Laughing Boy (9 page)

I

 

She was still asleep inside the house. He stood looking down upon her in the half-light. She seemed frail, childish, and sweet, with the shadow under the eyelids, her mouth faintly drooping, her figure reduced to almost nothing beneath the blanket. He thought of that drama of strength and weakness, of conquering and being conquered, fitting it to this small person, soft in sleep. Now that he was looking at her, he had no reservations; it only seemed a miracle that she should be his. He wondered at the mere chance it was; Slender Hair speaking to him of the dance and the racing, coming to Tsé Lani, this little incident and that, until out of nowhere that which might never have been entered and became the core of his life.

The sun would be up soon. He went to meet it.

 

'Dawn Boy, little chief,
May all be beautiful before me as I wander...'

 

She woke happy, watching him under lazy eyelids as he stood outside the door, naked save for his breech-clout, with the level sunlight touching the edges of his flanks and ribs, making a golden reflection where his upraised arms bunched the muscles at his shoulders. She thanked God and the gods indiscriminately. Whatever happened now, this could not be taken away. She shifted the blanket, closed her eyes, and assumed sleep.

He sat down beside her, a little nervous about her awakening. Her eyelids quivered, she yawned deliciously, she stretched her arms like a kitten playing. She sat up and smiled at him, seeing his face brighten as he responded.

'Have I slept so late? I shall get your breakfast as soon as I have fixed your hair. You should see it.'

He felt of its disarray, with the queue hanging lopsided, then he grinned at her. 'Your own is just as bad; go look at yourself in the spring.'

She reached over to a shelf and took down a small mirror, which she handed to him. He looked at himself in it; this was fascinating but a little disappointing. Finally she took it from him.

'Come, now, dress, and do up my hair.'

He had often exchanged that service with his brothers and sisters; it was a pleasant and friendly act. He had watched his mother and father together at it, one leaning against the other's knees, laughing when the brush pulled too hard, and he had seen that they extracted some pleasure from it which he did not know. Now he understood that, and the sheer domesticity of it delighted him. He felt really married, settled, a man who would soon have children, and speak as one of established position, no more a boy.

Breakfast was welcome when it came.

'To-day you must get me the wood for a loom,' she told him. 'It is a long time since I have woven, but I have beautiful blankets in my mind. I shall weave and you shall make jewelry.'

'No, to-day, before we do anything, we must make a sweat-bath. This is all different, here. We are starting off new. We must make ourselves clean, we must make a fresh start. And, besides, how can you weave? You have no sheep.'

'I shall buy wool in the store in town. They sell good wool there; the people round here bring it in.'

'Why do we not raise sheep? I have some in my mother's flock I could get.'

'Who will keep them? You will have your horses and your jewelry; that will be plenty. I must always be going in to work for that missionary woman.'

'I do not like your working in there.'

'Why, have you some bad thought?'

'No, I have no bad thought. But a house is empty when the woman is away.'

'I used to work for her every day; now I only work sometimes. She gives me good money. It is because of her that you will have silver to work with. To-morrow, when I go in, I shall bring you Mexican silver. And those days you can go tend to the horses. By and by, when we have made much money with your jewelry and horses and my weaving and work, we shall go back to your country. We shall go back rich. Is it not a good plan?'

'You have spoken well. Here, I do not know about these things, but you know, and your words are good. It is enough for me that I have you. It is not just that we are married, but we are married all through; there is not any part of us left out.'

'No; there is not any part of us left out. And you do not want a second wife, Laughing Boy?'

'No—no!' The extra-emphatic, three syllable negative,
'É-do-ta!'
long-drawn-out, with the decisive sign of the right hand sweeping away. 'Have you a sister you want me to take? If you want help here, in the hogahn, I will get one, but she will not be for me. She will be in the way. You are enough for me; perhaps you are too much for me, I think.'

Quickly she kissed him. He felt embarrassed, and loved it.

He had to teach her the ritual and song of purification, but, with faint childhood memories to aid her, she was quick to learn. Her close attention pleased him, and it was a pleasure to hear her sing. He was only sorry for her, that she had for so long been denied these things, and angry and puzzled at the schools and the American life that had forbidden them. In the end, he taught her songs that she had no business knowing, quite aware of what he did, as a kind of unavowed tribute and token of the special quality he felt in her.

 

II

 

After the steam bath and the water and the foaming yucca-suds, it was good to lie with hair spread out, drying, and talk vaguely of things to be done, and now and again to touch her. Great achievements completed themselves in a phrase. He drew
the design of a bracelet in the sand; he braided his hair and mimicked the nasal speech of a Ute. They fell to talking of the ways of different tribes, the old wars, and the present semi-hostility between the Navajo and the Pah-Utes.

'There is not often trouble with them,' he told her, 'but we do not like them. They live wild up in that country beyond Oljeto, where they are hard to catch, and they steal things. Mostly they trouble the Mormons; the Mormons are afraid of them, they say. Since I was a little boy, only once we had real trouble with them. Then one time we went on the war-path for them. I went on the war-path that time.'

He felt proud of the part he had played, and wanted to tell her about it.

'That was three years ago; I was just about full grown. Blunt Nose, he made the trouble, that one. He was chief of a band of them; he lived up beyond Naesjé cañon,, near Tsé Nanaazh. That is wild country, almost in the mountains. He was bad.

'He used to kill Mormon cattle all the time, a cow, and a cow, and a cow, here and there. He needed to keep no sheep. He did the way he pleased. He wore two pistols, and had a gun on his saddle, they say. He would ride down the middle of the trail, and not turn out for any one.

'One time he heard the Mormons had sent for soldiers, so he left their country alone. Then he sat quiet for a while, but his people got hungry. A Pah-Ute will eat almost anything, but there is very little up there. That is why the Navajos leave them alone; there is nothing in that country but a few Pah-Utes and a few antelopes. You cannot make anything out of the skins of either, so we let them alone.

'Well, now Blunt Nose decided to try mutton. He came down by Jahai Spring where Hungry Man lived. He had all his braves with him. They started to run off Hungry Man's sheep. Then The Doer came along. You have heard of him? He is the one who killed those two Americans; his father was Generous Chief, the one who never was captured when The People went into exile. So The Doer
came along; he saw that man's wife, where she came running. He rode up, he started shooting at those men. They shot back at him. They were too many for him; he rode away and they chased him. But he killed one.

'Then Blunt Nose was angry. He killed Hungry Man, and his two children. He ran off the sheep. He went back into the Naesjé country.

'The People around there gathered together to hunt him, but the trader at Oljeto told them not to. He told them to wait while he wrote a paper to American Chief at T'o Nanasdési. So they did that. Meantime Blunt Nose was talking. He learned that there were no soldiers in the Mormon country, but he said he liked mutton. He said no Coyote could kill one of his braves and not be punished; he said the Coyote People would pay for what they had done. He talked like this all around; he talked brave, calling us that name.

'In a little while he came down again. But they had men on watch, they made smoke signals. A lot of people came together and went after him, so that he had to make a big circle, around by Oljeto, to get back. When he went past the trading post, he shot into it. He did not hurt any one, but he spoiled some tin cans and broke some windows. Then, on his way home, he crossed the bridge over T'o Atsisi Creek. It is a big wooden bridge that you can ride a horse over; Washindon had it built. They sent two Americans to show how it should be built.

'Well, he came by this bridge. He was angry, so he burnt it, that man. And he got some sheep, and went home.

'Then the trader wrote another paper, a strong one, and sent it to American Chief. Meantime The Doer was getting up a war-party. The People were angry; they wanted to kill them, all those Pah-Utes. So American Chief wrote a paper saying that he was getting up a war-party of Americans who would do the fighting. He said to have good horses ready for them, and that the Navajos must not start fighting or there would be soldiers. That was what he said.

'He tried to talk to Dokoslid over the talking wires, to get the war-party, but a man down by Besh Nanaazh had cut some of the wires to mend his wagon, so he had to wait a day to fix them. Meantime he sent a rider with this paper.

'The rider came by Gomulli T'o trading post. His horse was lame and he was tired. I was there with a good horse, a roan. Yellow Mustache was the trader there; he told me to carry the paper. He told me to ride hard. He said I would be paid.

'I rode all day. I rode at night until the moon set. I rode after it was all dark, but I was afraid of the spirits. Then I made camp. The next morning I saw a fresh horse, so I caught it and rode on. The sun was about halfway up when I saw Oljeto. And right then the Pah-Utes saw me. They started after me, and I went as hard as I could for the trading post.

'I could hear them shooting at me; I could hear their bullets. I was very much afraid, but there was nothing to do except ride hard.

'Then I felt something hit me. It made a dull thump; it did not hurt. I thought, "I have been hit in the bottom of my spine. In a minute it will hurt. Probably I shall die, I do not want to die." That way I thought.

'I thought all that all at once, then I felt behind, but there was nothing. Then people began shooting from the windows of the trading post, and the Pah-Utes went away. I rode up to the door and got off, wondering if I should fall. But I was all right. There was a bullet in the cantle of my saddle; that was what I had felt.

'We waited five days for the American war-party; meantime they got some good horses together. Blunt Nose was around all the time. People gathered together in groups of ten to twelve families, or more, like in the days when we were always at war. Then those men came.

'There were eight of them. They all had badges on their shirts, like policemen, only not quite the same. One of them was a fat man; we did not see why they brought him.

'They said they wanted four Navajos to be trackers. The Doer
was to be head tracker. There were two other young men, and then they took me. They said they would pay me a dollar a day. That was a new idea to me, to be paid for hunting Pah-Utes. I thought you just hunted them.

'We tracked them for three days without seeing them. They tried to make us go at night, but we pretended not to be able to follow the trail. When The Doer told them that, they believed him. It was not an easy trail. Their horses were not shod, and they went a great deal over bald rock, they turned and doubled, they dragged branches behind them.

'We did not get much to eat, we could not make a fire. Those Americans brought a brown, sweet candy, and a little, dried-up black candy in boxes, something sticky. These we ate; you could go a long time on them. Then we had some dried corn. We started at first light; we went till it was quite dark. During the day it was hot among those rocks. We were hungry. It did not seem that we were following Pah-Utes; we were just following tracks in the sand, or little scratches on the rock, and some day we should come to the end of them, and something important would happen. Now the only thing in the world was those marks. When you saw one where you had not expected it, it seemed to shout at you.

'But we were gaining on them. On the fourth day they were much fresher, those tracks. We were close to them. Then we saw a couple of them, on lame horses, and we chased them. They had to cross a deep arroyo; when they went down into it we raced, hoping to catch them at the bottom of it. But they got up the other side; they just came up that side when we got to the near edge. Right away they started shooting. They shot at that fat man.

'Right away he fell off his horse. He landed on his stomach, and as soon as he landed he began to shoot. He shot between his horse's legs. He hit one Pah-Ute in the leg and one in the arm. Then we knew why he had been brought along, that fat man.

'We wanted to kill them, but the chief American said that they had to go to T'o Nanasdési to be punished. Their horses were no good, so they put them on those two young men's horses, and sent
them back with them and one American to Oljeto. That left me and The Doer. I had never seen him before, that man, but everybody has heard about him. I was anxious to do well in his eyes.

'In the afternoon we came to the mouth of Yotatséyi Cañon. The trail was fresh and clear. The Doer told them that the other end of the cañon was halfway up Napani Mountain, to our right. It went in a big curve, he said. If they got out there, we could never catch them, he said. So he told them to send three men with him, and he would take them straight across there. He would reach it by nightfall, he said. Then, in the morning, we could start in from both ends and catch them, he said. So they did that. I stayed with the four at the lower end. I thought about there being still ten Pah-Utes, but I did not say anything. I did not want to seem afraid, if The Doer was not.