Page:Weird Tales Volume 2 Number 2 (1923-09).djvu/42

Rh Aborigine, who electrified the college world by pitching Harvard to success in a fourteen-inning game, three to two, on the Princeton campus, upon that memorable afternoon in May, 1911. Well, that was Charley Eaglefeather, only he did it under his Christian name.

It was this same Eaglefeather who, during the following summer, played the all but unbeatable Quigley to a standstill on the Poughkeepsie clay courts, for the New York state championship. Upon Thanksgiving Day of that same year he ran eighty-five yards down the center of the Yale field, for a touchdown, and so saved the game. And it is still a matter of local gossip, around the lounging-rooms of the Baltusrol Golf Club, that it was an Indian—an educated Indian—who was runner-up to the redoubtable Spivvins himself, in the amateur state championship match, which went to the thirty-eighth hole before the red man finally finished, one down.

"Some Indian!" you will say.

And so he was. In fact, Eaglefeather was "runner-up" in a number of respects, including gambling debts and expense accounts, the latter of which, in time found their way to the house address of Miss Selina Pennington, of Boston.

But those old days had long since passed. Eaglefeather had resigned himself to the sterner facts of life. He was a construction engineer now, assistant to Weatherford of the S. P. & S. Moreover he was about to participate importantly in the building of a line of railroad up the desolate valley of the Clearwater, among the tombs of his ancestors, so to speak, and in a region over which he should have been king.

S BEFORE mentioned, we three came down the Clearwater that first evening, together. And I shall not soon forget the manner of our coming—certainly not now, in the light of the strange and wholly inexplicable later events.

We approached the valley by the norther route, dropping down from Spokane to Lewiston, thence over the divide to the upper Clearwater, and so down the river basin, across Wild Rose Prairie.

As we entered Wild Rose Prairie, bearing southward toward the base of Deadman's Hill, we came unexpectedly upon the Indian village. It lay to eastward of the river, over against the foothills. As we issued around an abrupt bend in the trail, there it was suddenly before us, huddled in an open area among the trees on the bank of a swift-running stream. It gave the odd impression of bursting upon us.

Not that it was large enough to cause much of an explosion; rather it was its diminutive appearance that surprised us. There were not to exceed a dozen tepees, ancient as to lineage, weatherbeaten, and sagging at their centerpoles.

In the foreground there may have been a dozen Indian men, reclining at ease, smoking their long-stemmed pipes, not less inert even than their environments. Back and forth through the village moved stolid, grim-faced women, brown-skinned and wrinkled, sagging heavily at the hips as they waddled about, intent upon their household affairs.

Throughout the camp were a score or more of children at play. They were half, or wholly, nude. At our approach they leaped up, to run swiftly and without sound, like a flock of frightened quail, dodging behind the tepee flaps, vanishing into the shrubbery, dropping into the tall grass, and at once became invisible. Thereafter we could feel the urge of brown faces and beady-black eyes peering furtively at us from out these various retreats.

An Indian, huge, fat, long-haired and greasy in appearance, squatted over a smoking campfire on the creek bank, frying fish. He must have been a democratic Indian to be thus employed in the presence of his squaws.

"How, George?" said Weatherford, addressing him.

The fat Indian twisted slowly, still squatting, to look at us with great dignity over his shoulder.

"How," he said, without surprise.

"We're going to build a railroad up here," Weatherford explained. "A railroad up the Clearwater—you sabe?" Weatherford was mixing his English with Chinese.

The Indian looked at him a moment stolidly, without emotion of any sort.

"Hyeu cultus!" he said, succinctly. "Halo cumtux!" (Very bad; no understand). Then he returned to his fish-frying.

"Can't he talk English?" asked Weatherford.

"I guess he could if he had to," admitted Charley Eaglefeather.

"Then he just won't?"

"Well—he didn't," said Charley Eaglefeather.

We moved on down the trail, not speaking further for the moment, thinking at least I was thinking—of the look on that old warrior's face—a look both droll and foolish, under the circumstances, squatting there, as he was, greasy and fat and squalid, over his little old smoking campfire. Yet this look, somehow, reminded me of an eagle in a cage, it was so silently dignified, so quietly defiant, so full of well-suppressed emotion. It was like the look of a king who has lost his throne, yet is still a king.

"Who are they—Kennisaus?" Weatherford asked.

"They are Kennisaus—yes," admitted Eaglefeather.

"All that is left of them?"

"It may be perhaps," Charley Eaglefeather replied impersonally.

Weatherford's eyes took on a reminiscent look So this was all that was left of the Kennisaus—a handful on a river bank, squatting about campfires: an extinct people, an all but vanished race, crowded to the final brink by the restless urge of that thing called "organized society"; clinging, nevertheless, tenaciously to their dead memories and the region of their last retreat And here was Charley Eaglefeather, Harvard graduate, football hero—matinee idol, as it were—son of a king, heir apparent to a throne that had vanished, home at last to the land of his youth, to the region over which he should be ruler—come for the purpose of building a railroad!

"And the one frying fish over the campfire?" inquired Weatherford, turning suddenly to Eaglefeather.

"The one frying fish over the campfire," echoed Charley Eaglefeather, "is Witchipa, Chief of the Kennisau tribe!"

We passed on down the trail to the scene of our forthcoming activities.

HE S. P. & S. construction camp lay sprawled over a flat area, a quarter of a mile wide, along the east bank of the Clearwater. It was a quiet enough place in the day time, deserted by all save only the mess hands, or now and then a slow-footed courier. After five o'clock in the evening, however, it became a wildly cavorting mass of humanity and horses, crawling, cursing, kicking, filling the silent valley with a medley of echoing sounds, which sobbed themselves into silence somewhere toward midnight.

We were working hard, against time, Weatherford issuing orders, and Courtney driving the construction crew at top speed. We had been told to get results. It sometimes snows along the Clearwater in September, always in November, and we hoped to finish the grade before it came.

Things seemed to break unfavorably for us, however, right from the very first; we appeared to be having an