Collected Stories (67 page)

Every cab, every party, was more than they could afford. If he lost an umbrella, it was a real misfortune. He wasn’t lazy, he wasn’t a fool, and he meant to be honest; but he was intimidated by that miserable sort of departmental life. He didn’t know anything else. He thought working in a store or a bank not respectable. Living with the Bixbys gave me a kind of low-spiritedness I had never known before. During my days of waiting for appointments, I used to walk for hours around the fence that shuts in the White House grounds, and watch the Washington monument colour with those beautiful sunsets, until the time when all the clerks streamed out of the Treasury
building and the War and Navy. Thousands of them, all more or less like the couple I lived with. They seemed to me like people in slavery, who ought to be free. I remember the city chiefly by those beautiful, hazy, sad sunsets, white columns and green shrubbery, and the monument shaft still pink while the stars were coming out.

I got my interview with the Director of the Smithsonian at last. He gave me his attention, he was interested. He told me to come again in three days and meet Dr. Ripley, who was the authority on prehistoric Indian remains and had excavated a lot of them. Then came an exciting and rather encouraging time for me. Dr. Ripley asked the right sort of questions, and evidently knew his business. He said he’d like to take the first train down to my mesa. But it required money to excavate, and he had none. There was a bill up before Congress for an appropriation. We’d have to wait. I must use my influence with my Representative. He took my pottery to study it. (I never got it back, by the way.) There was a Dr. Fox, connected with the Smithsonian, who was also interested. They told me a good many things I wanted to know, and kept me dangling about the office. Of course they were very kind to take so much trouble with a green boy. But I soon found that the Director and all his staff had one interest which dwarfed every other. There was to be an International Exposition of some sort in Europe the following summer, and they were all pulling strings to get appointed on juries or sent to international congresses—appointments that would pay their expenses abroad, and give them a salary in addition. There was, indeed, a bill before Congress for appropriations for the Smithsonian; but there was also a bill for Exposition appropriations, and that was the one they were really pushing. They kept me hanging on through March and April, but in the end it came to nothing. Dr. Ripley told me he was sorry, but the sum Congress had allowed the Smithsonian wouldn’t cover an expedition to the Southwest.

Virginia Ward, who had been so kind to me, went out to lunch with me that day, and admitted I had been let down. She was almost as much disappointed as I. She said the only thing Dr. Ripley really cared about was getting a free trip to Europe and acting on a jury, and maybe getting a decoration. “And that’s what the Director wants, too,” she said. “They don’t care much about dead and gone Indians.
What they do care about is going to Paris, and getting another ribbon on their coats.”

The only other person besides Virginia who was genuinely concerned about my affair was a young Frenchman, a lieutenant attached to the French Embassy, who came to the Smithsonian often on business connected with this same International Exposition. He was nice and polite to Virginia, and she introduced him to me. We used to walk down along the Potomac together. He studied my photographs and asked me such intelligent questions about everything that it was a pleasure to talk to him. He had a fine attitude about it all; he was thoughtful, critical, and respectful. I feel sure he’d have gone back to New Mexico with me if he’d had the money. He was even poorer than I.

I was utterly ashamed to go home to Roddy, dead broke after all the money I’d spent, and without a thing to show for it. I hung on in Washington through May, trying to get a job of some sort, to at least earn my fare home. My letters to Blake had been pretty blue for some time back. If I’d been sensible, I’d have kept my troubles to myself. He was easily discouraged, and I knew that. At last I had to write him for money to go home. It was slow in coming, and I began to telegraph. I left Washington at last, wiser than I came. I had no plans, I wanted nothing but to get back to the mesa and live a free life and breathe free air, and never, never again to see hundreds of little black-coated men pouring out of white buildings. Queer, how much more depressing they are than workmen coming out of a factory.

I was terribly disappointed when I got off the train at Tarpin and Roddy wasn’t at the station to meet me. It was late in the afternoon, almost dark, and I went straight to the livery stable to ask Bill Hook for news of Blake. Hook, you remember, had done all our hauling for us, and had been a good friend. He gave me a glad hand and said Blake was out on the mesa.

“I expect maybe he’s had his feelings hurt here. He’s been shy of this town lately. You see, Tom, folks weren’t bothered none about that mesa so long as you fellows were playing Robinson Crusoe out there, digging up curios. But when it leaked out that Blake had got a lot of money for your stuff, then they begun to feel jealous—said them ruins didn’t belong to Blake any more than to anybody else.
It’ll blow over in time; people are always like that when money changes hands. But right now there’s a good deal of bad feeling.”

I told him I didn’t know what he was talking about.

“You mean you ain’t heard about the German, Fechtig? Well, Rodney’s got some surprise waiting for you! Why, he’s had the damnedest luck! He’s cleaned up a neat little pile on your stuff.”

I begged him to tell me what stuff he meant.

“Why, your curios. This German, Fechtig, come along; he’d been buying up a lot of Indian things out here, and he bought your whole outfit and paid four thousand dollars down for it. The transaction made quite a stir here in Tarpin. I’m not kicking. I made a good thing out of it. My mules were busy three weeks packing the stuff out of there on their backs, and I held the Dutchman up for a fancy price. He had packing cases made at the wagon shop and took ’em up to the mesa full of straw and sawdust, and packed the curios out there. I lost one of my mules, too. You remember Jenny? Well, they were leading her down with a big box on her, and right there where the trail runs so narrow around a bump in the cliff above Black Canyon, she lost her balance and fell clean to the bottom, her load on her. Pretty near a thousand feet, I guess. We never went down to hold a post-mortem, but Fechtig paid for her like a gentleman.”

I remember I sat down on the sofa in Hook’s office because I couldn’t stand up any longer, and the smell of the horse blankets began to make me deathly sick. In a minute I went over, like a girl in a novel. Hook pulled me out on the sidewalk and gave me some whisky out of his pocket flask.

When I felt better I asked him how long this German had been gone, and what he had done with the things.

“Oh, he cleared out three weeks ago. He didn’t waste no time. He treated everybody well, though; nobody’s sore at him. It’s your partner they’re turned against. Fechtig took the stuff right along with him, chartered a freight car, and travelled in the car with it. I reckon it’s on the water by now. He took it straight through into Old Mexico, and was to load it on a French boat. Seems he was afraid of having trouble getting curiosities out of the United States ports. You know you can take anything out of the City of Mexico.”

I had heard all I wanted to hear. I went to the hotel, got a room,
and lay down without undressing to wait for daylight. Hook was to drive me and my trunk out to the mesa early the next morning. All I’d been through in Washington was nothing to what I went through that night. I thought Blake must have lost his mind. I didn’t for a minute believe he’d meant to sell me out, but I cursed his stupidity and presumption. I had never told him just how I felt about those things we’d dug out together, it was the kind of thing one doesn’t talk about directly. But he must have known; he couldn’t have lived with me all summer and fall without knowing. And yet, until that night, I had never known myself that I cared more about them than about anything else in the world.

At the first blink of daylight I jumped up from my damnable bed and went round to the stable to rout Hook out of his bunk. We had breakfast and got out of town with his best team. On the way to the mesa we had a break-down, one of the old dry wheels smashed to splinters. Hook had to unhitch and ride back to Tarpin and get another. Everything took an unreasonably long time, and the afternoon was half gone when he put me and my trunk down at the foot of the Black Canyon trail. Every inch of that trail was dear to me, every delicate curve about the old piñon roots, every chancy track along the face of the cliffs, and the deep windings back into shrubbery and safety. The wild-currant bushes were in bloom, and where the path climbed the side of a narrow ravine, the scent of them in the sun was so heavy that it made me soft, made me want to lie down and sleep. I wanted to see and touch everything, like home-sick children when they come home.

When I pulled out on top of the mesa, the rays of sunlight fell slantingly through the little twisted piñons,—the light was all in between them, as red as a daylight fire, they fairly swam in it. Once again I had that glorious feeling that I’ve never had anywhere else, the feeling of being
on the mesa,
in a world above the world. And the air, my God, what air!—Soft, tingling, gold, hot with an edge of chill on it, full of the smell of piñons—it was like breathing the sun, breathing the colour of the sky. Down there behind me was the plain, already streaked with shadow, violet and purple and burnt orange until it met the horizon. Before me was the flat mesa top, thinly sprinkled with old cedars that were not much taller than I, though
their twisted trunks were almost as thick as my body. I struck off across it, my long black shadow going ahead.

I made straight for the cabin, it was about three miles from the spot where the trail emerged at the top. I saw smoke rising before I could see the hut itself. Blake was in the doorway when I got there. I didn’t look at his face, but I could feel that he looked at mine.

“Don’t say anything, Tom. Don’t rip me up until you hear all about it,” he said as I came toward him.

“I’ve heard enough to about do for me,” I blurted out. “What made you do it, Blake? What made you do it?”

“It was a chance in a million, boy. There wasn’t any time to consult you. There’s only one man in thousands that wants to buy relics and pay real money for them. I could see how your Washington campaign was coming out. I know you’d thought about big figures, so had I. But that was all a pipe dream. Four thousand’s not so bad, you don’t pick it up every day. And he bore all the expenses. Why, it was a terrible expensive job, getting all that frail stuff out of here. Who else would have bought it, I want to know? We’d have had to pack it around at Harvey Houses, selling it at a dollar a bowl, like the poor Indians do. I took the best chance going, for both of us, Tom.”

I didn’t say anything, because there was too much to say. I stood outside the cabin until the gold light went blue and a few stars came out, hardly brighter than the bright sky they twinkled in, and the swallows came flying over us, on their way to their nests in the cliffs. It was the time of day when everything goes home. From habit and from weariness I went in through the door. The kitchen table was spread for supper, I could smell a rabbit stew cooking on the stove. Blake lit the lantern and begged me to eat my supper. I didn’t go into the bunk-room, for I knew the shelves in there were empty. I heard Blake talking to me as you hear people talking when you are asleep.

“Who else would have bought them?” he kept saying. “Folks make a lot of fuss over such things, but they don’t want to pay good money for them.”

When I at last told him that such a thing as selling them had never entered my head, I’m sure he thought I was lying. He reminded me about how we used to talk of getting big money from the Government.

I admitted I’d hoped we’d be paid for our work, and maybe get a bonus of some kind, for our discovery. “But I never thought of selling them, because they weren’t mine to sell—nor yours! They belonged to this country, to the State, and to all the people. They belonged to boys like you and me, that have no other ancestors to inherit from. You’ve gone and sold them to a country that’s got plenty of relics of its own. You’ve gone and sold your country’s secrets, like Dreyfus.”

“That man was innocent. It was a frame-up,” Blake murmured. It was a point he would never pass up.

“Whether he’s guilty or not, you are! If there was only anybody in Washington I could telegraph to, and have that German held up at the port!”

“That’s just it. If there was anybody in Washington that cared a damn, I wouldn’t have sold ’em. But you pretty well found out there ain’t.”

“We could have kept them, then,” I told him. “I’ve got a strong back. I’m not so poor that I have to sell the pots and pans that belonged to my poor grandmothers a thousand years ago. I made all my plans on the train, coming back.” (It was a lie, I hadn’t.) “I meant to get a job on the railroad and keep our find right here, and come back to it when I had a lay-off. I think a lot more of it now than before I went to Washington. And after a while, when that Exposition is over and the Smithsonian people get home, they would come out here all right. I’ve learned enough from them so that I could go on with it myself.”

Blake reminded me that I had my way to make in the world, and that I wanted to go to school. “That money’s in the bank this minute, in your name, and you’re going to college on it. You’re not going to be a day-labourer like me. After you’ve got your sheepskin, then you can divide with me.”

“You think I’d touch that money?” I looked squarely at him for the first time. “No more than if you’d stolen it. You made the sale. Get what you can out of it. I want to ask you one question: did you ever think I was digging those things up for what I could sell them for?”

Rodney explained that he knew I cared about the things, and was
proud of them, but he’d always supposed I meant to “realize” on them, just as he did, and that it would come to money in the end. “Everything does,” he added.