the medicine man’s body! Soon the good spirit will prevail and we will open the lodge and hear the words of Waukontonka!”
Well, hell, I knowed Striped Thunder wouldn’t say nothing but jest what Sir Wilmot had told him to say; but them fool Injuns would believe they was gitting the straight goods from the Great Spirit hisself.
Things got quiet in the lodge and the smoke died down, and Sir Wilmot says: “Thy children await, O Waukontonka.” He opened the door, and I’m a Dutchman if they was anything in that lodge but a striped polecat!
He waltzed out with his tail h’isted over his back and them Injuns let out one arful yell and fell over backwards; and then they riz up and stampeded—Crows, Arikaras, Sioux, Socs and all, howling: “The Unktehi have prevailed! They have turned Striped Thunder into an evil beast!”
They didn’t stop to open the gate. The Sioux clumb the stockade and the Crows busted right through it. I seen old Biting Hoss and Spotted Hawk leading the stampede, and I knowed the great Western Injun Confederation was busted all to hell. The women and chillern was right behind the braves, and in sight of fifteen seconds the only Injun in sight was Fat Bear.
Sir Wilmot jest stood there like he’d been putrified into rock, but Franswaw he run around behind the lodge and let out a squall. “Somebody’s slit the back wall!” he howled. “Here’s Striped Thunder lying behind the lodge with a knot on his head the size of a egg! Somebody crawled in and knocked him senseless and dragged him out while the smoke rolled!”
“The same man left the skunk!” frothed Sir Wilmot. “You Yankee dog, you’re responsible for this!”
“Who you callin’ a Yankee?” I roared, whipping out my knife.
“Remember the truce!” squalled Fat Bear, but Sir Wilmot was too crazy mad to remember anything. I parried his sword with my knife as he lunged, and grabbed his arm, and I reckon that was when he got his elber dislocated. Anyway he give a maddened yell and tried to draw a pistol with his good hand; so I hit him in the mouth with my fist, and that’s when he lost them seven teeth he’s so bitter about. Whilst he was still addled, I taken his pistol away from him and throwed him over the stockade. I got a idee his fractured skull was caused by him hitting his head on a stump outside. Meanwhile Ondrey and Franswaw was hacking at me with their knives, so I taken ’em by their necks and beat their fool heads together till they was limp, and then I throwed ’em over the stockade after Sir Wilmot.
“And I reckon that settles that!” I panted. “I dunno how this all come about, but you can call up yore women and chillern and tell ’em they’re now citizens of the United States of America, by golly!”
I then picked up the keg, because I was hot and thirsty, but Fat Bear says: “Wait! Don’t drink that! I—”
“Shet up!” I roared. “After all I’ve did for the nation tonight, I deserves a dram! Shame on you to begredge a old friend—”
I taken a big gulp—and then I give a maddened beller and throwed that keg as far as I could heave it, and run for water. I drunk about three gallons, and when I could breathe again I got a club and started after Fat Bear, who clumb up on top of a lodge.
“Come down!” I requested with passion. “Come down whilst I beats yore brains out! Whyn’t you tell me what was in that keg?”
“I tried to,” says he, “but you wouldn’t listen. I thought it was whiskey when I stole it, or I wouldn’t have taken it. I talked to Shingis while you were hunting the water bucket, jest now. It was him that put the skunk in the medicine lodge. He saw Ondrey hide the keg on Sir Wilmot’s side of the council circle; he sneaked a drink out of it, and that’s why he did what he did. It was for revenge. The onreasonable old buzzard thought Sir Wilmot was tryin’ to pizen him.”
So that’s the way it was. Anyway, I’m quitting my job as soon as I git back to Saint Louis. It’s bad enuff when folks gits too hifaluting to use candles, and has got to have oil lamps in a trading post. But I’ll be derned if I’ll work for a outfit which puts the whale-oil for their lamps in the same kind of kegs they puts their whiskey.
Your respeckful son,
Boone Bearfield.
THE AFFAIR AT GROVER STATION, by Willa Cather
I heard this story sitting on the rear platform of an accommodation freight that crawled along through the brown, sun-dried wilderness between Grover Station and Cheyenne. The narrator was “Terrapin” Rodgers who had been a classmate of mine at Princeton, and who was then cashier in the B—— railroad office at Cheyenne. Rodgers was an Albany boy, but after his father failed in business, his uncle got “Terrapin” a position on a western railroad, and he left college and disappeared completely from our little world, and it was not until I was sent West, by the University with a party of geologists who were digging for fossils in the region about Sterling, Colorado, that I saw him again. On this particular occasion Rodgers had been down at Sterling to spend Sunday with me, and I accompanied him when he returned to Cheyenne.
When the train pulled out of Grover Station, we were sitting smoking on the rear platform, watching the pale yellow disk of the moon that was just rising and that drenched the naked, gray plains in a soft lemon-colored light. The telegraph poles scored the sky like a musical staff as they flashed by, and the stars, seen between the wires, looked like the notes of some erratic symphony. The stillness of the night and the loneliness and barrenness of the plains were conducive to an uncanny train of thought. We had just left Grover Station behind us, and the murder of the station agent at Grover, which had occurred the previous winter, was still the subject of much conjecturing and theorizing all along that line of railroad. Rodgers had been an intimate friend of the murdered agent, and it was said that he knew more about the affair than any other living man, but with that peculiar reticence which at college had won him the sobriquet “Terrapin,” he had kept what he knew to himself, and even the most accomplished reporter on the New York Journal, who had traveled halfway across the continent for the express purpose of pumping Rodgers, had given him up as impossible. But I had known Rodgers a long time, and since I had been grubbing in the chalk about Sterling, we had fallen into a habit of exchanging confidences, for it is good to see an old face in a strange land. So, as the little red station house at Grover faded into the distance, I asked him point blank what he knew about the murder of Lawrence O’Toole. Rodgers took a long pull at his black briar pipe as he answered me.
“Well, yes, I could tell you something about it, but the question is how much you’d believe, and whether you could restrain yourself from reporting it to the Society for Psychical Research. I never told the story but once, and then it was to the Division Superintendent, and when I finished the old gentleman asked if I were a drinking man, and remarking that a fertile imagination was not a desirable quality in a railroad employee, said it would be just as well if the story went no further. You see it’s a gruesome tale, and someway we don’t like to be reminded that there are more things in heaven and earth than our systems of philosophy can grapple with. However, I should rather like to tell the story to a man who would look at it objectively and leave it in the domain of pure incident where it belongs. It would unburden my mind, and I’d like to get a scientific man’s opinion on the yarn. But I suppose I’d better begin at the beginning, with the dance which preceded the tragedy, just as such things follow each other in a play. I notice that Destiny, who is a good deal of an artist in her way, frequently falls back upon that elementary principle of contrast to make things interesting for us.
“It was the thirty-first of December, the morning of the incoming Governor’s inaugural ball, and I got down to the office early, for I had a heavy day’s work ahead of me, and I was going to the dance and wanted to close up by six o’clock. I had
