Roy Norton

“ IN San Francisco we all stopped at the Palace, then the famous place, and Jim began his round of buying. Poor Jim! How uncomfortable he appeared in his new clothing, how changed when stripped of his splendid beard, and how clumsily he walked in the shoes he must wear forever! I caught him in the act of sadly folding his moccasins after he had given his mukluks to a curio seeker. And Peechecan! Heavens! it was awful! In her native garb, thousands of miles from white women and in the freedom of the great North, she had appeared beautiful ”

“ Here came the Big Chicken and Jim. She had selected and he had foolishly allowed her to buy a bright red satin dress probably intended for evening wear. A yellow hat with plumes had also pleased her fancy. Round her neck and drooping far below her belt, which was made of nuggets, dangled a heavy nugget chain which weighed a few pounds and swung pendulous as she walked. ”

“ He walked up and down the room, his shoe heels striking awkwardly on the carpeted floor “I wish,” he went on bitterly, “that I'd never struck it! It isn't much to be richer than a king if you've got to pay—some prices.”
As I watched him, it began to dawn on me, dimly at first but with insistence, that this man of the wilderness, who belonged in the stern and undefiled places of the world, had only one road to happiness. I felt that perhaps I had been a fool.
“Jim,” I said in a sudden resolve to tell him the truth. “Peechecan left because she didn't want to be a drag on your life.” ”

“ Restless, greedy, and in haste, the gold hunters forged out over the hills in turgid, writhing streams of living men. Everything excitement, everything crowded and turbulent.
Jim was a simple sort of man who had been away from others so much that he had quite lost sight of their viewpoints. As the richest of us, he was at first flattered and wheedled ”

“ Almost everyone knew that Jim Jones, grave, six feet, bearded like a viking, and renowned for strength, had for a partner Tim Jordan, merry, five feet, hairless on face and crown, and merely wiry. The law of contrast! And for some seasons they were accepted as a pair of inseparables; but Death forced a division, and there came a spring season when Jim, after laying Tim away near where they had been prospecting, started to return to the trading post alone. ”

“ It was necessary for me to reason with her. “Peechecan,” I said, "what of Jim? He is still young. These are his people. He is rich, and can become a great chief among them. Is it fair to ask him to give it all up and go back to the North where there is nothing more for him to do? ”

“ WE grew to know them as one, and our liking for Jim didn't lessen, because in that country it was no disgrace for a man to take to himself an Indian wife. We called her “The Big Chicken,” not because she was big, for she was little; but it was easier to pronounce than Peechecan. ”

“ The thing that makes him despise those not of his race while obsequiously taking their gold dust for goods he has to barter; that makes the white women of the street who are more beautiful than the shaman's daughter deride her because she is not clothed to their taste and laugh at her endeavor ”

“ She couldn't look at him without showing her affection, and again had an opportunity to act as nurse, and was mothering him as if he was a baby when I left to bring a doctor. After this sanguinary event no man dared cross the path of The Squawman or refer to his family affairs, and for the remainder of that and the succeeding year he lived unmolested. ”

“ DID the formal marriage ceremony which they underwent make their wedding more binding than that of faith and the bound twigs? Did he prove recalcitrant to his opportunities and his race? Is an Indian girl to be treated as less than a woman? ”