The Mine with the Iron Door

by Harold Bell Wright

The Indian’s victim muttered an exclamation.

“In fact,” continued Natachee slowly as if to make every word effective, “it shines through the window of Miss Hillgrove’s room.”

The white man stood with his eyes fixed on that distant light, as one under a spell, then suddenly he whirled about, cursing his tormentor for bringing him there.

The Indian smiled, as in the old days one of his savage ancestors might have smiled in triumph, at a cry of pain successfully wrung from a victim of the torture. Then he said with stern but melancholy dignity:

“I, Natachee, often come here to sit on this spot from which one may look so far over the homeland of my Indian fathers. But for Natachee there is no light in the window of love. Where you, a white man, see the light, the red man sees only darkness. For Natachee the Indian there is no soft fire of a woman’s love and home and happy children. Where the fires of the Indian’s home life and love once burned, there are now only cold ashes and blackened embers. I shall often see you up here watching your star that is so near. But for me, Natachee, there is no star. The dark clouds of the white man’s lust for gold have hidden all the stars in the red man’s sky.”

In spite of his own suffering, Hugh Edwards was moved to pity.

On another occasion the Indian told his victim of Marta’s visit to his hut that night of the storm. He called attention to the fact that the very chair in which Hugh was sitting was the chair in which she had sat before the fire. The couch upon which Hugh slept was the couch upon which she had slept. Hugh’s place at the table had been her place.

Invariably, when he saw that the white man was nearing the limit of his endurance, the Indian would hold before him the promise of the future—the love and happiness that would be his when he should find the gold—the gold that he would perhaps strike—to-morrow.

At times the Indian would be gone for two or three days. Always he left with no word or hint that he was going. The white man would awaken in the morning to find himself alone in the hut, or perhaps the Indian would disappear at a moment when Hugh’s back was turned, or again Edwards, upon returning from his work in the evening, would find that Natachee had left the place sometime during his absence. Invariably, when the red man reappeared, he came in the same unexpected and unannounced manner. The white man never knew when to look for him, nor where. Often the captive would look up from his work to find the Indian only a few feet away, watching him.

At times, when Natachee returned from an absence of a day or more, he would tell his victim of Marta—how he had seen and talked with her—how she looked—what she was doing—painting such true and vivid pictures of the girl that the captive’s heart would ache with longing. Then the Indian, watching with devilish cunning the effect of his words, would assure his victim that the girl loved him but that she believed he had left her because he did not care for her, and that the grief of her disappointment and loneliness was seriously affecting her health.