On George fell the care of the four children. It was harder for him to work now, and there was less to be earned; yet he worked the harder for his four. Another year; and there were but two for him to shelter and to feed. The great White Plague stops not at the camps of the White man, but has hunted out the Red man in his wick-i-up, and is fast decreasing the number of the tribe; so two—the older two—of the children had gone to answer its call, and George was alone with the two that were hardly more than babies. Mourning for his dead, he must yet work for the living.
We give our sympathy to the woman left widowed who has little children looking to her for support. But she seldom fails in her trust, for the world is usually kind to a woman and ready to lend her aid. Rather give of your pity to the father who has babes to provide for when there is no woman to take up the burden with him. He must care for the home, and must go out in the world, as well, to work. Remember the burden is no less hard for him to bear even so be he is an Indian. It may not seem so to you, a white man, but you must recollect that the Indian takes a different point of view.
Long, long after his children were grown, and the old grandmother was dead, and George was living in his camp with grandchildren about him, the woman came again—she, Sophy, came to him—trying to win him back now that the woman he cared most for was dead. Sophy at last had tired of her revenge, had tired of jealousy and strife; had tired of everything in life but the one man who had once cast her off. Doctor Jim was dead—had died many years before. And so she came to the one she cared for still—as even she had cared most for. For George she cared always; so she came and stood at his door. Many snows had come and gone since his blood had moved at her will; and now it was too late for her influence to weigh with him. He was old; and when he sat before the campfire and saw a woman’s face move to and fro in the the smoke wreaths, it was the face of the woman who best loved him, always—not the face of the one he had loved for a time—that he saw.
So she went away, and at last there was peace between them. She died the other day. But George—Old George—lives still, and alone. He goes to the station day after day, as is his habit, and watches the trains as they come in, and answers the questions of the inquisitive travelers.
If my characters were white you might call this a love story with a bit of romance threaded in. Perhaps you will, anyway. For it all depends upon how you look at it. It is just a little story of what is happening all the while everywhere in the world. Love and jealousy; hatred and revenge. It does not very much matter whether they live on the water side of Beacon street (as they do who stood talking to Old George yesterday); or whether it is in the wick-i-ups of the sagebrush out on the great Nevada plains. These things come into the lives of all races alike.
George paid for the folly of his youth, as the transgressor usually does have to pay. If you live by the sea in the East, you will perhaps call this a punishment for George laid upon him as a rebuke by the “hand of divine Providence.” But if your home is by the Western sea, and you have knocked about a bit on the rough trails in the West, you will mayhap see in it only the workings of “natural law.”
That is all. It is a little story, but quite true. It might very easily have been made a White man’s story; but it isn’t, it is only the true story of a Paiute.
George is an Indian; but one in a whole tribe—each having his own story. And the tribe is but one of the race. And the race——
Are we not brothers?