T was when I was working for an outfit on the Little Missouri I got acquainted with Steve Benson, who one evening tells us his story of an Injun maid.
There was nine riders and, seeing we had begun to put up considerable hay, there was a machine-man regular, and there was a cook and the boss. Some good summers and hard winters I put in up there with Steve and the rest, observing all them things that constitutes God's country: heat haze, dust whirls, them still summer days, and hauling cows out of sloughs; and blizzards, and getting up at two in the morning—“Tumble up, you sons of guns!”—so's to keep track of where they were drifting.
In all these there occupations and enjoyments, and perils what ain't enjoyable except in the recollection, this here Steve takes part like a man. We was a kind of happy family there, for the boss he don't care for men to come and go too much. He says to any prospective assistant: “I don't look upon this ranch as a hand-out place for hobos, nor a passing resort of globe-trotters hitting across America. I like a man to stay a reasonable time, not just to quit when he gets able to tell his own stock without prying and wondering.” Consequent men came that meant to stay, if they could hold it down at all reasonable; and most stayed a good spell, and as I say we was a kind of happy family. The machine man didn't fit in very good; but he had been there so long that he was part of the family, although with a tendency to making what they call a break. Fred his name was. I disremember his last name—Babbacombe or Hecatombe or Somethingcombe, anyhow.
It was one night when the thin snow was managing somehow to come a-sifting in at a window, a-sieving through some indiscov'able crack and making a tiny indoor snowfall on the window ledge, and the stove was red-hot, and the riders for the day had come in, and supper was through, and that there clinging aroma of hash and apricots was bein' dispelled by this here aroma of Bull Durham rolled in wheat papers, that Steve indicated his story to us. I says “indicated” on purpose and intentional, for he was not utter obvious about his story. He leaves something to the imagination of his intelligent hearers, him feeling the story too deep to tell everything.
Getting his story at all came about owing to George Harrop, one of the riders, mentioning how he had met a string of Indians that day, and how they-all had stopped, tails to wind, to sign talk, just a passin' palaver in the drivin' snow. We talked first of all about sign talk, and shows each other signs, each addin' to the other's repertory so to speak! and we-all marvels at this here Babylonian strife of tongues among them aborigines, what makes sign talk a necessary invention.
This here machine man, Fred, he kind of snorts at sign talk and allows it might maybe serve for asking where's wood and water and eats, but not, for example, for expressing opinions and idees. Him talking about idees! It was just at that point Steve drifts in to explain that emotion and idees is sure capable of expression in sign language. He knew more about Injuns than any of us; so he could let us talk through our hats a whole lot and get the ground cleared—same as I'm clearing the ground for this here story of his—before chipping in at all.
Having corrected what you might call this machine man's superior ignorance regarding the impossibility of expressing heart trouble, or brain storm, by sign—instead of only signaling them simple desires, wood, water, and eats—he falls out of the talk and wets his wheat paper meditative where it had coiled loose from the tobacco. I see him yet. It's when the machine man says: “Me, I don't have any use for natives anywhere,” that Steve arouses himself again.
“We-all are natives of somewhere,” he murmurs, and again lapses into silence.
It was an interesting powwow with only this here fly in the ointment, so to speak, of Fred's foolish asides. But we evades unpleasantness, being in the mood for a soc'able evening, with the snow flying straight along outside and the stove red-hot inside. If it had only been the little machine man—this here Fred—who had made aspersive remarks about squaw men—which department of Injun talk we sure touches on in the course of our palaver—maybe Steve would never have spoken about his Injun maid. But George Harrop, with more intelligence, he promulgates his idee on that topic.
“Marrying a Injun don't appeal to me,” says he at some point in our powwow where the remark fits in. “I've seen some squaw men.”