B. M. BOWER: Historical Novels, Westerns & Old West Sagas (Illustrated Edition). B. M. Bower
for him.
Applehead had not approved of Luck’s final consent that Annie-Many-Ponies should stay and play the Indian girl in his big picture. In the mind of Applehead there lurked a grudge that found all the more room to grow because of the natural bigness and generosity of his nature. It irked him to see her going her calm way with that proud uptilt to her shapely head and that little, inscrutable smile when she caught the meaning of his grumbling hints.
Applehead was easy-going to a fault in most things, but his dislike had grown in Luck’s absence to the point where he considered himself aggrieved whenever Annie-Many-Ponies saddled the horse which had been tacitly set aside for her use, and rode off into the mesa without a word of explanation or excuse. Applehead reminded the boys that she had not acted like that when luck was home. She had stayed on the ranch where she belonged, except once or twice, on particularly fine days, when she had meekly asked “Wagalexa Conka,” as she persisted in calling Luck, for permission to go for a ride.
Applehead itched to tell her a few things about the social, moral, intellectual and economic status of an “Injun squaw”—but there was something in her eye, something in the quiver of her finely shaped nostrils, in the straight black brows, that held his tongue quiet when he met her face to face. You couldn’t tell about these squaws. Even luck, who knew Indians better than most—and was, in a heathenish tribal way, the adopted son of Old Chief Big Turkey, and therefore Annie’s brother by adoption—even Luck maintained that Annie-Many-Ponies undoubtedly carried a knife concealed in her clothes and would use it if ever the need arose. Applehead was not afraid of Annie’s knife. It was something else, something he could not put into words, that held him back from open upbraidings.
He gave Andy’s wife, Rosemary, the mail and stopped to sympathize with her because Annie-Many-Ponies had gone away and left the hardest part of the ironing undone. Luck had told Annie to help Rosemary with the work; but Annie’s help, when Luck was not around the place, was, Rosemary asserted, purely theoretical.
“And from all you read about Indians,” Rosemary complained with a pretty wrinkling of her brows, “you’d think the women just LIVE for the sake of working. I’ve lost all faith in history, Mr. Furrman. I don’t believe squaws ever do anything if they can help it. Before she went off riding today, for instance, that girl spent a whole HOUR brushing her hair and braiding it. And I do believe she GREASES it to make it shine the way it does! And the powder she piles on her face—just to ride out on the mesa!” Rosemary Green was naturally sweet-tempered and exceedingly charitable in her judgements; but here, too, the cat-and-dog feud had its influence. Rosemary Green was a loyal champion of the cat Compadre; besides, there was a succession of little irritations, in the way of dishes left unwashed and inconspicuous corners left unswept, to warp her opinion of Annie-Many-Ponies.
When he left Rosemary he went straight down to where the chuck-wagon stood, and began to tap the tires with a small rock to see if they would need resetting before he started out. He decided that the brake-blocks would have to be replaced with new ones—or at least reshod with old boot-soles. The tongue was cracked, too; that had been done last winter when Luck was producing The Phantom Herd and had sent old Dave Wiswell down a rocky hillside with half-broken bronks harnessed to the wagon, in a particularly dramatic scene. Applehead went grumblingly in search of some baling wire to wrap the tongue. He had been terribly excited and full of enthusiasm for the picture at the time the tongue was cracked, but now he looked upon it merely as a vital weakness in his roundup outfit. A new tongue would mean delay; and delay, in his present mood, was tragedy.
He couldn’t find any old baling wire, though he had long been accustomed to tangling his feet in snarled bunches of it when he went forth in the dark after a high wind. Until now he had not observed its unwonted absence from the yard. For a long while he had not needed any wire to mend things, because Luck had attended to everything about the ranch, and if anything needed mending he had set one of the Happy Family at the task.
His search led him out beyond the corrals in the little dry wash that sometimes caught and held what the high winds brought rolling that way. The wash was half filled with tumble-weed, so that Applehead was forced to get down into it and kick the weeds aside to see if there was any wire lodged beneath. His temper did not sweeten over the task, especially since he found nothing that he wanted.
Annie-Many-Ponies, riding surreptitiously up the dry wash—meaning to come out in a farther gully and so approach the corral from the west instead of from the east—came upon Applehead quite unexpectedly. She stopped and eyed him aslant from under her level, finely marked brows, and her eyes lightened with relief when she saw that Applehead looked more startled than she had felt. Indeed, Applehead had been calling Luck uncomplimentary names for cleaning the place of everything a man might need in a hurry, and he was ashamed of himself.
“Can’t find a foot of danged wire on the danged place!” Applehead kicked a large, tangled bunch of weeds under the very nose of the horse which jumped sidewise. “Never seen such a maniac for puttin’ things where a feller can’t find ‘em, as what Luck is.” He was not actually speak ing to Annie-Many-Ponies—or if he was he did not choose to point his remarks by glancing at her.
“Wagalexa Conka, he heap careful for things belong when they stay,” Annie-Many-Ponies observed in her musical contralto voice which always irritated Applehead with its very melody. “I think plenty wire all fold up neat in prop-room. Wagalexa Conka, he all time clean this studio from trash lie around everywhere.”
“He does, hey?” Applehead’s sunburnt mustache bristled like the whiskers of Compadre when he was snarling defiance at the little black dog. The feud was asserting itself. “Well, this here danged place ain’t no studio! It’s a ranch, and it b’longs to ME, Nip Furrman. And any balin’ wire on this ranch is my balin’ wire, and it’s got a right to lay around wherever I want it t’ lay. And I don’t need no danged squaw givin’ me hints about ‘how my place oughta be kept—now I’m tellin’ yuh!”
Annie-Many-Ponies did not reply in words. She sat on her horse, straight as any young warchief that ever led her kinsmen to battle, and looked down at Applehead with that maddening half smile of hers, inscrutable as the Sphinx her features sometimes resembled. Shunka Chistala (which is Sioux for Little Dog) came bounding over the low ridge that hid the ranch buildings from sight, and wagged himself dislocatingly up to her. Annie-Many-Ponies frowned at his approach until she saw that Applehead was aiming a clod at the dog, whereupon she touched her heels to the horse and sent him between Applehead and her pet, and gave Shunka Chistala a sharp command in Sioux that sent him back to the house with his tail dropped.
For a full half minute she and old Applehead looked at each other in open antagonism. For a squaw, Annie-Many-Ponies was remarkably unsubmissive in her bearing. Her big eyes were frankly hostile; her half smile was, in the opinion of Applehead, almost as frankly scornful. He could not match her in the subtleties of feminine warfare. He took refuge behind the masculine bulwark of authority.
“Where yuh bin with that horse uh mine?” he demanded harshly. “Purty note when I don’t git no say about my own stock. Got him all het up and heavin’ like he’d been runnin’ cattle; I ain’t goin’ to stand for havin’ my horses ran to death, now I’m tellin’ yuh! Fer a squaw, I must say you’re gittin’ too danged uppish in your ways around here. Next time you want to go traipsin’ around the mesa, you kin go afoot. I’m goin’ to need my horses fer roundup.”
A white girl would have made some angry retort; but Annie-Many-Ponies, without looking in the least abashed, held her peace and kept that little inscrutable smile upon her lips. Her eyes, however, narrowed in their gaze.
“Yuh hear me?” Poor old Applehead had never before attempted to browbeat a woman, and her unsubmissive silence seemed to his bachelor mind uncanny.
“I hear what Wagalexa Conka tell me.” She turned her horse and rode composedly away from him over the ridge.
“You’ll hear a danged sight more’n that, now I’m tellin’ yuh!” raved Applehead impotently. “I ain’t sayin’ nothin’ agin Luck, but they’s goin’ to be some danged plain speakin’ done on some subjects when he comes back, and given’ squaws a free