The Indians Hand

The Indian's Hand, by Lorimer
Stoddard

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Title: The Indian's Hand 1892
Author: Lorimer Stoddard
Release Date: October 24, 2007 [EBook #23178]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE
INDIAN'S HAND ***

Produced by David Widger

THE INDIAN'S HAND
By Lorimer Stoddard
Copyright, 1892, by J. B. Lippincott & Co.

The men had driven away. Their carts and horses disappeared behind
the roll of the low hills. They appeared now and then, like boats on the
crest of a wave, further each time. And their laughter and singing and
shouts grew fainter as the bushes hid them from sight.
The women and children remained, with two old men to protect them.
They might have gone too, the hunters said. "What harm could come in
the broad daylight?--the bears and panthers were far away. They'd be
back by night, with only two carts to fill."
Then Jim, the crack shot of the settlement, said, "We'll drive home the
bears in the carts."
The children shouted and danced as they thought of the sport to come,
of the hunters' return with their game, of the bonfires they always built.
One pale woman clung to her husband's arm. "But the Indians!" she
said.
That made the men all laugh. "Indians!" they cried; "why, there've been
none here for twenty years! We drove them away, down
there"--pointing across the plain--"to a hotter place than this, where the
sand burns their feet and they ride for days for water."
The pale woman murmured, "Ah, but they returned."
"Yes," cried her big husband, whose brown beard covered his chest,
"and burned two cabins. Small harm they did, the curs!"
"Hush," said the pale woman, pressing her husband's arm; and the men
around were quiet, pretending to fix their saddles, as they glanced at
another woman, dressed in black, who turned and went into her house.
"I forgot her boy," said the bearded man, as he gravely picked up his
gun.
They started off in the morning cool, toward the mountains where the
trees grew. And the long shadows lessened as the sun crept up the sky.

The woman in black stood silent by her door. No one bade her good-by.
The other women went back to their houses to work. The children
played in the dust; clouds rose as they shouted and ran. A day's
freedom lay before them.
But the woman in black still stood by her door, like a spectre in the
sunshine, her thin hands clasped together as she gazed away over the
plain toward Mexico.
Her face was parched and drawn, as if the sun from the sand had
burned into the bone. Her eyes alone seemed to live; they were hard
and bright.
Her house was a little away from the rest, on the crest of a hill facing
the desert plain.
She had heard the words of the bearded man: "Small harm the Indians
did." Had he forgotten her boy? How could he forget, while she was
there to remind them of the dead? Near her house was a small rock
roughly marked. The rude letters "Will, gone, '69," she had cut on it
with her own hands. It marked the last place where her boy had played.
She remembered how she went away softly--so he should not cry to
follow her--without a word, without a kiss.
Here her hands beat the side of the house.
"Oh, to have that kiss now and die!" But she had gone, unthinking, up
the road where the pale woman lived, then a rosy-cheeked happy bride,
not a widow like herself. They laughed and discussed the newcomers at
the settlement. It was a holiday, for the men were away over the hills,
cutting down trees to build their houses with.
As they talked there idly, they heard what they thought was the shrill
bark of dogs running up the hill. Startled, they went to the window.
Round the curve of the road came horses wildly galloping, and upon
their backs--Here the pale woman shrieked and fled. They were Indians,
beating their horses with their bare legs, their black hair streaming in
the wind.

Like a flash, she had bolted the door and barred the shutters as they
galloped up. She turned then. Through the open back door she saw the
women run screaming up the hill, their children in their arms.
Their children! Where was hers? She stopped as if turned to stone,