if you could dream all that. Suppose I could go to sleep and dream the whole of Tarr and McMurry’s . . . South Boy was thinking when he saw the lights of Fort Mojave over to the left, where the mesa pushed a projecting peninsula right down to the river.
The Fort looked like a city to South Boy, with its dozen big buildings, two of them monsters—two stories high. There were very few lights tonight. He had seen it one night last winter, when school was in session—lights blazing from every window. A stupendous sight. Breath-taking. Counting the Indian children there were three hundred people in those buildings! Even now when there was only maintenance staff and a half-dozen lighted windows, the sight of the Fort was thrilling enough to make him forget the glory of the night and his haphazard speculations on dream singing.
A little farther north was a row of three lights close together—the trader’s store. From there came the faint screech of a phonograph playing that new song “Redwing.” He was too far away to see, but he knew the phonograph would be on a cracker box just outside the door. Young Mojaves would be perched in a long row on the hitching rail; old people, sitting on the ground; a white man or two from the Fort; maybe even a white lady sitting in the trader’s rocking chair.
Havek stopped singing to listen. South Boy wished he would turn aside, but he went trotting on.
Suddenly the phonograph was drowned out by a chorus of strong voices.
“Oh the moon shines bright on pretty Redwing,
The breezes sighing, the night bird crying,
For far beneath his star her brave is sleeping,
While Redwing’s weeping
Her heart away.”
Havek threw back his head and joined in with the distant singers. Nothing could be more different from the Raven singing than this tin-pan-alley product. But Havek proved the saying, “A Mojave can sing anything.”
South Boy just listened with throbbing pleasure and a little melancholy, partly because of the sad plight of Redwing and partly because he had long since learned he could not sing.
The song faded, the lights grew dim and mingled with the lower stars. Before long they came to the place where the mesa dropped off again. Below them the mesquite floor stretched north as far as their eyes could see. Here and there were barren, alkali-encrusted playas that shone pale silver in the moonlight. A narrow, snaky lagoon began a mile away and wiggled off into the distance, its gray water showing a darker silver. There was a faint flicker of fire at the near end of it.
By that fire the hota would be holding the sing.
Havek stopped and leaned on his bow. South Boy stopped and looked at him expectantly.
Havek spat into the dark shadow that fringed the foot of the cliff.
“Nebethee’s down there, if he came up-river tonight.”
“Uh-huh,” said South Boy, speculatively. He walked to the very edge of the cliff and spat reflectively into the void, peering into the depth of the shadow, not anxiously, but with a certain sharp interest.
“Nebethee caught Pahto-shali-la and ate him, bones and all, and Pahto-shali-la was a full-sized man and a good fighter.”
South Boy could have given Havek an argument on that. White people maintained that the Mojave got drunk and fell into the river at flood time. But South Boy’s mind was too busy for arguments. He was swiftly reviewing the Mormonhater’s ideas on the cannibalistic monster that the white people called the “Mojaves’ devil.”
“Are you afraid to go down here?” asked Havek.
South Boy shook his head. The time had been when he would have cringed with terror at the mention of Nebethee’s name. When he was very small a big Indian girl had taken him to the brink of an old well and made him look down into the dark at their mingled reflections on the water. “Nebethee!” she said. “He will eat you!” That had scared him into a fit.
He was still too young to know better than to take tales of Indian doings to his mother—so he ran bellowing to her and had his first impression of Nebethee pretty well shaken out of him. Nebethee was just heathen nonsense. It was wicked to be afraid of him, because he was a heathen lie. By way of comfort he received the first of several lectures on the real or Presbyterian devil. A very different creature, indeed. South Boy had since acquired a shadowy, uneasy understanding of a complex of white or Christian devils that had overshadowed Nebethee completely.
But all that was by the way. About two years ago he had discovered by chance that in the dark of the moon the Mormonhater was doing some very mysterious hunting in the darkest places, and a good deal of it was around the big rock in the river below Needles that the Mojaves called “Nebethee’s house.” It took a year of chance, infrequent visits with the old trapper to wheedle the reason out of him.
The Mormonhater had many years ago seen a stuffed gorilla in a dime museum in San Francisco, so badly moth-eaten that it was about to fall apart. The proprietor was very sad about its condition. He said he’d give a hundred dollars for a fresh one.
The Mormonhater returned to his boat, his dogs and his trap lines, and in due course he began to give ear to the Mojave stories and descriptions of Nebethee. Then all at once it came to him! Nebethee was nothing else than a great, nocturnal ape. He wrote to the keeper of the dime museum and asked him how much he’d give for such a creature—hide and carcass.
He got a letter back—he even let South Boy read it. There in black and white was the offer of one million dollars for any gorilla shot in the Colorado River valley, plus an invitation for the Mormonhater to head a parade along the whole length of Market Street in an open carriage with the mayor of the city on one side of him, the carcass of the beast on the other.
The Mormonhater had fished his Bible out of his cartridge bag and made South Boy swear, with his right hand on the Book that he’d never tell anyone.
South Boy went home and carefully read everything that the Advanced Geography had to say about the great apes, and studied the very inadequate picture shown in it.
He hadn’t promised not to hunt the creature himself.
However, Nebethee-hunting had proven very poor around the ranch. Up here, down in that shadow, might be his golden opportunity.
A million dollars . . . that was all the money in the world. He’d give the Mormonhater half. He’d even let the Mormonhater share the carriage with him and the mayor and the late Nebethee.
Of course the geography said that gorillas were only found in Africa, and that they were herbivorous. But the geography said nothing at all about Mojaves or the Colorado River valley. It showed complete ignorance about this part of the world.
So South Boy stared eagerly into the cliff’s shadow and started off in a trot along its rim, looking for a place to descend. While the idea of crowds of strange people gave him shudders under most conditions, the thought of that crowd along Market Street in San Francisco made him feel good. Maybe it was because they would be cheering him. That’s what the Mormonhater said: “They’ll be yelling their heads off!”
Not far away he found a slide: a place where the smaller boys from the Fort came on Saturdays to slide down the steep, gravelly face of the mesa on boards—the equivalent of tobag-ganing in a snowless country. He could go down there without getting his pants full of prickly
