# Tongues of Flame (MacFarlane)/Chapter 36

NOW it had also happened that while the commit the of townspeople was meeting in the courthouse and looking for a man—a man whom everybody could trust because they all knew he was honest—the cabinet of Boland General, meeting in the library of Humboldt House, was doing almost the same thing. They were all haggard, anxious, depressed; yet old J. B., though looking thin and harrowed, was stout-hearted still—or affected to be.
"We're not lost yet," he proclaimed huskily. "Temporarily, though, we'll have to ask for a receivership. It's come to that."
"He'll have to be somebody familiar with the details of the business," observed Quackenbaugh, perhaps as nominating himself.
"He'll have to be somebody this town will believe in and trust like the sheep trust the shepherd," cut in lean Jim Pierce, perhaps as dashing Quackenbaugh's hopes.
"He must be a man who can deal with Indians too, for by this decision, the Siwashes are our masters." Mr. Boland went on doggedly, facing the bitter fact. "They own us. We must deal with them. But—why——" the old eyes lighted and his face and voice began to glow with a new birth of enthusiasm. "Why, if we can get them to be reasonable; if we can get them to set a fair valuation on their holdings—agree to a ​long period of amortization, why—why, Boland General can pay out every obligation and be as rich at the end as it was before the Supreme Court robbed us of all we've been working for."
"It all depends on—on getting the Indians to see reason. They have to do something with this timber; they have to continue the development of their property if it is to pay them a dividend. We're here; we're in position; they might as well arrange with us to go on manufacturing as to try to have someone else do it."
"But Mr. Boland," objected Quackenbaugh, "an Indian don't look at things like a white man. He isn't practical. Revenge—the satisfaction of kicking us all out—might mean more to them than dollars. They are queer, Indians are. Look at that yellow devil, Adam John."
So the discussion went forward in the Boland library, almost till the gray light of the second morning after—a morning which saw many things happen.
It saw the Red Cross come in. It saw Julius Hornblower come in. It saw the Salisheuttes! The Supreme Court had upset Hornblower's claim as it had upset Boland's title; yet it was his suit that had turned the eagle eye of that high court upon the matter, so that in a way he was the author of all this calamity; yet that abashed him nothing—pleased him perhaps. Anyway, vulture-like, bird of evil omen, he came flapping his way back into the debris, knowing it would be strange if he could not make some profit out of so much misery. It was indicative of the general mood that no one paid any attention to Hornblower at all.
But the first spectacular event of this second spectacular day was the return of an entire nation to its ​ancient seat and heritage. It came up the inlet in two largish gasoline launches, moving slowly, because towing each a string of smaller fishercraft behind. Out of these boats there clambered to the shore this nation—family groups of dark-skinned beings; members of both sexes in their prime, bowed and wrinkled old women, gnarled and twisted old men, children of all ages from infancy to adolescence, with here and there papooses astride their mothers' hips. All beyond infancy were more or less grotesquely dressed in more or less of white man's clothing—oldish men with rusty frock coats above overalls; stout, squat women in calico aprons, yet wearing blankets; middle-aged men in moccasins but wearing reefers or sweaters or even celluloid collars.
Having debarked at the inlet's edge, this ancient, tiny patriarchal nation began a reconnaissance in full force. Still in family groups, carrying their children or leading them, patient with the aged tramping slowly, with bright-colored handkerchiefs about their brows, the expedition moved through the ruins and stared about with a curious look of new proprietorship in its glance. Pigeon-toed, knock-kneed, inarticulate, seeing much and saying little, the Indians ambled along the front and up Whitman Avenue to come at length to a stand before the courthouse; for their reconnaissance was by no means aimless, and they had been proceeding under escort.
This escort was a white man, tall and awkward-looking, wearing a suit of clerical blacks; a spare and bony man, with a dead white and not unhandsome face and small dark eyes that glowed with a fanatic ardor. He sheltered a shock of crisp black ​hair under a black fedora hat worn without its accustomed crease in the crown; this making him look taller than he was, at the same time that it imparted an eccentric air. Close about him were grouped two bent and gnarled old Indians and four or five in the vigorous forties and fiftics, all wearing dingy frock coats as denoting some official garb, which was entirely proper since these were the chiefs of the tribe. But they were also elders of a Presbyterian church. From time to time they looked up reverently into the face of their tall white leader as to a missionary Moses.
A cry was raised: "The Salisheuttes! . . . The Salisheuttes!"
People heard and turned and stood to gaze at this nondescript group of human mongrels—the remnant of a once considerable tribe, owners by the treaty of 1855 of all "that certain tract of land between the west shore of Harper's Basin and the South Inlet thereto and the said east shore of the Pacific Ocean."
The Salisheuttes! Seventy-one of them in all! The Supreme Court, by its decision, had made them rich. Yet they did not look so very opulent now. In their awkward garments, with their curious, awed manner, they looked contemptible.
A crowd gathered quickly. Acid phrases, unflattering comments, and outraged exclamations were tossed from mouth to mouth with bleacher-like indifference to the feelings of those of whom they spoke.
"Here, you Siwashes!" bawled a sergeant of M.P.'s. "Head in there!" He waved his hand and the Reverend Jedediah Collins meekly led his charges into an avenue formed by two short rows of unoccupied conical tents, a score of which now dotted the courthouse grounds. ​"All same your tepees," encouraged the sergeant; and with a large gesture bade them take possession, then marked with satisfied eye while one of his sentries took up his march between them and the gaping crowd.
"Make yourselves comfortable, brethren," said the Reverend Jedediah to Chief Skookum Charlie, the ancient and time-withered chief of the Salisheuttes and the ruling elder of that congregation into which this missionary's spiritual labors had wrought these people. "I will go in and consult the young white chief."
He went into the courthouse and inquired his way to the jail. For there had been Salisheutte boys also in Henry Harrington's platoon, and this tribe had learned through them to trust Henry Harrington as they trusted no other white man save only Jedediah Collins; and it was a rock-rooted, storm-proof trust, entirely unaffected by such trifles as had turned the populace of Edgewater to frothing at the mouth against its former idol.
With their pastor departed, Chief Skookum Charlie squatted upon his heels on the lawn, with his six cochiefs dropping to their haunches round him. Chief Charlie lighted his pipe, a stubby, unbcautiful affair with a huge bowl and a thick stem from which old Charlie sucked contentment at so short a range that the tips of his eyelashes must have been singed had not time already denuded his lids of such a valance. His colleagues produced pipes also; some modern as the corner cigar store purveys, some as native and aged as themselves.
Rumor of the arrival of the Salisheuttes came quickly to John Boland, brooding in his den upon the hill. He started at the news. The inevitable had come nearer​—and he had not found the man who he felt could be trusted with negotiations so important and delicate; yet they must be entered upon at once; and he was temperamentally unfitted for the task himself; accustomed to command, he would not be good at supplication. Yet there was no one else he trusted this morning so much as he trusted himself.
True if he appeared among them suddenly, the people of Edgewater might leap upon him and tear him to pieces; yet Old Two Blades was not a coward. He took the chance. He ordered his car and descended for the first time into the smoldering city, daring the temper of the crowds.
Entirely alone, as advertising either his courage or his faith in his fellow citizens, he stepped out of his car at the courthouse—standing tall and nearly as erect, nearly as immaculate as ever. His manner was a bit complex—properly restrained as acknowledging sympathy with these victims of his, slightly humbled acknowledging that he himself had encountered bitter disaster; yet somehow dauntless besides, as insistent that though battered he was not broken, that he staggered but stood up. This manner was meant to show that he confessed a fault but that his will was still indomitable—that people, if they would be lenient and trust him once more, might yet have cause to be grateful to him.
And strangely the gathered throng neither spat upon him, nor spoke to him. It reviled him with silence. It did not clamor for his arrest for the gigantic fraud he had practiced. The people thought that would take care of itself. Their chief concern was in their own distresses and distractions. They wanted to know ​what they were going to do about everything—their homes—their losses, their bread and butter—their landlords, these squatting Siwashes here. Perhaps if any gave thought, they marveled at their own moderation; not realizing that as a community they had been purged by fire; that they were under a sort of moral conviction; that they had seen into their own hearts by the light of their own blazing homes; seen themselves as corrupted and debauched by this John Boland, with his cunning appeals to self-interest, until they had lost their sense of true values, till they had become petulant and self-willed as babies; until they had cried: "Away! Away with this assemblyman from the seventy-first! Release unto us Barabbas!"
But now Barabbas stepped out of his limousine and they felt only aversion for him. They let him pass—and the sergeant let him cross the open space to where the Salisheuttes were squatted.
"I am Mr. Boland," he announced gravely to Skookum Charlie.
The wrinkled old chief never budged from where he squatted on his haunches. There was merely curiosity in his glance, as at a potentate of yesterday.
"You Boland? . . . Humph!" Skookum Charlie grimaced, and flexed his wrinkles. "Skinny man—ugh!" He grunted contemptuously and glanced around the circle at his co-chicfs as asking them to note how a man who must have been able to buy so much to eat had profited so little from his opportunities. To be treated so objectively was an unusual experience for Mr. Boland, but he was prepared to endure much today and he knew the value of directness and felt it was called for here—he began promptly:
​"Chief Skookum Charlie! I have come to throw myself entirely on your mercy."
But he had chosen words unfortunately; the old chief swelled like a turkey about to strut.
"Mercy?" he rumbled out of the age-broken depths of his voice, and his eyes narrowed shrewdly and glittered, opaque almost as ebony, save in the very center where was a tiny yellow pit out of which shot a beam that searched and seared. "Mercy!" rumbled the chief again, withering in his scorn, "Did the white man show mercy to my son, Adam John?" Not that Adam John was any son of Skookum Charlie's or even of his tribe, but—he was an Indian.
"But, Adam John——" Mr. Boland was attempting to qualify, when the old chief interrupted imperiously.
"You big! Adam John little! You s-s-squash him like toad. Now me big! Chief Skookum Charlie heap big!" The old man smote his shrunken chest proudly and his bared yellow fangs dripped venom. "You little toad," he exulted fiercely. "Me squash-h-h you—flat!"
And that was all! That was all. The Indian's wrinkled face became a thing of stone. All its lines merged in resolution so implacable that Mr. Boland felt himself for once looking into the face of a man whose will was firmer than his could be, whose nature was more terrible in its tenacity. "An Indian is a poor thinker but he has got a long memory," Scanlon had once warned him; he had not felt the force of this till now when his spirit recoiled before this sprayed venom of Chief Skookum Charlie.
Boland tried to give him look for look but couldn't ​do it. He quailed before the smoldering judgment in those remorseless black beads of eyes and turned away glad enough to be facing them no longer. He tried to retire with dignity and perhaps managed it, but as he walked down the M.P.'s cleared space it was like running a gauntlet. He smarted under the curious and, as he felt, exulting glances bent on him. When he reached the car, his forehead, under the hatband, was wet with a sweat of physical and spiritual weakness. John Boland was almost in.
But at the very door of his car, he halted and turned and looked back over the heads of people, over the tops of tepces to the county jail. There his eyes roved until they found one window high up from which the bars were conspicuously missing. On this window he fixed his gaze for a few seconds and the expression of the lined face changed—changed as if hope sprang up again in him, for Old Two Blades was a very tenacious man.
There was hope even in Skookum Charlie, if he had known that the gleam in the old eyes was one half of humor—if he had known that Skookum Charlie, besides being a fierce and vengeful chief of a wronged and defrauded people, was also a mild and gentle elder of a Christian church. Yet, for that matter, neither did Skookum Charlie know that Boland, besides being a mighty creator of civilization, as well as a criminal optimist, was also an elder of a church.