The Native Blood
By Albert R. Lyman
Chapter 6
THE STORY THUS FAR: Down in the land of the Navajos, where the great, weird shapes of Monument Valley punctuate the skyline of the Southwest, Yoinsnez and his son and his daughter, Eltceesie, lived in a hogan, neighboring Husteele and his little son Peejo. But de- spite their neighborliness in all other things there grew a bitter rivalry between the two or the capture of a phantom horse — Beeleh thlizhen (Blackhorse) — a stallion of Arabian type that appeared full-grown on Huskaniny Mesa on the Utah-Arizona line, and which defied all efforts for his capture, whether of trickery, stealth, or force. As the occupants of each hogan would attempt his capture, the occupants of the other would lie in wait to see if their rivals were successful. Suddenly, however, the dread influenza struck the hogan of Yoinsnez, crushing the life from his son and prostrating all others. While their rivals were so stricken, Husteele and Peejo sought again to capture Blackhorse — but without success. Then the devastating plague visited the hogan of Husteele. Ten days later, after Yoinsnez had finally gained strength enough to visit his neighbor and rival, only eleven-year-old Peejo was still alive. Yoinsnez took the boy to his own roof and cared for him. He also took Husteele’s horses and herds and mingled them with his own, and burned down Husteele’s hogan in an effort to blot out the dread epidemic. Yoinsnez’s first feeling of compassion soon, however, turned to rising resentment and bitter distrust when Peejo seemed reluctant to tell all that he and his father, Husteele, had learned of Blackhorse. Before an adequate period of convalescence, Peejo and Eltceesie were out caring for the sheep, and as a rival for Eltceesie’s favor there came Natawney Begay, vain and favored son of the tribe’s big medicine man. In boyish physical conflicts he bested the sick-worn Peejo. Yoinsnez’s open approval of Begay’ s attentions widened the breach between Yoinsnez and Peejo, and, driven to anger, Peejo told Yoinsnez that he would never find Blackhorse until he had returned to Peejo the sheep and horses taken from his father’s corral, and then Peejo disappeared. Months had lengthened into years when Begay returned home from a celebration in New Mexico to tell a brooding Yoinsnez of having seen Peejo — a new Peejo, now the adopted son of a wealthy white man, who sent word that he would come back some day — a day of triumph for Peejo in which Yoinsnez “will crawl on his belly and beg me to help him.” Then there came further to plague Yoinsnez’s life a burly white man who set up a questionable trading post, operated on gambling principles, and who finally goaded the reluctant Yoinsnez into a bet for high stakes on a horserace and a footrace.
Yoinsnez with borrowed cash had covered the one hundred dollars, and he hoped to win, though he was reconciled to lose. Other Navajos, suspecting nothing, put up their cash on the old standby as long as anyone would call their bets.
The horse-race was dangerously close, but the gray seemed to fade out before they reached the line, and while the Navajos howled their delight and claimed their money, The Badger made a great show of disappointment, but remembering what a good loser he had pretended to be, he slapped Yoinsnez on the back as the money was delivered.
“Ha, ha, ha, youbetcherlife! Who played the trick this time? The old man is smarter than I took him to be.”
The flattery, however transparent, was too sweet to be resented, for in its refreshing spell the gloomy shadow of Peejo and his secret were forgotten.
The sight of that old bay mare leading across the line after all these years, stirred the native blood of the reservation, and they made more fuss over the Navajo boy preparing to run than they had made over the old mare. He simply had to win — they couldn’t bear anything short of it.
With the animation of racial pride like a stimulus in his blood, Yoinsnez mounted a hogan and watched with dropped jaw, Eltceesie beside him. The white man gave it every ounce of strength he had to give, but he fell behind as the exulting roar became deafening all around him.
The Badger was really disappointed at this outcome, yet he gathered himself and repeated his compliments. After all, he could well afford to give them the big laugh, the patronizing slap; they tickled the old man and paved the way for something different.
“Youbetcherlife! The old man knows what his men and his horses can do, and he knows now there’s no trick about it — it’s just the stuff in the winner that wins.”
Eltceesie was there to hear it — her father now had a pedestal from which he could crow too loud for her ever to challenge his claims again. Also she had caught the spirit of the big crowd and in spite of her school manners she had howled her delight when the Navajo boy took the lead. When Begay and his brown colt won glory in a greater event, she would forget her wanderer and worship the medicine man’s son.
In spite of The Badger’s soothing compliments, Yoinsnez simply had to indulge his passion for crowing; even that would not compensate for his long period of humiliation.
“A law!” ( Well, well ) he gloated as he entered the store, “The Great Spirit gives no people faster horses nor faster legs than he gives us. We fight our way in heat and cold; we meet the fury of drouth and desolation in the desert, and we thrive because of our superior toughness.”
The store-man made no answer and sat for this once as if he were humbled.
“Everything among us that can’t take it,” the old man went on, “must die, whether it’s a horse or a man. But your weak horses and your weak men are doctored along to live and propagate their kind for a weak race.”
The Badger listened; he was biding his time; he wanted the old man to get steamed up to the right pitch, like a melon fully ripe.
“Your horses have to be kept in warm barns or they die with the cold — you have to feed them with a spoon and wrap them in blankets like babies. Your men must have dainty food prepared for sick people, and they have to live in warm rooms away from the drafts and sleep in snug blankets like mice in winter. You are an effeminate breed,” Yoinsnez declared, rubbing it in with a vengeance, “that’s why our horse beat your horse, and our man beat your man.”
It was the old man’s turn to expand, but there are limits even to what treacherous policy will endure.
“You beat us,” The Badger conceded modestly, “but you can’t do it again.”
They couldn’t do it again — what an insult! There was nothing they wanted more to do than to prove they could do it again, and do it more completely. Apparently The Badger still thought himself alone in that game of “baiting,” not suspecting that Tillego was alive and rearing to run, and that he had never been beaten. And he didn’t dream that Begay had done the most heroic thing of his life in staying out of the race at his intended father-in-law’s request.
“We have faster horses and faster legs than the Navajos,” declared the store-man, waking up with premeditated antagonism, “not only faster legs but faster brains or we couldn’t trim you so often in cooncan.”
“Doetah! Doetah!” (No! No!) Yoinsnez exploded, knitting his heavy brow in no humor to hear it again, “We beat you fair and square. We can do it again. We and our horses have been learning for ages to run, to meet exposure, hardship, and hunger without exhaustion. You and your horses are tender like plants that grow in the shade.”
“Old men like to tell what they used to do,” The Badger interrupted, keen for the flame his words had kindled, “Your men and horses used to be the fastest in this country, but that was before we came.”
The old man stood with his back against the wall and resolved to be heard above the fog-horn of his opponent: “We are still the fastest!” he yelled. “We proved it. Now if you can’t keep still, we’ll prove it in a way that you’ll have to be still,” for he had in mind Begay and the invincible brown colt, and he was in a fever of eagerness to see them in glorious display on the track to the humiliation and loss of all who would bet against them.
The Badger jumped at it — his melon was ripe to pick; “I’ll bet my store against your sheep,” he announced in a thundering broadside. “Youbetcherlife! My store against your sheep on the white man’s horse, and I’ll bet a thousand dollars we can pass any man you put on the track!”
The old man flinched — his sheep! His living! And a thousand dollars — he had never had that much money at once.
“Hacoon!” (Come on) bantered the store-man, tormentingly, “Put up the goods or quit talking like a doting old man — my store against your sheep, and the winner takes both horses.”
The store was crowded with men who had been touched by seeing the old bay mare nose out ahead in the race, men who had yelled themselves hoarse with exultation when the Navajo boy crossed the line ahead. Something thicker than water in their blood had captured their sympathies for the old man’s national pride, and they wanted the medicine man’s son and his brown colt to shine in the big event this promised to be.
“Take it!” demanded Begay hotly.
“Take it! Take it!” called a dozen voices at once, “We’ll raise the money.”
Inspired by hearty support where he had been meeting ridicule, the old man faced the challenge without compromise. “Hacoon!” he snapped, making one word express volume of feelings.
“That’s the spirit!” bawled The Badger, patronizingly, reaching with his hand but failing to touch the old man, “Your man must be a Navajo, and your horse a Navajo horse, and if either party backs out he loses the stakes the same as if he had lost the race.
“Oaa, Oaa,” (Yes, yes) barked Yoinsnez from the corner into which he had retreated. “If you back out we have the store and the money. Your man must be a white man raised on milk and sugar; your horse from the warm stable and the soft blanket.”
They repeated the terms back and forth to forestall any misunderstanding, and Begay arranged the details. It was agreed the races should come off right there in thirty days at a big nahoni (chicken-pull celebration) ; the whole country to be invited.
The whole country coming right there — that was always gratifying to the store management and its separating machine.
A government agent, hearing of the unusual bet, came to discourage or to modify it, and The Badger, feeling certain that nothing short of force could turn Yoinsnez from his purpose of carrying it through, made a good appearance by pretending to be perfectly willing to drop the whole affair.
But the old Navajo, as soon as he heard the proposition, snorted his objection without compromise. “Doetah! (NO!) These are my sheep,” he insisted, “I do with them as I please. You let this hateful thing come and take roots in my dooryard, and now you object to my doing to him what he tries to do to me.
His native blood was up; he couldn’t wage the kind of war his people used to make in the good old times, but he could still wield his wits and his possessions, and he resented any meddlesome interference.
Finding the old man bent on the races no matter the hazard, the agent had both parties agree that in case of any breach of agreement, the races were to be run over.
Begay spent the thirty days eagerly grooming himself and his brown horse for the races, but his intended father-in-law, strange to relate, when the floodtide of his im- pulsive feelings ebbed to their usual water-mark, began in concern to contemplate the desperate chances he was taking. He looked at the hard, red face of the storeman, and remembered how he had always carried his point.
This contemplating may have resulted unconsciously from Eltceesie’s silent, though pronounced disapproval, but when she saw her father descending in troubled apprehension to the plane of common sense, she told him frankly he was taking a fool’s chance.
He tried to make a show of resenting her words, but down in his proud old heart they disturbed him, and saddling his pony he rode over to Klee Betow where Begay was bubbling with anticipation, and some of the confident young hopefuls who urged him to call the bet had gathered there to exult in advance while they counted the slow days to precede the nahohi. Something in the fire and hope of youth falls like a sweet balm on the weariness of toiling age, and the old man returned home vibrant and alive with confidence.
Eltceesie was no longer a little girl with sun-faded hair tied in a bob with a cotton string, but a young woman who had seen things beyond the narrow sphere of her father’s acquaintance, and she was the only one of his family left to comfort him in his doting old age. He clung to her as life and love cling to their last tie. The school at Shiprock had not estranged her from him; the native blood still loved its own, and she saw his folly and ignorance not with disgust, but with pity.
“White men have horses bred and trained to do nothing but run,” she told him when he returned with big hopes from Klee Betow, “You can’t beat them — you’ll lose everything.”
“Nothing beats Begay- — nothing beats Tillego,” and he clung to the hope the young bloods had inspired. “You think you know a better man — and better horses — ” he shook his head regretfully. “When Begay beats the white man, and all his people shout in wild praise, you can no longer refuse him, to dream of the wanderer who ran away because he was unfit.”
“Begay knows nothing beyond the reservation; like you he refuses to see. The Badger laughs at both of you, and he will take everything we have.”
With his hopes crushed again, he decided to slip out of it, and then he remembered the clearly-repeated agreement that the one who backed out lost everything the same as if he had come second in the race.
(To be continued)