Frontier and pioneer life -- West (U.S.) -- Fiction
The story set down here, I could not myself have learned if a chance
ramble over the foot hills of the Rim Rocks had not led one day to a
solitary little grave, surrounded by a picket fence marked by the
figure of a kneeling child carved in rough sand stone. As the guest of
the Mission School, I made the mistake of asking the mother, herself,
whose grave that was. Women, who are neither politicians nor politic,
have a plain way of uttering harsh facts. She did not speak about the
author of her boy's death in soft words, that little white haired
mother. She used a term oftener heard in the purlieus of criminal
courts. "To think," she exclaimed bitterly, "to think that Fordie,
descended from generations of Williams who have pioneered and fought
for and built up this country since ever the first Williams landed in
Boston in 1666, was done to death by this murderer, this truckster,
this political trickster, this outcast from the European gutters, this
huckster of lazaretto morals and bawd houses, who is overturning our
Nation with his oiled villainies and peddler ways! No, we have never
taken Government aid and we never shall! I like to know that my Indian
girls are safe." What more she added, I do not relate; for an angered
mother has a way of uttering terrible truths.
To-day, if you visit that grave on the crest of the saddle back, you
will find it flanked by two others, a man's on one side with the figure
of a trader carved in sandstone by the Indians; on the other, old
Calamity's with a plain granite slab; though I have heard strict people
say her body ought not to have been laid there because of the vagrant
character of her early life.
Indian boys from the school had shaped the coffin and carved the figure
for the stone. A girlish teacher read the Church Services for the
dead; and the children's voices rose a thin tremulous treble in the
funeral hymn around the grave. Wild flowers covered the casket, pearl
everlasting and the wind flower and the white Canada violet and the
painter's brush vari-colored as a flame; and a wreath had come up from
Smelter City.
Sights and sounds that have been a setting for sorrow, haunt the mind.
After that day, Eleanor could never hear the hammer of the woodpecker,
the lone cry of circling hawk, the whistling of the solitary mountain
marmot, without hearing also the thin treble of the Indian pupils
breaking and silencing on that funeral hymn till only the mother's
voice sang clarion to the end. She heard the low melting trill of the
blue bird and the wrangling rasp of the jay--true and counterfeit,
peace and discord--had God put right and wrong in the world for the
friction of the conflict between, to develop souls? Had one been set
over against the other, like light and shadow, to train the spiritual
eye to know?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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