Story Of A Bad Indian
by
Malita was a half-breed, the daughter of an old squaw man. She had spent several years at the Indian school in Phoenix, and had proved herself an apt pupil. Later she went to work on Simmons’ Ranch. She was a very pretty, healthy looking girl, and one day Morgan Jones, the hunter and trapper, asked her to marry him. She went with him to his cabin near the Reservation and settled down.
Jones was a devil-may-care sort of chap, who, when he had a little money, came to the straggling one-horse town near the Reservation, drank considerable whiskey, and amused himself by running his pony up and down the one street, firing off his gun, and shouting at the top of his voice. This was Jones’ idea of a good time, and his method of contributing his share to the sanguinary ornamentation of the embryo metropolis.
Malita made Jones a good wife, and attended to his creature comforts to the best of her ability, and when Jones returned to the cabin in an inebriated condition she soothed him, and put him to bed, looking upon such incidents as a matter of course. For a year or more they lived contentedly, and a little boy was born to them.
On the Reservation lived an Indian named Tixinopa, a splendid specimen of a savage athlete, and the most noted runner and hunter in his tribe. Like many of his race, while hating the white man, he loved the white man’s fire-water, and it made him surly and quarrelsome. He was a natural leader, and often, at night, he spoke with fiery eloquence of the wrongs of his race, sowing the seeds of unrest and rebellion.
Tixinopa was the only cloud which disturbed the domestic horizon of the Jones family. He haunted the vicinity of the cabin, and was continually asking Malita for whiskey and tobacco when Jones was away, until at last Jones intimated to him gently that his presence was, to say the least, undesirable. Being a child of the woods and hills, he did not have at his command a large vocabulary of diplomatic phrases to enable him to do this politely, in fact, he was blunt.
In describing the interview to Malita afterwards he said:
“I told him if he cum around here any more I’d smash his head, an’ he grunts an’ draws himself up this a-way, and looks ugly and says, ‘he’s a big Injun,’ and I told him to go to hell!”
For some time Tixinopa kept away from the cabin, but one day he appeared and demanded whiskey. He was half drunk, and his bloodshot eyes blinked at Malita as he swayed unsteadily in the doorway.
“No, Tixinopa, there is no whiskey.”
Tixinopa’s eyes grew ugly. “You lie, you half-breed squaw; but be it so, I will take the boy away until you remember where it is.”
So saying he lifted the baby by the arm and swung him on to his shoulder. The child cried out with pain from its twisted arm. Malita’s heart sunk with a dreadful fear.
“Give the child to me, Tixinopa, do not be so rough; see, you have hurt him.”
She tried to take the boy, but Tixinopa pushed her away roughly and she fell to the ground. Up she sprang and threw herself upon him, trying to get the boy, and in the struggle she scratched his face slightly, so that the blood came. With a curse he struck her full in the face with his clinched fist and she fell as if dead, and lay with her hands twitching feebly.
“Take your half-breed brat,” he hissed, throwing the baby roughly on the ground beside her. He turned to walk away, but something in the motionless form of the child caused him to look again, and he saw that his little head lay doubled under his arm in a way that could only mean one thing–a broken neck.