“What’s the matter with our answers?” said a man. Truly, mine had been a tenderfoot speech, and I sat silent.
McDonough’s white lips regained no color that night, and the skin drew tighter over the bones of his face as the hours wore on. He was proof against complaining, but no stoic endurance could hide such pain as he was in. Beneath the sunburn on his thick hand the flesh was blanched, yet never did he once ask if the hay wagon was not come for him. They had expected to get him off in it by seven, but it did not arrive until ten minutes before midnight; they had found it fifteen miles up the river, instead of two. Sitting up, twisted uncomfortably, he played cards until one of the company, with that lovable tact of the frontier, took the cards from him, remarking, “You’ll lose all you’ve got,” and, with his consent, played his hand and made bets for him. McDonough then sank flat, watching the game with his perplexed, half-shut eyes.
What I could do for him I did; it was but little. Finding his leg burning and his hand cold, I got my brandy—their whiskey was too doubtful—and laid wet rags on the leg, keeping them wet. He accepted my offices and my brandy without a sign; this was like most of them, and did not mean that he was not grateful, but only that he knew no way to say so. Laudanum alone among my few drugs seemed applicable, and he took twenty drops with dumb acquiescence, but it brought him neither sleep nor doze. More I was afraid in my ignorance to give him, and so he bore, unpalliated, what must have become well-nigh agony by midnight, when we lifted him into the wagon. So useless had I been, and his screwed-up eyes, with their valiant sparkle, and his stoic restraint, made me feel so sorry for him, that while they were making his travelling bed as soft as they could I scrawled a message to the army surgeon at the Post. “Do everything you can for him,” I wrote, “and as I doubt if he has five dollars to his name, hold me responsible.” This I gave McDonough without telling him its contents. Off they drove him in the cold, mute night; I could hear the heavy jolts of the wagon a long way. Six rocky fords lay between here and Washakie, and Scipio thus summed up the seventy-five miles the patient had before him: “I don’t expect he’ll improve any on the road.”
In new camps among other mountains I now tried my luck through deeper snow, thicker ice, and colder days, coming out at length lean and limber, and ravenous for every good that flesh is heir to, yet reluctant to turn eastward to that city life which would unfailingly tarnish the bright, hard steel of health. Of Still Hunt Spring I spoke no more, but thought often, and with undiscouraged plans to visit it. I mentioned it but once again. Old Washakie, chief of the Shoshone tribe, did me the honor to dine with me at the military post which bore his name. Words cannot describe the face and presence of that old man; ragged clothes abated nothing of his dignity. A past like the world’s beginning looked from his eyes; his jaw and long white hair made you silent as tall mountains make you silent. After we had dined and I had made him presents, he drew pictures in the sand for me with his finger. Not as I expected, almost to my disappointment, this Indian betrayed no mystery concerning the object of my quest.
“Hé!” he said (it was like a shrug). “No hard find. You want see him? Water pretty good, yes. Trees heap big. You make ranch maybe?”
When he heard my desire was merely to see Still Hunt Spring, I am not certain he understood me, or if so, believed me. “Hé!” he exclaimed again, and laughed because I laughed. “You go this way,” he said, beginning to trace a groove in the sand. “So.” He laid a match here and there and pinched up little hillocks, and presently he had it all set forth. I tore off a piece of wrapping-paper from the stove and copied the map carefully, with his comments. The place was less distant than I had thought. I thanked him, spoke of returning “after one snow” to see him and Still Hunt Spring. “Hé!” he shrugged. Then he mounted his pony, and rode off without any “good-by,” Indian fashion. I counted it a treasure I had got from him.
McDonough’s leg had knit well, and I met him on crutches crossing the parade ground. He was discharged from hospital, and (I will not deny it) his mere nod of greeting seemed somewhat too scant acknowledgment of the good will I had certainly tried to show him. Yet his smile was very pleasant, and while I noted his face, no longer embrowned with sun and riding, but pale from confinement, I noted also the unsubdued twinkle in his perplexed eyes. After all, why should I need thanks? As he hobbled away with his yellow hair sticking out in a cowlick under his hat behind, I smiled at my own smallness, and wished him good luck heartily.
The doctor, whose hospitable acquaintance I had made on first coming through the Post this year, would not listen to my paying him anything for his services to McDonough. Army surgeons were expected, he said, to render what aid they could to civilians, as well as to soldiers, in the hospital; he good-humoredly forbade all the remonstrance I attempted. When civilians could pay him themselves, he let them do so according to their means; it was just as well that the surrounding country should not grow accustomed to treating “Uncle Sam” as a purely charitable institution. McDonough had offered to pay, when he could, what he could afford. The doctor had thought it due to me to let him know the contents of my note, and that no such arrangement could be allowed.
“And what said he to that?” I asked.
“Nothing, as usual.”