by Clay Fisher
“Aye!” Dour Alec MacDonal actually laughed. “Now we can hitch the two of ye together and have a team of donkeys. That is, if the mule has no objections, lad.”
“Little man,” observed Big Anse without anger and picking the small Scot up by the collar of his sweat-soaked shirt, “one day you’re goin’ to git me riled. If you do, I’d be beholden to you if you’d pick a bright sunny day. Buryin’s alius give me the fantods when there’s a gray drizzle drippin’ or a scud of cloud bank clabbered up and puckerin’ to rain over the family plot.” With the half-meant warning, he put MacDonal back down and yielded the floor to Jepson.
The down-easter came right to the point.
“What happened and where do we stand now?” he demanded of Kelly, as the latter handed the mule’s halter rope to Big Anse. Kelly put him straight in less time than it took Big Anse to get a good grip on the exchanged rope. When he had finished, it was still the perverse Jepson who wanted a precise clarification. “Well,” he demanded bluntly, “where does that leave us? Do we stay or don’t we?”
Before anyone else more qualified could deliver an opinion, Big Anse stood surprisingly forward.
“We’ll jest make another vote of it, by Gawd,” he announced quietly. “Jepson?”
The glum-tempered easterner was no stranger to Indians, but the Hunkpapa Sioux were a far cry from the community-dwelling Mandans, Iowas, and Sacs of his experience along the lower river. “Turn back,” he said flatly.
“MacDonal?”
The Scot took a little longer to think about it, yet in the end he too decided Gall’s brethren were much more risky a cut of the red deck than the peaceful Crees of his Canadian boyhood. “Aye, clear out,” he said.
“Yank?”
Caswell was an honest coward. “Run for it!” he blurted.
“Mr. Kelly?”
“I’m for seeing it through, Anse.”
“And me,” nodded the giant Georgian in quick agreement.
“Phineas—?”
“Now wait a minute!” snapped the humorless Jepson, but he was too late. Anse already had his huge paw wrapped tighter around the mule’s halter rope.
“Phineas,” he said, “you vote to go or stay?” And with the question, he gave a tremendous jerk on the rope. Willy-nilly, the startled pack animal’s dozing head snapped an automatic yes. At the same time, his offended bray echoed angrily enough to have been heard back in Judith Basin.
“What did he say?” asked Kelly, cupping an ear.
“He’s fer stickin’ it out!” cried Anse delightedly.
“I rather imagined he would be,” admitted the black-haired scout, meanwhile watching the others anxiously to see if they were going to go along with the big southerners crude charade.
The sampling showed little promise.
Apparently, the opposition was not amused at being disenfranchised by a talking jackass.
13
There was a goodly silence then while the five men stared stubbornly at one another, and the mule eyed Big Anse resentfully. Not knowing he had been granted the glorious right of suffrage, Phineas was wanting only to maneuver his backside around to where he could plant a set of ironshod heels in the ex-Confederate’s burly hams. Before he could accomplish this, Kelly’s irrepressible Irish came to the top, easing the pressure for man and beast.
“We’ll toss a coin, boys,” he suggested lightly. “Heads we stay, tails we shag on out of here.”
“Toss it,” agreed MacDonal. “I’ve half a mind to stay regardless. The more I look at this country, the more fur I see in it. I canna help but be thinkin’ we’ll make a tidy stake if we put out our strychnine just so.”
“You will that,” Kelly assured him. “Have you got a silver dollar on you, Scotty? None of your Canadian tin, now. I want United States metal.”
“And ye shall have it, Mick,” the pawky little Scotsman arrowed him back. “I’m prepared to advance ye the sum requested and ’tis fer loan at a reasonable ten percent, the same as yer services, lad.”
Kelly laughed, reached into his war bag, and brought out a bent and verdigrised ten-cent piece. He threw it to MacDonal. The latter picked it out of the air, dug a mint-fresh US dollar out of his own buckskin moneybag, flipped the shining coin to Kelly with an eye twinkle of Celt understanding. The scout caught it expertly. “Heads we stay, tails we go,” he repeated, balancing the heavy coin on forefinger and thumb knuckle.
“Ah, no you don’t!” inserted Jepson quickly. “I don’t trust your deceivin’ Irish ways. We’ll call it in the air,” he concluded, jaw thrust.
“In the air it is!” Kelly laughed again and threw the coin high.
“Heads!” yelled Jepson defiantly.
“Tails!” cried Kelly happily.
And in the moment of their contrasting upward looks, the faces of both men changed color and contour.
The single shot came crashing from the meadow’s edge to the west. It caught the coin still turning lazily at the apex of its arc. It hit it, sent it whining away at a weird glancing angle. It struck the rock wall above the cabin site, ricocheted crazily off a quartz outcrop, spun to a stop in the dust at Big Anse Harper’s feet.
The hillman leaned over, picked it up.
It was drilled nearly dead center.
“Purty good shot,” he said laconically, suspending it with the promise of completing thought to come as the others eyed him, not wanting to look behind them toward the meadow’s west fringe. Big Anse turned slowly to face the site of the shot’s origin, finished his doubtful compliment as his suspicions were confirmed, “fer an Injun,” he conceded unhurriedly.
On his calm words, the rest of them came unwillingly around to take in the view westward.
It was a mountain vista, well designed to widen white eyes and shorten Wasicun breaths.
Sitting their tail-switching little prairie mustangs at the edge of the meadow’s backing timber, the low sun behind them flashing ocher red off their lance blades and rifle barrels, were twelve war-painted Hunkpapa braves. Fronting them, the smoke from his great shot still wisping thinly from the muzzle of Luther Kelly’s spoils-of-war Winchester, his handsome face as blank as an unlettered limestone head-marker, sat the thirteenth.
“Onhey!” shouted Red Paint, levering the empty brass casing spinningly out of the white scout’s priceless rifle and throwing the weapon to arm’s length above his head in the signal for the charge. “I will count the first coup!”
On the excited boast, he slammed his moccasined heels into the flanks of his spotted stud and sent him careening wildly toward the startled white men. Behind him his twelve braves echoed his hoarse challenge as they beat their scrubby mounts unmercifully with rifle barrel and lance shaft to race Sayapi for the honor of taking the first scalp.
“What did he say?” yelled Big Anse to Kelly as the five white men dove for the cover of the low cabin walls.
“He was betting his friends,” yelled back Kelly, leaping the cedar log barricade, “that he’d be the first to get his knife under white hair this afternoon.”
Then, grabbing Caswell’s old Springfield away from him and shoving the paralyzed army teamster to the safety of his knees behind the log wall, he added grimly, “Hold low and get their horses down.”
But Sayapi’s Sioux veered off too far out in the meadow to have any of their ponies downed by the white fire. There was a good reason for that. One with which “Lone Wolf” Kelly and his friends had nothing whatever to do.
From the south rim of the open grassland fronting the scout’s cabin site, the third member of the argument made his position known with true Hunkpapa simplicity—charging Red Paint as straightaway as the latter was bearing down on the beleaguered white men.
In an Indian, as in any other fight, two’s company, three’s a crowd. When Red Paint saw his uncle coming hellbent across the meadow for him, backed
by twenty-four of the twenty-six older warriors remaining loyal to the war chief, he lost faith in his new independent medicine. He did this because Gall was making it very clear by the way he was slicing in between Sayapi and his white targets that he intended to rescue Lone Wolf and his four friends even if he had to ride down his favorite nephew to do it.
Red Paint’s temper was as thin as his famous uncle’s. But he was no more a fool than was the latter. He had been trained in war by Gall himself. He knew when to stay and when to go.
Swinging his pony northward, he turned the charge with a precision no white cavalry could have approximated. His twelve braves streamed after him, not a pony faltering or missing a stride in the fluid shift. “Beautiful! Beautiful!” cried Kelly excitedly, as the young Sioux, seeing that Gall had halted his forces in mid-meadow and did not mean to pursue the issue, again flanked his troop in full gallop and brought its wiry mounts to a nostril-
flaring stop, facing his uncle across the winnowing mountain grass.
“Hear me, Sayapi!” called the latter. “After you had led your braves out of my camp in anger, I gave these Wasicun permission to hunt our lands through this winter. I gave Lone Wolf to understand that we Sioux would not bother him and his friends. I now give you to understand the same thing. I won’t say it again.” He paused, then added sharply. “And one more thing; I am keeping the girl now. I will keep her until she is well and can say rightly with whom she chooses to ride.”
“He-hau,” waved young Sayapi, greatly subdued in Kelly’s opinion. “I hear you, Uncle. Now you hear me.” As he went on, Kelly quickly lost the impression that he had just formed. “This Lone Wolf has insulted me twice. I have sworn to kill him for that. You cannot stop me, I take your orders no longer.” He paused exactly as Gall had, then yelled angrily, “And here is one more thing for you! I want that Kangi Wicasi girl. She is mine. I counted the first coup on her, and I want her back right now, do you hear?”
“Come over and get her,” suggested Gall flatly.
With the proposal, he pointed over his shoulder to the timber behind him. Following the gesture, Kelly saw the two missing Sioux of Gall’s group standing just within the fringe pines, holding up the rear poles of the wounded Crow girl’s pack-pony travois.
Sayapi looked across the meadow a long time, moving his dark glance repeatedly from his uncle to the girl. He wound up looking at the empty-faced Hunkpapa chief. His only reply to Gall’s unblinking invitation was to throw up his lean rifle arm once more, in silent signal to his followers, then wheel his paint stud and gallop away to the north. Without a sound his braves followed him. In ten seconds the stillness of the late mountain afternoon had refallen across the shadowed meadow.
“You were lucky,” said Gall, reining his blue roan war-pony to a nervous halt in front of the unfinished cabin fortress. “I think Sayapi would have gotten you.”
“He might have done so,” admitted Kelly ruefully, “since you gave him my sixteen-shooter and I had only this old Pony Soldier one-shot.”
The “sixteen-shooter” reference was a misnomer in actual ballistic fact, but Gall understood it. The scout was using the Sioux name for all the later lever-action repeaters, taken from the early Henrys which had, indeed, held sixteen of their short .44-caliber shells. The same went for calling the older Springfields “one-shots,” though with more accuracy.
“I gave it to him because you had broken his,” apologized Gall seriously. “I thought it might take a little of the bitterness out of his heart. But he is too much like me. Anyway, you were lucky. I think there are only two things that will make Sayapi break a charge once he has started in.”
“Gall is one of them,” grinned Kelly. “What is the other?”
“Death.”
The Irish scout nodded. As far as he was concerned, the two reasons were synonymous, the terms interchangeable. Gall was a very dangerous Indian. The kind you could never risk extended familiarity with; that you had to keep the steel in front of. His whole relationship with the Hunkpapa was getting on shaky ground. It was time to show a little steel.
“Well,” he said boldly, “I am glad to know that your word is better than your sign.” He touched his forehead properly. “I salute you for keeping your promise to me.”
Gall stared at him stonily.
“What do you mean about my word and my sign?”
Kelly had made the statement deliberately, of course. It was his conviction that without keeping the hostiles under the continued spell of what might be called a northern frontier version of the south’s white supremacy, they could not be controlled. As with the ex-captive black hordes of the late Confederacy, the numerical odds in their favor were simply too great to accept any lasting case of social equality. Hence, he had taken this moment to cut Gall back down to Indian size. He did not want to do it, nor did he like to do it. It was simply a case of necessity.
“You sat on the blanket at Laramie?” he said quietly.
“You mean that time Makhpiya Luta lied to us?”
“I mean that time. But Red Cloud did not lie to his brothers. He wanted peace, and he signed the white man’s paper for the Sioux. So did some others that I remember.”
Gall’s face clouded. His eyes looked far away.
“It is true I touched the pen,” he said, with a strange softness new to Kelly. “But I did not understand what I was doing, I did not know what the paper took away from the Sioux.” He made a helpless sign. “I was there only as Sitting Bull’s delegate. It was his fault. He should not have sent me. I am a warrior, I cannot read.”
“But you understood that the paper meant peace, that you were to kill no more white men?”
“Yes.”
“Yet you have continued to kill more? Is that not a true thing?”
“Yes.”
“It is what I meant by your word being better than your sign.”
“I knew all along it was what you meant, my brother,” admitted the head-bowed Sioux chief, almost inaudibly.
Kelly nodded and let the silence grow.
This side-thrust mention of the Laramie Treaty of 1868, Kelly’s first full year on the River, had left an acid taste in the Hunkpapa’s mouth. The Irish scout had meant that it should. A white man must never leave an Indian without impressing him that he, the white man, is always at least one full step ahead of him. It may have seemed a poor way to return Gall’s recent good treatment of him, but Kelly was satisfied he had made just the right stroke.
“No matter,” he concluded graciously, purposely attempting to sweeten the aftertaste of his bitter reminder of Sioux perfidy, “I am glad that I have your word now, and I know that you will keep it.”
Gall’s reaction completely confused him.
The great Sioux leader’s craggy face took on an expression of ineffable sadness. His oblique black eyes were even farther off on the distant horizon. The peculiar humble softness the scout had noted before in his deep voice burred even lower.
“In all the time that I have been a grown man,” he said to Luther Kelly, “in all the time that my father was a grown man, and before him his father, back to the earliest time in my people’s memory of touching the pen with the white man, even unto the time when all the Sioux lived east of the Big Muddy and had no horses, no Indian has ever been the first to break a treaty.” He turned his pony to go, adding without bitterness but with the weight of a lifetime of useless, losing war. “You may well be glad that you have my word, my brother. It has never been dishonored.”
Gall was gone then. He did not look back, nor did any of his braves.
Kelly, watching them go, failed to feel the relief such departures usually inspired. For the first time in his long years on the northwest frontier, he had met an Indian to whom he did not feel superior. More than that. In the brief moment of Gall’s soft goodbye, Luther S. Kelly had felt very clearly that the Hunkpapa was second-best man
to nobody in that hushed mountain meadow.
14
When the last of Gall’s warriors had cleared the meadow and were lost in the forested slopes to the east, Kelly roused himself from his strange depression. It was no time to be weighing white wrongs against red rights. Leave that to the bumble-heads in the Indian Bureau. Kelly had a problem of immediate survival on his hands.
There was a practical guarantee that Red Paint would be back in the morning. As certain was the supposition that Gall would not be around to chaperon his white friends the second time. The chief had clearly wanted to get on with his journey; to get the girl to the main Hunkpapa camp which, Kelly understood from conversation overheard among Gall’s braves, was over near the mouth of the Musselshell, a good three days eastward.
What the Sioux chiefs sudden interest in Sayapi’s pretty captive might amount to, Kelly did not care. Moreover, he did not even try to guess. It was a dangerous omission of imagination. As with the nephew before the uncle, the white scout’s innocence of heart signs was to prove a costly ignorance indeed.
At the moment, however, his only concern was for his own and the four other white scalps in his charge.
“Whether we stay the winter or not,” he told his companions tersely, “we’ve got to fort-up for right now. Best way to do that is finish the cabin as planned. We’ve got a melon-slice moon and plenty of Montana lanterns to light the job.” He threw an explanatory arm upward toward the blazingly starred night sky. “I suggest we get on with it right now. Any better offers?”
There were none.
Big Anse seized his axe and passed the mule’s halter rope to Kelly.
“I’ll cut and notch all thet the four of you and Phineas kin haul and set in place. Like them Hunkpapa boys say, ‘hopo! Let’s go.’ Let’s build a fire under our backsides. It’s a sight better than havin’ the Sioux set one under the bottoms of our bare feet, by Gawd!”
Kelly only agreed with a curt nod, not bothering to disabuse the others as to the Georgian’s popular misconception of the Sioux as torturers. Right now the impression would serve as a good spur, and right now a good spur was what Luther Kelly needed.