During the two years passed by Brick Willock in dreary solitude, conditions about him had changed. The hardships of pioneer life which, fifty years ago, had obtained in the Middle States yet prevailed, in 1882, in the tract of land claimed by Texas under the name of Greer County; but the dangers of pioneer life were greatly lessened. As Lahoma made the acquaintance of the mountain-range, and explored the plain extending beyond the natural horseshoe, Willock believed she ran little danger from Indians. He, himself, had ceased to preserve his unrelaxing watchfulness; after all, it had been the highwaymen rather than the red men whom he had most feared—and after two years it did not seem likely that such volatile men would pre serve the feeling of vengeance.
With the wisdom derived from his experience with wild natures, he carefully abstained from any attempt to force Lahoma's friendship, hence it was not long before he obtained it without reserve. As she walked beside him, grave and alert, she no longer thought of his bushy beard and prodigious mop of harsh hair; and the daily exhibition of his strength caused him to grow handsome in her eyes because most of those feats were performed for her comfort or pleasure. In the meantime he talked incessantly, and to his admiration, he presently found her manner of speech wonderfully like his own, both fluent and ungrammatical.
He knew nothing of grammar, to be sure, but there were times when his mistakes, echoed from her lips, struck upon his ear, and though he might not always know how to correct them, he was prompt to suggest changes, testing each, as a natural musician judges music, by ear. Dissatisfied with his own standards, he was all the more impatient to depart on the expedition after mental tools, despite the dangers that might beset the journey.
His first task prompted by the coming of Lahoma, had been to partition off the half of the dugout containing the stove for the child's private chamber. Cedar posts set in the ground and plastered with mud higher than his head, left a space between the top and the apex of the ceiling that the temperature might be equalized in both rooms. Thus far, however, they did not stay in the dugout except long enough to eat and sleep, for the autumn had continued delightful, and the cove seemed to the child her home, of which the dugout was a sort of cellar. Concerning the stone retreat in the crevice she knew nothing. Willock did not know why he kept the secret, since he trusted Lahoma with all his treasures, but the unreasoning reticence of the man of great loneliness still rested on him. Some day, he would tell—but not just yet.
"Lahoma," he said one day, "there's a settler over yonder in the mountains across the south plain. How'd you like to pay him a visit?"
"I don't want anybody but you," said Lahoma promptly.
Willock stood on one leg, rubbing the other meditatively with his delighted foot. Not the quiver of a muscle, however, revealed the fact that her words had flooded his heart with sunshine. "Well, honey, that's in reason. But I've got to take you with me after books and winter supplies, and I don't like the idea of traveling alone. It come to me that I might get Mr. Settler to go, too. Time was not so long ago when Injun bands was coming and going, and although old Greer is beginning to be sprinkled up with settlers, here and there, I can't get over the feel of the old times. They ain't no sensation as sticks by a man when he's come to be wedged in between forty-five and fifty, as the feel of the old times."
"Well," said Lahoma earnestly, "I wish you'd leave me here when you go after them books. I don't want to be with no strangers, I want to just squat right here and bear myself company."
"That's in reason. But, honey, while you might be safe enough whilst bearing the same, I would be plumb crazy worrying about you. I might not have good cause for worrying, but worrying—it ain't no bird that spreads its wings and goes north when cold weather comes; worrying—it's independent of causes and seasons."
"If you have got to be stayed with to keep you from worrying, they ain't nothing more to be said."
"Just so. That there old settler, I have crossed a few words with him, and I believe he would do noble to travel with. He's as gruff and growly as a grizzly bear if you say a word to him, and if he'll just turn all that temper he's vented on me on to any strangers we may run up against on the trail, he'll do invaluable."
"I'll go catch up the pony," said Lahoma briefly, "for I see the thing is to be did. This will be the first visit I ever made in my life when I wasn't drug by the Injuns."
"You mustn't say 'drug,' honey, unless specifying medicines and herbs. I ain't saying you didn't get it from me, and knowing you do get from me all I got, is what makes me hone for them books. You must say 'dragged.' The Injuns DRAGGED you from one village to another." He paused meditatively, muttering the word to himself, while Lahoma ran away to catch the pony. When she came back, leading it by the mane, he said, "I've been a-weighing that word, Lahoma, and it don't seem to me that 'dragged' sounds proper. It don't seem no sort of word to use in a parlor. What do you think? DRAGGED! How does that strike you?"
"I don't like the sound of it, neither," said Lahoma, shaking her head. "I think DRUG is softer. It kinder melts in the ear, and DRAGGED sticks."
"Well, don't use neither one till I can find out." Presently he was swinging along across the plain toward the southwestern range while the girl kept close beside him on the pony. Their talk was incessant, voicing the soul of good comradeship, and but for the difference between heavy bass and fluty soprano, a listener might have supposed himself overhearing a conversation between two Brick Willocks.
There was nothing about the second range of the Wichita Mountains to distinguish it from the one farthest toward the northeast except a precipice at its extremity, rising a sheer three or four hundred feet above the level plain. Beyond this lofty termination, the mountain curved inward, leaving a wide grassy cove open toward the south; and within this half-circle was the settler's dugout.
The unprotected aspect of that little home was in itself an eloquent commentary on the wonderful changes that had come about during the last seventeen years. The oval tract of one million five hundred thousand acres lying between Red River and its fork, named Greer County, and claimed by Texas, was in miniature a reproduction of the early history of America. Until 1860 it had not even borne a name, and since then it had possessed no settled abodes. Here bands of Indians of various tribes had come and gone at will, and here the Indians of the Plains, after horrible deeds of depredation, massacre and reprisal, had found shelter among its mountains. The country lay at the southwest corner of Indian Territory for which the Indians had exchanged their lands in other parts of the United States on the guarantee that the government would "forever secure to them and their heirs the country so exchanged with them."
At the close of the Civil War the unhappy Indians long continued in a state of smoldering animosity, or warlike activity, tribe against tribe, band against band; they had inherited the rancor and bitterness of the White Man's war with neither the fruits of victory nor the dignity that attends honorable defeat. The reservations that belonged originally to the Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Seminole and Creek tribes, were reduced in area to make room for new tribes from Kansas, Colorado and other states, and the Indian wars resulted. For a time the scalp-knife was crimsoned, the stake was charred, bands stole in single file over mountains and among half-dried streams; troups of the regular army were assaulted by invisible foes, and forts were threatened. Youths who read romances of a hundred years ago dealing with the sudden war-cry, the flaming cabin, the stealthy approach of swarming savages, need have traveled only a few hundred miles to witness on the open page of life what seemed to them, in their long-settled states, fables of a dead past.
But though the Indian wars in the Territory had been bloody and vindictive, they had not been protracted as in the old days. Around the country of the red man was drawn closer and more securely, day by day, the girdle of civilization. Within its constricting grasp the spirit of savagery, if not crushed, was at least subdued. Tribes naked but for their blankets, unadorned save by the tattoo, found themselves pressed close to other tribes which, already civilized, had relinquished the chase for agricultural pursuits. Primeval men, breathing this quickened atmosphere of modernity, either grew more sophisticated, or perished like wild flowers brought too near the heat. It is true the plains were still unoccupied, but they had been captured—for the railroad had come, and the buffalo had vanished.
Brick Willock and the man he had come to see were very good types of the first settlers of the new country—one a highwayman, hiding from his kind, the other a trapper by occupation, trying to keep ahead of the pursuing waves of immigration. It was the first time Lahoma had seen Bill Atkins, and as she caught sight of him before his dugout, her eyes brightened with interest. He was a tall lank man of about sixty-five, with a huge gray mustache and bushy hair of iron-gray, but without a beard. The mustache gave him an effect of exceeding fierceness, and the deeply wrinkled forehead and square chin added their testimony to his ungracious disposition.
But Lahoma was not afraid of coyotes, catamounts or mountain-lions, and she was not afraid of Bill Atkins. Her eyes brightened at the discovery that he held in his hand that which Willock had described to her as a book.
"Does he read?", she asked Willock, breathlessly. "Does he read, Brick?"
Willock surveyed the seated figure gravely. "He reads!" he responded.
The man looked up, saw Willock and bent over his book—discovered Lahoma on the pony, and looked up again, unwillingly but definitely. "You never told me you had a little girl," he remarked gruffly.
"You never asked me," said Willock. "Get down, Lahoma, and make yourself at home."
The man shut his book. "What are you going to do?"
"Going to visit you. Turn the pony loose, Lahoma; he won't go far."
"Haven't you got all that north range to yourself?" Bill Atkins asked begrudgingly.
"Yap. How're you making it, Atkins?"
"Why, as long as I'm let alone, I'm making it all right. It's being let alone that I can't ever accomplish. When I was a boy I began my travels to keep out where I could breathe, and I've been crowded out of Missouri and Kansas and Colorado and Wyoming and California, and now I've come to the American Desert thinking I could die in peace, but oh, no, not ME! I no sooner get settled and made my turf dugout, than here comes a stranger—"
"Name of Brick Willock, if you've forgot," interpolated Willock genially. "I'll just light my pipe, as I reckon there's no objections. Lahoma don't care, and you can breathe all right if you keep with the wind from you."
The man turned his back upon Willock, opened his book and read.
Lahoma approached the block of wood that supported him, while Willock calmly stretched himself out on the grass. "Is that a book?" she asked, by way of opening up the conversation.
The man gripped it tighter and moved his lips busily. As she remained at his knee, he presently said, "Oh, no, it's a hand-organ!"
Lahoma smiled pityingly. "Are you afraid of me, Atkins?"
The man looked up with open mouth. "Not exactly, kid!" There was something in her face that made him lose interest in his book. He kept looking at her.
"Then why don't you tell the truth? WE won't hurt you."
The man opened his mouth and closed it. Then he said, "It's a book."
"Did you ever read it before?"
"This is the third time I've read it."
"Seems as it hasn't accomplished no good on you, as you still tell lies."
The man rose abruptly, and laid the book on the seat. His manner was quite as discouraging as it had been from the start.
"Honey," interposed Willock, "that ain't to say a lie, not a real lie."
"IS it a hand-organ?" Lahoma demanded sternly.
"In a manner of speaking, honey, it is a hand-organ in the sense of shutting you off from asking questions. You learn to distinguish the sauces of speech as you gets older. Out in the big world, people don't say this or that according as it is, they steeps their words in a sauce as suits the digestion. Don't be so quick to call 'LIES!' till you learns the flavor of a fellow's meaning, not by his words but by the sauce he steeps 'em in."
"Don't get mad at me," said Lahoma to the trapper. "I don't know nothing, never having captured and branded the thoughts that is caged up in books. But I want to be civilized and I am investigating according."
The trapper, somewhat conciliated, reseated himself. He regarded the girl with greater interest, not without a certain approval. "How comes it that you aren't civilized, living with such a knowing specimen as your own father?"
"My father's dead. Brick is my cousin, but I not knowing nothing of him till he saved my life two years ago and after that, me with the Indians and him all alone. Would you like to hear about it?"
"I wouldn't bother him, honey, with all that long story," interposed Willock, suddenly grown restive.
"Yes, tell me," said the trapper, moving over that she might find room on the block of wood beside him.
Lahoma seated herself eagerly and looking up into the other's face, which softened more and more under her fearless gaze, she said:
"We was crossing the plains—father, mother and me, in a big wagon. And men dressed up like Indians, they come whooping and shooting, and father turns around and drives with all his might—drives clear to yonder mountain. And mother dies, being that sick before, and the jolting too much for her. So father takes me on his horse and rides all night, and I all asleep. Well, those same men dressed like Indians, they was in a cabin 'way up north, and had put their wigs and feathers off and was gambling over what they stole from the other wagons. So father, he sees the light from the window and rides up with me. And they takes him for a spy and says they, in a voice awful fierce, just this way—'KILL 'EM BOTH!'"
The trapper gave a start at the explosiveness of her tone.
Lahoma shouted again, as harshly as she could, "'Kill 'em both,' says they." Then she turned to Willock. "Did I put them words in the correct sauce, Brick?"
"You done noble, honey."
Lahoma resumed: "Now it was in a manner of happening that Brick, he was riding around to have a look at the country, and when he rides up to the cabin, why, right outside there was me and father, and two of the robbers about to kill us. 'What are you devils up to?' says Brick. 'You go to hell,' says the leading man, 'that's where we're going to send this spy and his little girl,' says he; 'you go to hell and maybe you'll meet 'em there,' he says. And with that he ups and shoots at Brick, the bullet lifting his hat right off his head and scaring the horse out from under him, so he falls right there at the feet of them two robber-men, on his back. Brick, he never harmed nobody before in his life, but what was he to do? He might of let them kill him, but that would of left father and me in their grip, so he just grabs the gun out of the leading man's hand, as he hadn't ever carried a gun in his life his own self, and he shot both them robbers, him still laying there on his back—"
"No, honey, I got up about that time."
"Brick, you told me you was still laying there on your back just as you fell."
"Did I, honey, well, I reckon I was, then, for when I told you about it, it was more recent."
"It's awful interesting," the trapper remarked dryly.
"Yes, ain't it!" Lahoma glowed. "Then father jumped on one horse with me, and Brick put out on another, and when I woke up, the Indians were all everywhere, but Brick come here and lived all alone and nearly died because he didn't have me to comfort him. So the Indians took me and they killed father, and for two years I was moved from village to village till Red Feather brought me to Brick. And then we found out we are cousins and he is going to civilize me. Brick, he remembers about a cousin of his, Cousin Martha Willock, her sister went driving out to the Oklahoma country with her husband and little girl and wasn't never heard of. I am the little girl, all right, and Brick he's my second cousin. And wasn't it lucky Brick was riding around that night, looking at the country, when they was about to put daylight into me?"
"I'd think," remarked the trapper, "that he'd take you back to your Cousin Martha, for men-folks like him and me aren't placed to take care of women-folks."
"Yes, but he got a letter saying my Cousin Martha and all her family is done been swept away by a flood of the Mississippi River, and him and me is all they is left of the Willockses, so we got to stick together. Besides, you see, he killed them two robbers, and the rest of the gang is laying for him; Brick, he feels so dreadful, he never having so much as put a scratch to a man's face before, for he wouldn't never fight as a boy, his conscience wouldn't rest if he was in civilization. He'd go right up to the first policeman he met and say, 'I done the deed. Carry me to the pen!' he'd say, and then what would become of me?"
"He might get another letter from your Cousin Martha to help him out of the scrape."
Lahoma stared at him, unable to grasp the significance of these foolish words, and Brick, seeking a diversion, explained his purpose of taking Lahoma to the settlements after supplies, and proffered his petition that Bill Atkins accompany them.
Lahoma has never forgotten that expedition to the settlements. Along the Chisholm Trail marched Brick Willock and Bill Atkins, one full of genial philosophy, responsive to every sight and sound along the way, the other taciturn and uncompanionable, a being present in the flesh, but seemingly absent in the spirit. Behind them rode the girl, with unceasing interest in the broad hard-beaten trail—the only mark in that wilderness to tell them that others had passed that way. The men walked with deliberate but well-measured step, preserving a pace that carried them mile after mile seemingly with little weariness. Three times on the journey great herds of cattle were encountered on their way toward Kansas, and many were the looks of curiosity cast on the little girl sitting as straight as an Indian on her pony.
She was glad when a swinging cloud of dust announced the coming of thousands of steers, attended by cowboys, for it meant a glimpse into an unknown world, and the bellowing of cattle, the shouting of men and the cracking of whips stirred her blood. But she was glad, too, when the stream of life had flowed past, and she was left alone with Brick and Bill, for then the never-ending conversation with the former was resumed, picked up at the point where it had been dropped, or drawn forward from raveled bits of unfinished discourse of the day before, and though Bill Atkins said almost nothing and always looked straight ahead, he was, in a way, spice in the feast of her enjoyment.
When they stopped for their meals, they drew aside from the trail, if possible near some spring or river-bed in which pools of water lingered, but such stopping-places were far apart in the desert country. At night there was a cheerful bonfire, followed by zestful talk as they lay on the ground, before falling asleep in their tarpaulins—talk eagerly monopolized by Brick and Lahoma, and to which Atkins seemed in a manner to listen, perhaps warming his heart at the light of their comradeship even as they warmed their hands in the early morning at the breakfast fire. Atkins had brought with him one of his books, and at the noon hour's rest, and at evening beside the bonfire, he kept his nose buried in its pages.
Lahoma did not think life would have been too long to devote to such pilgrimages. In the settlements, she was bewildered, but never satiated, with novelties, and on the way back, everything she had seen was discussed, expounded and classified between her and her "cousin." Sometimes her questions drove Brick up against a stone wall and then Bill Atkins would raise his voice and in three or four words put the matter in its true light.
"Bill, he's saw more of life than me," Brick conceded admiringly. "He has come and went amongst all sorts of people, but my specialty has in the main been low."
"Yes, I've seen more of life," Atkins agreed; "that's why I try so hard to keep away from it."
"The more I see, the more I want to see!" cried Lahoma eagerly.
"Yes, honey," Brick explained, "that's because you're a WOMAN."
Once more back in the cove, Lahoma dreamed new dreams, peopling the grassy solitude with the figures she had encountered on her travels, likening the rocks to various houses that had caught her fancy. She turned with absorbed interest to the primer and elementary arithmetic with which Brick had supplied himself as the first tools for his mental kit.
The journey hack home had been far easier than the descent into Texas because both Willock and Atkins had supplied themselves with ponies,—animals that sold ridiculously cheap at the outlying posts of the settlements. Brick Willock brought back with him something else to add cheerfulness and usefulness to approaching winter. This was a square window-sash, set with four small panes of good glass. It was hard work to place this window in Lahoma's side of the dugout, but it was work thoroughly enjoyed. Lahoma's room was on the west, and from noon to sundown, the advantage of the window was a source of never-ending delight.
"Good thing we've got our window," Brick would say as they sat on the low rude bench before the little stove, and the furious wind of January howled overhead. Or, when the wintry sky was leaden and all Brick's side of the partition was as dark as the hole of a prairie-dog, he would visit Lahoma, and gloat over the dim gray light stealing through the small panes. "That window's no bad idea!" he would chuckle, stooping his great bulk cautiously as he seated himself, as if to lighten his weight by doubling in upon himself.
"Good thing I've got my window," Lahoma would say as the snow lay thick on the plains and in broken lines all over the mountain, and the cutting blast made the fire jump with sudden fright. She would hold her book close to the dirt square in which the frame was planted, and spell out words she had never heard used, such as "lad," "lass," "sport," and the like mysteries. "This window is going to civilize me, Brick."
It did not lessen their relish in the subject that they had discussed it already a hundred times. It was the same way with the hand-made bench, with the trench that carried water from their door during sudden downpours, and with the self-congratulation over owning two ponies to keep each other company.
"They's one thing about us, Lahoma, which it ain't according to the big outside world, and yet I hope it won't never be changed. We are mighty glad we've got what we've got. And to be glad of what you've got is a sure way to multiply your property. Every time you brag on that window, it shines like two windows to me."
Spring came late that year, and in the early days of March, Brick rode over to the cove behind the precipice after Bill Atkins. "I want you to come over to my place," he begged, "and answer some of Lahoma's questions. Being closeted with her in that there dugout all winter, she has pumped me as dry as a bone."
Perhaps Bill Atkins had had his fill of solitude during that cold winter—or perhaps he was hungry for another hour of the little girl's company. Nothing, however, showed his satisfaction as he entered her chamber. "Here I am," he announced, seating himself on the bench. This was his only greeting.
"Is it drug or dragged?" demanded Lahoma.
"Dragged."
"Why don't God send me a little girl to play with, after me asking for one every night, all winter?"
"Don't understand God's business," replied Atkins briefly.
"I puts it this way," Brick spoke up; "God's done sent one little girl, and it ain't right to crowd Him too far."
"Will I be all they is of me, as long as I live?"
"Nobody won't never come to live in these plains," Brick declared, "unless its trappers and characters like us. But we'll stay by you, won't we, Bill Atkins?"
Atkins looked exceedingly gruff and shook his head as if he had his doubts about it. "You'll have to be taken to the States," he declared.
"But what would become of Brick?"
"Well, honey," said Brick, "you want to take your place with people in the big world, don't you?"
"Oh, YES!" cried Lahoma, starting up and stretching her arm toward the window. "In the big world—yes! That's the place for me—that's where I want to live. But what will become of you?"
"Well," Brick answered slowly, "the rock pile, t'other side the mountain is good enough for me. Your mother sleeps under it."
"Oh, Brick!" She caught his arm. "You wouldn't die if I went away, would you?"
"Why, you see, honey, they wouldn't be nothing left to go on. I'd just sort of stop, you know—but it wouldn't matter—out there in the big world, people don't remember very long, and when you're grown you wouldn't know there'd ever been a cove with a dugout in it, and a window in the wall, and a Brick Willock to carry in the wood for the fire."
"I'll always remember—and I won't go without you. He COULD go with me, couldn't he, Bill?"
"I suspicion he has his reasons for not," Atkins observed gravely.
"I has, and I shall never go back to the States."
"Then what's the use civilizing me?" demanded Lahoma mournfully.
"I want you to enjoy yourself. And when I'm old and no-'count, you'd need somebody to take care of you—and you'd go full-equipped and ready to stand up to any civilized person that tried to run a bluff on you."
"But, oh, I want to GO—I want to go out THERE—where there ain't no plains and alkali and buffalo-grass—where they's pavements and policemen and people in beautiful clothes. I don't mean NOW, I mean when I have got civilized." She drew herself up proudly. "I wouldn't go till I was civilized, till I was like them." She turned impulsively to Brick: "But you've got to go with me when I go! I'm going to stay with you till I'm fit to go, and then you're going to stay with me the rest of my life."
"Am I fit to go with her?" Brick appealed to Bill Atkins.
"You ain't," Bill replied.
"I ain't fit," Brick declared firmly. "I'm a-going to fitten you; but it's too late to work on me; and besides, if they WAS time enough, it ain't to the grain of my nature. I knows all I wants to know, which if little or much is enough for me. And I wouldn't be fit to go with you out into the big world and cut a figger in it, which couldn't be no figger but a figger naught. And Atkins who knows more than me, he says the same."
The tears were in Lahoma's eyes. She looked from one to the other, her little face deeply troubled. Suddenly she grabbed up her books and started toward the stove. "Then this here civilizing is going to stop," she declared.
"Lahoma!" Brick cried in dismay.
"Yes, it is—unless you promise to stay with me when I go to live in the big world."
"Honey, I'll promise you this: When you are ready to live out there, I'll sure go with you and stay with you—if you want me, when the time comes."
Lahoma seized his hand, and jumped up and down in delight.
"It's a safe promise," remarked Bill Atkins dryly.
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