first thing when you all got here. What happened to them? They gone already?”
The Klamaths hanging around nearest the open door relayed the message back to the crowd on the porch as soon as Knapp said it, almost in unison with Charley, who told it to Jack.
“Goddam it,” Knapp said. “Shut that, will you! I can’t hear myself think, much less follow you two with all that clatter.”
Scarfaced did as he was told, shoving the listeners back over the threshold of the office to get the door shut.
“Okay, Jack,” Knapp said. “I’ll get what you ask for. But you’re personally responsible. You sign for those tools, just like you signed on the treaty. And I get them back in good shape or it comes out of your allotment. You understand?”
He waited while Scarfaced relayed the words in Modoc and Jack responded.
“Captain Jack say you come see for yourself we take care of them.”
“Just like you did the axes, I suppose. You better find them.”
“They not lost.”
“Where are they at, then?”
Scarfaced Charley looked at him a moment, thinking, then said flatly: “Klamaths got them.”
“Took them?”
Scarfaced Charley had just looked at the agent, neither responding nor translating.
“What happened to them?” Knapp demanded. “You don’t get any of this stuff ‘til I get an answer.”
When the Indian still stood there, unresponsive, he said:
“You lost them gambling, didn’t you?”
“We didn’t.”
“But your boys did, didn’t they? Goddam it, you get them back before you draw a single tool from this list. “Open that door,” he ordered, then shouted out at the clump of Klamaths who stood waiting on the porch.
“David Allen, you out there? Get in here!”
Those on the porch stepped aside to let the Klamath chief through.
“Scarfaced here says your boys been gambling. Says you got the axes we gave the Modocs. I want them back.”
“We ain’t got no axes,” David Allen said, giving Scarfaced Charley a dirty look.
“Then you better find some. You get them here quick, or I’ll write Meacham. He’ll take them out of your next shipment -- or out of your boys’ hides. He told you no gambling. Scarfaced, you say that to Jack, here, too.”
He waited for the translation, then said,
“Go on. Get out of here, all of you. David, you get those axes here in an hour, or else. Jack, when he does it, you can come pick up your requisition -- and your axes. I don’t want to see any of you around here after that. Now get going.
#39
Pretty soon there was going to be a saw-mill. You could see the place it was going to be, close by the stand of trees just below the agency. Not that it was going to make much of a difference to them since they were Modocs. The Klamaths would run it. Make boards for the agency and for all that house building that was going to go on. Square houses, they would be, like the Bostons lived in. With windows, and porches to sit on, and doors to go in and shut behind you. No more rain coming down the smoke hole, getting things wet. Roofs, these houses would have, with shingles split out of cedar. Paint, even. Probably. Like what Ivan put on the buildings over there at the agency. White.
There wasn’t any saw-mill, not quite yet. Keintpoos figured he could wait for it. But right now, for this house, he would go with the old ways.
They had skidded the four big pines, each one tall as four men, all the way from up by the agency, where the trees finally took hold. Got them limbed and the bark skinned off. Ready to take the adze to, to square up the sides. Once that was done, they would be fit to set.
He had found a good spot for digging the house out. By the creek, but up off the low places the tules filled as the stream reached in from the lake. You could see it from the track that led up from Linkville past Klamath Agency to the fort. He had marked out where he wanted it, to show the women where to dig. They knew how to put it without anyone telling them: one wall toward where Sun rises, another to where Sun goes down. Every woman who meant to live there could come pitch in now, until he and Black Jim got the rail splitting going good with the other men. The women could do the digging: his two wives and his sister; Black Jim’s woman, his sister-in-law; his blood sister Mary and her girl, his niece. Then, when they got finished, he and Black Jim and some other men would set the posts in place. The four big beams would take the cross-pieces. On those would go the mats and thatch. Then the layer of dirt, where the grasses would grow and fill in, the whole thing -- up to the hatchway in the middle of the roof -- secure against the wind and rain. They’d have a mat to lower over that doorway when it got to blowing in.
His wives had settled the sleeping arrangements. Lizzie, his young wife; Rebecca, his older. Lizzie could have the end of the place, up in the direction of the agency. Black Jim and his woman could have the part beside her. Mary and her girl could put out their bed rolls on the sunset side of the house. He and his old wife and little girl would take the sunrise side for themselves, so they could sleep with their heads against the wall. No one stepping over them in the night that way. It was better. Everyone with their feet to the west, as they should be. No danger their spirits would slip off while they slept.
Maybe when the mill came in he would see about a wooden house. His wives had tried to make him promise. To quiet them, he did -- he promised to think about it. When they kept on at him, he ordered them to shut their mouths. He’d think about it -- later, he said again.
He figured the old kind of lodge was good enough. Some said they were better. Their damp dug into you by the time the grass finally started showing itself in the spring, but they paid back in their dim coolness when the days got long and hot. You could sleep in them uncovered, just in some clothes, almost until morning. Only in the cold time would you need to unroll a blanket. But you could sing out in the morning when you woke up from your dreams and sat up in your bed, and there would be people around to hear and answer you. When it was raining and you wanted to hang around inside where it was dry, you and everybody else could lie out on the beds and listen to the old wife’s stories to pass away the time.
Some said the wind knifed right through the Boston buildings almost bad as it cut through mat and brush wikiups, brought sickness to your wives and kids all during the time when Sun stayed low in the sky. As far as he was concerned, the other Modocs could put up with their woven mat houses and some sagebrush windbreaks while they waited on the wood planks coming if they were of a mind to. But not him, nor his women. He needed space for a lot of people of his blood to live in. And space for having talks in, if he was going to be a la`qi. He needed a lodge as good as Old Schonchin’s, or else they all would say -- and not just the Klamaths -- that he came down a long way, letting the Bostons talk him in so easy.
Next day or so he would want to set the four timbers, so the women had better keep digging.
