Zane Grey The Rainbow Trail

Archiwum

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it not so? Glen Naspa's spirit calls for wisdom, not revenge. Willetts must be
a bad man. But we'll let him live. Life will punish him. Who knows if he was
all to blame? Glen Naspa was only one pretty Indian girl. There are many white
men in the desert. She loved a white man when she was a baby. The thing was a
curse. . . . Listen, Bi Nai, and the Navajo will talk.
"Many years ago the Spanish padres, the first white men, came into the land
of the Indian. Their search was for gold. But they were not wicked men. They
did not steal and kill. They taught the Indian many useful things. They
brought him horses. But when they went away they left him unsatisfied with his
life and his god.
"Then came the pioneers. They crossed the great river and took the
pasture-lands and the hunting-grounds of the Indian. They drove him backward,
and the Indian grew sullen. He began to fight. The white man's government made
treaties with the Indian, and these were broken. Then war came fierce and
bloody war. The Indian was driven to the waste places. The stream of pioneers,
like a march of ants, spread on into the desert. Every valley where grass
grew, every river, became a place for farms and towns. Cattle choked the
water-holes where the buffalo and deer had once gone to drink. The forests in
the hills were cut and the springs dried up. And the pioneers followed to the
edge of the desert.
"Then came the prospectors, mad, like the padres for the gleam of gold. The
day was not long enough for them to dig in the creeks and the canyon; they
worked in the night. And they brought weapons and rum to the Indian, to buy
from him the secret of the places where the shining gold lay hidden.
"Then came the traders. And they traded with the Indian. They gave him little
for much, and that little changed his life. He learned a taste for the sweet
foods of the white man. Because he could trade for a sack of flour he worked
less in the field. And the very fiber of his bones softened.
"Then came the missionaries. They were proselytizers for converts to their
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religion. The missionaries are good men. There may be a bad missionary, like
Willetts, the same as there are bad men in other callings, or bad Indians.
They say Shadd is a half-breed. But the Piutes can tell you he is a
full-blood, and he, like me, was sent to a white man's school. In the
beginning the missionaries did well for the Indian. They taught him cleaner
ways of living, better farming, useful work with tools many good things. But
the wrong to the Indian was the undermining of his faith. It was not humanity
that sent the missionary to the Indian. Humanity would have helped the Indian
in his ignorance of sickness and work, and left him his god. For to trouble
the Indian about his god worked at the roots of his nature.
"The beauty of the Indian's life is in his love of the open, of all that is
nature, of silence, freedom, wildness. It is a beauty of mind and soul. The
Indian would have been content to watch and feel. To a white man he might be
dirty and lazy content to dream life away without trouble or what the white
man calls evolution. The Indian might seem cruel because he leaves his old
father out in the desert to die. But the old man wants to die that way, alone
with his spirits and the sunset. And the white man's medicine keeps his old
father alive days and days after he ought to be dead. Which is more cruel? The
Navajos used to fight with other tribes, and then they were stronger men than
they are to-day.
"But leaving religion, greed, and war out of the question, contact with the
white man would alone have ruined the Indian. The Indian and the white man
cannot mix. The Indian brave learns the habits of the white man, acquires his
diseases, and has not the mind or body to withstand them. The Indian girl
learns to love the white man and that is death of her Indian soul, if not of
life.
"So the red man is passing. Tribes once powerful have died in the life of Nas
Ta Bega. The curse of the white man is already heavy upon my race in the
south. Here in the north, in the wildest corner of the desert, chased here by
the great soldier, Carson, the Navajo has made his last stand.
"Bi Nai, you have seen the shadow in the hogan of Hosteen Doetin. Glen Naspa
has gone to her grave, and no sisters, no children, will make paths to the
place of her sleep. Nas Ta Bega will never have a wife a child. He sees the
end. It is the sunset of the Navajo. . . . Bi Nai, the Navajo is
dying dying dying!"
XV. WILD JUSTICE
A crescent moon hung above the lofty peak over the valley and a train of
white stars ran along the bold rim of the western wall. A few young frogs
peeped plaintively. The night was cool, yet had a touch of balmy spring, and a
sweeter fragrance, as if the cedars and pinyons had freshened in the warm sun
of that day.
Shefford and Fay were walking in the aisles of moonlight and the patches of
shade, and Nas Ta Bega, more than ever a shadow of his white brother, followed
them silently.
"Fay, it's growing late. Feel the dew?" said Shefford. "Come, I must take you
back."
"But the time's so short. I have said nothing that I wanted to say," she
replied.
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"Say it quickly, then, as we go."
"After all, it's only will you take me away soon?"
"Yes, very soon. The Indian and I have talked. But we've made no plan yet.
There are only three ways to get out of this country. By Stonebridge, by
Kayenta and Durango, and by Red Lake. We must choose one. All are dangerous.
We must lose time finding Surprise Valley. I hoped the Indian could find it.
Then we'd bring Lassiter and Jane here and hide them near till dark, then take
you and go. That would give us a night's start. But you must help us to
Surprise Valley."
"I can go right to it, blindfolded, or in the dark. . . . Oh, John, hurry! I
dread the wait. He might come again."
"Joe says they won't come very soon." [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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