by Clay Fisher
The red watchers were not loathe to grant the beauty of the thing.
H’g’un! H’g’un! Growl the courage-word. Lone Wolf’s medicine was still the strongest. His hmunha, his magic power to hurt, was still the most potent. His wotahe, his charm for personal protection, was still the best. Admit it, admit it! Nobody save Lone Wolf Kelly would have tried such a shot, none but he could have made it. It was no wonder Crazy Horse called him The-Little-Man-With-The-Big-Heart. It was a better name for him than Lone Wolf. Roll it on the tongue, it sounded good, “Little Big Heart.”
Even Gall was impressed.
“Hopa, hopa! Pretty, pretty!” rumbled the Hunkpapa war chief in generous if expressionless tribute. “Lone Wolf has an eye like Wanbli K’leska, the Spotted Eagle.”
“Wowicake, you say a true thing,” agreed one of the two lieutenants flanking the Sioux leader, a man distinguished among the flat-torsoed company of his brothers by a remarkable paunch. “But then Lone Wolf had the advantage and also a better gun.”
“Ha-a-u,” acknowledged Kelly, before Gall could answer. “Owotanla! Frog Belly’s tongue is straight as always!” He had met the squat Sioux many years before, or at least had seen him, and had never forgotten him. The memory was not mutual.
The fat brave glared at him, growling a sullen, indistinguishable answer. But Kelly was not deceived. Beyond rash courage, the average horseback Indian of the High Plains responded most emotionally to rank flattery. Frog Belly was average. Kelly knew Gall’s big-barreled lieutenant was well enough pleased at having his name recalled by an enemy of Lone Wolf’s caliber.
Gall’s own continuing grimness, however, proved uncontaminated.
“Pick up your gun,” he told the humiliated Red Paint. “You, Lone Wolf, go ahead of me. Take the mule to ride. We have work for you to do and it will not wait. Do you understand?”
“Work for me?” returned Kelly curiously. The conversation was now entirely in Sioux, a tongue in which the white scout was as fluent as his red host. “Then you were not trailing these poor heyokas, these simple clowns and fools from Fort Buford?”
“No. We were trailing you. Go now. Take the mule as I said. Take him, and we shall turn back south from whence we came. Our camp is but a little way down there. Hopo. Hookahey.”
There was no chance to develop the debate. Not even for a speechmaker of Kelly’s gifts. The dark-eyed scout knew that. He had two choices. Do what they asked and get shot later—argue about it and get shot now. To his recent business associates, he apologized hurriedly.
“I’m sorry, boys. This is one time I read a set of signs exactly backward. They were trailing me, not you. To that extent I brought them down on you. I’ll do what I can to make it up to you by talking them off your track.
“Meantime, sit tight right where you are until things shape up. Don’t try to run whatever you do.
“Also, meantime, goodbye.
“I’ve a hunch you won’t see me again, or if you do, you won’t want to look at me. Good luck—”
“Take the mule,” repeated Gall, his face still, his voice monotone flat. “I won’t say it again.”
“You won’t need to, my friend!” grinned Kelly in English. He took the lead rope from Big Anse, who had caught up the mule and led it in. Swinging aboard the bony beast with laudable alacrity, he completed the grin. “I learn very fast for a Wasicun! Hopo, let’s get out of here.”
“Hold on, cuss it all, Kelly—!”
Jepson had once again belatedly caught up with the rapid drift of current affairs. Or almost had.
He had not understood Kelly’s allusion to the likelihood of their not wanting to look at him if they saw him again, but even his turtle-slow mind could translate what was going on in front of his small-pupiled eyes at the present moment. The unprincipled Irish rascal was throwing in with the Indians, leaving them, his helpless white companions, to the later and leisured mercy of the uncertain red men!
“You can’t jest ride out on us like this! Mebbe you know where you’re goin’ and how you’re goin’ to make out. Thet’s jest fine! But what in God’s name is goin’ to happen to us, man?”
Luther Kelly turned his head and laughed.
There was in the sound both an irrepressible outer humor and a certain plaintive undertone of Celt sadness.
“Mr. Jepson,” he called back, kneeing the mule obediently in the direction indicated by the eloquent grace of Gall’s rifle muzzle, “it’s like Wee Robbie Burns told his frightened little friend, the Mouse—that ‘wee, sleekit, cowrin’ tim’rous beastie’ for whom he had such great, gentle-souled compassion.
“Still thou art blessed compared wi’ me!
The present only toucheth thee:
But, och! I backward cast my e’eon prospects drear!
An’ forward, though I canna see,
I guess an’ fear!”
7
The Sioux caravan wound swiftly along the serrated spine of the ridge, where the trail led southward through airily spaced stands of hundred-year-old conifers. The occasional unexpected breaks of open grassland gave forth upon dizzying cliff drops and startling vistas out across Judith Basin to the apparent ends of the prairie earth. The motionless air of high noon hung redolent with the sun-released headiness of cedar, pine, and balsam, and with the even more pungent aroma of woodland humus arising from the deep-matted cone and needle floor of the forest.
Nothing stirred.
Even the birds were still.
“Of course,” Gall nodded to Kelly, breaking the lazy sunlit silence matter-of-factly, “you understand that if you are not successful in the matter, we shall kill you.”
“Of course,” agreed the latter. “One does not expect to be rewarded for failure.”
Actually, he did not know whether the Sioux chief was speaking literally or testing his nerves. That was the delightful thing about the Hunkpapa, or in fact about any of the wild Plains Indians. You never knew what they were thinking or what they meant to do. Which was easily enough explained. Neither did they.
Yet in his eight perilous years along the Yellowstone, Kelly had learned the secret of staying alive among the unstable Sioux and their even more fractious first cousins, the Cheyenne. He had discovered the peculiar compound of emotions which separated them from their white brothers. The latter, at least by comparison, were mentally adults, conditioned in their behavior by consciousness, respect, or fear of settlement law. The Indians had the happy minds of completely undisciplined children, the killing reflexes of completely dangerous carnivores.
And like any other wild-born animal, the nomad hostile could smell fear. The smell of it set him crazy, made his heart bad, brought him to do things for which later, more often than not, he was abjectly sorry. But by that time it was far too late. The big trick was, Kelly knew, never to falter in front of them when they had you cornered. Never to let them get behind you for more than a minute. Never to allow them to maneuver downwind of you, where they could catch the smell of the fear in your sweat.
But knowing and doing were two different matters.
Gall had already explained what lay ahead.
His party had been on an Absaroka horse raid. They had made a good gather of the Crow ponies but not quite a clean escape. Half a dozen of the enemy had come up through the morning darkness at just the wrong time. There had been a little last-minute skirmish. Nothing much. Only five Crows killed and one shot in the leg.
It had been thought wise to bring the wounded one along. No use leaving a live witness behind to identify the raiders. Besides, a Crow captive was always a big coup. And this particular one bade fair to prove a real big coup.
But three days of hard riding to outdistance the Absaroka pursuit had been bad for the captive’s wound. Very bad. Now that wound must have attention or the Crow would die. Gall did not want that. He wanted this enemy to live a long time. Aye,
he had his personal reasons for desiring this thing, but they were none of Lone Wolf’s affair, and Gall would not discuss them with him.
The Hunkpapa had stopped at Reed’s to see if the old man had any white man’s medicine that would heal the Crow’s leg. It was there he had learned that Lone Wolf was but hours ahead of him on the foothill trail. He had set out at once to come up with him.
Why? Lone Wolf should know that. If anyone could draw out the poison from that wound, would it not be Lone Wolf himself? There was no time for false modesty. Gall had heard about his power to heal long ago. He had not forgotten it. He had seen it work with his own eyes, and he thought of it now, and he hoped that Lone Wolf remembered his big medicine well enough to do magic things with that Crow wound.
If he did not and the Crow died, it would be as Gall said. They would have to kill him. Nohetto, it was really quite simple.
As Kelly’s searching mind struggled through this confusing welter of back-thought, the war party neared the Sioux camp.
Smelling the aromatic updraft of the woodsmoke down the ridge, the white scout made one last cautious try at clearing up the situation.
He put the proposition straightaway to Gall.
“There is but one thing which puzzles me in all this, my brother,” he announced fraternally. “How did the Border People come to know of my skill with medicines?” He used the proper Sioux tribal division name for the fierce Hunkpapa to further the imposture of offhand comradery. “I had thought it a power which I had kept well hidden.”
He knew better than to deny the gift with which the Sioux had endowed him. Right now it represented his only chance, or at least his best one, for saving his shoulder-long hair. But it was safe enough to question the source of Gall’s information, indeed the very act and form of putting the query was a subtle flattery of the kind most dear to the Indian ego.
The Hunkpapa chief looked at him.
“You do not remember me?” he asked softly.
Kelly shook his head. In truth he did not, though there was a haunting familiarity about the renowned warrior’s face and form which had bothered him from the first moment back at the wolf hunter’s camp.
“Think back a long time,” said Gall. “Many, many moons ago. In the camp of the English half-breeds. The pemmican-makers from the Land of the Grandmother.”
Kelly’s eyes widened. “You were with Sitting Bull!” he cried. “That time he came to visit the Red River Sioux half-breeds on their buffalo hunt.” He shook his head again. “I can’t believe that I would have forgotten you!”
“I was only a warrior then, a young man. I sat in the last rank of Tatanka’s braves that day. You did not see me, but I saw you. You were no more than a boy. Very young. Very frightened. You thought we were going to kill you. Remember?”
Kelly remembered with a vengeance. And, too, with that sad twinge of ineffable poignancy which is reserved to a grown man’s greatest love: that for the lost and long-ago beauty of his boyhood.
Seven years ago!
He had just gotten out of his three-year hitch in the Union infantry. Was journeying west with a band of mixed-blood buffalo hunters from Canada; commercial pemmican-makers from the Red River of the North country, as Gall had indicated.
The Red River breeds, Sioux by principal Indian derivation, had advised him to buy a Hudson’s Bay blanket coat such as they wore, and to adopt the blue broadcloth hood and red sash they affected as well, so that should they encounter any of the wild Sioux, the latter would not distinguish him for an American. He had gladly taken the advice, but the ferret-eyed Tatanka Yotanka was not to be misled by any such thin device.
When, far out in the buffalo country, Sitting Bull and his painted band had ridden suddenly into the peaceful camp of their half-breed brothers, the wily medicine man had singled out the young stranger at once. And had called him for a hated American on the spot.
Kelly’s life had been saved by the quick thinking of the ancient half-breed whose wagon he was sharing on the trek. The old man had remembered his young American friend setting a broken arm for a little child earlier in the march—Corporal Luther S. Kelly had served ninety days of his three years in service as a medical orderly—and when Sitting Bull grew threatening, he called for the shy youngster to be brought forward.
Showing the neatly splinted limb to the curious wild Sioux, he had extolled the American boy’s strange and wondrous powers as a healer of the sick, adding that he had been trained for this work among the Pony Soldiers. The Sioux, already familiar with the white man’s doctors through both the Indian Bureau and the army posts, were impressed. When the half-breed patriarch concluded his oration with the explanation that the young American had been allowed to accompany the pemmican-makers so that he might minister to their ills or to the accidents of the chase, they accepted the fabrication without question.
Sitting Bull had even let the white-faced youth lance a bad abscess on the back of his neck and had been quite pleased with the relief afforded by the ex-corporal’s crude surgery.
Since that time and thinking nothing of it, Kelly had always carried with him the lancet, forceps, set of probes, rusty surgical needle, bundle of catgut sutures, bottle of carbolic, and tin of camphorated tincture of opium with which he had absconded from the army; the whole conveniently contained in a buckskin bundle no bigger than his hand and transported with his other spare personal effects in his belt-slung war bag.
Inclining his head to Gall’s last question now, he had good reason to be happy with the habit, and to remember with gratitude his ninety days of serving under army Surgeon John K. Blake at Fort Wadsworth in the desolate Dakota foothills these nearly eight years gone.
8
The ponies broke into a jingling trot.
Kelly tensed his hand on the mule’s halter rope. He knew he was no more than seconds from getting the chance to demonstrate his surgical talents on a basis most bona fide doctors never enjoy—that of staking his own life on his ability to save the patient’s. The grim thought occurred that this Indian arrangement might lead to a great improvement in the standards of modern settlement medicine, or at least in the careful practice thereof, and with the thought the white scout laughed aloud.
Gall glanced around, surprised.
“I don’t remember anything funny about that visit to the camp of our English cousins,” he said. “Unless it was sticking Old Tatanka in the neck with that little knife. That was pretty funny, all right.”
Kelly did not remember the incident as being outstandingly hilarious but was quick with a second laugh all the same.
“Yes, that was it!” he exclaimed. “I was just recalling how frightened I was, even as you say. I thought my time had come when they told me that it was the great Sitting Bull who visited us. And then to think of me cutting his neck with the little knife! Do you remember him calling my attention to the warriors standing all around with their rifles pointing at me and telling me that they had been instructed to shoot if he cried out when the knife went in? That was pretty funny all right, just as you say!”
“I am glad you think so,” said Gall.
“How is that, my brother?”
“Soon you will have a chance to try it again. Just the same way.”
“I beg your pardon?”
The Sioux chief looked at him a full ten seconds. Then he said it very quietly.
“The guns will be around you again when you use the little knife. That’s all.”
Moments later, they reached the Sioux camp. Kelly committed it to memory with one sweeping glance.
There were no lodges or pack animals, as this was a war party, but the braves had erected a snug shelter cleverly woven of cedar fronds and pegged down, drumskin tight, with two expensive Four Point blankets of scarlet and black. This clearly had been built to house the wounded Crow. The unusual thoughtfulness shown in the construction of any kind of sh
elter for a fellow Indian, wounded or not, whetted Kelly’s curiosity. At the same time, his proximity to the shelter’s occupant was tightening the walls of his stomach with apprehension.
That Indian in there had better be in a treatable condition. He had better have a wound within the simple limits of Lone Wolf’s peacetime army experience. If he did not—
But there was no point in such “ifs.”
The devil take the red hellions. Win or lose, they were not going to be treated to any hesitation on Yellowstone Kelly’s part.
He slid down from the mule, stepped quickly between Gall and the cedar bough shelter. “I will go in alone,” he said quietly, “or I will not go in at all.”
Gall’s face clouded.
“Now why do you say that?”
“My medicine will not work unless I first see the sick one alone.”
“I don’t believe you.”
Kelly shrugged, feeling his stomach grow smaller still within him. “I don’t care what you believe. My big medicine will not begin to work if I am being watched.”
“It worked for Tatanka and there were a hundred and seventy of us watching you.”
“That was different.”
“How different?”
“That was a small thing. The air was clean. There was no evil spirit about.” Kelly was stalling dangerously for time to be alone in the shelter. Time to think. To gather his mind. To figure out some desperate way to make a break for it if the injured brave were too far gone to help. He lied deliberately and skillfully, gambling on his knowledge of the Sioux fears and superstitions, as he played his trump bluff.
“I smell death in this camp—!” he said harshly.
Gall sprang back from the shelter as though the white scout had struck him in the face. The other braves, coming up in time to overhear the sibilant hiss of Kelly’s remark, moved away as swiftly. Crouched and tense they hung behind their leader, slant eyes fastened on the dark-faced white scout.
“Go in,” said Gall at last. “But remember that out here, the guns are watching you.”