian. Those two thin ragged lines of blue tattoo which, on each side from the point of the jaw, run downward on the neck until they disappear beneath his blanket, prove Gray Wolf’s elevation. They are the marks of an aboriginal nobility whereof the paleface in his ignorance knows nothing. Thirty Indians in all the tribes may wear these marks. And yet, despite such signs of respect, Gray Wolf has become the subject of acrid tribal criticism; and he feels it like the edge of a knife.
Keats was quill-pricked to death by critics. But Keats was an Englishman and a poet. Petronius Arbiter, Nero’s minion, was also criticised; despite the faultfinder, however, he lived in cloudless merry luxury, and died laughing. But Petronius was a Roman and an epicure. Gray Wolf is to gain nothing by these examples. He would not die like the verse maker, he could not laugh like the consul; there is a gulf between Gray Wolf and these as wide as the width of the possible. Gray Wolf is a stoic, and therefore neither so callous nor so wise as an epicure. Moreover, he is a savage and not a poet. Petronius came to be nothing better than an appetite; Gray Wolf rises to the heights of an emotion. Keats was a radical of sensibility, ransacking a firmament; Gray Wolf is an earthgoing conservative—a more stupendous Tory than any Bolingbroke. Of the two, while resembling neither, Gray Wolf comes nearer the poet than the Sybarite, since he can feel.