The cheerful blackguard

I, José de la Mancha y O'Brien, was born on the ninth day of November, 1865, in Spain, of an Irish mother and a Spanish sire. Ten years later my parents entered the service of God, my father from a battle-field, my mother living in a convent.

With my brother, Don Pedro, the Brat, then eight years old, I was sent away from Spain to Tita, a fat Irish aunt, whose highly poisonous husband, Uncle Tito, was English, and lived in London. From their house, when he was old enough, I took the Brat to my school where I attended to his morals with a small strap. I had been busy for several terms explaining to the other chaps at school that they were heretics and doomed to hell, and as my skin was not large enough to hold the lickings they supplied me, they paid the balance to my little brother. He spoke as yet but very broken English and could not understand why he should share with me the glories of an early martyrdom. He shunned me.

Yet, when in 1883 I went to college, the Brat was not content to be left alone. Indeed he ran from school, and when I next heard from him, was in America, where he had gone to work for a man called Lane. When the summer vacation left me free, Aunt Tita supplied me with money and sent me off to collect my Brat. I was to bring him home and place him at a private school in Oxford where I could always keep him out of mischief. Thus I set out, determined to tear the Brat's hide off over his ears when I caught him. Perhaps he expected as much and was ungrateful, for when in due course I arrived in Winnipeg--from whence his letter appeared to have been posted--I could find no trace of my brother or of any man called Lane in Manitoba. There the search ended in bitter disappointment.

When I had lost my brother, with nothing left in all the world to love, a dog adopted me. Rich Mixed was named after a biscuit box containing twenty-seven distinct species of biscuits. You will realize that a dog must be of the noblest pedigree who had twenty-seven quarterings on his coat of arms and showed unmistakable descent from every possible kind of thoroughbred from daschund to great Dane. I loved him dearly and was consoled for my brother's loss.

Since I could not take Brat home, and would not return without him, I had no use for the remaining funds. Most of the cash was disposed of at a race-meeting where the wrong horses won. The rest of it merely dispersed.

At that time, a laundress pursued me with a bundle of my washing and a bill I could not pay. To dispose of this poor widow, I despatched her with a note to the Presbyterian minister. My letter accused him of deserting one whom he had sworn always to love and cherish. Mrs. Minister appears to have been morbid, for she put the police after me for attempting to levy blackmail. I could not safely remain in Winnipeg.

And yet I had not then the means for flight until I thought of Tito's dressing-case, a gift from His late Catholic Majesty to my fat uncle. It proved good enough to pay for a farewell dinner, at which I consulted my friends on the idea of flight from the city. Then just as they began to give me good advice, the police became obnoxious. I fled with my advisers in a cab beyond the city limits, and there we found a bad house where wine was plentiful. At the door we left cabby crowned with a chaplet of ham frill and crooning lullaby songs to his aged horse. Indoors we drank more wine than we could carry. Later in the evening Rich Mixed and I set forth to find my brother. We had no place to go to, and no money, so we did not get very far before I fell asleep out on the starlit prairie.

Once Rich Mixed woke me up to hear a terrible wailing close beside us, a wolf-howl, but for its human throb a thing beyond all anguish of the beasts, heartrending desolation keening star-high, while its faint echoes throbbed on the horizon. The huskies at the mission gave tongue in answer, the tame dogs bayed in distant Winnipeg. For some time Rich Mixed and I lay listening, while above us the star-blaze drowned in depths of the vast sky.

Again I woke, feeling the frosty crispness of the grass, breathing delicious air scented with perfume of roses. The green dawn widened, edged at the sky-line with clear topaz light. There, in the electric air of the Great Plains, life was all delight, up from the perfumed ground to those immensities of aerial splendor heralding the sun. I had never felt so well, or half so happy. And I had been drunk. Is the reader shocked? Why? If we poor moths were horrified by candles, our wings would not get burned.

Through sleep itself, and from the very moment of awaking, I was disturbed by the noise of the middle night, those agonized and desolating howls. Who howled? And what the deuce was it howling about? To see about that I got up, stretching myself and feeling rather dizzy, as though from running in circles. Then I lurched forward, tripped and sat down with a bang on a grave mound. The place was full of graves!

And as I fell the mournful wailing in the twilight changed at mid-howl into a funny chuckle. Then a soft voice said to me, "So. You come!"

I looked up, and saw Rain.

You may remember Tennyson's words, about the Woman you, and I, and all true men have loved:

"As I beheld her, ere she knew my heart, My first, last love, the idol of my youth, The darling of my manhood, and alas Now the most blessed memory of mine age."

The wilderness has always been to me a visible expression of that great Holy Trinity, of Power, Love and Truth, which we call God.

In Rain, the glamour of God's wilderness had taken human form as a red Indian girl with youth's delicious gravity of bearing, the childlike purity of the untainted savage, hale strength, athletic grace and eyes derisive. Sorrow had made her at that time aloof, remote from the world I lived in as a Madonna set above an altar, and yet her smile seemed to make fun of me. I looked up at her with reverence, with wonder, and if I loved, the love I offered to her was sacred, not profane. Yet if I seemed to worship, she would ridicule, so I had to pretend as a boy does to a girl. "Oh, don't mind me," I stuttered. "Please go on with that howl!"

"Boy-drunk-in-the-morning," she answered. "My dream, he say you come."

"So I have come," said I.

Years afterward, when I had learned her language, Rain told me in Blackfoot the whole story of the adventure, which led her to that meeting with me there on the plains at dawn.

She was a Blackfoot, of the Piegan or southern tribe, which settled in Montana, and her father was Brings-down-the-Sun, a war chief and a priest. In the winter before we met, the Piegan chiefs came to her father's lodge. At their request, he opened the sacred bundle of the Buffalo Mystery, whose ancient and solemn ritual engaged them for a day and a night in prayer. Afterward, they held a meeting of the council, to discuss the manifest wasting away of the bison herds on which the people depended for their food.

For years, the Stone-hearts (white men) had been slaughtering bison by millions for their hides, leaving the meat to rot. Now the last herds were surrounded by hungry tribes, and the end was in sight when the people must die of famine. So the chiefs sat in council.

Flat Tail had been told by his dream that all the buffaloes were hidden in a cave. Iron Shirt believed that the Stone-hearts were hiding the main herd in the country beyond the World-Spine (the Rocky Mountains). But Brings-down-the-Sun spoke of an Ojibway from the far East, who told him about the Man-it-o-ba or Land of the Great Spirit near to the lodge where the Sun God lived, from whence he rose each morning to cross the sky. "I am going," he told the council, "to this Land of God, and there I will open again my sacred bundle. I will speak to the Sun Spirit about our herds of bison, and How they are being wasted by the Stone-Hearts. I will pray that hearts of stone may be changed to flesh and blood lest all the people die."

So taking his daughter, Rain, to serve him in the ritual, Brings-down-the-Sun set out from their home beside the World-Spine, and traveled eastward for a thousand miles, crossing the plains to Manitoba, which was the Land of God. There at the sunrise making his prayer, he died, passing the threshold of God's house into the presence.

Rain showed me the hole where the Stone-hearts had buried her father. The ground spirits would catch him there, so she had torn up the earth and taken out the body. She had built a scaffold, where now her dead lay robed and armed in majesty, facing the sunrise. She had shot her father's horse so that its ghost might carry his shadow to the Sand Hills.

And afterward she had prayed.

"Oh, great Above-Medicine Person, Spirit in the Sun, I pray to you!

"All you Above Spirits and Under Spirits carry my prayer to the Sun!

"And all you holy Animals, wiser and stronger than I, have pity! Pray for me.

"I have made sacrifice of my jewels, and my long braids of hair. Great Sun God, take my father's shadow to the Sand Hills, that he may be with our dead."

The Seven Persons, our stars of the Great Bear, were pointing to the earth; the Lost Children, our Pleiades, were sleepy on their way to bed, when Rain felt the spirit leaving her father's body to ride the Wolf Trail, the milky way which leads to the hereafter.

And there was Morning Star. "Dear Morning Star," she pleaded, "don't give long life to me, for I am all alone."

She threw herself upon the upturned soil. "Oh, mother," she sobbed, "I'm all alone, and oh, so frightened. And you, dear Beaver Woman, my Dream Helper, can't you send me help? Oh, send a man to take me to my people."

The Piegan camp was a thousand miles away. What chance had she of escaping death among the hostile tribes between, or outrage at the hands of the Stone-hearts?

It was then she lifted up her voice in the Indian death-wail, and so continued mourning until I came in the gray of dawn, sent by her secret helper in answer to her prayer.

I saw the rifled grave, the scaffold and her dead. "The people," said I, "who run this graveyard will be so pleased!"

"You think so? My old man, he seeks the Mán-it-ou, but the Black Robe," she pointed to the Mission of St. Boniface, "the sacred man, he say 'The King of God is within you.' So my old man," this with a great gesture sweeping toward the skies, "he go seek!"

Rain's talk was a compound of charm, French half-breed patois, two or three English words, and the sign language. But, as we Spaniards have it, she was sympática, her eyes, her smile, expressing all she felt, and I have found love a great interpreter.

Her blanket, fallen wide apart, disclosed a beautiful tunic of white antelope skin, set with the teeth of elk, which tinkled softly.

"You little duck!" I whispered. That was profane love, but it really couldn't be helped.

"K'ya!" She drew back, folding the blanket across her breast. "Boy-drunk-in-the-morning, you métis, es?"