by Max Brand
“Will you?” he said.
“Yes. But you never paint your whole body, do you?”
“No, I never do that. You know why.”
She hung her head. “Yes,” she murmured, “I know why.”
He forced himself to say calmly: “It is still a pain to me to remember that I could not stand the torment of the tribe initiation. Perhaps Sweet Medicine sent that punishment on me. But of course it is too late to stand for the initiation again. If a lad fails once, he cannot have a second chance. But that is cruel. That makes the sickness in my heart, Blue Bird.”
“Look,” said Lazy Wolf. “The little fool is crying about it!”
Rusty touched her face.
“It is true! Your face is wet. What’s the matter, Blue Bird?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Nothing. But to think that you should have had such grief and shame . . . you . . . you . . . ah, Red Hawk.”
“Go on,” commanded her father. “Paint the red hawk on his chest, since that’s all the ornament he’ll have. Do it well, Blue Bird. You know how, by this time. I tell you, Rusty, that she’s been painting the thing even on stones. At every encampment, on everything . . . always a red hawk . . . to remember you by, I suppose.”
“Well, that’s strange,” said Rusty, “I’d think that you could remember a friend like me without painting a red hawk, Blue Bird.”
“Ah,” grunted the trader, “you never will have a brain in your head, Rusty.”
The girl got out the paints and the brushes. She began to paint a pouncing hawk with wings furling back, and beak and cruel talons extended.
He bent his head and looked down to his chest. The wings of the stooping hawk extended right across his breast from shoulder to shoulder.
“How beautiful,” said Rusty Sabin. “Ai! Ai! To think that I never shall be able to see it right side up.”
“But you shall,” said the girl, and brought out a square mirror that she held up before him, laughing.
He stared at the picture of himself, enchanted.
“And now you can dress,” said Blue Bird. “Here are the whitest deerskin leggings . . . you see how they are fringed? Here is a shirt worked with porcupine quills of every color. Here are the beaded moccasins.”
“Ah, how lucky if they should all fit,” said Rusty.
“Lucky?” murmured Lazy Wolf. “Well, you may call it luck if you wish . . . but I’d call it foolishness.”
* * * * *
In the lodge of Standing Bull the assemblage was so choice that not a single man was present who had not counted at least five painted feathers that represented the number of men each had killed—an honor far greater than the taking of five scalps. For that matter, it was known that Red Hawk never had taken a scalp in all the days of his life, but the smallest boys could not look on him without a shudder of admiration.
All of them were profusely painted in the most ceremonial style in whites and blacks and reds and yellows of fantastic design, so that they looked far from human.
Only Rusty Sabin himself carried on his breast the single design. By his failure, in his eighteenth year, to endure the tortures of the initiation into manhood, he had forfeited the proud privilege of being painted as a good Cheyenne should be for an important occasion.
The feast was short because the food was simple. It was washed down with water and, as a special luxury that showed the magnificence of Standing Bull as a generous host, with tea sweetened with sugar to the point of nausea. Rusty Sabin had lost some of his Cheyenne tastes. He barely was able to swallow that drink and keep on smiling.
Afterward, when the guests had departed, Red Hawk sat for a long time with Standing Bull and watched the dying of the fire. The son of the chief, excited by the strange events of the evening, whimpered now and then in his sleep, and the soft voice of the squaw hushed the child.
At last Standing Bull said: “How is it in your heart, Red Hawk?”
Rusty answered: “It is like a March day when the sun is bright and the wind is cold from the snow. I am Cheyenne, but I must go to live with my own people.”
“Could you forget them?” asked Standing Bull.
“Whenever I look at the color of my skin, I must remember.”
“Remember them, then, but stay with us. We have paid a price for you. A Cheyenne father has loved you . . . a Cheyenne mother has nourished you. The god of the Cheyennes has spoken to you.”
“These are all great prices,” agreed Rusty, shaking his head, “but my mother was a white woman, and the price she paid down for me was her life, which Dull Hatchet took, and her scalp, which the Cheyennes carried away.”
“Does her spirit come near you still?” asked Standing Bull.
Rusty put his hand on the green scarab that hung from his neck. “You know, brother,” he said, “that when the scalp is gone from the head, the spirit will not go to the Happy Hunting Grounds. Therefore her ghost is still wandering in the air. She is always near me. When I am with my people, the Cheyennes, I am glad, but she is unhappy. When I am with the whites, I am sad, but she is happy.”
“If she paid down the price of her life,” said Standing Bull gloomily, “then you belong to her and must do as she bids you to do. I am sorry for you, Red Hawk. How long do you stay with us now?”
“I go in the first gray of tomorrow’s light.”
“Ah, that is a sorrow for me. I shall ride part of the way with you, if I may.”
“You shall ride with me, and bring with you ten of your best braves. Each of them shall take extra horses and saddles on which goods may be packed. When you return with them, there will be new rifles for all of the warriors who follow you. There will be some of the light woolen blankets that the white men weave with machines. There will be medicine against fevers, and knives of strong steel, and hatchets, and axes, and whole packages of beads, and eagle feathers, and everything that makes an Indian rich. There will be something for every man, and every woman, and every child in the tribe. You will stand in the center of the encampment and you will give out the gifts according to the rank and age of each. Every time you make a present you will say . . . ‘This is from the hands of Red Hawk. In this way he says farewell to his red people.’”
“Are you so rich?” asked Standing Bull.
“I have been made rich by Sweet Medicine,” said Red Hawk.
“Sweet Medicine have mercy upon me,” murmured the young chief swiftly. “I shall ride with you in the morning, brother. But ai, ai! What an ache there is in my heart.”
* * * * *
During the night the messages were sent. In the first gray of the morning, when even the dogs of the village still were asleep, twelve riders issued from the town and traveled across the prairies, each of them with ten or a dozen extra horses driven ahead in a swiftly running cluster.
They passed over the rolling country. They entered the lifeless flat of the true prairie, a green sea, a trackless plain where a compass would be needed for travel, or else the faultless instinct and memory of a red Indian. The prairie made them diminish. Within the immense horizon they grew leagues long, and man and horse became traveling specks.
Chapter Two
When the tap came at the kitchen door of the little house in Witherell, Maisry Lester was wrapping a blanket about her father. The weather was bland, but, as soon as the day ended, a dampness came into the air from Witherell Creek and the consumptive fever of Richard Lester was apt to begin again at that time of the day. So his daughter would start up the fire in the kitchen stove and make him comfortable again with a bit of warmth before he went to bed. There he sat with his head bent over a book while she hurried to answer the tapping at the door.
When she opened, Rusty Sabin stood there, laughing. But she shrank for a moment away from him. His suit of white deerskin made his skin seem darker than the mere sun could dye it, and his hair was almost as long as it had been in the old, wild days when she had first known him. Besides, he was radiant with colored work of porcupine q
uills, like a fragile armor, and his feet glistened with an inlaying of beads. So she shrank for one instant as if from a wild Indian, then she ran into his arms.
He held her there, laughing. Her face was upraised, but he did not kiss her. That was a white custom that he had at last learned, it was true, but now he seemed to have returned to his old Indian ways, which did not permit of such intimacy. To any Indian a kiss was unclean.
He began to wave his hand over her shoulder to Richard Lester, Maisry’s father, and Lester, shouting a happy welcome, started to rise.
Rusty ran and prevented him. Then he turned and called out in Cheyenne, and there appeared on the threshold six feet four of immensity—Standing Bull himself, with the fierce beauty of an Achilles on his face. The young chief carried in his hand a long-barreled rifle, and his other arm was raised to the ceiling as he said—“Hau!”—in a voice of soft thunder.
Rusty presented him.
“My brother, Standing Bull,” he said. He chattered for a moment in Cheyenne.
The Indian turned his expressionless face to one and then to the other of the white people. His dignity was more perfect than that of a senator.
“Your brother, Rusty?” exclaimed Richard Lester. “You mean your foster brother, of course?”
“No, no. My blood brother. We have exchanged blood. We are the same flesh and the same spirit. Standing Bull is my brother. . . . Seat yourself, Standing Bull. Here is a chair for you. No, you’d rather sit on the floor, I know. . . . Ah hai! What do you think of him, Maisry?”
“I never saw such a man . . . does he understand a word of English?”
“Not a word.”
“What shall we do for him?”
“Give him a dozen pounds of meat and he’ll be happy. We’ve left ten Cheyenne warriors back in the hills with their horses. Standing Bull goes back with them in a few days, after they’ve had their presents.”
“I have half a leg of cold mutton,” said the girl. “What will he have with it?”
“Water”—said Rusty, then corrected himself—“no, tea . . . with plenty of sugar in it. A pot of tea and the sugar bowl emptied into it. That will make him happy.”
Presently they had Standing Bull seated in a corner of the kitchen, with his rifle leaning against the wall beside him. On his knees there was a platter in which stood a gray crust of grease over the red of the mutton juice, and a great leg of mutton from which only one wedge had been carved.
Standing Bull got a good grip on the mutton bone, regarded knife and fork not a whit, and began to eat. He would sink in his teeth, get a grip on the long fibers of the meat, and then tear off a dangling strip that he consumed with snapping movements of head and jaw.
Both the girl and Richard Lester had to turn their heads from this spectacle, but while their smiles froze they saw Rusty regarding the huge Cheyenne with a look of the blindest affection.
“And that was what you found out of the great adventure? That was what you brought back from the return to the prairie, Rusty?” asked the girl.
He looked at the brightness of her hair and the blue of her eyes as though he could see nothing else. But presently he recalled himself and cried: “Ah, yes, there’s another thing! Look . . .”
He ran out of the house and came back in a moment carrying a weighty little sack of buckskin. He was not a huge man like Standing Bull. Rather, he was made with a compact neatness and his weight lay only where it could be of the greatest advantage. And seriously or in frolic, there was not a man among the Cheyennes who cared to wrestle with that leaping, snapping, iron-handed, cat-footed Red Hawk. Now, with a stroke, with the side of his hand, he ripped open the sewing of the sack and dumped onto the table a flood of gold. Some of the nuggets rolled off the table and ran rattling to the ends of the room.
Standing Bull regarded that shining shower with only an instant of attention. Then he resumed his attack on the leg of mutton, which he rapidly was stripping to the bone. But the Lesters ran toward the table in one movement and spread out their hands to keep any more of the treasure from spilling onto the floor.
“Rusty! Rusty! Rusty!” cried Maisry. “What have you done? Where did you find it?”
“I didn’t steal it,” said Rusty. And he laughed to see their joy.
“Did you mine it yourself?” asked the father, his eyes burning as they gloated over the gold.
“Yes . . . I dug it and panned it all myself.”
“If you got so much in such a short time . . . there must be millions left!” cried Richard Lester. “Where is the place, Rusty?”
“What do we care for millions?” asked Rusty.
“Care for them? Why, Rusty!” exclaimed the girl. “Do you mean that you wouldn’t be rich if you could be?”
“It doesn’t do much good,” said Rusty. “If you have a great deal of wealth, your poor friends come and ask for it.”
“But with us it isn’t the way it is with Indians,” she explained. “We don’t give away all our money to beggars. Only something to charity.”
“Is that all we do?” said Rusty. “Well, I’ve said good bye to the place where I dug that gold, and I don’t think that I could go back. Not unless I were driven back.”
“But listen to me!” cried Richard Lester. “Gold like this . . . free gold in such nuggets . . . great heavens, Rusty, it must be one of the richest deposits in the world!”
“Perhaps it is,” said Rusty carelessly. “All that matters to me is that we’ll have plenty of money now. I must go to work anyway, you say. Among the whites there’s no free, happy life of hunting and war. There must be work, sitting at a table, writing on paper. And if it must be that way, then I shall make more money with my work. But this will take you wherever you need to be for your sickness, Mister Lester. And this will build a home for me and for Maisry. What more could a man want than enough? You know the saying among the Cheyennes . . . too much in the hand is the burden that breaks the back. . . . And there’s an equal amount of the gold for my red brothers, the Cheyennes.”
“Ah ha?” exclaimed Richard Lester. “An equal amount, did you say? For the red Indians? Rusty, are you going to waste a fortune on ignorant Indians?”
“Hush,” said the girl. “That only will hurt Rusty’s feelings. It’s all right, Rusty. Whatever makes you happy is all right.”
* * * * *
At the stores of the trading post, early the next morning, there was a murmur, a stir, and then a clamor. Here was a man ordering supplies at a rate that astonished them all. Four hundred rifles, with fifty-pound chunks of lead and solid poundage of the best powder, hatchets, knives for skinning, knives for cutting up meat, axes, spades, hoes in quantities, heavy packages of beads. Never had there been such a flood of orders delivered by a single voice in the town of Witherell.
“It’s a war,” said someone. “He’s going to raise the Indian tribes. He’s half an Indian himself, that Rusty Sabin.”
But Charlie Galway, leaning on a long rifle, his curling hair sweeping across his shoulders as his head was bent in thought, remembered only one thing—that these provisions were being paid for in solid nuggets and in gold dust. Where that gold had come from, more could be obtained. And Charlie Galway was a philosopher who always thought past the present and into the future.
Among white men it would have been hard to find a more magnificent physical specimen than Charlie Galway. He was scarcely an inch shorter than Standing Bull himself, and, although he lacked some of the dimensions of the huge Cheyenne, he was almost as formidable about the shoulders. He had brilliant blond hair and blue eyes that turned to steel color, when he was excited, but he was rarely excited. This morning, looking up from under his brows, he watched the flash and shine of White Horse as Rusty Sabin moved the stallion back and forth. He looked at that bitless hackamore and watched the horse controlled more by voice and the touch of the knees than by the reins. He looked at the face of Rusty Sabin, too, and then turned to the man at his shoulder and said: “You know this Sabin?
This fellow they call Rusty?”
“I know about him. Nobody really knows him,” said the other. “How can you know a man who is two-thirds Indian? Not in blood but in brain.”
“He’s not big, but he looks like something,” said Charlie Galway.
“That’s what a lot of dead men say,” said the other. “Fellows who have to shoot straight a lot of times generally manage to get the knack of it. He’s had death in his face fifty times, I suppose. White Horse . . . that’s the famous White Horse that you’ve heard so much about. Wild. The whole plains chased him for two years. Then Rusty Sabin went out and walked him down.”
“Walked him down?” asked Charlie Galway, incredulous.
“Yes. That’s what I said, and that’s what I mean. Walked him down.”
“Ah,” said Charlie Galway.
Throughout the rest of the day Galway went on trailing Rusty Sabin, until the white Indian’s great heaps of purchases were gathered together and paid for, all of them, in gold. And when but a double handful of the precious stuff remained, that went to a one-legged, white-faced fellow on the rim of the watching, envious crowd. A horse had fallen with him six months before; now he was waiting for death, rather than for anything that life could bring to him, until into his cupped hands Rusty Sabin poured those pounds of wealth.
And these were times when a lucky man might get 40¢ a day for his labor.
The cripple looked blindly down at the savings of a lifetime—at peace, at comfort, rained into his hands by heaven. He did not speak because he could not speak. And if he had had words, he would have addressed them to heaven, not to any mortal man like Rusty Sabin.
But Charlie Galway, watching, smiled a little, with the quick, flashing smile that goes with a secret thought.
Rusty Sabin might be a dangerous fighting man, but he also was a fool, and Charlie Galway was more than a match for any fool in this world.