The Loom of the Desert

by Idah Meacham Strobridge

THE BLUE-EYED CHIEF

IT sounds a bit melodramatic, in these days of “Carlisle” education for the Indian, and with “Lo” himself on the lecture platform, to tell of a band of one time hostile red men having a white chief—once a captive—who so learned to love his captivity that when freedom was to be had for the taking, he refused it, and still lives among them, voluntarily. Contentedly—happily? Who knows? He says so; and with no proof to the contrary we must needs believe him.

Once in every three years he leaves his home among the mountains of eastern Oregon, and goes for a week to San Francisco by the sea. Once in every three years he may be seen there on the streets, in the parks, at the theaters, on the beach, at the Cliff or the Heights, as strangers are seen daily, and with nothing about him to mark him in any wise different from a thousand others. You might pass him dozens of times without particularly observing him, save that he is always accompanied by a woman so evidently of a different world than that which he has known, that your attention is at once arrested, and your curiosity is whetted to know the story—for story there is, you are sure. And what a story! One does not have to go to fiction for tales of the marvelous; and these two—he, roughened, bearded and browned, clothed as the average American laborer taking a holiday; she, with the bearing of a gentlewoman, and dressed as they do who have found the treasure-trove that lies at the end of the rainbow—these two have a tragic story, all their own, that few know. It is this:

Back in those far days when the Pacific Railroad was undreamed of—before we had so much as ever guessed there might in reality be a stage line between the Missouri and the Sacramento—one noon the wheels of an emigrant wagon were moving down a wide Nevada valley, where the sage gray of the short greasewood was the only thing remotely green; moving so slowly that they seemed not to move at all. It was a family from one of the States of our Middle West, going to California. The man walked beside the slow-moving wagon. Sometimes some of the children walked, too. The woman rode and held in her arms a wee boy whose own arms fought and sturdy legs struggled often to walk with the others—a blue-eyed boy, bonny and beautiful.

Days and days of unblinking sunshine; and always the awful stillness of the plains. There had been weeks of it; and this day when they came down the broad wash that was the drain from the bordering mountain range, a thick heat lay on the land, making welcome the promised noon rest where the greasewood grew tall. All down the length of the now dry wash the brush was more than shoulder high—annually wetted as it was by the full spring creek.

When the greasewood grows so high it may easily hide a foe.

The wagon bumped and ground its wheels over the stones of the road here in the wash toward the row of tall greasewood, a dozen yards away. Over there they would halt for a noon rest. Over there they would eat their noon meal—drink from their scanty water supply—and then resume the dreary journey.

This day was just such an one as all their other desert days had been; the place seemed to them not different in any way from the other miles of endless monotony. As they neared the high brush, one of the children—a fair-haired girl of eight—picking up a bright pebble from the road, held it up that her father might see. The other children walking beside the wagon picked up pebbles, too—pebbles red, and purple, and green, that had come down the bed of the creek when the flood came. In the wagon the woman sat holding the blue-eyed boy in her arms.