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

before the fight. He had four children too, and one of them, the
oldest girl, was in her teens already. And they were all by his
second wife. His first children were already grown up and had
families of their own. He says two of the boys were killed in the
battle. And that was in sixty.”
    Before the father could speak, he went on to Gwen,
"It was right after that the black painter got started. The
Indians took an awful lickin’ in the second battle, when they had
troops from California and everything in against
them, and they scattered all over the country north of the lake. When
the reservation was laid out, their chief, Winnemucca, called ’em
all back, but there was quite a few wouldn’t come. Thought it was a
trap, I guess, or just didn’t like the idea of being fenced in when
they’d had the whole country to themselves."
    "About the way the jack-rabbits had it,"
the father said.
    "Maybe," Harold said. "Anyway, they’d
been getting along on it for a sight longer than there’d been white
men anywhere in America, and the country was still as fit to live
in as it ever had been. Our kind wrecked it worse in
ten years than they had in lord knows how many hundreds, maybe
thousands."
    "Ignorance and poor tools," the father
said.
    "We got a long ways to go in some things then,
before we catch up with their ignorance."
    "You sound like Arthur," the father said.
"Arthur and that sour-faced newspaper friend of his in Virginia
City that got him started reading all that useless trash; what was
his name? Bates. Jim Bates. Back to nature, and it’s a sin to make
an honest dollar, and so on."
    "Not an honest one," Harold said, and
looked quickly at Gwen again.
    "Anyway, Joe Sam was one of them that wouldn’t
come back. He took his family and traveled clear up into the
mountains somewhere northwest of us here, up around Shasta somewhere,
near as we can make out. Arthur thinks the black cat got started up
there, in some extra bad winter. He thinks it’s kind of Joe Sam’s
personal evil spirit, not a regular one for the Piutes. Either way,
it’s got so, in his mind, it kind of stands for the whole business
of being run out by the white man, the end of things, you might say.
Like the ghost dance was for the ones that stayed together."
    "Wasn’t there a real one?" Gwen asked.
    "I don’t know," Harold said. "I
never saw a black one myself, or heard of anybody that did, for that
matter. But there might have been one—a freak, dark enough to call
black. There was something, that’s sure.”
    "A dream," the father said. “The old fool
can’t tell dreams and facts apart any more."
    "No," Harold said, shaking his head. "It
comes out too often. Little things about it. Whatever he’d added to
it since, he remembers something."
    "He can’t remember anything," the father
said. "He couldn’t even remember his own name. ‘Sam’ he
said, when we asked him," he told Gwen. "He’d heard it
somewhere, and that was all he could think of. So we called him Joe
Sam, because Curt was already calling him Joe."
 
"He knows his real name, all right,"
Harold said. "He won’t tell us, that’s all. Indians keep
them secret. They think it gives anybody a power over them to know
their real names."
    "Rubbish," the father said, "pure,
romantic rubbish. The notions Arthur digs up," he said to Gwen,
"are enough to make a reasonable man weary. It’s all this
useless stuff he reads." He waved a hand loosely at the
bookshelves in the corner behind him. "Novels and poetry and
fairy stories about the ancient Greeks and the Chinese and the Lord
only knows what. Not a dependable fact or a piece of usable
information in the whole lot. Now it has him  manufacturing the
same sort of nonsense. He’s as completely a dreamer as Joe Sam
himself, only it isn’t just by spells."
    "He does a little thinking of his own,"
Harold said, as softly as Arthur might have said it.
    The father snorted. “Precious little I’d call
thinking."
    "About all that’s done