Bill, driving the little car which
he had named the Swallow, reached the quarters at
the School of Fire in a rising cloud of dust.
The wind had risen suddenly and the fine sand whipped
around the long board buildings, driving in through
every crack and crevice. All the rest of the
afternoon it blew, and at six o’clock, when the
Major came in, he was coated with the fine yellow
dust. By nine o’clock, when Bill went to
bed, a small gale was singing around, and about one
o’clock he was awakened by the scream of the
wind. It shrieked and howled, and the quarters
rattled and quivered.
Bill remembered the Swallow and his
dad’s car, both standing at the back door.
He rose and went to his mother’s room. He
found her curled up in a little ball on her quartermaster’s
cot, looking out of the window.
“Come in, Billy,” she
said as she saw him at the door. “You are
missing a great sight.”
They cuddled close, their arms around
each other, and pressed their faces close to the pane.
The yellow sand was driven across the prairie like
a sheet of rain. The Major’s big car shuddered
with each fresh blast, and the little Swallow seemed
to cower close to the ground. Continuous sheets
of lightning made the night as bright as day.
Over the whine and whistle of the wind they could
hear the distant rumble of the thunder. The room
was full of dust, driven through the cracks of the
window. Their throats were choked with it.
The wind blew harder and harder; the lightning grew
brighter, slashing the black sky with great gashes
of blinding light.
Bill looked sober. “Gee,
it is fierce!” he said in an awed tone.
“Where is dad all this time?”
“In his room sound asleep,”
said Mrs. Sherman. “I suppose he is used
to sights like this. Wasn’t it nice
of Oklahoma to stage such a wonderful sight for us?
I wouldnt have missed it for anything.”
“It is going to rain,”
said Bill, again looking out. “The thunder
is growing louder and louder. Did you ever see
anything like the glare the lightning makes?”
All at once Mrs. Sherman clutched Bill and pointed
out.
“Oh, look, look!” she cried.
Bill followed the direction of her
finger, and saw a small rabbit running before the
blast. He was going at a rate that caused his
pop eyes to pop worse than ever. As he skimmed
along, he made the mistake of trying to turn.
In a second he was being rushed along sidewise, hopping
frantically up and down in order to keep on his feet,
but unable to turn back again or to stop. Bill
and his mother laughed until they cried as the little
rabbit was hustled out of sight around the end of the
students’ quarters.
The lightning grew worse and occasionally
balls of flame shot earthward. The thunder rolled
in a deafening roar. Then suddenly the wind stopped stopped
so suddenly and completely that Bill jumped and his
mother said, “Goodness me!” in a small,
scared voice.
There was a long pause as though Nature
was calling attention to her freaks, and then down
came the rain. It came in rivers, sheets, floods.
The roads ran yellow mud; the creek over the bluff
commenced to boil. The sparse dwarfed trees that
clung to the sides of the gullies bent under the weight
of falling water.
It poured and poured and poured.
Bill had seen rain before, if not
in such quantities. He found himself growing
sleepy, and kissing his mother twice, once for luck
and once for love, as he told her, he went to bed
and to sleep, while the downpour continued until almost
morning.
The roads were impassable, although
a hot, steamy, sunshiny day did its best to dry things
up. Bill spent most of the day putting the poor
half-drowned Swallow in shape.
Frank telephoned, but could not get
over. He was excited about the damage that had
been done at the Aviation Field. One of the great
hangars had collapsed, ruining the machines inside.
No planes were allowed to fly.
Frank wanted Bill to walk over and
Bill suggested the same pastime for Frank; consequently
neither one would go. The roads continued to be
a gummy, sticky mass of clay, and after four or five
days Frank started to walk across the prairie to the
School of Fire.
Just before he reached the bridge
crossing the glen between the New Post and the School,
he heard a joyful whoop and there was Bill running
to meet him.
“Hey there!” called Bill,
as soon as he could possibly make himself heard.
“I was just starting over to see you.”
“Come on back!” grinned
Frank. “I am at home this morning.”
“Not as much as I am,”
answered his friend. “Gee, it has been a
long week! Did you ever see such a storm?”
“Oklahoma can beat that any
time she wants to,” boasted Frank. “That
was just a little one. You ought to see
a real blizzard or ‘sly coon’ as we call
the cyclones. They are bad medicine, as the Indians
say.”
“This was big enough to start
with,” said Bill. “I thought the Swallow
was going to fly away. And dad’s big car
reeled around. And you should have seen
our bath tub! It was full of sand.”
“Clear up to the top?” asked Frank teasingly.
“There was a good inch in it,”
retorted Bill, “and it looks to me as though
that was a good deal of sand to trickle through the
windows when they all have screens and were closed
besides.”
“It surely does get in,”
granted Frank. “Hello, there comes Lee!
Where is he going, I wonder, without his fatigue suit
on?”
“I suppose you mean those overall
things he works in, don’t you?” said Bill.
“I know that much now. Lee doesn’t
wear them any more. He was so crazy over mother
and so good to her and to me that dad got him transferred
to his Battery, and now he is our orderly.”
“How did he manage to do that?” said Frank.
“Why, there was some fellow
who wanted to leave the guns and work around the quarters
as janitor. They have an idea that it is an easy
job. So dad let him make the exchange, and I
can tell you we were all about as pleased as we could
be.”
“Good work!” commended
Frank, but without enthusiasm. He did not want
Bill to have the fun of having Lee for orderly.
He had been trying to think up some scheme whereby
the soldier would be sent over to fill that position
with his own father.
“Lee is a peach,” said
Bill warmly. “Look what he made me.”
He fished in his pocket and drew forth
a length of chain. The small, delicate links
were carved from a single piece of wood, and at the
end, like an ornamentation, hung a carved cage in
which rolled a little wooden ball. It was all
very curious and delicate.
“My, but that’s a peach,” said Frank.
“You ought to see the one he
did for mother,” said Bill. “Small
enough for a bracelet almost, and the little ball
smaller than a pea. The links are all carved
on the outside, and there is a sort of rose on the
end of this cage thing, and Lee painted it all up
pink and green where it ought to be like that.
“He knows all about a car too.
This week he has been going over dad’s car and
the Swallow, and they run like grease.”
Frank fiddled with the chain.
He had nothing to say. On account of his Indian
blood, his silent ways and mischievous nature, Lee
had always filled him with interest. He could
tell wonderful stories too of his own times and the
times that lay long behind him, as he heard of them
from his father and grandfather.
Lee’s grandfather knew a great
many things that he never did tell, but once in awhile
he was willing to open his close-set old mouth and
talk. He wore black broadcloth clothes, a long
coat, and a white shirt, but never a collar.
A wide black, soft-brimmed hat was set squarely on
his coal black hair. Under the hat, smooth as
a piece of satin, his hair hung in two tight braids
close to each ear. They were always wound with
bright colored worsted. Grandfather Lee, the old
chieftain, liked bright colors, so he usually had
red and yellow on his braids. They hung nearly
to his waist, down in front, over each coat lapel.
Small gold rings hung in his ears, and under his eyes
and across each cheek bone was a faint streak of yellow
paint.
His Indian name was Bird that Flies
by Night, and he lived about a hundred miles away,
on a farm given him by the Government. He had
lived there quite contentedly for many years, tilling
the ground when he had to. But now everything
was changed. Oklahoma had given up her treasure,
the hidden millions that lay under her sandy stretches.
Oil derricks rose thickly everywhere, and Bird that
Flies by Night found that all he had to do was to
sit on his back porch and look at the derrick that
had been raised over the well dug where his three
pigs used to root. Two hundred dollars a day
that well was bringing to the old Bird and, as Lee
said, was “still going strong.”
“And here I am,”
said Lee grimly, “enlisted for three years!”
Lee’s father was an Indian of
a later day. He had gone through an eastern college
and had been in business in a small town when the oil
excitement broke out. He went into oil at once,
and was far down in the oil fields, Lee did not know
where.
As a boy, Lee himself had refused
to accept the schooling urged by his mother and college-bred
father, and had led a restless, roaming life, filled
with hairbreadth escapes, until the beginning of the
war, when he had enlisted in the hope of being sent
across where the danger lay. But like many another
man as brave and as willing, he had been caught in
one of the war’s backwaters, and had been stationed
at Fort Sill.
Sauntering up to the quarters, the
boys found Lee staring moodily at the small and racy
Swallow, now standing clean and glistening in the bright
sunlight.
“She knocks,” he said,
knitting his fierce black brows. “All morning
I have been working over that car, and I can’t
find that knock.”
The boys came close and listened.
“I don’t hear any knock,” said Frank.
They all listened.
“Don’t you hear it now?” said Lee,
speeding the engine.
“Seems as though I hear something,” said
Bill, partly to please Lee.
They all listened closely.
Lee commenced to pry about in the
engine. “I have it, I think,” he
exclaimed triumphantly as he took out a small piece
of the machinery. Frank motioned Bill one side,
and they wandered around the end of the building.
“Don’t you feel sort of
afraid to let Lee tinker with your car?” he
asked with a show of carelessness.
“Not a bit! Dad says he
is a born mechanic and he trusts him with all the
care of his car. If dad thinks he can fix that,
why, I guess it is safe to let him do anything he
wants to do with the Swallow.”
“Do you ever let anybody else
drive the Swallow?” asked Frank. “I
wouldn’t mind taking it some day if you don’t
care.”
Bill looked embarrassed.
“I would let you take her in
a minute,” He said, “but dad made me promise
that I would never loan the Swallow to anyone.
It is not that he wants me to be selfish, but he says
if anything should happen, if the car should be broken,
or if there should be an accident and some other boy
hurt, I would sort of feel that it was my fault.”
“I don’t see it that way
at all,” said Frank, who was crazy to get hold
of the pretty car and show it off to some boys and
girls he knew in Lawton. He didn’t want
to drive with Bill. He was the sort of a boy who
always wants all the glory for himself. That car
was quite the most perfect thing; the sort a fellow
sees in his dreams. Frank knew that he could
never hope to own such a car, and the fact that Bill
was always willing to take him wherever he wanted
to go was not enough. Bill had never driven to
Lawton, the town nearest the Post. He had told
Frank that he would take him with him the first time.
Frank had thought it would be pretty fine to go humming
up the main street past all the people from the Post
and the ranches, and the old Indians and the crowds
of Indian boys his own age who always came in on Saturday
from the Indian school near by. He had been anticipating
that trip ever since Bill had appeared with the Swallow;
but now he felt that it would be far nicer if Bill
would or could be made to loan him the car. Of
course he couldn’t run it, but he could run
an airplane engine, and he was perfectly willing to
try running the little Swallow.
Frank had a great trick of getting
his own way about things, and he reflected with satisfaction
that as long as the roads to Lawton were almost impossible
for traffic after the rainfall, there would be a few
days in which to scheme for his plan. Nothing
of this, however, appeared in his face. He turned
and shrugged his shoulders.
“Well, if you and your dad think
Lee can handle a car all right, it’s all the
same to me,” he laughed. “My father
says you never can trust an Indian anyhow.”
“Well, we would trust Lee with
anything in the world,” reiterated Bill.
“That’s all right, too,
if you think so,” said Frank, trying slyly to
breed distrust in Bill’s heart. “I
guess you never heard my father tell some of his Indian
stories. You would feel different if you had.”
“But anybody would just have
to trust Lee,” said Bill. “Why, he
is as good as gold! And he hates a lie, and he
has such nice people two of the prettiest
little sisters. One of them plays the harp.
It’s one of those big gold ones, and she is
so little that Lee says she has to trot clear round
the harp to play some of the notes, because her arms
are too short to reach.”
“He’s half Indian just
the same,” insisted Frank. He warmed to
the subject as he went on. He couldn’t
forgive Lee, quite the most thrilling and amusing
soldier he knew, for letting himself be made
Major Sherman’s orderly.
“Well, I am for Lee every time,”
said Bill, “and I would wager anything I have
that he is just as true blue as as well,
as my dad!” Bill could pay no greater compliment,
and the words rang out clear and honest. The
boys stood beside the quarters, staring idly across
the bluff as they talked. They were so interested
in their conversation that they were not aware of
a listener. Lee, with a part of the Swallow in
his hand to show Bill, had followed them in time to
overhear the conversation concerning himself, but
he quickly drew back and returned to the automobile.
“Good boy, Billy!” he
said softly to himself. Then with a dark look
coming into his face, “So you can’t trust
an Indian, can you? Ha ha! I wonder what
we had better do about that?”