The Native Blood

By Albert R. Lyman

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Chapter 10

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 despite their neighborliness in all other things there grew a bitter rivalry between the two for the capture of a phantom horse — Beleeh 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 horse race and a foot race, which the Navajos won, but which proved merely to be bait for another race with higher stakes. At the big race the horse and runner backed by the Navajos came in last, but Peejo arrived on the scene from his far-away adopted home to advise that the white man’s horse and runner were Navajo and he could prove it. Yoinsnez was included bu Eltceesie to seek Peejo’ s help, which he did in reluctant humility. Peejo presented his evidence, and by the terms of the wager the issue was left in confusion, but it was finally decided to run the races again, for which Peejo brought in a black horse from Texas and the Badger imported a famous racehorse from the Pacific coast. Peejo also brought a trainer and began to get in shape for the foot-race. Then came Natawney Begay and challenged Peejo to wrestle and quickly threw Peejo on the first fall.

The trainer bent over the wrestlers in alarm, and the Colonel, having been brought in displeasure to the scene, began to register his protest. “It won’t do; you’re unequally matched!” he insisted.

“Isn’t it understood that I never quit till I’m licked?” Peejo demanded, his firm jaw suggesting the temper of an angered bulldog. “This game has three rounds; this is only one.”

Dismissing the two men who were bending over him, he rubbed the sand from his eyes and turned to the exultant Begay, his lips pressed tightly together, but his index fingers hooked in a stubborn lock.

As soon as they had clinched again, Peejo drew up quickly with his knees on his chest and went backward on the sand pulling Begay after him. Before they had landed in what would constitute a fall, Peejo’s feet shot up against Begay’s stomach with the suddenness and force of two giant springs, pitching him forward on his head in a heap.

Surprised and chagrined, the medicine man’s son gathered himself and repeated the challenge. Peejo consented without a word, and they circled warily. Darting in with animal intuition, it became quick work, deep short breaths, suppressed grunts, strength, and resolution and love and hate in a vital contest before the very face of its coveted prize. Eltceesie, the trainer, and the Colonel looked on with drawn breath. Panting fate hung on the struggle — the deepest of heart-desires fought in it for dearest life.

Peejo was deliberate and cool — definite purpose in every movement, however rapidly he had to make it. Begay was inured to the hard punishment of the hills, proud scuffle champion of all the tricks the hillmen knew. And now he knew Peejo’s trick, and it would not bear repeating.

But the trick had different variations, and it began the second time in quite another way. The rest of it happened like the instant springing of a steel trap, landing Begay on his head with no time to analyze the process.

Mortified and angered, he insisted on another chance, noting slyly the worshipful eyes of the shepherdess fixed on the hero from Texas. The trainer positively objected, “Twice in succession gets the blue ribbon,” he announced, preparing to rub Peejo off.

A race between Blackhorse and the bay was already in progress, a race for recovery from the long truck ride, and to adjust to the dry climate of the heated desert. The parties concerned went back and forth from one stable to the other as eagerly as if they might be watching the two horses toiling on the track. To the black stallion it was the home land with agreeable appeal to his native affinities. But the sand, the alkali water, and the scorching winds were strange and disagreeable to the bay. They hauled his water from a distant spring, and they gave him shower baths to keep him cool. Yet the bay was to carry no more than seventy-five pounds in the race, while Peejo, never trusting his races to another rider, weighed twice that much.

The people who had attended the Nahohi a month before, returned now bringing their friends. The story of the mystery horse traveled fast and far after Peejo’s arrival, and people poured in from places near and distant to see the supernatural mustang and the remarkable outcast who had brought him back to the homeland.

The Colonel resolved that the footrace, scheduled for ten, should not be delayed, though cars and horsemen continued to appear over the hill up to the very minute of starting. People from California and the outside in general figured that Henderson’s record left no room for doubt, and they bet accordingly. Noise, bluster, and general confusion made a scene different from any over which the desert had ever raised its mysterious hands before. A race between a remote tribe of Indians and all the rest of the world! It was uniquely ridiculous, and the jostling crowd was a-buzz with relish for it like a swarm of bees.

Then it suddenly developed that the contest had a new angle: Natawney Begay intended to run.

“The h— he does!” barked the Badger,

Begay was there in person, insisting that he had a perfect right to run if he took a notion, and he had taken a very pronounced notion. The track was wide enough for three, he would be the third man and count for the Navajo winner if he came out ahead, and nobody was going to stop him.

Nobody did stop him. His entry in the race matched Navajo money against Navajo money till the latest bets had to be on one of the natives or not at all.

A murmur of awe and wonderment ran through the crowd as they saw the two sons of the sandhills stripped for action : the muscles like braided rawhide, clean and hard — the powerful legs and mighty lung-capacity; they represented nature’s stern selection from hard-fighting generations where the weak and the deformed had been uncompromisingly culled from the race. They were her splendid achievement of physical fitness, and one of them was fitness plus artful training.

Henderson had a good physique, but of very different type. He was “a good individual” and had been carefully trained, but his ancestors had not been selected by inexorable process for their supreme fitness. Neither he nor they had followed long-legged sheep over desert hills for months at a time.

The three rode in a car to the starting-point a mile and a half away where they looked like specks under the bright desert sun. It was a typical summer morning of the reservation, the two hands raised as always against the sky-line, and the distant mists giving promise of wind or rain.

The signal shot was too distant to be heard, though the crowd listened and strained its eyes. Yoinsnez and Eltceesie had mounted their old hogan on the line across the outcome, and on the other side the Badger was perched on the cab of a truck, pressing a pair of binoculars feverishly against his face. There were other glasses, mainly among visitors from the big outside, but everybody watched, and the din died down to a whisper.

The runners looked like a fuzzy little knot in the long path, and the naked eye could not discern the leader. A man with a telescope mounted the back of his coupe and volunteered as official announcer.

“Begay is ahead, Peejo behind,” he yelled.

They seemed to hold that identical position for a quarter of a mile while Yoinsnez squirmed and muttered, training his once-keen eyes on the moving specks, and fumbling absently with his disarranged turban.

“Peejo gaining on Henderson — Henderson gaining on Begay,” called the announcer.

The three moved gradually into as much of a knot as when they started and came near enough to be distinguished without glasses. They had covered a mile and neither one ahead. The shepherdess shaded her eyes with her hand and kept her gaze fixed on the race as if her life depended on it. Her father, his long teeth showing over his sagging lip, had lost all account of everything else in creation.

Begay fell behind, the other two ran abreast — toiling, side by side in spite of desperate effort to get away. It looked as if one might be setting the pace with the limit of his power, and the other reserved for a last dash. But which one?

It was no longer a test of speed, but of death-daring endurance — a measuring of the iron in the vital reserve, and a test of the skill in combining that iron with supreme effort. Two hearts hammered out their desperate demand for every
thing placed to their credit by inheritance or by training. Agonizing effort showed on their faces as they came near and their reeking skin glistened in the fierce sunlight.

The Badger stood with his big hat in both hands, his mouth eagerly open for a big noise. Yoinsnez leaned forward as in a trance.

Peejo took the lead; Henderson toiled after him in vain and they shot over the line!

Pandemonium broke loose — the wild howl of the desert in its victory! The Badger disappeared from the cab-roof. Yoinsnez, animated like a released captive, bounded down from the hogan, the shepherdess after him. They wanted to find Peejo, but a thousand of his exultant tribesmen had him surrounded with their deafening applause.

When the Colonel and the trainer rescued him from being smothered and ordered the enthusiastic throng to stay back, the old man and his daughter followed to the shade where they laid Peejo on a blanket and rubbed him with some clear liquid.

Yoinsnez was proud, patriotic, loving, thrilled, everything else all at once to a soul-bubbling degree. He fidgeted and tried to tell it all while he half-reached for his beloved champion. The shepherdess simply looked the admiration she could tell better with her eyes than her tongue. She had never looked that way before, even in the old days when Begay was victor on the hills, or when he rode gloriously away on the bay mare to the hunt.

“Now I want you to lie still here a while,” ordered the trainer. “Just rest quietly and talk with your friends,” and hurrying past the little shed they had improvised for the black horse, he went on to join the Colonel in claiming the stakes.

“Yes, do talk to us,” pleaded the shepherdess, catching up the trainer’s words. “Tell us now about Beteeh thlizhen. Please tell us,” and she kneeled very near him on the sand.

“It’s a long story to begin right now,” he objected, but catching her hungry eye, he raised on his elbow, looked around to make sure no one could hear, and began in their native tongue. He wanted none of the curious visitors to get a word of it, for it was difficult enough, even with his hardboiled methods, to keep them from prying into his affairs.

“You know we all hunted Blackhorse,” he was speaking of the old years before his people died, “but we couldn’t catch him. He wouldn’t be caught. Well,” and he gazed away at Huskaniny Mesa, “over there on the other side is a shelf, half a mile long, and on it there is a little spring. When we found it, nothing had ever been there to eat the big grass, and we made a trail into it from the hillside. The rim of smooth rock above it was sloping — a determined horse could slide down to the shelf, but it was much too steep and high for him ever to climb back that way.”

The shepherdess had become oblivious to everything but Peejo and his story, while her father, his long teeth showing over a sagging lip, had gone back over the years to follow the mesa-king again.

“We put our three mares on that shelf as a lure for the Blackhorse,” and he looked around again to be sure no Navajos were hearing what he said, “the black mare, the bay mare, and the white mare, and we built a strong fence higher than a man across the trail so that nothing could pass. Then we went away, giving Blackhorse time to discover them and slide down over the rock. We watched for a chance to go back when you wouldn’t know and follow our track.”

“Oaa!” nodded the old man in rapture of understanding, for he was back again in mind and soul on the big chase over Huskaniny Mesa.

“When you got sick, we went back to the shelf and found Blackhorse there with the mares. Oh, what a beauty! He snorted loud when he saw us, lifting up his head high and turning his ears at us in surprise and defiance. He flew back to the rock to climb up where he had come down. He couldn’t — there was no footing. He slid back every time, leaving streaks of hair and blood on the rock. When he saw us coming with our ropes, he bounded round us and ran to the lower side of the shelf. On the very rim he raised his head and tail straight in the air, looking fire at us with his kingly black eyes. Then he snorted long and loud and plunged over the rim.”

“Oh!” gasped Eltceesie. “If it had been any other horse, it would have killed him.”

“It did kill him!” and Peejo looked at her steadily from under his straight brows in stinging memory of the tragedy. “He fell two hundred feet and struck on some big rocks. I could show you his bones there now.”

“Yaw de law!” barked old Yoinsnez. “Your father killed Blackhorse! Then the great Spirit killed your father and all his family — but I saved you.”

“You’re making fun of us,” the shepherdess protested in injured tones. “You’re laughing at us — you’re telling us Blackhorse was killed, that his bones are over there on the rocks, but we can see him alive there under the shed.”

(To be continued)