From photograph by A. A. Forbes
MAHALA JOE
I
In the campoodie of Three Pines, which you probably know better by its Spanish name of Tres Pinos, there is an Indian, well thought of among his own people, who goes about wearing a woman's dress, and is known as Mahala Joe. He should be about fifty years old by this time, and has a quiet, kindly face. Sometimes he tucks up the skirt of his woman's dress over a pair of blue overalls when he has a man's work to do, but at feasts and dances he wears a ribbon around his waist and a handkerchief on his head as the other mahalas do. He is much looked to because of his knowledge of white people and their ways, and if it were not for the lines of deep sadness that fall in his face when at rest, one might forget that the woman's gear is the badge of an all but intolerable shame. At least it was so used by the Paiutes, but when you have read this full and true account of how it was first put on, you may not think it so.
Fifty years ago the valley about Tres Pinos was all one sea of moving grass and dusky, greenish sage, cropped over by deer and antelope, north as far as Togobah, and south to the Bitter Lake. Beside every considerable stream which flowed into It from the Sierras was a Paiute campoodie, and all they knew of white people was by hearsay from the tribes across the mountains. But soon enough cattlemen began to push their herds through the Sierra passes to the Paiutes' feeding-ground. The Indians saw them come, and though they were not very well pleased, they held still by the counsel of their old men; night and day they made medicine and prayed that the white men might go away.
Among the first of the cattlemen in the valley about Tres Pinos was Joe Baker, who brought a young wife, and built his house not far from the campoodie. The Indian women watched her curiously from afar because of a whisper that ran among the wattled huts. When the year was far gone, and the sun-cured grasses curled whitish brown, a doctor came riding hard from the fort at Edswick, forty miles to the south, and though they watched, they did not see him ride away. It was the third day at evening when Joe Baker came walking towards the campoodie, and his face was set and sad. He carried something rolled in a blanket, and looked anxiously at the women as he went between the huts. It was about the hour of the evening meal, and the mahalas sat about the fires watching the cooking-pots. He came at last opposite a young woman who sat nursing her child. She had a bright, pleasant face, and her little one seemed about six months old. Her husband stood near and watched them with great pride. Joe Baker knelt down in front of the mahala, and opened the roll of blankets. He showed her a day-old baby that wrinkled up its small face and cried.
"Its mother is dead," said the cattleman. The young Indian mother did not know English, but she did not need speech to know what had happened. She looked pitifully at the child, and at her husband timidly. Joe Baker went and laid his rifle and cartridge belt at the Paiute's feet. The Indian picked up the gun and fingered it; his wife smiled. She put down her own child, and lifted the little white stranger to her breast. It nozzled against her and hushed its crying; the young mother laughed.
"See how greedy it is," she said; "it is truly white." She drew up the blanket around the child and comforted it.