The Indians Hand | Page 4

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.

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