A Cool Million (13 page)

“I still prefer coffee,”
Lem
said firmly.

“Bah!” said the other, disdainfully;
“I’d as soon drink skim milk. Good whisky or
cawn
for
me.”

“The only thing I miss in this camp,”
said Mr. Whipple, “is baked beans and brown bread. Ever eat ‘
em
, stranger?” “No,” said the Pike man, “none of your Yankee
truck for me.”

“What’s your favorite food?” asked
Lem
with a smile.

“Sow teats and hominy, hoe cakes and
forty-rod.”

“Well,” said
Lem
,
“it depends on how you’ve been brought up. I like baked beans and brown bread
and pumpkin pie. Ever eat pumpkin pie?”

“Yes.”

“Like it?”

“I don’t lay much on it.”

Throughout this dialogue, the
stranger ate enormous quantities of food and drank six or seven cups of coffee.
Mr. Whipple realized that the damage was done and that he would have to go into
the town of Yuba for a fresh supply of provisions.

Having finished three cans of
pineapple, the Pike man became social over one of Mr. Whipple’s cigars, which
he had taken without so much as a “by-your-leave.”

“Strangers,” he said, “did you ever
hear of the affair I had with Jack Scott?”

“No,” said Mr. Whipple.

“Jack and
me
used to be a heap together. We went
huntin
’ together,
camped out for weeks together, and
was
like two
brothers. One day we
was
a-
ridin
’
out, when a deer started up about fifty yards ahead of us. We both raised our
guns and shot at him. There was only one bullet into him, and I
knowed
it was mine.”

“How did you know it?” asked
Lem
.

“Don’t you get curious,
stranger.
I
knowed
it, and that
was enough. But Jack said it was his. ‘It’s my deer,’ he says, ‘for you missed
your shot.’ ‘
Looka
here, Jack,’ says I, ‘you’re
mistaken. You missed it. Don’t you think I know my own bullet?’ ‘No, I don’t,’
says he. ‘Jack,’ says I calmly, ‘don’t talk that way. It’s dangerous.’ `Do you
think I’m afraid of you?’ he says
turnin
’ on me. ‘Jack,’
says
I,
`don’t provoke me. I kin whip my weight in
wildcats.’ ‘You can’t whip me,’ he says. That was too much for me to stand. I’m
the rip-tail
roarer
from Pike County, Missouri, and
no man can insult me and live. ‘Jack,’ says I, ‘we’ve been friends, but you’ve
insulted me and you must pay with your life.’ Then I up with my iron and shot
him through the head.”

“My, how cruel!” exclaimed Betty.

“I was sorry to do it, beautiful
gal, for he was my best friend, but he disputed my word, and the man that does
that has to make his will if he’s got property.”

No one said anything, so the Pike
man continued to talk.

“You see,” he said with a friendly
smile. “I was brought up on
fightin
’. When I was a
boy I could whip every boy in the school.”

“That’s why they call you a rip-tail
roarer
,” said Mr. Whipple jokingly.

“You’re right,
pardner
,”
said the Pike man complacently. “What did you do when the teacher gave you a
licking?” asked Mr. Whipple.

“What did I do?” yelled the
Missourian with a demoniac laugh.

“Yes, what?” asked Mr. Whipple.

“Why, I shot him dead,” said the
Pike man briefly.
“My,” said Mr. Whipple with a smile.
“How many teachers did you shoot when you were a boy?”

“Only one.
The rest heard of it and never dared touch me.”

After this last statement, the
desperado lay down under a tree to finish in comfort the cigar he tad snatched
from Mr. Whipple.

Seeing that he did not intend to
move just yet, the others proceeded to go about their business.
Lem
and Jake Raven went to the mine, which was about a mile
from the cabin.
Shagpoke
saddled his horse for the
ride into town after a fresh stock of provisions. Betty occupied herself over
the washtub.

Some time had elapsed, when
Lem
and Jake Raven decided that they would need dynamite to
continue their operations.
Lem
was down at the bottom
of the shaft, so the Indian was the one to go to camp for the explosives.

When Jake did not return after
several hours,
Lem
began to worry about him. He
remembered what the Pike man had said about his Indian policy and was afraid
that that ruffian might have done Jake an injury.

Our hero decided to go back and see
if everything was all right. When he entered the clearing in which the cabin
stood, he was surprised to find the place deserted.

“Hi, Jake!”
Lem
shouted bewilderedly.
“Hi, Jake
Raven!”

There was no answer. Only the woods
sent his words back to him in an echo almost as loud as his shout.

Suddenly, a scream rent the silence.
Lem
recognized the voice of the screamer as Betty’s,
and ran quickly toward the cabin.

The door was locked.
Lem
hammered on it, but no one answered. He went to the
woodpile to get an ax and there found Jake Raven lying on the ground. He had
been shot through the chest. Hastily snatching up the ax
Lem
ran to the cabin. A few hearty blows and the door tumbled in.

In the half gloom of the cabin,
Lem
was horrified to see the Pike man busily tearing off
Betty’s sole remaining piece of underwear. She was struggling as best she
could, but the ruffian from Missouri was too strong for her.

Lem
raised
the ax high over his head and started forward to interfere. He did not get very
far because the ruffian had prepared for just such a contingency by setting an
enormous bear trap inside the door.

Our hero stepped on the pan of the
trap and its saw-toothed jaws closed with great force on the calf of his leg,
cutting through his trousers, skin,
flesh
and halfway
into the bone besides. He dropped in a heap, as though he had been shot through
the brain.

At the sight of poor
Lem
weltering in his own blood, Betty fainted. In no way
disturbed, the Missourian went coolly about his nefarious business and soon
accomplished his purpose.

With the hapless girl in his arms he
then left the cabin. Throwing her behind his saddle, he pressed his cruel spurs
into his horse’s sides and galloped off in the general direction of Mexico.

Once more the deep hush of the
primeval forest descended on the little clearing, making peaceful what had been
a scene of wild torment and savage villainy. A squirrel began to chatter
hysterically in a treetop and from somewhere along the brook came the plash of
a rising trout Birds sang.

Suddenly the birds were still. The
squirrel fled from the tree in which he had been gathering pine cones.
Something was moving behind the woodpile. Jake Raven was not dead after all.

With all the stoical disregard of
pain for which his race is famous, the sorely wounded Indian crawled along on
his hands and knees. His progress was slow but sure.

Some three miles away was the boundary
line of the California Indian Reservation. Jake knew that there was an
encampment of his people close by the line and it was to them that he was going
for help.

After a long, tortuous struggle, he
arrived at his destination, but his efforts had so weakened him that he fainted
dead away in the arms of the first redskin to reach him. Not before, however,
he had managed to mumble the following words:

“White
man shoot
.
Co camp quick…”

Leaving Jake to the tender
ministrations of the village squaws, the warriors of the tribe assembled around
the wigwam of their chief to plan a course of action. Somewhere a tom-tom began
to throb.

The chief’s name was Israel
Satinpenny
. He had been to Harvard and hated the white man
with undying venom. For many years now, he had been trying to get the Indian
nations to rise and drive the palefaces back to the countries from which they
had come, but so .far he had had little success. His people had grown soft and
lost their warlike ways. Perhaps, with the wanton wounding of Jake Raven, his
chance had come.

When the warriors had all gathered
around his tent, he appeared in full regalia and began a harangue.

“Red men!” he thundered. “The time
has come to protest in the name of the Indian peoples and to cry out against
that abomination of abominations, the paleface.

“In our father’s memory this was a
fair, sweet land, where a man could hear his heart beat without wondering if
what he heard wasn’t an alarm clock, where a man could fill his nose with
pleasant flower odors without finding that they came from a bottle. Need I
speak of springs that had never known the tyranny of iron pipes? Of deer that
had never tasted hay? Of wild ducks that had never been banded by the U.S.
Department of Conservation?

“In return for the loss of these
things, we accepted the white man’s civilization, syphilis and the radio,
tuberculosis and the cinema. We accepted his civilization because he himself
believed in it. But now that he has begun to doubt, why should we continue to
accept? His final gift to us is doubt, a soul-corroding doubt. He rotted this
land in the name of progress, and now it is he himself who is rotting. The
stench of his fear stinks in the nostrils of the great god Manitou.

“In what way is the white man wiser
than the red? We lived here from time immemorial and everything was sweet and
fresh. The paleface came and in his wisdom filled the sky with smoke and the
rivers with refuse. What, in his wisdom, was he doing? I’ll tell you. He was
making clever cigarette lighters. He was making superb fountain pens. He was
making paper bags, doorknobs, leatherette satchels. All the powers of water,
air and earth he made to turn his wheels within wheels within wheels within
wheels. They turned, sure enough, and the land was flooded with toilet paper,
painted boxes to keep pins in, key-rings,
watch
fobs,
leatherette satchels.

“When the paleface controlled the
things he manufactured, we red men could only wonder at and praise his ability
to hide his vomit. But now all the secret places of the earth are full. Now
even the Grand Canyon will no longer hold razor blades. Now the dam, O
warriors, has broken and he is up to his neck in the articles of his
manufacture.

“He has loused the continent up
good. But is he trying to de-louse it? No, all his efforts go to keep on
lousing up the joint. All that worries him is how he can go on making little
painted boxes for pins, watch fobs, leatherette satchels.

“Don’t mistake me, Indians. I’m no
Rousseauistic
philosopher. I know that you can’t put the
clock back. But there is one thing you can do. You can stop that clock. You can
smash that clock.

“The time is ripe. Riot and
profaneness, poverty and violence are everywhere. The gates of pandemonium are
open and through the land stalk the gods
Mapeeo
and
Suraniou
.

“The day of vengeance is here. The
star of the paleface is sinking and he knows it. Spengler has said so; Valery
has said so; thousands of his wise men proclaim it.

“O, brothers, this is the time to
run upon his neck and the bosses of his armor. While he is sick and fainting,
while he is dying of a surfeit of shoddy.”

Wild yells for vengeance broke from
the throats of the warriors. Shouting their new war cry of “Smash that clock!”
they smeared themselves with bright paint and mounted their ponies. In every
brave’s hand was a tomahawk and between his teeth a scalping knife.

Before jumping on his own mustang,
Chief
Satinpenny
ordered one of his lieutenants to
the nearest telegraph office. From there he was to send code messages to all
the Indian tribes in the United States, Canada and Mexico, ordering them to
rise and slay.

With
Satinpenny
leading them, the warriors galloped through the forest over the trail that Jake
Raven had come. When they arrived at the cabin, they found
Lem
still fast in the unrelenting jaws of the bear trap.

“
Yeehoieee
!”
screamed the chief, as he stooped over the recumbent form of the poor lad and
tore the scalp from his head. Then brandishing his reeking trophy on high, he
sprang on his pony and made for the nearest settlements, followed by his horde
of blood-crazed savages.

An Indian boy remained behind with
instructions to fire the cabin. Fortunately, he had no matches and tried to do
it with two sticks, but no matter how hard he rubbed them together he alone
grew warm.

With a curse unbecoming one of his
few years, he left off to go swimming in the creek, first looting
Lem’s
bloody head of its store teeth and glass eye.