Lahoma

by J. Breckenridge Ellis

"Well, don't use neither one till I can find out." Presently he was swinging along across the plain toward the southwestern range while the girl kept close beside him on the pony. Their talk was incessant, voicing the soul of good comradeship, and but for the difference between heavy bass and fluty soprano, a listener might have supposed himself overhearing a conversation between two Brick Willocks.

There was nothing about the second range of the Wichita Mountains to distinguish it from the one farthest toward the northeast except a precipice at its extremity, rising a sheer three or four hundred feet above the level plain. Beyond this lofty termination, the mountain curved inward, leaving a wide grassy cove open toward the south; and within this half-circle was the settler's dugout.

The unprotected aspect of that little home was in itself an eloquent commentary on the wonderful changes that had come about during the last seventeen years. The oval tract of one million five hundred thousand acres lying between Red River and its fork, named Greer County, and claimed by Texas, was in miniature a reproduction of the early history of America. Until 1860 it had not even borne a name, and since then it had possessed no settled abodes. Here bands of Indians of various tribes had come and gone at will, and here the Indians of the Plains, after horrible deeds of depredation, massacre and reprisal, had found shelter among its mountains. The country lay at the southwest corner of Indian Territory for which the Indians had exchanged their lands in other parts of the United States on the guarantee that the government would "forever secure to them and their heirs the country so exchanged with them."

At the close of the Civil War the unhappy Indians long continued in a state of smoldering animosity, or warlike activity, tribe against tribe, band against band; they had inherited the rancor and bitterness of the White Man's war with neither the fruits of victory nor the dignity that attends honorable defeat. The reservations that belonged originally to the Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Seminole and Creek tribes, were reduced in area to make room for new tribes from Kansas, Colorado and other states, and the Indian wars resulted. For a time the scalp-knife was crimsoned, the stake was charred, bands stole in single file over mountains and among half-dried streams; troups of the regular army were assaulted by invisible foes, and forts were threatened. Youths who read romances of a hundred years ago dealing with the sudden war-cry, the flaming cabin, the stealthy approach of swarming savages, need have traveled only a few hundred miles to witness on the open page of life what seemed to them, in their long-settled states, fables of a dead past.

But though the Indian wars in the Territory had been bloody and vindictive, they had not been protracted as in the old days. Around the country of the red man was drawn closer and more securely, day by day, the girdle of civilization. Within its constricting grasp the spirit of savagery, if not crushed, was at least subdued. Tribes naked but for their blankets, unadorned save by the tattoo, found themselves pressed close to other tribes which, already civilized, had relinquished the chase for agricultural pursuits. Primeval men, breathing this quickened atmosphere of modernity, either grew more sophisticated, or perished like wild flowers brought too near the heat. It is true the plains were still unoccupied, but they had been captured—for the railroad had come, and the buffalo had vanished.

Brick Willock and the man he had come to see were very good types of the first settlers of the new country—one a highwayman, hiding from his kind, the other a trapper by occupation, trying to keep ahead of the pursuing waves of immigration. It was the first time Lahoma had seen Bill Atkins, and as she caught sight of him before his dugout, her eyes brightened with interest. He was a tall lank man of about sixty-five, with a huge gray mustache and bushy hair of iron-gray, but without a beard. The mustache gave him an effect of exceeding fierceness, and the deeply wrinkled forehead and square chin added their testimony to his ungracious disposition.

But Lahoma was not afraid of coyotes, catamounts or mountain-lions, and she was not afraid of Bill Atkins. Her eyes brightened at the discovery that he held in his hand that which Willock had described to her as a book.

"Does he read?", she asked Willock, breathlessly. "Does he read, Brick?"

Willock surveyed the seated figure gravely. "He reads!" he responded.

The man looked up, saw Willock and bent over his book—discovered Lahoma on the pony, and looked up again, unwillingly but definitely. "You never told me you had a little girl," he remarked gruffly.