by Clay Fisher
No, confound it! He was not going to let himself be euchred out of this anticipated pleasure by any immoral snip of a grateful Indian girl!
He brought his black eyes up from the floor, and they were snapping. Bobbing his dark head to the worried waiters-by-the-fire, not one of whom had uttered a sound through his frowning silence, he put himself on company record with a great deal of righteous conviction.
“I will take her back to Gall as soon as there’s light, boys. The red rascals won’t miss her much before then, and I’ll be able to meet them about midway on the trail back here. That way it will make it right with them, saving face and all that nonsense, you see, and we will then be able to go on with our hunting plans.
“On the other hand,” he warned them, following a little pause, “it would be very bad if they trailed her back here before I got started back with her. They’re always ready to believe the worst of a white man, especially where their women are concerned, and there would likely be a lively time convincing them we ever had any intention of returning this rather attractive one at all. Do I make my point?”
They nodded that he did.
“There are no objections then?”
There were none.
“Good! Then I propose to make up a batch of bread and have breakfast. Any takers?”
There was a chorus of good-natured assents as Kelly grinned and went to work. Everyone was vastly relieved, and within a few minutes the coffee was brought to just the right rolling boil and removed to settle out. By the time it had, the scout’s irresistible light bread was ready. The heady twin odors of freshly baked frying-pan rolls and richly simmering mocha erased even Jepson’s habitual gloom. With pleased grunts and chewings, he cautiously allowed that “fer what started out to be a sinful mean one, this here day looks better by the minute.”
When Kelly had finished his own food, he took a cup of coffee and a piece of bread over to the Crow girl.
“Eat this,” he told her gruffly in Sioux. “It will return your strength. When it is daylight,” he went on quickly, “I am going to take you back to the Hunkpapa. You understand,” he qualified defensively, as she remained silent, “that I must do this. You are Indian, you know that they will come for you. We have no choice, nohetto, there is no more to it.”
Still the girl said nothing. Neither did she reach to take the coffee or the bread. Kelly’s eyes narrowed.
“Did you hear me? Take this food. Drink the pejuta sapa, anyway. It is good black medicine. I made it myself. And I have sweetened it heavily for you with the real can hanpi, the real white man’s sugar.”
He held out the cup once more, adding caustically in English and referring to the known Indian weakness for sweets, “That ought to please your red soul. You’d probably stab a man in his sleep for half a pound of real white sugar.”
When there was still no answer from the girl, he knelt quickly by her side. She only turned as quickly away from him, putting her face to the log wall and clutching the blanket more tightly about her dusky shoulders.
He put the coffee and the bread aside, took her none too gently by a tensed arm, forced her back around.
“When a white man speaks to you, Crow Girl—” He began in formal frontier rebuke, then broke off helplessly, struck speechless in mid-superiority by the oldest weapon in the female world: Crow Girl was crying.
Kelly did not know why, but the sight of that lovely young face stained wet with the salt tears of shame and worn gray by the pain of her shattered leg, plus the pathetically small look of her huddled, no bigger than a child, under the worn blanket, nearly unnerved him.
His rough hand went impulsively to her cheek, brushing back the disheveled auburn-black hair and patting the small head mechanically, while his thick tongue tried in vain to form words his humbled mind refused to supply.
This young girl had him going. If not already gone. He was completely baffled by her strange effect on him. In his entire experience, Kelly had never before seen a grown or nearly grown Plains Indian crying; in hard fact he had never even seen one of their blank-faced, shoe-button-eyed children weep. Now this young Kangi Wicasi woman had shed open tears twice within the past twenty-four hours. And both times in his behalf!
The white scout winced.
At a time like this, a man had to be honest with himself.
Even a great simpleton like Luther S. Kelly caught on eventually.
Toughen up, Kelly.
And smarten up.
Horseback Indians did not weep from bodily hurt. This girl had cried when he first saw her in the Hunkpapa camp shelter, because her heart had been touched by his gentle words to her. She was crying now by the reverse, cruel token of his necessarily heartless decision to take her back to Gall, and by the harsh, unkind way he had told her of that decision.
But admitting the impact she had had upon you, and then being guided by the admission, were two vastly varying situations. It would very probably cost him his life, as well as the lives of his four friends, to give this Sioux captive the sanctuary she sought. He knew the Hunkpapa mind in such matters. There could be no possible compromise with Gall. The moment the war chief discovered Crow Girl had gone, he would come after her. When he did that, there remained no doubt he would find her.
Over their coffee and bread, his comrades had told him the girl had shown up outside the cabin on one of the Sioux ponies. This borrowed beast she had painfully dismounted from, whacked across the rump with her heavy willow crutch-stick and sent galloping back up the trail to the Sioux campsite from which she had fled upon him. For Gall to track the familiar bare-hoof prints of one of his own mounts in the damp humus of the forest trail would be an elementary exercise. Something the Hunkpapa chief could do at a long-going lope. And unless Kelly intercepted the Sioux party somewhere along that telltale track with an obvious bid to return the escaped girl—
He dispelled the unpleasant end–certainty of the thought with a decisive headshake, spoke gently to the girl, still using Sioux.
“Do not weep anymore, now,” he smiled. “Eat the food, and sleep a little. I will do the same. We will talk more when the sun has warmed the mountainside,” he lied deliberately, turning away.
Back at the fireplace, he dropped his voice carefully.
“Watch her,” he instructed Big Anse. “I’ve got time for an hour’s nap before I start back with her. Luckily, there’s no rush. Gall won’t travel until daybreak. Still, there’s no way of knowing how far or fast he will come. Better wake me up when the first sun hits the tips of that high ridge.” He motioned toward a broken line of peaks to the west, concluding, “Do I make myself clear?”
“As gravel-bottom branch water,” Big Anse grinned. “Any chance of taggin’ along with you, Mr. Kelly?” he went on. “Jest in case them red guts turns off balky on you.”
Kelly looked the huge hillman over, decided there was a very good chance. He could use the outsized southerner’s tough company and he would need an extra hand with Phineas and the crippled girl.
“All right,” he agreed quickly. “Now don’t let me sleep over an hour, you understand?”
Anse and the others nodded that they did. Satisfied, Kelly turned in. He was in deep sleep within sixty seconds. Beyond him, in her darkened corner, the Indian girl relaxed in relieved turn. Presently, her peaceful breathing was added to the exhausted scout’s. The fire cricked and popped with drowsy, permeating warmth. Lulled by its resinous reassurance and drugged by the flavor and fragrance of their first deep-puffed pipes of the day, the Fort Buford wolf hunters let down. Good coffee, hot bread, strong tobacco, and pure inner contentment had their seductive ways. When Kelly’s hour had passed and Big Anse moved obediently to awaken him, MacDonal put out a restraining hand.
“There now, lad. No need to be hasty. Let the poor devil rest. He’s not had a decent sleep in three nights.”
“But he said to be
sure and git him up,” insisted Anse. “I dunno, now.”
“Aye, and he also said there was no great rush,” grunted MacDonal. “Now ye do as I say, lad. Let him snooze another wee bit while. The same fer the little Injun lassie yonder. The poor thing’s all run out, like a frightened fawn.”
“Sure,” said the taciturn Jepson. “There cain’t no harm come of it. Let ’em sleep.”
“Well,” muttered Big Anse, unconvinced. “I dunno. But most likely you’re right. It ain’t even full light so far and the sun’s not yet quite tippin’ them yonder hawgbacks of his’n. I allow it won’t hurt to give ’em another few minutes.”
Perhaps there was a potential of truth in the easygoing Georgian’s allowance.
The ill-fated wolf hunters never found out.
It was not a few minutes but a full hour later when Luther Kelly awoke of his own accord and sat up, wide-eyed.
He narrowed his dark glance to the bright glare of the glass-clear Montana morning shimmering beyond the unhung frame of the cabin’s doorway. From there his startled squint jumped to the distant crags of the western ridge. The clean pink wash of the climbing sun lay far down its timbered flanks. His misguided friends had let him sleep past his allotted hour. There was no question of that. The only question was whether or not they had let him sleep too far past it.
“You poor fools!” was all he flung at them, before leaping for the doorframe and a full view of the cabin-site meadow beyond it.
“Good morning,” said Gall, easing his blue roan to a halt not twenty feet from the cabin door and expressionlessly signaling his followers to spread out behind him in a trapping semicircle. “We are grateful that you gave the girl shelter. Now bring her out.”
17
Kelly eyed the Hunkpapa chief with what he trusted was a passingly fair impression of white scout supremacy.
“I was just leaving to bring her back to you,” he bluffed boldly. “My companions let me oversleep, or I would have met you on the trial.”
“You lie,” said Frog Belly, the fat subchief who was Gall’s right hand in battle.
“Your tongue is crooked as a sick snake’s track,” barked Tokeya Sapa, the Black Fox, who was as lean as was Knaska, the Fat Frog, rotund. And who was, moreover, Gall’s left hand in war, as Frog Belly was his right. “I can see beyond your shoulder into the little log house. The girl is still sleeping there in the far corner.”
Gall kneed his roan pony toward Black Fox, peering in through the cabin door along the line of his lieutenant’s scowl. Kelly saw his eyes contract.
“I did not think you would lie to me, Lone Wolf,” he said slowly. “I thought you and I had looked at one another and spoken like brothers.”
Shaking his head, he turned his gaze on Kelly, and the scout was amazed to see that he was not angry but strangely hurt. Once more his previous Indian opinions were given a sharp shake, his professional sangfroid faltering under the Sioux leader’s steady glance.
“I have not lied to Gall,” he defended uncertainly. “I have told you what I meant to do. But I was very tired. I had not slept for three suns.”
“Bring the girl out,” repeated Gall flatly, and Kelly saw that the palaver had gone against him and was over.
He did not say anything at once, because he did not know what it was he wanted to say. Nor did he move, by virtue of the same indecision. But in the pause, another spoke and acted for him.
“It will not be necessary to bring her out,” said a strained voice at his elbow. “I am ready. I bring myself out.”
Kelly came around to see Crow Girl, leaning gray-faced on her willow crutch, just behind him. Her slight body was twisted grotesquely in the painful effort to balance its full weight on the left leg alone. Her clear gray eyes, dark now with suffering and shame, looked past him as though he were no more than a piece of the lintel or the jamb or the threshold of the door opening.
“Because Lone Wolf lied to us,” announced Gall, dismissing the girl after a close hard glance to make sure she was all right, and turning back to Kelly still somewhat sadly, “we will take his mule for the Kangi Wicasi woman.” He returned his hurt frown to Crow Girl. “If this one can ride a Sioux war pony through the blind night with that bad knee, she can sit astride a Wasicun pack mule in the bright sunlight.”
Behind him in the cabin, Kelly heard Big Anse growl, “You and what Union army, you slit-mouth red son! You lay a hand on Phineas, I’ll dot your damn eyes for you square in the middle!” But he had no time to spare Anse so much as a grin. He was too concerned with Gall.
Watching the latter narrowly as he spoke about Crow Girl and the mule, Kelly was again puzzled at the savage chieftain’s soft attitude. It left a man with a mighty uneasy feeling. And but one possible conclusion. Gall, second only to Crazy Horse in Sioux Nation military command, had given a personal trust to both the captive girl and himself—a trust which both had unknowingly held and, hence, unknowingly dishonored.
He set his blunt jaw unhappily.
For a man who had been on the frontier as long as he had and who held such a fancy settlement reputation for his surpassing store of wild Indian savvy, Yellowstone Kelly was a pretty sorry specimen. He had to admit now that in the past few hours, he had learned more about the “insides” of those same wild Indians than he had in the past several years. Still, he must not let this ounce of new insight overbalance the far greater weight of his older knowledge. Indians were still Indians. In the present very touchy situation, the least aggressive word or overt motion might mean five white scalps drying in the Judith Mountain breeze on their belt-dangling ways to the Hunkpapa winter camp on the Musselshell.
He opened his mouth to cede the mule to Gall, along with the pretty little Kangi Wicasi captive, hoping to advance the talk from this firm base to a reconfirmation of the war chief’s permission to winter-hunt the Sioux-held foothills.
The arrangement was never reached. Nor even broached.
Crow Girl moved proudly past him, chin held high. He stood aside, surprised, and as he did, haughtily tilted chin or not, he caught the sun sparkle of the farewell tear glinting down the pale, dirt-streaked cheek.
That did it for Luther Sage Kelly.
His long arm, thick and hard as a sun-dried cedar post, shot out. His hand, big enough to wrap and lap itself half again around her small arm, closed like a No. 6 bait-pan trap above her elbow. “Stand right where you are,” he told her quietly, “I have changed my mind.”
The sick girl looked at him, and it was reward enough to last a man his whole life. Which was well. His whole life might be over within the next ten seconds.
He heard the rash of cocking rifle hammers ripple through the Sioux ranks, and the low mutter of animal growlings which muffled the hammer clicks. But Kelly was suddenly Kelly again. His overweening hunger for excitement was singing in him like the feathered whisper of a war arrow or the mean whine of a ricocheting rifle slug.
The dark flash of his grin struck the tension from his face. His black eyes danced. He took his hand away from the girl, turned his flicking smile expectantly on Gall—and waited.
Behind him he could hear the groans of despair from Caswell, MacDonal, and Jepson. But he could also hear Big Anse Harper’s happy curse, “Keep the red sons uh bitches busy, Mr. Kelly, I’ll need a minute to git the boys to the front-wall rifle slits!” and his heatless smile only grew the wider.
Gall looked at Frog Belly, then at Black Fox.
“I don’t like it,” said Frog Belly.
“It’s a trick,” muttered Black Fox.
Gall receipted their opinions with a nod, turned to the crouching Kelly. “I want the girl now. Give her to me.”
“That is just the trouble, brother.”
“What is the trouble?” frowned Gall.
The white scout bobbed his head with unthinking speed, the reflex answer surprising him as much as
it did the Hunkpapa chief. “I want her too—!”
Gall returned his excited stare with one of enforced calculation. Black Fox was right. There was a trick hidden somewhere.
“And what makes Lone Wolf think he can take her?” he probed slowly.
“This!” said Kelly, and snaked his Winchester from its leaning place just inside the doorframe.
Gall’s glittering eyes widened at the sight of the recovered rifle. Now there was even a little excitement in his heavy voice. “Did you kill Sayapi?”
“Only a little. I hit him behind the ear while he slept. I left him telanunwela, dead yet alive,” shrugged the white scout, using the Sioux phrase for unconsciousness.
“Why did you not kill him?” Gall could not comprehend such charity. “He would have killed you. In fact,” he added thoughtfully, “he will kill you.”
“Would you kill a sleeping enemy?” Kelly asked, stalling to give Anse and the others time to get set.
“I have done it.”
“Would you kill me thus?”
“Of course.”
“Well, you see, my brother, that is the difference between a Wasicun and a Shacun.”
“It’s a bad difference, Lone Wolf. It will get you killed one day.”
“I don’t sleep very often,” grinned Kelly.
“I have heard that,” nodded the other. “And very lightly too, I understand.”
“Yes, very lightly, too.”
Gall shifted his pony two steps away from Black Fox’s mount. Kelly did not take his eyes from him, but he could sense and hear the other Sioux behind their chief moving their horses to insure shooting room.