The Indians Hand | Page 4

upon the wrist. The
hand sprang up at her. With a howl of agony the creature fell bumping
beneath.
Then all again was still.
Her face was wet and warm with the spattered blood.
Outside she heard the crackling of a burning house, then gunshots far
away, and distant shouts. On tiptoe she went to the garret window, and
peeped round its edge. Over the hills, quite near, she saw the men
returning. One house was blazing--the minister's. The Indians were
retreating. Near her door, grazing, stood a riderless horse. She knew its
owner. As they rode past, they caught at it, but were stopped by a shout
from her door. An Indian rushed out, handsome, young, holding aloft a
bare right arm without a hand. In his language he shrieked to them for
revenge, pointing up with his red wrist to the attic where she stood.
The eyes of the woman shot fire. She leaned far out and shook her fist
from the garret window.
"One Indian at least!"
She hurled the axe at them. It fell far short. They fired as they passed,
but none hit her. Nearer came the men.
The wounded man leaped to his horse and with a curse rode on. The
woman laughed as he passed beneath, then sat down in the dusky loft
with a red pool at her feet.

Shortly the men returned. Some went by down the hill, after the Indians.
Others put out the fire. All was confusion, bustle, shouts.
Then the women and the children came and added to the din, and the
men who had followed returned. But the woman in black sat alone in
the loft, till she heard the crowd at her door below, and the voice of the
pale woman say:
"Where is Mary?"
She rose and lifted the trap-door--it was unbolted--and went down.
The pale woman came to her, but she pushed her aside, and wiped her
face with her sleeve.
"Are they killed? any of them?" she said. Her friend answered, "No,
Mary, not one." "No harm this time," said the bearded man. "Except my
house, it is burned," said the minister's wife. "We'll soon have another."
"I don't mean you!" cried the woman in black. "I mean them--red devils.
Have you got any?--killed any? You"--this to Jim, who never missed a
shot--"you"--this to the bearded man--"have you killed any?"
And the men answered, "No."
And one man said, "Their horses were faster than ours."
"Not one!" The woman in black drew herself up proudly. "Yes, one;
better than killed. Wait." The women shrunk from her as she darted up
the stair. They looked at each other wonderingly. The woman returned
with something in her grasp. She flung it on the table. "It is an Indian's
hand. His arm will shrivel to the bone. They will leave him some day to
die in the sand." The women shuddered and drew back; the men
crowded round, but they did not touch the hand.
"Are you afraid?" said the woman in black. "Afraid of that thing!"
She bent back the fingers and looked in it with a smile of contempt.
Her face took an ashen hue: the hand struck the table edge and fell

upon the floor. She seemed to be trying to think for a second, then she
gave one awful cry, and leaned her face against the wall, with her hands
hanging at her side.
The pale woman tried to go to her, but her husband drew her back, and,
with a silent crowd around, slowly picked up the hand.
For a second he hesitated, then did as she had done, but gently. He bent
back the fingers of the severed hand and read its history written there,
"S S, 64," in white letters on the palm.
He remembered then how, twenty years ago, when she brought the
child to him, he had tied its little hand in cooling salve.
It was larger now.
The whisper went around, "It is her boy's hand," and they crept toward
the door.
The pale woman took a flower from her dress, one she had put there
hours before, and placed it in the brown fingers on the table and went
out.
The woman did not stir from the wall. "Leave the hand," she said.
"It is there," and the bearded man closed the door gently behind him.
The woman in black turned. Her hard eyes were dim now.. She took the
hand from the table and undid her dress and placed it in her breast, and
went to the window, and watched, far off, a cloud of dust made golden
by the sun, as it rolled away across the plain, down toward Mexico.

End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Indian's Hand, by Lorimer
Stoddard
***