by Clay Fisher
The Sioux were entirely fascinated.
Gall was openly impressed.
He stepped impulsively toward Kelly, his left hand raised palm out in the lingua franca arm signal of Indian peace with respect and friendship the prairie over. At the same time, he growled, “Waste! Waste!” in his grizzly-deep Sioux bass.
It was a rare tribute coming from the Hunkpapa who stood second only to the great Sitting Bull in the tribal councils of his, the fiercest of all the Throat Slitter people. Kelly recognized the goldenness of the moment, struck while the Indian mood was malleable.
“Haho, thank you.” He bowed soberly. Then, straightening to look at Gall as one chief to another, “I have done what you asked me, my brother. The girl lives and is greatly relieved. It is time for you to keep your part of the bargain.”
Gall nodded thoughtfully. But before he could speak, a tall shadow fell between him and the white scout. “What bargain?” said Red Paint flatly. “We only promised to shoot you if you failed.”
“The unspoken part of such a promise,” replied Kelly quietly, “is that you shall free me if I succeed.” Then, with deliberate acidity. “Are you a Mandan dog-eater or a Hunkpapa warrior? Will you sneak around your word like a Pawnee pony stealer or stand beside it like a Sioux chief?”
Kelly, of a sudden, was no longer blarneying his red hosts in protection of his hair. His Irish was up at last, and he had had enough and more than enough of Red Paint and of Hunkpapa tongue-splitting in general.
“You, Sayapi!” he barked at Red Paint. “Answer me, I am talking to you!”
The young chief’s face writhed. His eyes narrowed to Mongol slits. For the third time in ten minutes, his hand went to his knife. This time it did not stop. The ugly weapon came away from its sheath in a gleaming arc of upraised naked steel as Sayapi leaped and struck at the unarmed white scout in one eye-blinding movement of animal speed.
Swift as was the youth’s attack and lightning fast as was Kelly’s sidewise dive to avoid it, the third member of the brief dialogue moved quicker still.
Gall struck with the speed of a hurled buffalo lance.
Coming from the side and slightly behind his berserk subchief, he was beyond Red Paint’s field of vision. The young chief did not know for some seconds what had happened. He sat in the soft dirt and churned up pine needles where he had landed, shaking his head to clear his blurred sight of the lingering shock of the fall Gall had given him.
Kelly was shaking his head a little, too.
Seizing the leaping youth from the rear, Gall had raised him bodily over his head, whirled him once full around, slammed him back-flat to the ground in less time than it had taken Kelly to simply leap aside and regain his balance in avoiding Red Paint’s initial lunge. And the latter was no stripling. He stood three inches over six feet and must have weighed at least one hundred and ninety-five pounds.
The white scout had never seen an equal combination of speed and brute strength applied with such exact science. As was his careful habit, he made a mental note of the fact against future possible need: Gall, second-in-war-command to Crazy Horse among the combined Sioux bands, was everything that frightened settlement talk had said he was in savagery and fighting skill; and he was, beyond that, physically the strongest man Luther Kelly had ever seen. Small wonder, Kelly recalled grimly, that his Hunkpapa friends had shown such little stomach for his offer to oblige them in a hinmangas duel. To fight a man like Gall with a knife, regardless of the rules, would be like tackling a Bengal tiger with a toothpick.
Again, there was time only to file the thought.
Gall was lifting the young warrior to his feet, and the latter was twisting away from him, livid with shame and repeated loss of face. Gall let him go.
“Pick up your knife,” he told him, kicking the weapon toward him. “Go quietly, and give thanks to Wakan Tanka that you did not kill Lone Wolf, who had no weapon, and thus bring dishonor on my lodge.”
To Kelly he added with head-shaking regret, “Wonunicun, Lone Wolf, it was a mistake. I apologize for my nephew.”
Kelly nodded, surprised to learn that Red Paint was actually Gall’s blood nephew. But he said nothing, and the Hunkpapa chief went on.
“Sayapi is young, and he hates the white man, yet he is not a coward. It is the girl that made him do that just now, do you understand? He has looked at her and is a little crazy because she has not looked back at him. Nohetto, that is all. Do you not see?”
Kelly felt like saying, “Yes, he did not see,” but instead he nodded gravely that he understood.
It was clear enough to him that Red Paint was jealous of the girl, but he, Kelly, being himself completely without personal experience in the field of romance, was certainly no expert on love signs. He had made little from the Hunkpapa youth’s behavior toward the Crow girl other than to assume, from his proprietory action in seizing her from the warriors before the operation, that she was his personal captive, and he was naturally concerned with her arriving home in good condition so that he might strut to his haughty young heart’s content in front of the envious eyes of lesser youths. After all, to take a beautiful Crow girl in a pony raid conducted by the great Gall himself, in which no other Sioux had brought home so much as a scalp—let alone an enemy horse—was a little more than just something for a young man only now turned twenty.
Kelly conceded his density on the way of a red man with a red maid and was careful to keep his thoughts on Gall and his own immediate escape from the Sioux camp.
“Hau, my brother,” he waved politely, “these things will happen. A man understands.” Then, as indifferently as he could. “With Gall’s permission I will go now …”
The famed Hunkpapa looked at him a long while. This time there was no nod, thoughtful or otherwise. There was no sign of any kind at all from Gall.
Just the slant-eyed, emotionless, unfathomable Sioux stare.
11
“Go in peace,” said the Sioux chief, after a time which seemed to Kelly like eternity compounded.
“Thank you,” answered the latter, touching the fingertips of his left hand to his forehead before signing them gracefully toward Gall. “Do my friends and I also have your permission to hunt up here this winter?”
“What do you hunt?”
“We are out after wolf pelts. It is my thought that it will be a good thing for the game up here to thin out the wolves a little. What do you think?”
“It will be a good thing. You may stay.”
“Thank you.”
“Stop thanking me. Just go.”
“There is still one thing more. About the girl. A way to carry her on the trail,” said Kelly.
Gall queried the white scout carefully on the subject. As carefully, Kelly described to him the method of making a travois stretcher, used by the army where pack animals or riding mounts but no ambulances or field wagons were available. Long poles were cut and a regulation litter made up. Then, the forward, longer end of the poles were fastened low to the pack or riding saddle fenders, while two men on foot bore the rear ends. In this way the occupant of the litter could be transported quite swiftly and with little or no discomfort.
Gall thanked Kelly and promised that such a litter would be at once constructed.
“Then there is just the matter of giving the girl this medicine to ease her pain.” The scout held up the container of camphorated tincture of opium, the army’s standard anodyne. “It will take but a moment.” He did not wait for Gall’s approval but turned at once back to the rock and the silent Crow girl.
She had regained consciousness. He smiled at her and gave her the medicine, bringing some water for her to swallow with it. She obeyed quietly, letting him raise her in his arms to drink and then to lower her gently back, as trustingly as a child.
“I heard what you said to them about the travois,” she whispered, staring up at him with a d
irectness that went through him like a fever chill. “I am grateful for that. The leg hurts very much.”
For the first time, he noticed that her eyes were gray; as gray and clear as springwater in a limestone pool. He had seen it in the Crows and knew that among them it was not uncommon, but had never seen the color peculiarity so strikingly demonstrated in any of her Absarokan tribesmen as in this young girl.
“It will hurt much less in a little while,” he told her, made uneasy by her unfaltering gaze and dropping his own dark eyes before it. “The medicine will make you forget it for many hours.”
She smiled as she surprised him in his overt study of her pagan beauty, and he blushed like a schoolboy caught looking at teacher’s shapely ankle.
“I must go now,” he mumbled clumsily. “Is there any last thing I may do for you?”
“Yes!” she replied quickly, and to his certain surprise. “You may take a message for me!”
There was an urgency in it that would not be denied, and he bent slightly over her. “To whom? Be quick with it, girl! We do not have all fall. The Sioux will be coming over in a minute.”
“I have a brother,” she murmured. “He is a scout for the Pony Soldiers. I do not know where he is now, but you can find him. He is not unknown,” she put in proudly.
“His name!” gritted Kelly, stealing a nervous look toward the Sioux. “Hopo—!”
“You could not pronounce his name in my tongue,” smiled the girl. “But the Wasicun call him Curly.”
It hit Kelly like the bounce of a four-pound war club off good solid skull bone.
Curly! Of course! Why hadn’t he remembered?
For the past few seconds, he had been studying the Crow girl’s flawless features openly, haunted by a growing conviction that he had seen her somewhere else before this—yet knowing he could never actually have done so and forgotten her. Now it was all clear.
Curly, the best full-blood scout the army had according to reports along the river posts. Curly, the friendly Crow, the intelligent, easy-smiling, soft-voiced Kangi Wicasi, the loyal Absaroka guide who had cast his lot with the Wasicun Walk-A-Heaps and Pony Soldiers from boyhood. And Curly, the handsomest one male human being Luther Kelly had ever seen, red or white or black or any shade in between. That was where he had seen the girl’s perfect face before; striking feature for striking feature mirrored in her brother’s classic profile.
“I know him,” he told her, recovering from the side thought with another covert glance at the waiting Sioux. “Not as a brother or a friend but by reputation. I will be able to find him and give him your message.”
Now, out of the tail of his darting eye, he saw Gall start toward them. “Hurry now!” he warned her. “Is it that you want me to tell your brother that Gall, the Hunkpapa, has captured you?”
“Not Gall. Sayapi. Gall is good. Red Paint is the devil who shot me. He knew I was a woman, too. He told me that later, laughing about it. Saying he could see my body in the dark and wanted it. So he shot me low down as I ran away. I wish he had killed me, or I did wish it until—”
“Nohetto!” interrupted Kelly harshly. “That’s enough of that! Did Red Paint tell the others he had shot you deliberately?”
“No, he told them it was an accident. And he talked Gall into thinking it would be a big coup to bring me back here. They hate the Kangi Wicasi, but Gall would have left me when he found I was a woman. He has a brave heart, but he dotes on that Sayapi—!”
“He also rides herd on him pretty roughly!” Kelly couldn’t help saying in English, before dropping rapidly back into Sioux. “But the message!” he rapped. “It is that you want me to tell Curly Gall’s band has you captive?”
“Yes, that is it. Curly will come. He will bring the Pony Soldiers to punish these Sioux dogs!”
“I will tell him.” He shot another glance at the nearing Gall. “It is goodbye now.” Gall was almost up to them. “May Wakan Tanka walk beside you.”
“Lone Wolf—!”
Her soft cry caught him turning to check the scowling Sioux chief’s approach with a disarming grin and careless hand sign to say that he was coming now.
“Yes—” He threw it back, side-mouthed, over his shoulder.
“You heard Gall say that Sayapi had looked at me?”
“Yes, yes.” He kept his smile on Gall.
“And that I had not looked back at him?”
“Yes, what of it, girl? Hopo!”
“Only this,” she said, the whisper so fiercely soft, it spun him back around to face her, the gray eyes stabbing so deeply into his that he felt the look clear to the toes of his Arapahoe moccasins, “I have looked back at you!”
Kelly had no answer. He wheeled away from her.
It was not a matter of time. He could not have made her a logical reply given the remainder of the winter in which to phrase it. The girl’s strange avowal had caught him squarely in the center of the meadow. There was no chance to reach the trees.
He was still standing there, completely routed, when Gall’s deep voice touched him on the shoulder.
“Hopo, hurry it up now. Look yonder at Sayapi’s pony.”
Kelly did as he was told, grateful for the rescue from the clear-eyed Crow girl’s growing spell.
His gratitude was short-lived. He felt his scalp tighten, the individual nape hairs on his neck come erect.
“I do not see Sayapi’s pony,” he said in a small voice.
“Of course,” replied Gall, his savage features a study in Sioux inscrutability. “That is because he is gone. And Sayapi with him.”
“I see your point,” admitted the white scout hurriedly, “and a little more beside.” He legged it unashamedly for the pack mule, swung aboard him, kicked the bony brute around. “Sayapi has taken ten braves with him!” he said to Gall.
“Twelve,” corrected Gall. “The same twelve who lost face with him when you smashed his gun up there by the Wasicun’s fire.”
“Thirteen Sioux on a dead man’s trail,
Yo! ho! ho! and a bottle of wolf-bait—! ”
Kelly shouted grinningly as he put his heels into the mule. The latter broke into a lumbering run up the ridge track, headed for the wolf hunters’ camp.
“What did you say?” called Gall, cupping his ear for the galloping scout’s answer.
“Lay on, Macduff—!”
Kelly yelled back over his shoulder.
“And damn’d be him that first cries,
‘hold, enough!’”
12
Kelly had an unexpected, not altogether pleasant surprise awaiting him when he slid the lathered mule up to the ashes of the wolf hunters’ campfire. His companions were gone.
He had only begun to clench his long jaw in anger at this desertion and more, at this disregard for his parting admonition to sit tight no matter what, when his wide mouth relaxed and the bad light went out of his black eyes.
Clear and ringing, off to the east, came the chonking of a double-bitted axe swung by a man who cut his notches deep and clean. Moments later he heard the clear tenor carry of Big Anse Harper’s “Timber—!” followed by the breaking crash of an eighty-foot cedar septuagenarian careening earthward through the slender arms of its lesser fellows.
By thunder! That was more like it.
The boys were over at his cabin-site stakes, felling trees. Evidently, they had made up their minds, independently of what happened to him, to stick it out. Good for them! They were showing more spunk than a man would have thought.
Not two hours before, when quick thinking had been the order of the moment, MacDonal, the shrewd Scot, had taken over from Jepson, the stubborn State of Maine man whose bulldog grit and Yankee acquisitiveness had envisioned the venture in the first place. Now, facing a probable Indian fight for their isolated lives, both MacDonal and Jepson had willingly subordinated themselves to a
towering hillbilly oaf whom they had twenty-four hours previously been treating on a par with the pack mule.
It reminded Kelly of the war.
A man in the ranks learned very fast when the bullets were flying. And the first thing he learned was that under fire, sergeants frequently became captains and colonels, while captains and colonels as often turned into blundering privates of the line, with suddenly no more sense of how to direct an attack or order a retreat than the newest recruit in the regiment.
It more than simply pleased the watching white scout to see the two older wolf hunters jumping to the big southerner’s commands. There was a reason for Kelly’s gratification. What Big Anse’s commands had accomplished in the two hours Kelly had been away could well mean the difference between standing the Sioux off or going under for keeps. The Georgian had already cut and notched enough timbers for the others to have up a good three feet of wall entirely around Kelly’s ground plan for their winter quarters. And, in addition to the wall already in place, there was enough other timber down and trimmed to get on with the raising at the rate of a foot an hour.
The scout stepped silently from the screening pines, calling clearly across the meadow to avoid drawing a shot from the nervous Caswell, on rifle guard while his companions worked in the timber.
Caswell ran toward him, exhibiting a relief and gladness that would, Kelly thought, have been a grand fine flattering feeling in a stronger man. In Caswell, it only made a fellow’s skin crawl with embarrassment. Nevertheless, Kelly accepted the weakling’s gratitude for what it was and did not let him suspect that he was any less glad to see Caswell than Caswell was to see him.
The others were only seconds behind Caswell in crowding around him, Big Anse being the first to put his welcome into words.
“I’m tolerable glad to see thet mule, Mr. Kelly.” He grinned awkwardly. “I was just gittin’ set to snake them big butt-cut cedar sticks fer the roof stringers out’n the timber by myse’f.”