Bower, 1874-1940 - The heritage of the Sioux

" Fer half a cent," threatened old Applehead, in a bad humor because his arguments had not quite convinced him that he was not meditating a disloyalty, " I'd kill that danged dawg. And if I was runnin' this bunch, I'd send that squaw back where she come from, and I'd send her quick. Take the two of 'em together and they don't set good with me, now I'm tellin' yuh! If I was to say what I think, I'd say yuh can't never trust

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an Injun — and shiny hair and eyes and slim build don't make 'em no trustier. They's something scaley goin' on around here, and I'd gamble on it. And that there squaw's at the bottom of it. What fur's she ridin' off every day, V nobody knowin' where she goes to ? If Luck's got the sense he used to have, he'll git some white girl to act in his pitchers, and send that there squaw home 'fore she double-crosses him some way or other."

"Oh, hold on, Applehead!" Pink felt constrained to defend the girl. "You've got it in for her 'cause her dog don't like your cat. Annie's all right; I never saw anything outa the way with her yet."

" Well, now, time you're old as I be, you'll have some sense, mebby," Applehead quelled. " Course you think Annie's all right. She's purty, V purtyness in a woman shore does cover up a pile uh cussedness — to a feller under forty. You're boss here, Andy. When she comes back, you ask 'er where she's been, and see if you kin git a straight answer. She'll lie to yuh — I'll bet all I got, she'll lie to yuh. And when a woman lies

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about where she's been to and what she's been doin', you can bet there's something scaley goin' on. Yuh can't fool me! "

He turned and went up to the small adobe house where he had lived in solitary contentment with his cat Compadre until Luck Lindsay, seeking a cheap headquarters for his free-lance company while he produced the big Western picture which filled all his mind, had taken calm and unheralded possession of the ranch. Applehead did not resent the invasion; on the contrary, he welcomed it as a pleasant change in his monotonous existence. What he did resent was the coming, first, of the little black dog that was no more than a tramp and had no right on the ranch, and that broke all the laws of decency and gratitude by making the life of the big blue cat miserable. Also he resented the uninvited arrival of Annie-Many-Ponies from the Sioux reservation in North Dakota.

Annie-Many-Ponies had not only come uninvited— she had remained in defiance of Luck's perturbed insistence that she should go back home. The Flying U boys might overlook that fact

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because of her beauty, but Applehead was not so easily beguiled — especially when she proceeded to form a violent attachment to the little black dog, which she called Shunka Chistala in what Applehead considered a brazen flaunting of her Indian blood and language. Between the mistress of Shunka Chistala and the master of the cat there could never be anything more cordial than an armed truce. She had championed that ornery cur in a way to make Applehead's blood boil. She had kept the dog in the house at night, which forced the cat to seek cold comfort elsewhere. She had pilfered the choicest table scraps for the dog — and Compadre was a cat of fastidious palate and grew thin on what coarse bits were condescendingly left for him.

Applehead had not approved of Luck's final consent that Annie-Many-Ponies should stay and play the Indian girl in his big picture. In the mind of Applehead there lurked a grudge that found all the more room to grow because of the natural bigness and generosity of his nature. It irked him to see her going her calm way with that proud uptilt to her shapely head and that little,

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inscrutable smile when she caught the meaning of his grumbling hints.

Applehead was easy-going to a fault in most things, but his dislike had grown in Luck's absence to the point where he considered himself aggrieved whenever Aimie-Many-Ponies saddled the horse which had been tacitly set aside for her use, and rode off into the mesa without a word of explanation or excuse. Applehead reminded the boys that she had not acted like that when Luck was home. She had stayed on the ranch where she belonged, except once or twice, on particularly fine days, when she had meekly asked " "Wagalexa Conka," as she persisted in calling Luck, for permission to go for a ride.

Applehead itched to tell her a few things about the social, moral, intellectual and economic status of an " Injun squaw "— but there was something in her eye, something in the quiver of her finely shaped nostrils, in the straight black brows, that held his tongue quiet when he met her face to face. You couldn't tell about these squaws. Even Luck, who knew Indians better than most — and was, in a heathenish tribal way, the adopted son

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of Old Chief Big Turkey, and therefore Annie's brother by adoption — even Luck maintained that Annie-Many-Ponies undoubtedly carried a knife concealed in her clothes and would use it if ever the need arose. Applehead was not afraid of Annie's knife. It was something else, something he could not put into words, that held him back from open upbraidings.

He gave Andy's wife, Rosemary, the mail and stopped to sympathize with her because Annie-Many-Ponies had gone away and left the hardest part of the ironing undone. Luck had told Annie to help Rosemary with the work; but Annie's help, when Luck was not around the place, was, Rosemary asserted, purely theoretical.

" And from all you read about Indians," Rosemary complained with a pretty wrinkling of her brows, "you'd think the women just live for the sake of working. I've lost all faith in history, Mr. Furrman. I don't believe squaws ever do anything if they can help it. Before she went off riding today, for instance, that girl spent a whole hour brushing her hair and braiding it. And I do believe she greases it to make it shine the way

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it does! And the powder she piles on her face — just to ride out on the mesa! " Rosemary Green was naturally sweet-tempered and exceedingly charitable in her judgements; but here, too, the cat-and-dog feud had its influence. Rosemary Green was a loyal champion of the cat Compadre; besides, there was a succession of little irritations, in the way of dishes left unwashed and inconspicuous corners left unswept, to warp her opinion of Annie-Many-Ponies.

When he left Rosemary he went straight down to where the chuck-wagon stood, and began to tap the tires with a small rock to see if they would need resetting before he started out. He decided that the brake-blocks would have to be replaced with new ones — or at least reshod with old boot-soles. The tongue was cracked, too; that had been done last winter when Luck was producing The Phantom Herd and had sent old Dave Wiswell down a rocky hillside with half-broken bronks harnessed to the wagon, in a particularly dramatic scene. Applehead went grumblingly in search of some baling wire to wrap the tongue. He had been terribly excited and full of enthusiasm for the

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picture at the time the tongue was cracked, but now he looked upon it merely as a vital weakness in his roundup outfit. A new tongue would mean delay; and delay, in his present mood, was tragedy.

He couldn't find any old baling wire, though he had long been accustomed to tangling his feet in snarled bunches of it when he went forth in the dark after a high wind. Until now he had not observed its unwonted absence from the yard. For a long while he had not needed any wire to mend things, because Luck had attended to everything about the ranch, and if anything needed mending he had set one of the Happy Family at the task.

His search led him out beyond the corrals in the little dry wash that sometimes caught and held what the high winds brought rolling that way. The wash was half filled with tumble-weed, so that Applehead was forced to get down into it and kick the weeds aside to see if there was any wire lodged beneath. His temper did not sweeten over the task, especially since he found nothing that he wanted.