Told In The Hills Part 20

"No, I believe not, necessarily," she replied, "though I suppose such a windfall would be welcomed; but if there happens to be any superfluous members in a family, it is a profitable way to dispose of them, among some of the Columbia Basin Indians, anyway. Davy MacDougall can give you more information than I, as most of my knowledge is second-hand. But I believe this tribe of the Kootenais is a grade above that sort of traffic--I mean bartering their own kindred."

"How long have you been out here, Miss Rachel?" he asked, as abruptly as she had questioned him of the white men.

"About a year--a little over."

"And you like it?"

"Yes; I like it."

In response to several demands, he had enthroned Miss Margaret on his lap by this time; and even there she was not contented. His head seemed to have a special fascination for her babys.h.i.+p; and she had such an insinuating way of snuggling upward that she was soon close in his arms, her hands in easy reach of his hair, which she did not pull in infantile fas.h.i.+on, but dallied with, and patted caressingly. There was no mistaking the fact that Stuart was prime favorite here at all events; and the affection was not one-sided by any means--unless the man was a thorough actor. His touch, his voice even, acquired a caressing way when Miss Margaret was to be pleased or appeased. Rachel, speaking to Tillie of it, wondered if his attraction was to children in general or to this one in particular; and holding the baby so that her soft, pink cheek was against his own, he seemed ruminating over the girl's replies, and after a little--

"Yes, you must, of course," he said thoughtfully; "else you could never make yourself seem so much a part of it as you do."

During the interval of silence the girl's thoughts had been wandering.

She had lost the slight thread of their former topic, and looked a little at sea.

"A part of what?" she asked.

"Why, the life here. You seem as if you had always belonged to it--a bit of local color in harmony with the scenes about us."

"How flattering!--charmingly expressed!" murmered Miss Hardy derisively.

"A bit of local color? Then, according to Mr. Stuart's impressions I may look forward to finding myself catalogued among greasy squaws and picturesque squaw men."

"You seem to take a great deal of delight in turning all I say or do into ridicule," he observed. "You do it on the principle of the country that guys a 'tenderfoot'; and that is just one of the things that stamp you as belonging to the life here. I try to think of you as a Kentucky girl transplanted, but even the fancy eludes me. You impress one as belonging to this soil, and more than that, showing a disposition to freeze out new-comers."

"I haven't frozen you out."

"No--thanks to my temperament that refuses to congeal. I did not leave all my warmth in the South."

"Meaning that I did?"

"Meaning that you, for some reason, appear to have done so."

"Dear me, what a subtle personage you make of me! Come here, Margaret; this a.n.a.lyst is likely to prejudice you against your only auntie."

"Let her be with me," he said softly, as the baby's big blue eyes turned toward Rachel, and then were screened by heavy, white lids; "she is almost asleep--little darling. Is she not a picture? See how she clings to my finger--so tightly;" and then he dropped his face until his lips touched the soft cheek. "It is a child to thank G.o.d for," he said lovingly.

The girl looked at him, surprised at the thrill of feeling in his tones.

"You spoke like a woman just then," she said, her own voice changed slightly; "like a--a mother--a parent."

"Did I?" he asked, and arose with the child in his arms to deliver it to Aunty Luce. "Perhaps I felt so; is that weakness an added cause for trying to bar me out from the Kootenai hills?"

But he walked away without giving her a chance to reply.

She saw nothing more of him until evening, and then he was rather quiet, sitting beside Tillie and Miss Margaret, with occasional low-toned remarks to them, but not joining in the general conversation.

"What a queer remark that was for a man to make!" thought Rachel, looking at him across the room;--"a young man especially"; and that started her to thinking of his age, about which people would have widely different opinions. To see him sometimes, laughing and joking with the rest, he looked a boy of twenty. To hear him talking of scientific researches in his own profession and others, of the politics of the day, or literature of the age, one would imagine him at least forty. But sitting quietly, his face in repose, yet looking tired, his eyes so full of life, yet steeped in reveries, the rare mouth relaxed, unsmiling, then he looked what he probably was, thought the girl--about thirty; but it was seldom that he looked like that.

"Therefore," reasoned this feminine watcher, "it is seldom that we see him as he really is; query--why?"

"Perhaps I felt as a parent feels!" How frank his words had been, and how unlike most men he was, to give utterance to that thought with so much feeling, and how caressing to the child! Rachel had to acknowledge that he was original in many ways, and the ways were generally charming.

His affections were so warm, so frankly bestowed; yet that gracious, tender manner of his, even when compared with the bluntness of the men around him, never made him seem effeminate.

Rachel, thinking of his words, wondered if he had a sweetheart somewhere, that made him think of a possible wife or children longingly--and if so, how that girl must love him!

So, despite her semi-warlike att.i.tude, and her delight in thwarting him, she had appreciation enough of his personality to understand how possible it was for him to be loved deeply.

Jim, under Miss Hardy's tuition, had been making an attempt to "rope in"

an education, and that night was reading doubtfully the history of our Glorious Republic in its early days; garnis.h.i.+ng the statements now and then with opinions of his own, especially the part relating to the character of the original lords of the soil.

"Say, Miss Rache, yer given' me a straight tip on this lay-out?" he said at last, shutting the book and eyeing her closely.

The question aroused her from the contemplation of the Hermes-like head opposite, though she had, like Hardy, been pretending to read.

"Do you mean, is it true?" she asked.

"Naw!" answered Jim, with the intonation of supreme disgust; "I hain't no call to ask that; but what I'm curious about is whether the galoot as wrote the truck lied by accident--someone sort o' playin' it on him, ye see--er whether he thought the rest o' creation was chumps from away back, an' he just naturally laid himself out to sell them cheap--now say, which is it?"

In vain his monitor tried to impress on his mind the truth of the chronicles, and the fact that generations ago the Indian could be truly called a n.o.ble man, until his child-like faith in the straight tongue of the interloper had made a net for his feet, to escape which they had recourse only to treachery and the tomahawk, thus carving in history a character that in the beginning was not his, but one into which he was educated by the G.o.dly people who came with their churches and guns, their religion and whisky, to civilize the credulous people of the forests.

Jim listened, but in the supercilious disbelief in his eyes Rachel read the truth. In trying to establish historical facts for his benefit, she was simply losing ground in his estimation at every statement made.

"An' you," he finally remarked, after listening in wonderful silence for him--"an' you've read it all, then?"

"Yes, most of it."

"An' swallowed it as gospel?"

"Well, not exactly such literal belief as that; but I have read not only this history, but others in support of those facts."

"Ye have, have yeh?" remarked her pupil, with a sarcastic contempt for her book-learning. "Well, I allow this one will do me a life-time, fer I've seen Flatheads, an' Diggers, an' Snakes!"

Thus ended the first lesson in history.

"Don't you think," said Tillie softly to Stuart, "that Rachel would win more glory as a missionary to the Indians than among her own race? She is always running against stumbling-blocks of past knowledge with the progressive white man."

Rachel cast one silencing glance at the speaker; Tillie laughed.

"Never mind," she said rea.s.suringly; "I will say nothing about your other attempt, and I only hope you will be willing to confine yourself to the Indians near home, and not start out to see some Flatheads, and Diggers, and Snakes for yourself."

"Lawd bress yeh, honey!" spoke up Aunty Luce, whose ears were always open to anything concerning their red neighbors; "don' yo' go to puttin'

no sech thoughts in her haid. Miss Rache needs tamin' down, she do, 'stead o' 'couragement."

"Well, it's precious little encouragement I get here, except to grow rusty in everything," complained Rachel. "A crusade against even the Diggers would be a break in the monotony. I wish I had gone with you to the Kootenai village, Mr. Stuart; that would have been a diversion."

"But rather rough riding," he added; "and much of the life, and--well, there is a great deal one would not care to take a lady to see."

"You don't know how Rachel rides," said Tillie, with a note of praise in her voice; "she rides as hard as the men on the ranch. You must go together for a ride, some day. She knows the country very well already."