The Prairie (61 page)

"Proceed with your explanation," interrupted Middleton.

"Ah! and a bloody and wicked sight it was. There I lay in a low bed of
grass, as two of the hunters came nigh each other. Their meeting was not
cordial, nor such as men, who meet in a desert, should give each other;
but I thought they would have parted in peace, until I saw one put his
rifle to the other's back, and do what I call a treacherous and sinful
murder. It was a noble and a manly youth, that boy—Though the powder
burnt his coat, he stood the shock for more than a minute, before he
fell. Then was he brought to his knees, and a desperate and manful fight
he made to the brake, like a wounded bear seeking a cover!"

"And why, in the name of heavenly justice, did you conceal this?" cried
Middleton.

"What! think you, Captain, that a man, who has spent more than
threescore years in the wilderness, has not learned the virtue of
discretion. What red warrior runs to tell the sights he has seen, until
a fitting time? I took the Doctor to the place, in order to see whether
his skill might not come in use; and our friend, the bee-hunter, being
in company, was knowing to the fact that the bushes held the body."

"Ay; it ar' true," said Paul; "but not knowing what private reasons
might make the old trapper wish to hush the matter up, I said as little
about the thing as possible, which was just nothing at all."

"And who was the perpetrator of this deed?" demanded Middleton.

"If by perpetrator you mean him who did the act, yonder stands the man;
and a shame, and a disgrace is it to our race, that he is of the blood
and family of the dead."

"He lies! he lies!" shrieked Abiram. "I did no murder; I gave but blow
for blow."

The voice of Ishmael was deep, and even awful, as he answered—

"It is enough. Let the old man go. Boys, put the brother of your mother
in his place."

"Touch me not!" cried Abiram. "I'll call on God to curse you if you
touch me!"

The wild and disordered gleam of his eye, at first induced the young men
to arrest their steps; but when Abner, older and more resolute than
the rest, advanced full upon him, with a countenance that bespoke the
hostile state of his mind, the affrighted criminal turned, and, making
an abortive effort to fly, fell with his face to the earth, to all
appearance perfectly dead. Amid the low exclamations of horror which
succeeded, Ishmael made a gesture which commanded his sons to bear the
body into the tent.

"Now," he said, turning to those who were strangers in his camp,
"nothing is left to be done, but for each to go his own road. I wish you
all well; and to you, Ellen, though you may not prize the gift, I say,
God bless you!"

Middleton, awe-struck by what he believed a manifest judgment of Heaven,
made no further resistance, but prepared to depart. The arrangements
were brief, and soon completed. When they were all ready, they took
a short and silent leave of the squatter and his family; and then the
whole of the singularly constituted party were seen slowly and silently
following the victorious Pawnee towards his distant villages.

And I beseech you,
Wrest once the law, to your authority:
To do a great right, do a little wrong.
—Shakespeare.

Ishmael awaited long and patiently for the motley train of Hard-Heart
to disappear. When his scout reported that the last straggler of the
Indians, who had joined their chief so soon as he was at such a distance
from the encampment as to excite no jealousy by their numbers, had gone
behind the most distant swell of the prairie, he gave forth the order to
strike his tents. The cattle were already in the gears, and the movables
were soon transferred to their usual places in the different vehicles.
When all these arrangements were completed, the little wagon, which had
so long been the tenement of Inez, was drawn before the tent, into which
the insensible body of the kidnapper had been borne, and preparations
were evidently made for the reception of another prisoner. Then it was,
as Abiram appeared, pale, terrified, and tottering beneath a load
of detected guilt, that the younger members of the family were first
apprised that he still belonged to the class of the living. A general
and superstitious impression had spread among them, that his crime had
been visited by a terrible retribution from Heaven; and they now gazed
at him, as at a being who belonged rather to another world, than as a
mortal, who, like themselves, had still to endure the last agony before
the great link of human existence could be broken. The criminal himself
appeared to be in a state, in which the most sensitive and startling
terror was singularly combined with total physical apathy. The
truth was, that while his person had been numbed by the shock, his
susceptibility to apprehension kept his agitated mind in unrelieved
distress. When he found himself in the open air, he looked about him,
in order to gather, if possible, some evidences of his future fate, from
the countenances of those gathered round. Seeing every where grave but
composed features, and meeting in no eye any expression that threatened
immediate violence, the miserable man began to revive; and, by the time
he was seated in the wagon, his artful faculties were beginning to plot
the expedients of parrying the just resentment of his kinsmen, or, if
these should fail him, the means of escaping from a punishment that his
forebodings told him would be terrible.

Throughout the whole of these preparations Ishmael rarely spoke. A
gesture, or a glance of the eye, served to indicate his pleasure to
his sons, and with these simple methods of communication, all parties
appeared content. When the signal was made to proceed, the squatter
threw his rifle into the hollow of his arm, and his axe across his
shoulder, taking the lead as usual. Esther buried herself in the wagon
which contained her daughters; the young men took their customary places
among the cattle, or nigh the teams, and the whole proceeded, at their
ordinary, dull, but unremitted gait.

For the first time, in many a day, the squatter turned his back towards
the setting sun. The route he held was in the direction of the settled
country, and the manner in which he moved sufficed to tell his children,
who had learned to read their father's determinations in his mien, that
their journey on the prairie was shortly to have an end. Still nothing
else transpired for hours, that might denote the existence of any
sudden, or violent, revolution in the purposes or feelings of Ishmael.
During all that time he marched alone, keeping a few hundred rods in
front of his teams, seldom giving any sign of extraordinary excitement.
Once or twice, indeed, his huge figure was seen standing on the summit
of some distant swell, with the head bent towards the earth, as he
leaned on his rifle; but then these moments of intense thought were
rare, and of short continuance. The train had long thrown its shadows
towards the east, before any material alteration was made in the
disposition of their march. Water-courses were waded, plains were
passed, and rolling ascents risen and descended, without producing the
smallest change. Long practised in the difficulties of that peculiar
species of travelling in which he was engaged, the squatter avoided
the more impracticable obstacles of their route by a sort of instinct,
invariably inclining to the right or left in season, as the formation of
the land, the presence of trees, or the signs of rivers forewarned him
of the necessity of such movements.

At length the hour arrived when charity to man and beast required a
temporary suspension of labour. Ishmael chose the required spot with his
customary sagacity. The regular formation of the country, such as it
has been described in the earlier pages of our book, had long been
interrupted by a more unequal and broken surface. There were, it is
true, in general, the same wide and empty wastes, the same rich and
extensive bottoms, and that wild and singular combination of swelling
fields and of nakedness, which gives that region the appearance of
an ancient country, incomprehensibly stripped of its people and their
dwellings. But these distinguishing features of the rolling prairies had
long been interrupted by irregular hillocks, occasional masses of rock,
and broad belts of forest.

Ishmael chose a spring, that broke out of the base of a rock some forty
or fifty feet in elevation, as a place well suited to the wants of his
herds. The water moistened a small swale that lay beneath the spot,
which yielded, in return for the fecund gift, a scanty growth of grass.
A solitary willow had taken root in the alluvion, and profiting by its
exclusive possession of the soil, the tree had sent up its stem far
above the crest of the adjacent rock, whose peaked summit had once
been shadowed by its branches. But its loveliness had gone with the
mysterious principle of life. As if in mockery of the meagre show of
verdure that the spot exhibited, it remained a noble and solemn monument
of former fertility. The larger, ragged, and fantastic branches still
obtruded themselves abroad, while the white and hoary trunk stood naked
and tempest-riven. Not a leaf, nor a sign of vegetation, was to be seen
about it. In all things it proclaimed the frailty of existence, and the
fulfilment of time.

Here Ishmael, after making the customary signal for the train to
approach, threw his vast frame upon the earth, and seemed to muse on the
deep responsibility of his present situation. His sons were not long in
arriving; for the cattle no sooner scented the food and water than they
quickened their pace, and then succeeded the usual bustle and avocations
of a halt.

The impression made by the scene of that morning was not so deep, or
lasting, on the children of Ishmael and Esther, as to induce them to
forget the wants of nature. But while the sons were searching among
their stores, for something substantial to appease their hunger, and the
younger fry were wrangling about their simple dishes, the parents of the
unnurtured family were differently employed.

When the squatter saw that all, even to the reviving Abiram, were busy
in administering to their appetites, he gave his downcast partner a
glance of his eye, and withdrew towards a distant roll of the land,
which bounded the view towards the east. The meeting of the pair, in
this naked spot, was like an interview held above the grave of their
murdered son. Ishmael signed to his wife to take a seat beside him on a
fragment of rock, and then followed a space, during which neither seemed
disposed to speak.

"We have journeyed together long, through good and bad," Ishmael at
length commenced: "much have we had to try us, and some bitter cups have
we been made to swallow, my woman; but nothing like this has ever before
lain in my path."

"It is a heavy cross for a poor, misguided, and sinful woman to bear!"
returned Esther, bowing her head to her knees, and partly concealing her
face in her dress. "A heavy and a burdensome weight is this to be laid
upon the shoulders of a sister and a mother!"

"Ay; therein lies the hardship of the case. I had brought my mind to the
punishment of that houseless trapper, with no great strivings, for
the man had done me few favours, and God forgive me if I suspected him
wrongfully of much evil! This is, however, bringing shame in at one door
of my cabin, in order to drive it out at the other. But shall a son of
mine be murdered, and he who did it go at large?—the boy would never
rest!"

"Oh, Ishmael, we pushed the matter far. Had little been said, who would
have been the wiser? Our consciences might then have been quiet."

"Eest'er," said the husband, turning on her a reproachful but still a
dull regard, "the hour has been, my woman, when you thought another hand
had done this wickedness."

"I did, I did the Lord gave me the feeling, as a punishment for my sins!
but his mercy was not slow in lifting the veil; I looked into the book,
Ishmael, and there I found the words of comfort."

"Have you that book at hand, woman; it may happen to advise in such a
dreary business."

Esther fumbled in her pocket, and was not long in producing the fragment
of a Bible, which had been thumbed and smoke-dried till the print was
nearly illegible. It was the only article, in the nature of a book,
that was to be found among the chattels of the squatter, and it had been
preserved by his wife, as a melancholy relic of more prosperous, and
possibly of more innocent, days. She had long been in the habit of
resorting to it, under the pressure of such circumstances as were
palpably beyond human redress, though her spirit and resolution rarely
needed support under those that admitted of reparation through any of
the ordinary means of reprisal. In this manner Esther had made a sort
of convenient ally of the word of God; rarely troubling it for counsel,
however, except when her own incompetency to avert an evil was too
apparent to be disputed. We shall leave casuists to determine how
far she resembled any other believers in this particular, and proceed
directly with the matter before us.

"There are many awful passages in these pages, Ishmael," she said, when
the volume was opened, and the leaves were slowly turning under her
finger, "and some there ar' that teach the rules of punishment."

Her husband made a gesture for her to find one of those brief rules of
conduct, which have been received among all Christian nations as the
direct mandates of the Creator, and which have been found so just, that
even they, who deny their high authority, admit their wisdom. Ishmael
listened with grave attention, as his companion read all those verses,
which her memory suggested, and which were thought applicable to the
situation in which they found themselves. He made her show him the
words, which he regarded with a sort of strange reverence. A resolution
once taken was usually irrevocable, in one who was moved with so much
difficulty. He put his hand upon the book, and closed the pages himself,
as much as to apprise his wife that he was satisfied. Esther, who so
well knew his character, trembled at the action, and casting a glance at
his steady eye, she said—