Turkestan and the Rise of Eurasian

Empires: A Study of Politics and

Invented Traditions Ali Anooshahr
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Turkestan and the Rise
of Eurasian Empires
Turkestan and the Rise
of Eurasian Empires

A Study of Politics and

Invented Traditions

ALI ANOOSHAHR

1
1
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 CONTENTS

Acknowledgments vii

1. Introduction 1

2. The Origins of the Question of Origins 7

3. The Early Ottomans in Idris Bitlisi’s Hasht Bihisht 28

4. The Early Safavids 56

5. Uzbeks and Kazakhs in Fazl Allah Khunji’s

Mihmannamah-i Bukhara 84

6. Mongols in the Tarikh-i Rashidi 114

7. Timurid India 139

8. Epilogue 171

Bibliography 185
Index 199
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Some of the material in this book was presented in various conferen-

ces where it benefitted from the feedback of the participants. I would
especially like to thank the conveners and attendants at the following
venues: Eurasian Empires Seminar Series (University of California, Los
Angeles), From Timur to Nadir Shah: Imperial Connections Between Iran,
India, and Central Asia (Pembroke College, Cambridge University),
Annual Meeting of the American Comparative Literature Association
(Cambridge, MA), The Epistemological Frontiers of Persian Learning
(University of California, Los Angeles), Institute for South Asian Studies
Seminars (University of California, Berkeley), Rūm and Hind: Relations
and Shared Experiences of Conquest, Acculturation and Turkish Rule in
Pre-Modern India and Anatolia (University of St Andrews). Additionally,
the following individuals gave much useful feedback and criti-
cism: Nile Green, Nikkie Keddie, Vural Genç, Gabriel Piterberg, Sanjay
Subrahmanyam, Muzaffar Alam, Charles Melville, Munis Faruqui,
Audrey Truschke, Taymiya Zaman, Baki Tezcan, Sudipta Sen, Blain Auer,
Sholeh Quinn, Sunil Kumar, Corinne Lefèvre, and Roy Fischel. Most of
all Wendy DeSouza repeatedly listened to, read, discussed, offered sug-
gestions, and commented on the entire project many times. I owe the
most appreciation to her support. Material in chapters 4 and 6 appeared
earlier in the Journal of Early Modern History 18, no. 6 (2014) and in
I. Poonawala, ed., Turks in the Indian Subcontinent, Central and West
Asia (Oxford University Press, 2016). A Turkish version of chapter 3
is published in the Journal of Ottoman History 50 (2017). I thank
viii Acknowledgments

the editors of these publications for their generosity. I also thank the anon-
ymous reviewers at Oxford University Press, as well the reviewers and
editors of the International Journal of Middle East Studies, Iran: Journal
of Persian Studies, and Middle Eastern Literatures for their feedback on
earlier drafts of some of these chapters. I am responsible for whatever
errors remain after all the suggestions and criticisms offered by those
listed above.
This book is dedicated to Daisaku Ikeda for his tireless efforts in pro-
moting peace, culture, and education.
Turkestan and the Rise
of Eurasian Empires
 1

Introduction

It has long been known that the origins of the early modern dynasties
of the Ottomans, Safavids, Mughals, Mongols, and Shibanids in the six-
teenth century go back to “Turco-Mongol” or “Turcophone” war bands.1
Often this connection has been taken at face value, usually along the lines
of ethnic or linguistic continuity. However, the link between a mytholo-
gized “Turkestani” or “Turco-Mongol” origin and these dynasties was not
simply and objectively present as fact. Rather, much creative energy was
unleashed by courtiers and leaders from Bosnia to Bihar (with Bukhara
and Badakhshan along the way) in order to manipulate, invent, and
in some cases disavow the ancestry of the founders of these dynasties.
Essentially, one can even say that Turco-Mongol progenitors did not beget
the Ottoman, Safavid, Mughal, Mongol, and Shibanid states. Quite the
contrary, one can say that historians writing in these empires were the
main ancestors of the “Turco-Mongol” lineage of their founders. Using
one or more specimens of Persian historiography, in a series of five case
2 T U R K E S TA N A N D T H E R I S E O F E U R A S I A N E M P I R E S

studies, each focusing on one of these nascent polities, I intend to show

how “Turkestan,” “Central Asia,” and “Turco-Mongol” functioned as liter-
ary tropes in the political discourse of the time.
This approach is important because it queries the problematique of ori-
gins not as a modern issue but as it was confronted in the sixteenth cen-
tury. In other words, it sheds light on how historians of this crucial phase
of Eurasian history dealt with their past. It thus liberates the informa-
tion about Turco-Mongol origins found in these sources from presentist,
nationalist, and anachronistic views that treat them as ethnogenetic data
and restores it to its actual function as part of a premodern project of
genealogy.
The kinship groups that constructed such genealogies were not the
tribal nuclei of future nations but emerging aristocratic lineages in need
of a proper family tree, cultural significance, and overall legitimation
for their newfound power. As we will see, for the nascent empires of the
sixteenth century, Turco-Mongol or Turkestani origins were frequently
deferred to another time, another place, another phase, or another peo-
ple. The comparative approach including all five states (and crucially the
two Central Asian ones) will show how Turco-Mongol origins had to be
constructed or modified even in Turkestan, the alleged Urheimat of these
war bands-cum-dynasties.2
Persianate historians living in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and
writing about the Turco-Mongol or Turkestani ancestry of their kings
were usually the inventors of such genealogical projects. In many ways, the
invention of pedigrees from a mythologized past for new leaders was neces-
sitated by the very act of inscribing one’s patron in the teleology of Islamic
monarchies, by the very logic of historiographic expectations.3 This was
because fundamentally, Persian historical narratives reified and attempted
to construct stable categories such as “kings,” “dynasties,” and the “foun-
dation of a state” out of chaotic military-political events (for example, the
violent entry into a city such as Tabriz or Bukhara by armed men). In their
construction and reifications of events and people, the authors of Persian
histories invented identities for the individuals involved (no longer as a
band of armed men but as “founders” or “warrior kings”). This identity,
Introduction 3

regardless of how accurate or inaccurate, was essentially a literary image,

a phantom. It did not merely “represent”; it also “alienated” those indi-
viduals in their own image, an image that was conditioned by the semiotic
imprint of a specific genre and discourse: the Persian-language chronicle.
The natural dissociation created in this process between individuals
and their image would then have to be overcome by the realm of the sym-
bolic, which reinscribed the image with familiar meaning. The symbolic
included not just Koranic/biblical accounts, ethnographic stereotypes,
myths of investiture, and so on but of course Turco-Mongol genealogy
(which had to be appropriated or rejected). The goal of the present book is
to see how such strategies were deployed and why.
Now, in composing origin myths, Persianate chroniclers had to draw
on a common cultural repository in the Persian historical tradition.
Historical writing in the Persian language dates back to the tenth century
of the Common Era. However, for our purposes the developments of this
genre during the Mongol and Timurid periods are crucial. A number of
changes occurred in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and these pro-
vided the immediate background of sixteenth-century chroniclers. First,
the details of a common Turco-Mongol genealogy were worked out, stan-
dardized, and synthesized by Persian historians.4 Second, there developed
a strategy of legitimizing in Islamic terms the reign of pagan rulers who
relied on a different set of political traditions than the ones espoused by
their subjects. Third, there was an intensified awareness of geography in
these compositions, brought about because of the truly universal extent of
the Mongol Empire as well as the extensive travels and campaigns under-
taken by the rulers. Equally significant in this world order were various
ambassadors’ reports, which were sent to the emperor and were often
included in the texts of the chroniclers. By the late Mongol and Timurid
periods, a fourth feature of chronicles became prominent: the sacraliza-
tion of space in Islamic terms, especially as symbolized by the mention
of numerous shrines in the realm. Finally, historians of the Mongol and
Timurid eras began to compose histories in verse in the manner of Persian
epics for their patrons, casting them as near-mythical warriors.5 This was
the historiographical background in which the authors discussed in this
4 T U R K E S TA N A N D T H E R I S E O F E U R A S I A N E M P I R E S

book wrote their works and which they drew upon in their acts of invent-
ing origins.
Also significant was the development of the role of authors in the post-
Mongol world. As İlker Evrim Binbaş has argued, certainly in the fifteenth
century, intellectual production operated within noncourtly networks,
among a circle of authors who shared common ideologies and values.6
The unstable political conditions of the later fifteenth century further
strengthened the role of authors, as numerous newly established princes
drew on the support of intellectuals to legitimize their rule. At times, well-
educated princes even participated in writing or other forms of cultural
production.7 In short, men of letters (including historians) of the fifteenth
century had become a significant political force in society, and they seem
to have shared a sense of group identity.
This trend only intensified into the sixteenth century, as new absolut-
ist states formed and engaged in ideological battles against their rivals.
As Kaya Şahin has shown, the intellectual networks of the previous era
were further expanded through the growth of imperial bureaucracies, and
historiography played a key role among professional groups. Historical
writing was considered a prestigious activity and a sort of political inter-
vention into the fortunes of the early modern states.8
The texts studied in this book fall right in the middle of the processes
charted above. They were composed during the collapse of fifteenth-
century states (Timurid, Aqqoyunlu, and Lodi) and the formation of new
ones in the sixteenth century. However, the cultural products created at
the very moment of this transition were the works of not professionalized
bureaucrats but men of letters who had to fit their new patrons into the
teleology of empires as it had been developed in the historical canon of the
previous two hundred years.
Analyzing them will help reconfigure the early history of sixteenth-
century Eurasian empires of the Ottomans, Safavids, Shibanids, Mughals,
and Mongols by focusing not on how abstracted and reified “empires”
fared through the centuries but, rather, on how actual individuals (usu-
ally, but not always, authors of chronicles) utilized symbols and mean-
ing in order to grapple with issues of foundation, origins, and to some
Introduction 5

extent legitimacy. Such a comparative analysis cannot be contained in a

straightforward and continuous narrative. Nor is it possible to force such
case studies into exact replicas of each other. The particularities and con-
text of each “state” and its “ideologues” were unique, so that while they
might resemble each other insofar as everyone was confronting the issue
of Turco-Mongol origins, they differed from one another in various ways
as well.
Before we proceed to the contents of the argument, we should not at all
assume that we can approach the topic from a purely objective distance, as
if the very question I ask is not itself historical. Indeed a secondary layer
of historiography must be undertaken prior to the actual analysis of the
sources. This involves a survey of the seminal texts of European authors
and travelers that provided the first hypotheses regarding the origins of
Eurasian empires in the budding fields of Western orientalism. In other
words, the project of origins in a modern historical analysis will be noth-
ing short of naive or hypocritical if it does not consider its own origins—
the period of early orientalism when such questions were first asked. The
search will take us back all the way to the early modern period—not long
after the time when Persianate authors handled the same problems in
their own texts. This is the topic of the next chapter.

NOTES

1. René Grousset, The Empire of the Steppe: A History of Central Asia, trans. Naomi
Walford (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1970); Peter B. Golden, An
Introduction to the History of the Turkic Peoples: Ethnogenesis and State-Formation in
Medieval and Early Modern Eurasia and the Middle East (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz,
1992); Carter Vaughn Findley, The Turks in World History (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2005).
2. Comparative studies of the empires treated in this book are actually uncommon.
Most tend to focus on the overall fortunes of mainly three states: the Ottomans,
Mughals, and Safavids, over their entire historical trajectory. Among these, with
the notable exception of V. V. Bartold’s Mussulman Culture, trans. S. Suhrawardy
(reprint; Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2009), the rest generally ignore Central
Asia. This began with Marshal G. S. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam, Volume 3: The
Gunpowder Empires and Modern Times (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974),
6 T U R K E S TA N A N D T H E R I S E O F E U R A S I A N E M P I R E S

and has continued to Douglas E. Streusand, Islamic Gunpowder Empires: Ottomans,

Safavids, and Mughals (Boulder: Westview Press, 2010), as well as Stephen Dale, The
Muslim Empires of the Ottomans, Safavids, and Mughals (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2009). More specific studies are less common and include
Stephen Blake, Time in Early Modern Islam (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 2013); Gülru Necipoğlu, “Framing the Gaze in Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal
Palaces,” Ars Orientalis 23 (1993): 303–342; Francis Robinson, “Ottomans-Safavids-
Mughals: Shared Knowledge and Connective Systems,” Journal of Islamic Studies 8
(1997): 151–184.
3. Here I am inspired by the Lacanian performance arts theory of Christian Metz,
The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1982), 4.
4. Mihály Dobrovits, “The Turco-Mongolian Tradition of Common Origin and the
Historiography in Fifteenth-Century Central Asia,” Acta Orientalia Academiae
Scientiarum Hungaricae 47 (1994): 269–277.
5. C. Melville, “The Mongol and Timurid Periods: 1250–1500,” in C. Melville, ed., A
History of Persian Literature, X: Persian Historiography (London: I. B. Tauris, 2012),
155–208.
6. İlker Evrim Binbaş, Intellectual Networks in Timurid Iran: Sharaf al-Dῑn ‘Alῑ Yazdῑ
and the Islamicate Republic of Letters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2016), 6.
7. Binbaş, Intellectual Networks in Timurid Iran, 20–21.
8. Kaya Şahin, Empire and Power in the Reign of Süleyman: Narrating the Sixteenth-
Century Ottoman World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 4,
165, 182.
 2

The Origins of the

Question of Origins

It may come as no surprise to readers that the convergence of the search

for origins, comparative empires, and textual scholarship that characterize
the present study are actually quite old and go back to the very origins of
Western historical, philological, and orientalist scholarship in the seven-
teenth and eighteenth centuries. We must therefore critically review this
tradition in order to understand how it developed, why it developed in
the way that it did, what was implicit in it, and what was expunged from
it. As we shall see, the European debate regarding “Asian empires” could
often be reduced to two main issues: oriental despotism and racial origins.
While modern scholarship has continued the debate regarding despotism
into the twenty-first century, the discussion regarding racial origins was
closed off by the late eighteenth century and has received less attention
since then.
The main reason questions of origins were posed by European schol-
ars regarding “Muslim empires” of the early modern era was that in the
8 T U R K E S TA N A N D T H E R I S E O F E U R A S I A N E M P I R E S

seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, European voyages of discovery

overseas had undermined the biblical origin narratives of humanity, which
now had to be reinterpreted in light of new encounters. Moreover, in the
same period the Muslim empires were part of the actual political reality.
European travelers wanted to understand the foundations and main char-
acteristics of these formidable states as well as their relationship to their
own various European states. One particular intellectual trend actually
saw these empires as directly related to Europe and saw their populations
as sharing the same racial identity as Europeans.
The spokesperson for this view was the French physician and traveler
François Bernier (d. 1688), who, after visiting Egypt, Arabia, and India and
serving as a doctor at the Mughal court, composed a number of influen-
tial writings upon his return home. In many ways Bernier spearheaded
Western study of the Ottomans, Mughals, and Safavids by comparing the
issue of property in these three empires, arguing famously that “those
three countries, Turkey, Persia, and Hindustan, have no idea of the prin-
ciple of meum and tuum, relatively to land or other real possessions.”1 As
is well known, Bernier helped develop the concept of “oriental despotism”
by describing the immense powers of the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb and
his supposed possession of all property in India as typical of the crown’s
prerogatives in the East.2 Of course, as many scholars have argued since,
Bernier’s ultimate goal in this portrayal was to present the Mughal realm
as a negative exemplar of the dangers of royal power. He believed that his
home country of France, confronted with the rising tide of Louis XIV’s
absolutism, should take heed of the Indian case.3
However, Bernier also wrote some important, but hitherto overlooked,
comments specifically about the origins of the inhabitants of states. These
comments can be found in his Travels in the Mughal Empire as well as
the less well-known but still significant treatise on the racial origins of
the inhabitants of the earth entitled “Nouvelle Division de la Terre, par
les differentes Especes ou Races d’hommes qui l’habiten.”4 In this text,
Bernier argued that the population of the earth should be divided into
four distinct races: (1) the “first race,” (2) East Asians, (3) Africans, and
(4) the Lapp people of Finland. Bernier’s “first race” was a very inclusive
The Origins of the Question of Origins 9

category and comprised not just the people of Europe but all the people
of the Middle East, North Africa, and India. Bernier counted the native
population of the Americas in this category as well. Regarding the people
of Mongolia and China, even though Bernier counted them as a separate
race, he was convinced that they were “practically white” (véritablement
blancs).5 In short, Bernier’s classification implied that basically the ruling
elite and much of the population of both Europe and western and south-
ern Asia all had the same racial origins, the shades of “whiteness” for him
in these countries being mere internal variation brought about by expo-
sure to the sun.6
This classificatory inclusiveness in part reflected the origins of the
concept of race in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe that was
formed in conjunction with the justification of slavery in the Americas
and Africa.7 Among other things, Bernier’s notion of whiteness seems to
be connected to the power of enslavement especially over Africans, and
this category extended to both Europeans and West Asians in the sev-
enteenth century. Indeed, Bernier had encountered black Africans in the
slave markets of Egypt and Arabia during his travels, and at least some
of his observations regarding Africans were derived solely based on his
inspection of enslaved black women in Mocha, Yemen.8
We see how this classification scheme worked in Bernier’s travelogue
to India as well. Bernier wrote in the introduction to his Travels that
even though the Mughal dynasty was descended from “Tamerlan” and
originated in “Tartary,” nevertheless in his day the “the offices of trust
and dignity” and “rank in the army” were filled not just by those of the
“Mongol race” but “indifferently by them and strangers from all coun-
tries: the greater part by Persians, some by Arabs, and others by Turks.”
The glue that connected the ethnically diverse ruling elite of the empire
together, he claimed, was race and religion. “To be considered a Mongol,”
he concluded, “it is enough if a foreigner have a white face and profess
Mahometanism.”9 Whiteness of course, and not religion, also tied Bernier
himself to this ruling class.
Bernier overcame the separation caused by religion through his appeal
to another common “spiritual” faculty.10 As stated above, he was employed
10 T U R K E S TA N A N D T H E R I S E O F E U R A S I A N E M P I R E S

as a physician in Hindustan and was engaged in a number of intellectual

projects with his patron of Iranian origin, Danishmand Khan.11 Bernier’s
identification with his patron was rooted in his assumption that a common
“rationality” was shared by educated Muslim and Christian elites (versus
the Catholic masses of France and Hindu masses of India).12 This aspect
too was related to the discourse on slavery insofar as it pitted rationality
against animality among people. Specifically, as a physician, Bernier was
a follower of the philosopher Pierre Gassendi, who believed that humans
possess two souls: a rational and an animal soul. Expanding on this thesis,
Bernier held that climate and physiology could cause inequality among
humans by weakening the rational souls in some humans so that inevita-
bly “those who excel in the powers of the mind command those who only
excel in brute force.”13
Now while Bernier clearly showed a sense of commonality across
Eurasia based on race and rationality, he left open the possibility of racial
degeneration due to climatic change. In fact, he averred that the descen-
dants of white foreigners who made up the membership of the Mughal
elite eventually grew dark and generally inferior to their ancestors. He
wrote, “It should be added, however, that the children of the third and
fourth generation who have the brown complexion, and the languid man-
ner of this country of their nativity, are held in much less respect than the
newcomers.”14 Without getting into too much explanation, Bernier was
essentially implying here that the white ruling elite would decline within a
few generations, growing dark and losing its vitality. In short, he provides
perhaps the best example of how issues regarding race, origins, and the
empires of the Ottomans, Mughals, and Safavids became intertwined in
the earliest stages of European orientalism. In Bernier’s case, however, the
process involved actual identification between Europe and Asia.
Ideas similar to Bernier’s belief regarding common cultural and racial
origins and affiliation among all the people of western Eurasia were still
alive at the end of the next century, when what was perhaps implicit in his
writing was expressed more explicitly by another French intellectual. This
was Jean Sylvain Bailly (d. 1793), a scholar and the revolutionary mayor of
Paris who later fell to the Terror and was guillotined. Like Bernier, Bailly
The Origins of the Question of Origins 11

actually believed that the origins of all major Asian and European civ-
ilizations must be traced to a single progenitor, a group of people who
had populated these regions in a southward migration out of the heart of
Eurasia, among whom Tartars and Goths were but recent arrivals.15 He
argued that the cultural and civilizational achievements of the Chinese,
Chaldeans, Indians, Danes, Persians, Celts, and ancient Greeks were too
similar and therefore unlikely to be the result of communication. Rather,
a common ancestry was the only way to explain them.16 While Bailly
overemphasized whiteness and northern superiority as the source of cul-
tural creativity (preempting the nineteenth and twentieth centuries), it is
important to note that his positing of a hyperborean homeland, a Siberian
Atlantis, for the great civilizations and races of both Europe and Asia still
implied common kinship bonds between the inhabitants of Europe as well
as those residing in western and southern Asian empires.17
Of course, not all French intellectuals were on board with Bernier and
Bailly’s inclusive racial ideas. In fact some rejected Bernier’s notions of
common biological ancestry and instead focused on his ideas of racial
degeneration as well as his criticism of Mughal, Ottoman, and Safavid des-
potism. This was done most famously by none other than the giant of the
French Enlightenment, Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de
Montesquieu (d. 1755). Montesquieu was certainly familiar with Bernier’s
Travels along with a host of other seventeenth-century travel narratives
(such as those by Jean Chardin and Jean-Baptiste Tavernier). From the
works of these men, Montesquieu further developed his ideas about the
problems of despotic government in Asia. Bernier’s role in Montesquieu’s
De l’esprit des lois (1748) is particularly relevant. While Montesquieu drew
specially on Chardin for depicting specific aspects of political despotism
in the East,18 his citations from Travels in the Mughal Empire by Bernier
almost entirely dealt with issues of climate, religion, and of course racial
degeneration. Montesquieu’s reading of Bernier shows in fact that the dis-
course of orientalism was not always marked by the repetition of a set of
“othering” statements over many centuries of European writings about the
“East.” Rather, at critical junctures, it also involved the actual suppression
of conflicting evidence that in fact contradicted the “othering” discourse.
12 T U R K E S TA N A N D T H E R I S E O F E U R A S I A N E M P I R E S

It is interesting to see how Montesquieu’s selective reading of Bernier

was accompanied by an undermining of the traveler’s initial foundation
for his belief in an inclusive pan-Eurasian ancestry—namely, slavery.
Montesquieu redefined slavery from the actual sale and legal ownership
of some humans by others to a metaphorical condition that encompassed
the conditions of any human living without the benefits of political liber-
ties (as he defined them).19 In this way, Montesquieu could distance the
people of northwestern Europe from the rest of the world, including even
southern Europeans such as the Spaniards.
As we know, Montesquieu argued that geography determined the char-
acteristics of various peoples and societies in the world. Western Europe
alone, because it could boast of the mildest climate, was home to a free
people and limited government. In Asia, on the other hand, he argued,
there were no mild climatic zones. Instead extreme cold regions bordered
on extreme hot regions.20 This of course meant that, unlike Europe, Asia
was doomed to perpetual despotism and slavery.
Naturally, as climate hardly changed significantly, the division had
been virtually eternal. Montesquieu, who was influenced by the Swedish
scholar Olaus Rudbeck’s (d. 1702) claims of Nordic superiority and excep-
tionalism, was not willing to accept a common ancestry for all Eurasian
people rooted in antiquity.21 This meant that even in ancient times when
the Romans referred to Scythians, Huns, and Germans equally as barbar-
ians, no substantial commonality could have existed among them. Instead
Montesquieu believed that what perhaps connected these barbarian
ancestors of contemporary Eurasian states was their original habitation
in the colder zones of the north and their subsequent migrations to the
southerly and warmer zones of the Mediterranean and Asia. However, the
move from north to south, he argued, transformed the simple, active, and
free northerners into overimaginative, lazy, and enslaved southerners.22
The only exception, as stated above, was in milder Western Europe, where
Montesquieu believed courage and freedom coexisted. He wrote, “I do not
know whether the famous Rudbeck, who in his Atlantica has bestowed
such praises on Scandinavia, has made mention of that great prerogative
which ought to set this people [the Goths or Nordic people] above all the
The Origins of the Question of Origins 13

nations upon earth; namely, this country’s having been the source of the
liberties of Europe—that is, of almost all the freedom which at present
subsists amongst mankind.”23
The movement from north to south thus had a deleterious effect on
most northern people. And this was where Bernier’s narrative played into
Montesquieu’s argument. For example, Montesquieu drew on a passage
in Bernier where the French traveler described the effects of the extreme
heat of India on his body as one of his main pieces of evidence for how
climate influences physiognomy and hence human behavior.24 Elsewhere,
Montesquieu again used the evidence of Bernier to show how the extreme
heat of India could give rise to the ideas of metempsychosis.25 Of course,
most relevant of all was Montesquieu’s use of Bernier’s comment cited
above about the degeneration of white races in India. This Montesquieu
used as evidence to support his thesis of the racial decline of northerners in
the south due to the negative impact of heat. He cited Bernier in claiming
that “the Indians are naturally a pusillanimous people; even the children
of Europeans born in India lose the courage peculiar to their own cli-
mate.”26 In short, and ironically, Montesquieu was using Bernier’s remarks
on climate in order to undermine the French traveler’s belief in racial and
cultural commonality among the inhabitants of Eurasian empires.
Montesquieu was able to do this by showing how the same process of
degeneration would have happened over and over again to the ancestors
of other Asian dynasties of his day: the Turks/Tartars/Scythians, who
were now all equated as one people. This would of course separate them
from the Nordic barbarians who conquered Western Europe. For exam-
ple, Montesquieu wrote regarding the founders of the Ottoman Empire
and their overthrow of the Byzantines, “The Tartars who destroyed the
Grecian empire established in the conquered countries slavery and des-
potic power. The Goths, after subduing the Roman Empire, founded mon-
archy and liberty.” Why was this? Montesquieu explained it thus:

The reason is that the people of Tartary, the natural conquerors of

Asia, are themselves enslaved. They are incessantly making con-
quests in the south of Asia, where they form empires: but that part of
14 T U R K E S TA N A N D T H E R I S E O F E U R A S I A N E M P I R E S

the nation which continues in the country finds that it is subject to

a great master, who, being despotic in the south, will likewise be so
in the north, and exercising an arbitrary power over the vanquished
subjects, pretends to the same over the conquerors. . . .Hence it
follows that the genius of the Getic or Tartarian nation has always
resembled that of the empires of Asia. The people in these are gov-
erned by the cudgel; the inhabitants of Tartary by whips.27

The “empires of Asia” refers to the Ottomans, the Mughals, and the
Manchus, while “the Tartars” describes their Inner Asian founders. In
Montesquieu’s formulation, Eurasian states and empires were now essen-
tialized and divided based on differences in their founders’ ethnicity.
Bernier’s ideas about “racial” and cultural commonality were no longer
viable.
Montesquieu’s views toward Tartars and Asia were by no means domi-
nant yet. Some of his positions on Asia were directly opposite those of his
own contemporaries. As seen above, Bailly continued to evoke the com-
mon Eurasian ancestry (which Bernier had espoused) well into the end of
the century. Voltaire (d. 1778), on the other hand, focused on the very con-
cept of “oriental despotism,” which he believed was flawed and could be
challenged through a critical reading of the evidence—namely, the trav-
elogues of the previous century. By the end of the century, others, such as
English historian Edward Gibbon (d. 1794), rejected Montesquieu’s cli-
matic theories and relied on a “sociofunctional” analysis that could recon-
nect the ancestors of European and Asian states—namely, the Goths and
the Tartars. Finally, the traveler Anquetil-Duperron (d. 1805) exposed the
whole discourse as an excuse for colonial exploitation of Asia.
Let me begin with Voltaire. In his Essay on Universal History (French
original published in 1751 in Sweden), Voltaire attacked the sources from
which the image of Eastern despotism had been derived. He observed that
seventeenth-century French travelers to Mughal India often contradicted
their own statements in various parts of their narratives. He found, for
example, that the same traveler would claim in one section that Mughal
emperors possessed all the property in their domain while in the same
The Origins of the Question of Origins 15

passage mentioning numerous rajas succeeding to the landed estates of

their ancestors. Voltaire believed that it was irreconcilable that all the gran-
dees in the Mughal realm were slaves while simultaneously being described
as masters of twenty to thirty thousand soldiers. He found incompatible
the claim that “there is no other law than the will of the Mogul” with the
statement “the rights of the people have not been invaded.”28
Voltaire did not think that the French traveler Tavernier was even
worth discussing, “for he hardly directs us any further than to find the
high roads, and to purchase diamonds.” Bernier, he believed, was a more
worthy source. He attacked Bernier’s statements that the Mughal emperor
possessed all the land by undermining Bernier’s assumption that the proc-
ess of giving away land by the emperor implied his ownership. Voltaire
compared this with the practice of the “kings of Europe” and the Holy
Roman Emperor having the right to give away church lands and fiefs in
Germany and Italy when they became vacant.29 In essence, without both-
ering much about their origins, Voltaire believed that Eurasian empires
were indeed similar and that the essentialized concept of oriental despot-
ism was basically an exaggeration and contradiction. He concluded sar-
donically by writing, “Bernier did not imagine that his words would be
misconstrued so far, as to think that all the Indians manure, build, and
toil for a Tartar.”30 We can observe that Voltaire held quite an opposite
view than Montesquieu with regards to “oriental despotism.” This fact may
have been related to Voltaire’s general approval of enlightened absolute
monarchs such as Frederick II of Prussia and Karl II of Sweden. Whatever
the case may be, Voltaire showed that a source-critical scholarship could
already provide a better understanding of comparable Eurasian empires in
the mid-eighteenth century.
Voltaire’s empirical approach was perhaps most thoroughly and fruit-
fully employed by the English historian Edward Gibbon, who offered
some striking conclusions of his own. In his Decline and Fall of the Roman
Empire, composed between 1776 and 1788 (bookended by the American
and the French revolutions), Gibbon actually argued that all “barbarians”
were comparable, not because of biological similarity but because of their
stage in human evolution. Thus various “tribes” of Britons, Scythians,
16 T U R K E S TA N A N D T H E R I S E O F E U R A S I A N E M P I R E S

Sarmatians, Germans, and Native Americans—in other words, “the sav-

ages, both of the old and new world”—all shared a fundamental common-
ality.31 This commonality consisted of the proximity of the savage to the
state of nature. The list bears remarkable similarity to Bernier’s “first race”
expounded a century before. But here, Gibbon was redefining Bernier’s
categories away from biology and toward stages of evolution.
Essentially, Gibbon believed that all barbarians were men of instinct: free
and brave but undisciplined and thus subject to domination. Only a pow-
erful ruler who could master all the tribes would be able to mold them
into a nation. So, for instance, the Romans were able to subjugate the
native inhabitants of Britain because “the various tribes of Britons pos-
sessed valor without conduct, and the love of freedom without the spirit
of union. They took up arms with savage fierceness; they laid them down,
or turned them against each other with wild inconsistency; and while
they fought singly, they were successively subdued.”32 On the other hand,
the Huns and Tartars fared better because they were able to find what
the Britons lacked—a powerful leader: “The constant operation of var-
ious and permanent causes contributed to unite the vagrant Hords into
national communities, under the command of a supreme head.”33
Gibbon’s position on the essential similarity of the “savages” led him
to a remarkable conclusion. He was willing to extend not only the nega-
tive but also the positive attributes of the barbarians with near-complete
equality. So, for instance, Gibbon shared the common eighteenth-century
view that the institutions of modern European states derived from the
traditions of the ancient Germans. He wrote, “The most civilized nations
of modern Europe issued from the woods of Germany, and in the rude
institutions of those barbarians, we may still distinguish the original prin-
ciples of our present laws and manners.”34 This included, for instance, the
roots of the British Parliament and the documents that guaranteed the
rights of nobles—in other words, all checks against monarchical despot-
ism. Yet, whereas Montesquieu believed that such institutions were par-
ticular to Europeans, Gibbon had no difficulty finding parallels among
all barbarians. For example, regarding the absence of despotism and the
presence of parliamentary institutions among the Tartars/Scythians (for
The Origins of the Question of Origins 17

Gibbon they were all the same), he stated, “But the power of a despot
has never been acknowledged in the deserts of Scythia. The immediate
jurisdiction of the Khan is confined within the jurisdiction of his own
tribe; and the exercise of his royal prerogative has been moderated by
the ancient institution of a national council: the Coroultai, or Diet, of the
Tartars.”35 In other words, Gibbon found parallels between the Mongol
assembly (kuriltay) and the Imperial Diet of the Holy Roman Empire. He
even claimed to have detected the features of European feudalism among
these barbarians: “The rudiments of a feudal government may be dis-
covered in the constitutions of the Scythian or Tartar nations.” All these
institutions therefore guaranteed that Eurasian khans could not rule as
despots. Gibbon knew very well that his statements ran counter to the
views of Montesquieu, who believed in the “perpetual” slavery of the
Tartars. He took some pains to explicitly reject the French philosophe’s
positions as expressed in The Spirit of Laws, saying, “Montesquieu labors
to explain a difference, which has not existed, between the liberty of the
Arabs, and the perpetual slavery of the Tartars.”36 In Gibbon’s formulation,
of course, all barbarians would have known the fruit of liberty thanks to
their primitive social condition, regardless of their ethnoracial origins or
the climate of their homeland.
Yet the most striking statement by Gibbon in this regard occurs when
he described the laws of the Tartars in their later history under Genghis
Khan. Here, Gibbon pointed out with admiration the religious tolerance
of the khan, which Gibbon incredibly compared with the Enlightenment
thought of the eighteenth century. He exclaimed, “But it is the religion of
Zingis [Genghis] that best deserves our wonder and applause. The Catholic
inquisitors of Europe, who defended nonsense by cruelty, might have been
confounded by the example of a Barbarian, who anticipated the lessons of
philosophy, and established by his laws a system of pure theism and per-
fect toleration.” The author’s admiration for the very “modern” policy of
Genghis Khan comes through clearly in these lines. But Gibbon did not
stop there and made the comparison even more explicit. He wrote in a
footnote to this passage, “A singular conformity may be found between
the religious laws of Zingis Khan and of Mr. Locke.”37
18 T U R K E S TA N A N D T H E R I S E O F E U R A S I A N E M P I R E S

In short, Gibbon stood almost diametrically opposed to Montesquieu

with regard to his views of the barbarians of the East and West. Whereas
Montesquieu divided and reduced people along a clear East/West divide,
where one side stood for freedom and limited government and the other
stood for despotism and slavery, Gibbon found a perfect comparability
between all the barbarians down to their political institutions, which he
did not believe were the sole inheritance of Europeans alone. Gibbon even
went a step further though and found the Scythians/Tartars to have been
well ahead of Europe in matters of religious toleration.
One would think that as a fellow Englishman and as a most prominent
historian, Gibbon should have proved very influential on other British
scholars of the eighteenth century. However, colonialism derailed the pos-
sibility of further expansion of the thesis of common Eurasian origins.
The problem was already diagnosed by contemporaries. Perhaps the best
known of these critics was Abraham Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron (d.
1805), the French orientalist who introduced Europe to the holy text of
Zoroastrianism, the Avesta, as well as the Hindu texts of the Upanishads
through French translations.38 Prior to his publications, Anquetil-
Duperron had traveled in India between 1755 and 1761, spending a con-
siderable time with the Parsee (Zoroastrian) community of Surat. He had
also witnessed firsthand the early decades of expansion of the English
East India Company in South Asia. Upon his return to Europe, Anquetil-
Duperron strongly attacked the concept of oriental despotism as a sham.
He stated that many of the European travel accounts on Asia, including
Bernier’s, were mere fiction and that, unlike what they and subsequently
Montesquieu had claimed, contracts, laws, property, and proper diplo-
matic relations existed in Asia just as in Europe.39 In his own day, Anquetil-
Duperron declared, the concepts of oriental despotism, the possession of
all property by the sovereign, and enslavement of the people were actually
the projection of a colonial plan of mastery and domination in Asia. It was
a masque for Europe’s own vile greed.40
One of the main targets for Anquetil-Duperron’s attacks was the work
of Alexander Dow (d. 1779), the East India officer who had claimed, in
language rife with meteorological determinism, that the heat of India
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 CHAPTER XXV
A DIFFERENCE OF OPINION

Betty was whipping mayonnaise in the kitchen when a voice hailed

the Diamond Bar K ranch in general.
“Hello the house!”
Through the window she saw a rider on a horse, and a moment later
her brain localized him as a neighborhood boy who had recently
joined the forest rangers. She went to the door, sleeves still rolled
back to the elbows of the firm satiny arms.
“Hoo-hoo!” she called, flinging a small hand wildly above her head in
greeting. “Hoo-hoo, Billy boy!”
He turned, caught sight of her, and at once began to smile. It was
noticeable that when Betty laughed, as she frequently did for no
good reason at all except a general state of well-being, others were
likely to join in her happiness.
“Oh, there you are,” he said, and at once descended.
“Umpha! Here I am, but I won’t be long. I’m making salad dressing.
Come in to the kitchen if you like. I’ll give you a cookie. Just out o’
the oven.”
“Listens good to Billy,” he said, and stayed not on the order of his
coming.
She found him a plate of cookies and a stool. “Sit there. And tell me
what’s new in the hills. Did you pass the dam as you came down?
And what d’you know about the tunnel?”
The ranger stopped a cookie halfway to his mouth. “Say, that fellow
—the one drivin’ the tunnel—he’s been shot.”
“What!”
“Last night—at Don Black’s cabin.”
A cold hand laid itself on her heart and stopped its beating. “You
mean—on purpose?”
He nodded. “Shot through the window at dark.”
“Mr. Hollister—that who you mean?”
“Yep. That’s what he calls himself now. Jones it was at first.”
“Is he—hurt badly?”
“I’ll say so. In the side—internal injuries. Outa his head when I was
there this mo’ning.”
“What does the doctor say?”
“He ain’t seen him yet. On the way up now. I ’phoned down from
Meagher’s ranch. He’d ought to pass here soon.”
“But why didn’t they get the doctor sooner? What were they thinking
about?” she cried.
“Nobody with him but Don Black. He couldn’t leave him alone, he
claims. Lucky I dropped in when I did.”
Impulsively Betty made up her mind. “I’m going to him. You’ll have to
take me, Billy.”
“You!” exclaimed the ranger. “What’s the big idea, Betty?”
“Dad’s gone to Denver to the stock show. I’m going to look after him.
That’s what Dad would want if he were here. Some one’s got to
nurse him. What other woman can go in on snowshoes and do it?”
“Does he have to have a woman nurse? Can’t Mr. Merrick send a
man up there to look after him?”
“Don’t argue, Billy boy,” she told him. “You see how it is. They don’t
even get a doctor to him for fifteen or sixteen hours. By this time he
may be—” She stopped and bit her lip to check a sudden swell of
emotion that choked up her throat.
Bridget came into the kitchen. Betty’s announcement was both a
decision and an appeal. “Mr. Hollister’s been hurt—shot—up in the
hills. I’m going up to Justin to make him take me to him.”
“Is he hur-rt bad?” asked the buxom housekeeper.
“Yes. I don’t know. Billy thinks so. If I hurry I can get there before
night.”
Bridget hesitated. “I was thinkin’ it might be better for me to go,
dearie. You know how folks talk.”
“Oh, talk!” Betty was explosively impatient. She always was when
anybody interfered with one of her enthusiasms. “Of course, if you
could go. But you’d never get in through the snow. And what could
they say—except that I went to save a man’s life if I could?”
“Mr. Merrick might not like it.”
“Of course he’d like it.” The girl was nobly indignant for her fiancé.
“Why wouldn’t he like it? It’s just what he’d want me to do.” Under
the brown bloom of her cheeks was the peach glow of excitement.
Bridget had traveled some distance on the journey of life, and she
had her own opinion about that. Merrick, if she guessed him at all
correctly, was a possessive man. He could appreciate Betty’s valiant
eagerness when it went out to him, but he would be likely to resent
her generous giving of herself to another. He did not belong to the
type of lover that recognizes the right of a sweetheart or a wife to
express herself in her own way. She was pledged to him. Her
vocation and avocation in life were to be his wife.
But Bridget was wise in her generation. She knew that Betty was of
the temperament that had to learn from experience. She asked how
they would travel to the dam.
“On horseback—if we can get through. The road’s not broken yet
probably after yesterday’s storm. We’ll start right away. I can’t get
Justin on the ’phone. The wire must be down.”
The ranger saddled for her and they took the road. Betty carried with
her a small emergency kit of medical supplies.
Travel back and forth had broken the road in the valley. It was not
until the riders struck the hill trail that they had to buck drifts. It was
slow, wearing work, and, by the time they came in sight of the dam,
Betty’s watch told her that it was two o’clock.
Merrick saw them coming down the long white slope and wondered
what travelers had business urgent enough to bring them through
heavy drifts to the isolated camp. As soon as he recognized Betty,
he went to meet her. Billy rode on down to the tents. He knew when
he was not needed.
Rich color glowed in her cheeks, excitement sparkled in her eyes.
“What in the world are you doing here?” Merrick asked.
She was the least bit dashed by his manner. It suggested censure,
implied that her adventure—whatever the cause of it—was a bit of
headstrong folly. Did he think it was a girl’s place to stay at home in
weather like this? Did he think that she was unmaidenly, had bucked
miles of snowdrifts because she could not stay away from him?
“Have you heard about Mr. Hollister? He’s been hurt—shot.”
“Shot?”
“Last night. At Black’s cabin.”
“Who shot him?”
“I don’t know. He’s pretty bad, Billy says.”
“Doctor seen him yet?”
“He’s on the way now. I want you to take me to him, Justin.”
“Take you? What for?”
“To nurse him.”
He smiled, the superior smile of one prepared to argue away the
foolish fancies of a girl.
“Is your father home yet?”
“No. He’ll be back to-morrow. Why?”
“Because, dear girl, you can’t go farther. In the first place, it’s not
necessary. I’ll do all that can be done for Hollister. The trip from here
won’t be a picnic.”
“I’ve brought my skis. I can get in all right,” she protested eagerly.
“I grant that. But there’s no need for you to go. You’d far better not.
It’s not quite—” He stopped in mid-sentence, with an expressive lift
of the shoulders.
“Not quite proper. I didn’t expect you to say that, Justin,” she
reproached. “After what he did for us.”
“He did only what any self-respecting man would do.”
Her smile coaxed him. “Well, I want to do only what any self-
respecting woman would do. Surely it’ll be all right if you go along.”
How could he tell her that he knew no other unmarried woman of her
age, outside of professional nurses, who would consider such a thing
for the sake of a comparative stranger? How could he make her see
that Black’s cabin was no place for a young girl to stay? He was
exasperated at her persistence. It offended his amour propre. Why
all this discussion about one of his employees who had been a tramp
only a few months since?
Merrick shook his head. His lips smiled, but there was no smile in his
eyes. “You’re a very impulsive and very generous young woman. But
if you were a little older you would see—”
She broke impatiently into his argument. “Don’t you see how I feel,
Justin? I’ve got to do what I can for him. We’re not in a city where we
can ring up for a trained nurse. I’m the only available woman that
can get in to him. Why did I take my Red Cross training if I’m not to
help those who are sick?”
“Can’t you trust me to look out for him?”
“Of course I can. That’s not the point. There’s so much in nursing.
Any doctor will tell you so. Maybe he needs expert care. I really can
nurse. I’ve done it all my life.”
“You don’t expect to nurse everybody in the county that falls sick, do
you? Don’t you see, dear girl, that Black’s shack is no place for
you?”
“Why isn’t it? I’m a ranchman’s daughter. It doesn’t shock or offend
me to see things that might distress a city girl.” She cast about in her
mind for another way to put it. “I remember my mother leaving us
once for days to look after a homesteader who had been hurt ’way
up on Rabbit Ear Creek. Why, that’s what all the women on the
frontier did.”
“The frontier days are past,” he said. “And that’s beside the point,
anyhow. I’ll have him well looked after. You needn’t worry about
that.”
“But I would,” she urged. “I’d worry a lot. I want to go myself, Justin—
to make sure it’s all right and that everything’s being done for him
that can be. You think it’s just foolishness in me, but it isn’t.”
She put her hand shyly on his sleeve. The gesture was an appeal for
understanding of the impulse that was urgent in her. If he could only
sympathize with it and acknowledge its obligation.
“I think it’s neither necessary nor wise. It’s my duty, not yours, to
have him nursed properly. I’ll not shirk it.” He spoke with the finality
of a dominant man who has made up his mind.
Betty felt thrown back on herself. She was disappointed in him and
her feelings were hurt. Why must he be so obtuse, so correct and
formal? Why couldn’t he see that she had to go? After all, a decision
as to what course she would follow lay with her and not with him. He
had no right to assume otherwise. She was determined to go,
anyhow, but she would not quarrel with him.
“When are you going up to Black’s?” she asked.
“At once.”
“Do take me, please.”
He shook his head. “It isn’t best, dear girl.”
In her heart flamed smokily rebellious fires. “Then I’ll go with Billy.”
He interpreted the words as a challenge. Their eyes met in a long,
steady look. Each measured the strength of the other. It was the first
time they had come into open conflict.
“I wouldn’t do that, Betty,” he said quietly.
“You don’t know how I feel about it. You won’t understand.” Her voice
shook with emotion. “I’ve got to go.”
Merrick knew that he could prevent the ranger from guiding Betty to
the gulch where the wounded man was, but it was possible to pay
too great a price for victory. He yielded, grudgingly.
“I’ll take you. After you’ve seen Hollister, you can give us directions
for nursing him. I should think the doctor ought to know, but, if you
haven’t confidence in him, you can see to it yourself.”
Betty found no pleasure now in her desire to help. Justin’s opposition
had taken all the joy out of it. Nor did his surrender give her any
gratification. He had not yielded because he appreciated the validity
of her purpose, but because he had chosen to avoid an open
breach. She felt a thousand miles away from him in spirit.
“Thank you,” she said formally, choking down a lump in her throat.
 CHAPTER XXVI
BLACK IS SURPRISED

It is not in youth to be long cast down for the troubles of a stranger,

even one who has very greatly engaged the sympathy. In spite of
Betty’s anxiety about the wounded man, her resilient spirits had sent
her eagerly upon this adventure.
She would see Justin. He would approve her plans with enthusiasm.
Together they would ski across the white wastes, they two alone in a
vast world of mysterious stillness. The thin clear air of the high
Rockies would carry their resonant voices like the chimes of bells.
Silences would be significant, laughter the symbol of happy
comradeship. For the first time they would come glowing through
difficulties, perhaps dangers, conquered side by side. And at the end
of the journey waited for them service, that which gave their joyous
enterprise the value of an obligation.
And it was not at all like that—not a bit as she had day-dreamed it on
the ride to Sweetwater Dam. The joy was struck dead in her heart.
Miserably she realized that Justin could not understand. The ardent
fire that burned in her soul seemed only mushy sentiment to him, on
a par with the hysteria that made silly women send flowers to brutal
murderers they did not know.
The bars were up between them. The hard look in his eyes meant
anger. There would be no expression of it in temper. He was too self-
contained for that. None the less it was anger. The reflection of it
gleamed out from under her own dark lashes. She told herself she
hated the narrowness in him that made him hold so rigidly to the
well-ordered, the conventional thing. Why couldn’t he see that there
was an imperative on her to live? Well, she would show him.
Probably he thought that in every clash of will she ought to yield. He
could learn his lesson just as well now as later.
She held her head high, but there was a leaden weight in her bosom
that made her want to sob.
Often she had been proud of his tremendous driving power, the force
that made of him a sixty-horse-power man. She resented it fiercely
to-day. He was traveling just a little too fast for her, so that she could
hardly keep up with him. But she would have fallen in her tracks
rather than ask him to go slower.
Once the slither of his runners stopped. “Am I going too fast?” he
asked coldly.
“Not at all,” she answered stubbornly.
He struck out again. They were climbing a long slope that ended in a
fringe of timber. At the top he waited, watching her as she labored up
heavily. The look he gave her when she reached him said, “I told you
so.”
Before them lay a valley, beyond which was another crest of pines.
“How far now?” Betty asked, panting from the climb.
“Just beyond that ridge.”
“That all?” she said indifferently. “Thought it was a long way.”
“We’ll coast into the valley,” he replied curtly.
She watched him gliding into the dip of the slope. He was not an
expert on runners as her father was, but he had learned the trick of
the thing pretty well. It was in line with his thoroughness not to be a
novice long at anything he set out to master.
Betty shot down after him, gathering impetus as she went. She was
watching the path ahead, and it was not till she was close upon him
that she saw Merrick had fallen. She swerved to the left, flinging out
her arms to prevent herself from going down. Unsteadily she
teetered for a moment, but righted herself with an effort and kept
going till she reached the bottom.
Merrick was on his feet when she turned.
“Anything wrong?” she called.
“One of my skis broken.”
She went back to him. “How did it happen?”
“Dipped into a rock under the snow.” His voice was sullen. Like many
men who do well whatever they undertake, he resented any mishap
due to lack of his own skill. His sense of superiority would have been
satisfied if the accident had befallen her instead of him.
Betty did not smile, but, nevertheless, she was maliciously pleased.
It would bring him down a peg, anyhow.
“What’ll you do?” she asked.
“I suppose I can hobble along somehow. Perhaps I’d better take your
skis and hurry on. I could borrow a pair at the cabin and come back
for you. Yes, I think that would be better.”
She shook her head. “No, I’ll go on and send Mr. Black with a pair.
I’d rather not wait here in the cold. I’ll not be long. You can keep
moving.”
This did not suit Merrick at all. He did not want to be regarded as an
incompetent who had bogged down in the snow. It hurt his pride that
Betty should go on and send back help to him, especially when they
felt criss-cross toward each other.
“I’d rather you didn’t,” he said. “You don’t know who is at the cabin.
That tramp Cig may be there—or Prowers. They’re dangerous, both
of them. Yesterday they tried to blow up the men working on the
tunnel.”
“You can lend me your revolver, then, if you like. But I’m not afraid.
Mr. Black wouldn’t let them hurt me even if they wanted to.”
“It’s not very cold. I’d be back in a little while. And, as you say, you
could keep moving.”
“No, I’m going on,” she answered, and her quiet voice told him she
had made up her mind.
He unbuckled his belt and handed it to her. “You’ll be safer with that
.38,” he said. What he thought is not of record.
“Thanks.” Betty’s little smile, with its hint of sarcasm, suggested that
there was not the least need of the revolver; if she wore it, the only
reason was to humor his vanity and let him feel that he was
protecting her.
She crossed the valley and climbed the ridge. From the farther side
of it she looked down upon a log cabin of two rooms, a small stable,
and a corral. They nestled in a draw at her feet, so close that a man
could have thrown a stone almost to the fence. The hillside was
rough with stones. With Justin’s mishap in mind, she felt her way
down carefully.
Smoke poured out of the chimney and polluted the pure light air. No
need of seeing the fire inside to know that the wood was resinous fir.
Betty knocked on the door.
It opened. Black stood on the threshold looking down at her in
ludicrous amazement. She had taken off her coat and was carrying
it. Against a background of white she bloomed vivid as a poinsettia in
her old-rose sweater and jaunty tam. The cold crisp air had whipped
the scarlet into her lips, the pink into her cheeks.
“What in—Mexico!” he exclaimed.
“How’s Mr. Hollister?”
“A mighty sick man. Howcome you here, miss?”
The sound of a querulous voice came from within. “Tell you I don’t
want the stuff. How many times I got to say it?”
“I’ve come to nurse him. Billy brought us word. Father wasn’t home
—nor Lon. So Mr. Merrick brought me.”
“Merrick,” he repeated.
“He’s over the hill, a ways back. Broke a ski. He’d like you to take
him a pair. I’ll look after Mr. Hollister.”
As she followed the lank range rider into the cabin, she pulled off her
gauntlets. Her cold fingers fumbled with the ski ties.
“Lemme do that,” Black said, and dropped on a knee to help.
“I guess you can do it quicker.” She looked at the patient and let her
voice fall as she asked a question. “Is he delirious?”
“Crazy as a hydryphoby skunk.” He repeated what he had said
before. “A mighty sick man, looks like.”
Betty looked into the hot, fevered face of the man tossing on the bed.
From her medicine kit she took a thermometer. His fever was high.
She prepared medicine and coaxed him to swallow it.
“Where is he wounded?” she asked.
“In the side.”
“Did you wash out the wound and bind it up?”
“Yes’m. I’ve took care of fellows shot up before.”
“Bleed much?”
“Right smart. Did you hear when Doc Rayburn was comin’?”
“He’s on the way.” She found cold water and bathed the burning
face.
“Wisht he’d hustle along,” the range rider said uneasily.
“He won’t be long.” With a flare of anger she turned on Black. “Who
shot him?”
“I dunno. He was shot through the window whilst he was ondressin’
for bed. We come together from the old Thorwaldson cabin a while
before.”
“Did that Cig do it?”
“Might have, at that.” Black was putting on his webs. “Reckon I’ll drift
back an’ pick up yore friend Merrick.”
“Yes,” she said absently. “It was that tramp Cig or Jake Prowers,
one.”
“Yore guess is as good as mine,” he said, buttoning to the neck a
leather coat.
“Can’t we have more light in here? It’s dark. If you’d draw back that
window curtain—”
“Then Mr. Bushwhacker would get a chanct for another shot,” he
said dryly. “No, I reckon we’ll leave the curtain where it’s at.”
Her big startled eyes held fascinated to his. “You don’t think they’d
shoot him again now.”
“Mebbeso. My notion is better not give ’em a show to get at him. You
keep the door closed. I’ll not be long. I see you got a gun.”
There was something significant in the way he said it. Her heart
began to beat fast.
“You don’t think—?”
“No, I don’t. If I did, I’d stay right here. Not a chanct in a hundred.
How far back’s yore friend?”
“Less than a mile.”
“Well, he’s likely been movin’ right along. When I reach the ridge, I’ll
give him the high sign an’ leave the skis stickin’ up in the snow
there.”
“Yes.” And, as he was leaving, “Don’t be long,” she begged.
“Don’t you be scared, miss. Them sidewinders don’t come out in the
open an’ do their wolf-killin’. An’ I won’t be gone but a li’l’ while. If
anything worries you, bang away with that .38 an’ I’ll come a-
runnin’.”
He closed the door after him. From behind the curtain she watched
him begin the ascent. Then she went back to her patient and bathed
his hot hands. Betty echoed the wish of the range rider that the
doctor would come. What could be keeping him? From the Diamond
Bar K ranch to Wild Horse was only a few miles. He must have
started before she did. It would not be long now.
In spite of a two days’ growth of beard, the young fellow on the bed
looked very boyish. She gently brushed back the curls matted on the
damp forehead. He was rambling again in desultory speech.
“A cup o’ cold water—cold lemonade. Happy days, she says. No
trouble friendship won’t lighten, she says, with that game smile
lighting up her face. Little thoroughbred.”
A warm wave of exultant emotion beat through her blood. It reached
her face in a glow of delicate beauty that transformed her.
“You dear boy!” she cried softly, and her eyes were shining stars of
tender light.
 CHAPTER XXVII
THE MAN WITH THE BLEACHED BLUE EYES

There was not much she could do for him except bathe again his
face and hands. He asked for a drink, and Betty propped him up with
her arm while she held the tin cup to his lips. Exhausted by the effort,
he sank back to the pillow and panted. All the supple strength of his
splendid youth had been drained from him. The muscles were lax,
the movements of the body feeble.
Sunken eyes stared at her without recognition. “Sure I’ll take your
hand, and say ‘Thank you’ too. You’re the best little scout, the best
ever.”
She took the offered hand and pressed it gently. “Yes, but now you
must rest. You’ve been sick.”
“A Boche got me.” His wandering subconscious thoughts flowed into
other memories. “Zero hour, boys. Over the top and give ’em hell.”
Then, without any apparent break from one theme to another, his
thick voice fell to a cunning whisper. “There’s a joint on South Clark
Street where I can get it.”
Into his disjointed mutterings her name came at times, spoken
always with a respect that was almost reverence. And perhaps a
moment later his voice would ring out clear and crisp in directions to
the men working under him. Subjects merged into each other
inconsequently—long-forgotten episodes of school days, college
larks, murmured endearments to the mother who had died many
years since. Listening to him, Betty knew that she was hearing
revelations of a soul masculine but essentially clean.
A sound startled her, the click of the latch. She turned her head
swiftly as the door opened. Fear drenched her heart. The man on the
threshold was Prowers. He had come out of a strong white light and
at first could see nothing in the dark cabin.
Betty watched him as he stood there, his bleached blue eyes
blinking while they adjusted themselves to another focus.
“What do you want?” she asked sharply, the accent of alarm in her
voice.
“A woman, by jiminy by jinks!” The surprise in his squeaky voice was
pronounced. He moved forward to the bed. “Clint Reed’s girl. Where
you come from? How’d you get here?”
She had drawn back to the wall at the head of the bed in order to
keep a space between them. Her heart was racing furiously. His cold
eyes, with the knife-edge stab in them, held hers fast.
“I came in over the snow to nurse him.”
“Alone?”
“No. Mr. Merrick’s with me.”
“Where?”
“At the top of the hill. He broke a ski.”
“Where’s Don?”
“Gone to meet him. They’ll be here in a minute.”
A cunning, impish grin broke the lines of the man’s leathery face. He
remembered that he had come prepared to be surprised to hear of
Hollister’s wound. “Nurse who?” he asked suavely.
“Mr. Hollister, the engineer driving the tunnel.”
“Sick, is he?” He scarcely took the trouble to veil his rancorous
malice. It rode him, voice, manner, and mocking eye. His mouth was
a thin straight line, horribly cruel.
“Some one shot him—last night—through the window.” She knew
now that he had done it or had had it done. The sense of outrage, of
horror at his unhuman callousness, drove the fear out of her bosom.
Her eyes accused him, though her tongue made no charge.
“Shot him, by jiminy by jinks! Why, Daniels had ought to put the
fellow in the calaboose. Who did it?”
“I don’t know. Do you?” she flashed back.
His evil grin derided her. “How would I know, my dear?”
He drew up a chair and sat down. The girl did not move. Rigid and
watchful, she did not let her eye waver from him for an instant.
He nodded toward the delirious man. “Will he make it?”
“I don’t know.”
“Doc seen him yet?”
“No.”
“Glad I came. I can help nurse him.” He cut short a high cackle of
laughter to ask a question. “What’s yore gun for, dearie? You
wouldn’t throw it on poor Jake Prowers, would you?”
He was as deadly as dynamite, she thought, more treacherous than
a rattlesnake. She wanted to cry out her horror at him. To see him
sitting there, humped up like a spider, not three feet from the man he
had tried to murder, filled her with repulsion. There was more in her
feeling than that; a growing paralysis of terror lest he might reach out
and in a flash complete the homicide he had attempted.
She tried to reason this away. He dared not do it, with her here as a
witness, with two men drawing closer every minute. Don Black had
told her that he wouldn’t strike in the open, and the range rider had
known him more years than she had lived. But the doubt remained.
She did not know what he would do. Since she did not live in the
same world as he, it was not possible for her to follow his thought
processes.
Then, with no previous intimation that his delirium had dropped from
him, the wounded man startled Betty by asking a rational question.
“Did you come to see how good a job you’d done?” he said quietly to
Prowers.
The cowman shook his head, still with the Satanic grin. “No job of
mine, son. I’m thorough.”
“Your orders, but maybe not your hand,” Hollister insisted feebly.
Betty moved into his line of vision, and to his startled brain the
motion of her was like sweet unearthly music. He looked silently at
her for a long moment.
“Am I still out of my head?” he asked. “It’s not really you, is it?”
“Yes,” she said, very gently. “You mustn’t talk.”
“In Black’s cabin, aren’t we?”
“Yes.”
“Shot through the window, Black told me. Remember, if I don’t get
well, it was this man or Cig that did it.”
“I’ll remember,” she promised. “But you’re going to get well. Don’t
talk, please.”
“Just one thing. What are you doing here?”
“I came to look after you. Now that’s all—please.”
He said no more, in words. But the eyes of sick men are like those of
children. They tell the truth. From them is stripped the veil woven by
time and the complexities of life.
Sounds of voices on the hillside drifted to the cabin. Betty’s heart
leaped joyfully. Friends were at hand. It was too late now for Prowers
to do any harm even if it was in his mind.
The voices approached the cabin. The girl recognized that of
Merrick, strong and dominant and just a little heavy. She heard
Black’s drawling answer, without being able to distinguish the words.
The door opened. Four men came into the room. The two who
brought up the rear were Dr. Rayburn and Lon Forbes.
“Oh, Lon!” Betty cried, and went to him with a rush. “I’m awf’ly glad
you came.”
She clung to him, trembling, a sob in her throat.
The rawboned foreman patted her shoulder with a touch of
embarrassment. “There—there, honey, ’s all right. Why didn’t you
wait for old Lon instead o’ hoppin’ away like you done?”
Prowers tilted back his chair on two legs and chirped up with satiric
comment. “We got quite a nice party present. Any late arrivals not
yet heard from?”
Both Lon and Justin Merrick were taken aback. In the darkness they
had not yet recognized the little man.
The foreman spoke dryly. “Might ’a’ known it. Trouble and Jake
Prowers hunt in couples. Always did.”
“I could get a right good testimonial from Mr. Lon Forbes,” the
cowman said, with his high cackle of splenetic laughter. “Good old
Lon, downright an’ four-square, always a booster for me.”
Betty whispered. “He’s an awful man, Lon. I’m scared of him. I didn’t
know any minute what he was going to do. Oh, I am glad you came.”
“Same here,” Lon replied. “Don’t you be scared, Betty. He can’t do a
thing—not a thing.”
Merrick had been taking off his skis. He came up to Betty now. “Did
he annoy you—say anything or—?”
“No, Justin.” A shiver ran down her spine. “He just looked and
grinned. I wanted to scream. He shot Mr. Hollister. I know he did. Or
had it done by that Cig.”
“Yes. I don’t doubt that.”
The doctor, disencumbered of impedimenta of snowshoes and
wraps, fussed forward to the bedside. “Well, let’s see—let’s see
what’s wrong here.”
He examined the wound, effervesced protests and questions, and
prepared for business with the bustling air that characterized him.
“Outa the room now—all but Miss Reed and one o’ you men. Lon,
you’ll do.”
“I’ll stay,” announced Merrick with decision.
“All right. All right. I want some clean rags, Black. You got plenty of
hot water, I see. Clear out, boys.”
“You don’t need a good nurse, Doc?” Prowers asked, not without
satiric malice. He was playing with fire, and he knew it. Everybody in
the room suspected him of this crime. He felt a perverted enjoyment
in their hostility.
Black chose this moment to make his declaration of independence.
“I’d light a shuck outa here if I was you, Jake, an’ I wouldn’t come
back, seems to me.”
The cold, bleached eyes of the cowman narrowed. “You’re givin’ me
that advice as a friend, are you, Don?” he asked.
The range rider’s jaw stopped moving. In his cheek the tobacco quid
stuck out. His face, habitually set to the leathery imperturbability of
his calling, froze now to an expressionless mask.
“I’m sure givin’ you that advice,” he said evenly.
“I don’t hear so awful good, Don. As a friend, did you say?” The little
man cupped an ear with one hand in ironic mockery.
Black’s gaze was hard as gun-metal. “I said I’d hit the trail for home if
I was you, Jake, an’ I’d stay there for a spell with kinda low visibility
like they said in the war.”
“I getcha, Don.” Prowers shot a blast of cold lightning from under his
scant brows. “I can take a hint without waitin’ for a church to fall on
me. Rats an’ a sinkin’ ship, eh? You got a notion these fellows are
liable to win out on me, an’ you want to quit while the quittin’ is good.
I been wonderin’ for quite a while if you wasn’t yellow.”
“Don’t do that wonderin’ out loud, Jake,” the other warned quietly. “If
you do, you’ll sure enough find out.”
The little man laughed scornfully, met in turn defiantly the eyes of
Betty, Merrick, and Forbes, turned on his heel, and sauntered out.