The men had driven away. Their carts and horses disappeared behind the roll of the low hills. They appeared now and then, like boats on the crest of a wave, farther each time. And their laughter and singing and shouts grew fainter as the bushes hid them from sight.
The women and children remained, with two old men to protect them. They might have gone too, the hunters said. “What harm could come in the broad daylight?—the bears and panthers were far away. They’d be back by night, with only two carts to fill.”
Then Jim, the crack shot of the settlement, said, “We’ll drive home the bears in the carts.”
The children shouted and danced as they thought of the sport to come, of the hunter’s return with their game, of the bonfires they always built.
One pale woman clung to her husband’s arm. “But the Indians!”
That made the men all laugh. “Indians!” they cried; “why, there’ve been none here for twenty years! We drove them away, down there”—pointing across the plain—“to a hotter place than this, where the sand burns their feet and they ride for days for water.”
The pale woman murmured. “Ah, but they returned.”
“Yes,” cried her big husband, whose brown beard covered his chest, “and burned two cabins. Small harm they did, the curs!”
“Hush,” said the pale woman, pressing her husband’s arm; and the men around were quiet, pretending to fix their saddles, as they glanced at another woman, dressed in black, who turned and went into her house.
“I forgot her boy,” said the bearded man, as he gravely picked up his gun.
They started off in the morning cool, toward the mountains where the trees grew. And the long shadows lessened as the sun crept up the sky.
The woman in black stood silent by her door. No one bade her good-bye. The other women went back to their houses to work. The children played in the dust; clouds rose as they shouted and ran. A day’s freedom lay before them.
But the woman in black still stood by her door, like a spectre in the sunshine, her thin hands clasped together as she gazed away over the plain toward Mexico.
Her face was parched and drawn, as if the sun from the sand had burned into the bone. Her eyes alone seemed to live; they were hard and bright.
Her house was a little away from the rest, on the crest of a hill facing the desert plain.
She had heard the words of the bearded man: “Small harm the Indians did.” Had he forgotten her boy? How could he forget, while she was there to remind them of the dead? Near her house was a small rock roughly marked. The rude letters, “Will, gone, ’69,” she had cut on it with her own hands. It marked the last place where her boy had played. She remembered how she went away softly—so he should not cry to follow her—without a word, without a kiss. Here her hands beat the side of the house.
“Oh, to have that kiss now and die!” But she had gone, unthinking, up the road where the pale woman lived, then a rosy-cheeked happy bride, not a widow like herself. They laughed and discussed the newcomers at the settlement. It was a holiday, for the men were away over the hills, cutting down trees to build their houses with.
As they talked there idly, they heard what they thought was the shrill bark of dogs running up the hill. Startled, they went to the window. Round the curve of the road came horses wildly galloping, and upon their backs—Here the pale woman shrieked and fled. They were Indians, beating their horses with their bare legs, their black hair streaming in the wind.
Like a flash, she had bolted the door and barred the shutters as they galloped up. She turned then. Through the open back door she saw the women run screaming up the hill, their children in their arms.
Their children! Where was hers? She stopped as if turned to stone, then undid the door.
They dragged her out by the wrists, by the hair. She fought with them stronger than ten men. But there were twenty; she was alone. The little street was empty. They strangled her, beat down her face, dragged her upon a horse, and, with her crosswise on the saddle, galloped up and down, as they fired the cabins and the sheds. Her hands were shackled, and her eyes blind with blood, but she thought only of her child. “Where could he be?”
There were gunshots. Down the hills like mad came the white men for their wives and children.
Then the Indians turned back toward the plain. They rode past her house.
There, where she had left him, stood the child, dazed with surprise. She held out her arms tied together and called to him to come.
“Fool! fool!” Here the woman in black struck her temples with her hands. “Fool!” Why had she not galloped by and never noticed him?
But she begged, caught at the horse’s head, struggled to get to him; and the Indian stopped for a moment in his flight and caught up the child and went on.
Then the thought came to her of the end of that ride—what was to come—after. And she tried to drop the boy, to let him slide gently to the ground; but the Indian held them fast.
Behind, nearer, came the following men, louder the guns. The horse she was on snorted, staggered under the weight of the three, and as they reached the plain the child was torn from her, she was pushed away. But she rose and staggered after them amid the blinding dust. They must take her too. Sobbing, she called to them as she stumbled on. Many times she fell. Then she could go no more.
That was all. Her story ended there, with the thundering of horses’ hoofs and the taste of dust in her mouth. They found her there unconscious. Her friends tended her. When she came back to life she asked no questions but left her neighbour’s house and came to her door, where she was standing now, and gazed away over the sand where he had gone, down toward Mexico.
The years went by, and she was still alone in the house where two should have been. And now far off she saw the dust blowing in a long, rolling, pinkish line. But the dust blew so often, and nothing came of it—not even the Indians.
The boy she knew was dead, but they—his murderers—remained somewhere.
If she could have one now in her power!
The woman in black pondered, as she had so many times, how she should torture him. No pain could be too horrible. She looked at the fire in the stove, and piled on the logs—the logs that were brought with such trouble from the mountains where the trees grew. She could not make it hot enough. She dropped on her knees and watched the iron grow red. And the letters of the maker’s name stamped on it grew distinct, and the word “Congress,” half defaced, and the figures “64.” Ah, those letters! she could have kissed the spot, for her child had touched it. Charmed by the glow, when left alone, he laid his baby hand flat on it, and burned deep into the palm were those letters, “S S, 64.”
She would know him among a million by that mark.
But he was dead. The Indians remained.
The woman in black stood up. Why should she not go to them? There were pools in the plain where she could drink. That would be enough.
The men were away; the women were at work. Who could stop her?
She put on her bonnet and started off down the hill through the green bushes. The air was still crisp, though the sun was hot.
The desert must have an end. She would keep on to Mexico. She walked quickly, and her dress grew grey with dust, and the air scorching, as she reached the plain. But she kept on, and only looked back once at the house on the hill, and at the window where the pale woman sat.
The dust choked her, and she stumbled, and the sole of one shoe came half off, and slapped, and banged, and delayed her as she walked. She tore it off and went on, but the sand cut and burned her so that she sat down and wept, and wanted to go back for her other pair, the ones she wore on Sundays. The hill, though, looked so distant that she wearily got up and went on, on, till she could go no more, and crept under the shadow of a rock. There was no water near. Her throat was parched, and her temples beat wildly. She must go back and start again, strengthened, fortified. She would start to-morrow, or at night, when the cool would let her get too far to return.
By slow degrees she dragged herself up the hill. The pale woman came out of her house, and nodded, but the woman in black did not smile in return. She closed her door, and went up to her