To turn back for the space of a paragraph, I am bound to admit that these dying Indians often behaved very foolishly, and, in their superstitions brought much of the fatality upon themselves. For example, they had a horror of the white man's remedies, and refused to take the medicines administered to them. Brought down from the cool, fresh mountains, where they lived under the trees in the purest air and in the most beautiful places, they at once fell ready victims to malarial fevers. The white man, by a liberal use of quinine and whisky, as well as by careful diet, lived very well at the Reservation, and suffered but little, yet had he been forced to live in a pen, crowded together like pigs in a sty, with the bad air, on the damp, mouldy ground, he had died too, as fast perhaps as the Indian died.
The old man could do but little for the dying girl. He was in bad odor with the officers; they treated him with as little consideration almost as if he too had been a savage. But he was constant at her side; he brought a lemon which he had begged, on his knees, as it were, and tried to make her a cool drink of the slimy, wormy water. But the girl could not drink it. She turned her face once more to the wall, and this time, it seemed, to die.
One morning, before the sun rose, she recovered her wandering mind and called old Forty-nine to her side. She was surely dying; but her mind was clear, and she understood perfectly all she said or did. Her dark eyes were sunken deep in their places, and her long, sun-browned hands were only skin and bone. They fell down across her heaving little breast, as if they were the hands of a skeleton. Little wonder that her persecutors had turned away with horror, perhaps with fear, from those deep, hollow eyes, and the pitiful emaciated frame, that could no longer lift itself where it lay.
The old man fell down on his knees beside her and reached his face across to hers. With great effort she lifted her two naked long, arms, and wound them about the old man's neck. He seemed to know that death was near, as he reached his face over hers. Over his cheeks and down his long white beard the tears ran like rain and fell on her face and breast.
"Forty-nine, father! Let me call you father; may I? I never had any father but you," said the girl feebly, as the tears fell fast on her face.
"Yes, yes, call me father. Call me father, Carrie, my Carrie; my poor, dear, dear little Carrie,—do call me father, for of all the world I have only you to love and live for," sobbed the old man as if his heart would break.
"Well, then, father, when I die take me back, take me back to the mountains. I want to hear the water—the cool, sweet, clear water, where I lie; and the wind in the trees—the cool, pure wind in the trees, father. And you know the three trees just above the old cabin on the hill by the water-fall? Bury me, bury me there. Yes, there, where I can hear the cool water all the time, and the wind in the trees. And—and won't you please cut my name on the tree by the water? My name, Carrie—just Carrie, that's all. I have no other name—just Carrie. Will you? Will you do this for me?"
"As there is a God—as I live, I will!" and the old man lifted his face as he bared his head, and looked toward heaven.
The girl's mind wandered now. She spoke incoherently for a few moments, and then was silent. Her form was convulsed, her breast heaved just a little, her helpless hands reached about the old man's neck as if they would hold him from passing from her presence; they fell away, and then all was still. It was now gray dawn.
This man's heart was bursting with rage and a savage sorrow. He was now stung with a sense of awful injustice. His heart was swelling with indignation. He took up the form before him; up in his arms, as if it had been that of an infant. He threw his handkerchief across the face as he passed out, stooping low through the dark and narrow doorway, and strode in great, long and hurried steps down the street and over toward the hills beyond, where his horse was tethered in the long, brown grass.