Free Track of the Cat - Walter Van Tilburg Clark by Clark Page A

worked his lower lip up over his moustache
and down again, smiling at the same time. "I wouldn’t believe
all I see, my dear, if I were you. He’s no child, to be sure, but
he’s nowhere near as old as he thinks he is, either. They have no
real means of keeping track of their age, you know, and they grow old
much faster than white men."
    He left the statement in the air, as clearly only an
introduction, and lighted his cigar again. When the smoke came full
and easy, he blew a long, slow cloud of it up into the lamp, and went
on.
    "We had one once, did odd jobs for us in
Virginia City. A woman. The men wouldn’t work at all, if they could
help it. Beneath their dignity. They preferred to beg for food and
whisky and cast-oif clothes. She was a sight, this one. Rose, we
called her, in order that there should be something sweet about her."
    He chuckled and looked at Gwen to be sure she
understood the joke. Gwen made the little smile, and looked from the
corners of her eyes at Harold. His face was expressionless and he was
working one hand slowly back and forth over the other, which he had
made into a fist on the table.
    "And also," the father went on, "because
we had to call her something. She was unbelievably fat and dirty, and
had bad eyes, like most of them, and her hair down in bangs so long
it half covered them. She wore a bedspread with huge red flowers on
it for a shawl. That’s actually what suggested the name Rose to us.
And an old pair of men’s shoes, three sizes too large for her, and
never tied up. She was honest enough, as Indians go," he said,
chuckling, and inviting Gwen, with a look, to
enjoy this joke too. "Never stole anything unless we left it
around in the open, or weren’t there to watch her.
    "Well, to get to the point, I always took it for
granted that Rose was forty-five or fifty at least. Her face was
heavily lined, and she’d had something like twelve children, though
there didn’t seem to be more than three or four of them left alive.
They have no idea how to take care of a child, or any interest in
doing so. Once they’re off those boards the women carry them around
on, they either survive or they don’t, pretty much by accident,
like any other little animals. But then I chanced to meet a man who’d
known her before she came to Virginia City. He was a hunter or
trapper or some such. At any rate, he was a squaw-man. He’d lived
with Indians more than with whites, and wore his own hair clear down
over his shoulders, like a buck. Joel Blaine, I believe his name was.
Ever happen to meet him up there?"
    Gwen shook her head.
    "No, you wou1dn’t be likely to, I guess.
Probably before your time, and a secretive cuss anyway. Got that from
the Indians too, I suppose. At any rate, he’d known Rose when she
was a kid, and guess how old he said she was?"
    He asked the question happily, and sat back smiling
widely at Gwen and waiting to astound her with the answer.
    "I wouldn’t have any idea," Gwen said,
trying to smile.
    "Twenty-six or seven, not more," the old
man announced triumphantly. "And it’s the same with Joe Sam
here," he went on, after allowing her time to understand him
fully.
    "You cou1dn’t possibly guess his age by
looking at him, and he himself hasn’t any real idea of it, either.
He claims he’s over a hundred, but I’ll wager bourbon to sump
water he’s not much over half that."
    "He’s older than that," Harold said. "He
was already a brave when Fremont camped at Pyramid Lake, and that was
pretty near sixty years ago. Remember, he told Arthur about a brass
cannon they had?"
    "He’s like any other child," the father
said. "He don’t know the difference now between what he saw
and what somebody told him, maybe thirty years later."
    "I don’t know," Harold said. "He
remembers a lot of little things, too, like about the kind of buttons
Fremont had on his coat. And he was a war chief of some sort, when
they had that fight on the Truckee. He spoke in the last council they
had