A Savage.

Thames Star, Volume XV, Issue 4898, 20 September 1884, Page 1

A Savage.

Going up Broadway last week with a friend from the West, we met a half-breed Indian coming down the street near the Post Office; and I was surprised to hear my friend exclaim: " Why, halloo Jim, what are you doing inNew^ York?" : Leaving the two talking together at a warm window in the Post, Office, I took a stage and rode home. He was a poor common looking fellow, that half-breed, with thin worn clothing, only distinguishable from the ordinary tramp by his tall, lithe form, long black hair, dark face, and piercing black eyes, and I wondered why my high-toned friend had stopped to renew acquaintance with that link of two ! races. Three days later I met my friend and remarked : "Well, Will, that Indian didn't get your scalp ? " "No. Let me tell you something about him." 11 All right." " I met him first at Abidene, Ks.; he was our guide in a surveying party. Saved my life one night." " How ? " " Prom a rattlesnake; the deadly reptiles are the constant menace of surveying parties ; in measuring off land you suddenly hear under your very feet in the thick grass the blood-curdling warning, and you must immediately jump or to be bitten; but at night they will actually crawl under your blanket and lie up close to you to get warm. That is your terrible and unconscious danger; move hand or foot and they bury their deadly fangs in you. The only way to keep them out of a tent is to surround it with a horse-hair lariat, laid in an unbroken circle on the ground; they will not crawl over it, the hair scratches them, or perhaps they mistake it for their mortal enemy, the black snake. Bat to the story: One night, in the bright moonlight streaming into the tent, Jin: saw a rattlesnake crawling over my neck, and just as I moved, he caught it by the tail.-.quick as lightning, and flung it through the tent door. 'Poor fellow, he was hungry the other night, and I took him over and ordered a first class supper for us both, and he

told me a little incident that went right down to ihe bottom of my "-heart. He is only a poor half-breed outcast, but he's as true as steel, and when they come to make up. jewels at the last day for the great crown, I think there will be something shining in his heart that may give poor Jim a chance. This is what he told me:—He had been away West to see his old Indian mother, who lives with her tribe, and was returning* across the plains on his pony when, one day, about half-way between Denver aDd Fort Wallace, he saw a waggon in the distance which appeared to hare gone into camp. Riding toward it he was surprised to see no horses in sight; and going still nearer he saw a woman sitting on the ground crjiog as if her heart would break. At her breast she held a j poor hungry-looking baby, which was seeking nourishment from a source which was evidently fast failing for the want of food. It was a pitiful scene ; the woman's husband lay dead in the waggon, and the horses had broken loose and gone in search of food, while not a spark of fire was left, and not a bite of food. The woman, or rather girl she might have been called, she was so young, told a sad tale of I suffering end destitution. She had married against the wishes and commands of her father who lived on a comfortable farm near Concordia, Es, and after a year of deprivation and toil with her bus* band, on a farm he had rented a few miles from her father, they had decided to go further West, and had started in their waggen with all they possessed in the world, including a little baby one or two months old. For a few weeks they enjoyed the trip; the weather was pleasant, game plentiful, and grass abundant for the horses. Then they got into a sterile region and became lost on the wide prairie, where day after day they had driven round in a circle; then her husband had taken sick and suddenly died in two days before Jim fonnd them, and in despair she had given up all hope and sat down to wait for death to take her and her pitiful babe. "Jim had plecfy of jerked meat with him and some coffee arid' 6th>r liftl^

articles- of food, and li* ac ualiy turned round to hide his tears, he said, when he S&w that poor half starved creature eat. He wasn't the man to leave that woman alone out there, so he stood by her and her baby, put them on his pony, abandoned the waggon after burying the dead, and at her,request started with them for their old home, walking and leading the pony, and occasionally killing some.game on the •way with his trusty Spencer rifle. The weather was gradually growing colder, Until sundown on Tuesday, when they reached the locality of her old home, and a few flakes of snow began to fall. It was there the woman made a fatal mistake. Instead of having Jim go with her te her father's house, she had him leave her within half a mile of the farm, thinking she could better effect a reconciliation with her father if she returned home alone. So, parting with Jim,, under his promise to come to her father's the next morning, she trudged along the old familiar road alone, and Jim rode out of sight towards the Tillage, when be stw her reach her father's,,door. Poor girl, he didn't see her father spurn her from the door. He didn't see her turn her weary footsteps out into the coming snowstorm, and wander heart-broken and desolate and aimlessly down the road into the darkness; he didn't hear the cry of the little, miserable freezing baby at her breast; he didn't hear her wail of anguish ; he didn't see the white snow weaving its mantle of eternal silence over her and the little dead baby by the roadside ; but there he found them the next morning with the snow heaped over them, a frozen smile on her face, and pressing the,head of her homeless babe to her homeless breast. Did I say 'homeless ? Ob, no ; they had gone home to that Father who had heard their pleading voices, and their cold hands knocking at the gates of pearl."