by Clay Fisher
“Well, Lone Wolf,” said Gall, “here is an end to talk. Let us now see what we are going to do.”
“Yes,” replied Luther Kelly, low-voiced, “let us see.” And as he said it, he hipped the Winchester, letting its octagonal muzzle study the region of Gall’s quill-worked war shirt just beyond the cartilage of the prosternum and slightly below the left breast.
It was a long, nerve-tight standoff. But Gall was a real war chief. He saw the rifle slits in the cabin’s front wall, and he saw protruding from them the four barrels of the Wasicun wolf hunters’ guns. He added to that unwavering number the beautiful new sixteen-shooter of Lone Wolf, which was wandering his shirtfront in little lazy circles around his heart. When he had done that, he had his total. And his answer.
Five white rifles cocked and aimed meant five Sioux saddles emptied as the minimum price of an immediate conclusion. The final figure could easily be far more. Gall had not risen to his high place in the war councils of the wild Sioux because he was a hothead or a fool. True, his flaring temper had made him a famous and feared hand-to-hand fighter. But it was his ability to control that murderous trait under pressure which had made him the tactical terror he was to his white enemies.
He demonstrated that dangerous control now.
A later time would do much better than the present, he cautioned himself, for taking the measure of Lone Wolf Kelly. Besides, revenge, like a piece of prime buffalo meat, only grew the sweeter with proper aging.
But Gall was also intensely honest. His way was never the devious, nor the split-tongued way of Sitting Bull among the wild, nor Red Cloud among the tame Sioux. He always said what he had to say.
“I owe you a life,” he pointed out to Kelly, “so I will not fight you now.” The scout knew he referred to his sparing of young Red Paint, but said nothing, and the war chief went on.
“But you must know that you are no longer welcome here. That I will fight you the next time we meet. That I will try to kill you if I can. Nohetto. I go now to make my peace with Sayapi. Look well to your watch fires, Wasicun.”
“What about the girl?” asked Kelly curiously, as the Hunkpapa turned his pony away.
Gall stopped.
“What about the girl?” he emphasized, stony-eyed.
“Do you still want her?”
Gall looked at the tiny Crow girl, not at Kelly. He looked at her a long time and until she dropped her eyes. “I will always want her,” he rumbled, fierce gaze softening. “As long as I shall live and look up to the sun, that long will she stay in my heart.” His eyes swept the little cedar-rimmed mountain clearing as though they would fix it forever in the future accounts book of his memory. “I will never forget this place,” he finished softly. “Nor will you,” he charged his impassive followers. “From this time forward, it will be called ‘Crow Girl Meadow’ among our people.”
He spun the roan viciously around, dark arm flashing skyward. “Hopo! Hookahey!”
“Hopo,” echoed Frog Belly without enthusiasm.
“Hookahey,” grumbled Black Fox in agreeing disenchantment.
The twenty-six outmaneuvered Sioux swung their shaggy little ponies and were gone across the meadow and into the trees. The time of their passing counted fewer seconds than the number of gaudily dyed horsehair tassels bobbing from their buffalo lances. And, when they had disappeared, the only sound to break the returned lovely quiet of the mountain morning was the compressed company of long-held breaths exhaling from their white watchers.
18
Once again there was a vote of war in the little white camp. There was no doubt now but what the question of stay or go had assumed the proportions of life or death. Gall had so announced himself. Furthermore, he had stated his intention of forgiving Sayapi. This could only mean the Sioux band would be back at full strength, the odds against the wolf hunters again raised to their former eight-to-one. It had been gamble enough when they had only to guess at the solvency of Gall’s guarantee not to harm them. Now that he had promised to kill them, the company barometer dropped like hot lead from a shot tower.
Even Big Anse was depressed. And Phineas, disenfranchised. The vote went four-to-one in favor of getting out at once, Kelly being the lone dissenter.
The mercuric-tempered scout, not smiling now and sober as a Sioux, was no longer humoring any Quixotic ideas of danger and adventure. The happy Irish inspiration which had made him grab Crow Girl’s arm at the last minute had had time to take a bad chill. Hence there were no frontier heroics, real or imagined, involved in his decision. He saw it as a simple case of humane consideration; the selfsame impersonal pity the soldier shows when, on the field of battle, he raises the head of his enemy whom he has just mortally wounded and gives him to drink from his canteen: to move the Indian girl now would be to kill her.
Gall’s departure had given him his first chance to reexamine her closely. When he had replaced the blankets about her shaking form, he knew what he had to do.
Her fever was raging again, the rotten stench of the gangrene returning. It gave a man no choice. He had to open up that leg again. At the same time, he could not ask his comrades to wait, nor could he join them with the girl. To subject her to the rigors of the forced night march now necessary to get the others safely out of the foothills and back to Reed’s Ranch in the outer basin would be to finish her as surely as putting a gun to her temple and pulling the trigger.
She was going to die anyway. The least a man could do was to help her do it with dignity and with all possible peace of mind. That much was no more than God expected of any of his little sparrows. How was it the line in the Scriptures went? Inasmuch as ye have done it unto the least of these, ye have done it unto me? Something not far from that. In any event a man of Kelly’s simple faith had no option, nor did he ask one.
The anxious wolf hunters, glum Jepson and cowardly Caswell included, urged him with a heat which warmed him wonderfully to take the Indian girl and get out with them. They could and would gladly rig a litter like the one the Sioux had made for her, slinging it from the aprons of Phineas’ aparejo and trotting by turns at the rear poles. But the scout would not see it. Big Anse then pleaded clumsily to be allowed to stay on with him and the “little redskin lady.” Kelly remained quietly adamant. His reasoning was equally immovable.
It was his fault, he repeated calmly, that the Hunkpapa had come down on their camp in the first place. It was his fault that the girl had led the Sioux raiders back onto them in the second place. It would be his fault if they did not reach Reed’s alive in the third place. And their best chance of reaching Reed’s, he stressed, lay in Big Anse Harper.
Anse was the only one among them who could track, trail, read sign, or smell an ambush well enough to guide them out. He was, in effect, the only one of them who had what Kelly called “a natural built-in feel for Indians,” and despite his lack of experience, these superior native instincts made it imperative for him to accompany his friends. If Big Anse would listen to him and the rest of them would listen to Big Anse, Kelly could guarantee them they would all be shaking hands with Old Man Reed before daybreak.
At first the hulking Georgian was obdurate, but a compromise was reached by late afternoon. He would take the others into Reed’s, then return with Phineas and an emergency load of ammunition, salt, sugar, and tobacco. All of the present supplies, including the deadly little black bottles with their neat St. Louis pharmaceutical labels, Alkaloid of Strychnia, were to be left with Kelly.
They were not to imagine, the scout chided them good-naturedly, that his actions were heroic or his position hopeless. He was doing what he was doing because he wanted to do it and because he saw a very good chance of getting away with it.
Gall was certain to go to the main winter camp on the Musselshell for reinforcements before attempting his promised assault. Indians simply fancied far better odds than eight-to-one when trying to take an alerted, forted-
up bunch of white hunters. That meant at least a week of pony travel time, going and coming back. By then Big Anse would have returned with the mule and the girl’s leg most likely improved enough for them to put her aboard Phineas and pack her out to Reed’s well ahead of Gall’s curtain-call return to the cabin-site meadow.
This specious argument was uneasily accepted, as twilight closed in over the Judith Basin foothills.
Now, as the little group waited anxiously inside the cabin for full darkness to follow the short autumn dusk, the scout had a final warning for them.
Within the past hour, a new need for urgency and dispatch of movement had appeared; this, in addition to the Sioux’s Musselshell timetable.
There was a change in weather coming.
Kelly could smell snow.
“Now wait!” he ordered Big Anse, who immediately wanted to stay again. “Let me qualify that before you start bellowing like a fly-bitten bull in a dry wallow!” The big man quieted down with a trusting grin, and Kelly got on with it. It was a deliberate lie but as white as the snow it was twisted about.
They were to remember, he reminded them, that they were at nearly eight-thousand feet and far north. An early fall storm could mean trouble. He could remember winters when the high country had been closed in as early as late August. But the way the wind smelled to him right now, the storm was perhaps three days off. Beyond that, he compounded the falsehood (the wind smelled of big snow not hours away), it would most probably be a normal light autumn fall. Something like three or four inches. Six at the most. Anyway, Anse would have ample time to get back from Reed’s and the others to get started from there on out to Fort Buford before any really rough weather came on.
Big Anse, new to Montana and the merciless abruptness of the meanest winter weather in North America, accepted the fabrication and the discussion ended in an awkward silence.
The five men shook hands, all around, with considerable feeling.
Their terse, spoken goodbyes were by no means the full measure of the Fort Buford wolf hunters’ feelings for the fey-humored Irish scout. Kelly was a man who talked very well to other men but to whom other men invariably experienced difficulty in talking. The most obvious explanation for the apparent perversity was his truly deep shyness, a peculiar reticence to trust his feelings to his fellows which was almost Indian in its intensity. It was his nature to befriend others while not allowing them to befriend him. It was possibly this very Siouan fear of being rejected which made him understandable and acceptable to the implacably wild Hunkpapa and Oglala. But in the present case, it only sped and made awkward the last words between him and his white companions.
The darkness was down now all around them.
They filed swiftly out of the little cabin, Anse bringing the mule from the unfinished fur shed lean-to where he had been stabled since Gall’s departure.
“Good luck,” said Kelly softly as they moved away into the gloom. “You’ll make it all right.”
“Sure we will!” Big Anse’s reply echoed confidently. “We got the world by the tail on a downhill pull, goin’ back. From here to Reed’s, the trail drops forty feet a minute!”
They all heard Kelly’s quick answering laugh, then the last words any white man would hear from him that raging winter of 1875-76. “Remember what Sir Walter Scott had to say on the subject of advancing down the mountainside, boys!” he called cheerfully.
“Huh—?” Big Anse questioned wonderingly. “How’s thet?”
“Even the haggis, God bless her, can charge downhill—!”
The Georgian thought it over a moment, gave Phineas a hard jerk with the halter rope. “What the hell’s a haggis?” he asked his three companions. Fortunately, Alec MacDonal was following next behind him. “A haggis,” recited the wiry Canadian woodsman, “is a Scotch puddin’ made of the heart, liver, and lights of a blatherin’ sheep, mixed with onions and oatmeal and boiled in the stomach of the very animal out of whose guts ye made the main ingredients.”
“And what does thet make us?” growled the skeptical Jepson, overhearing the answer and hurrying his step.
“Why, I reckon a ‘gut-cinch’ to reach Reed’s Ranch!” Big Anse guffawed and let out another notch in his own seven-foot stride.
Nobody returned his raucous chuckle or appreciated by any audible risibility his empty-headed humor.
It was a night when only idiots or Irishmen would laugh.
BOOK THREE:
SOUTH PASS
19
Five hours after the Fort Buford wolf hunters left the little cabin in Crow Girl Meadow, the wind began an uneasy restless moaning through the pine and cedar tops.
It was a northwest wind coming down out of the Aleutians and coursing along the frozen spine of the Canadian Rockies. Yet it was strangely warm and gentle in the beginning. It held that way for exactly one hour, then dropped away to a dead, ticking-watch stillness.
Kelly, only a few minutes returned from the weirdest game hunt of his life, glanced up from his work over the girl’s knee.
The silence became a tangible thing. The cold creeping in the uncovered cabin door had texture, body, and literal feel. Like a bad mist along the Big Muddy’s bottomlands. Or the raw blind sea fog Kelly could remember shrouding up the Potomac when he had been a green, underage recruit in Company G, Tenth Infantry, stationed in the capital ten long years before in the spring of ’65.
He waited, poised on one knee, listening.
That peculiar earlier warmth in the air? The beginning gentleness of that wind? Now this dropped-pin stillness? Aii-eee, as the Sioux would say, no waste, no waste: not a good thing at all.
The girl, eyes closed to endure the pain of his uncasing her splinted leg and his pulling away of the serum-glued cotton bandage from the reopened knee, now looked up at him, eyes wide. She was in time to catch his apprehensive glance out the door, to share his tense attitude of strained listening.
“Wanitu,” she whispered quickly.
Kelly shook his head. “Wasiya,” he corrected.
Crow Girl’s face grew frightened. Wanitu was only the normal wintertime, Wasiya was the Blizzard King, the particular god of the wild Montana snowstorms which were things fearfully apart from the peaceful happiness of Wanitu’s otherwise snug and sleepy shelter.
“He comes so soon?” she asked plaintively. “The Winter Giant comes now?” She tried a wan smile, wandered off aimlessly. “So soon, so soon—”
“The sooner the better,” Kelly assured her grimly, setting his teeth at the sight of the knee as the last of the matter-caked bandage came away. “You had better make a big prayer to whatever the Crow People call Wakan Tanka that the old devil comes tonight. And that he decides to stay a long time when he gets here.”
“Why is that, Lone Wolf?”
She was still managing the smile, and Kelly grimaced. The pain in that hideous green and purple lump which had once been a knee had to be enormous. Yet as long as Indian flesh and nerves could endure, she would not “make his heart sad” by showing it.
“If the Winter Giant strikes tonight and strikes heavily,” he told her, “we are spared, you and I. We are given a little longer to live.”
“But,” she protested, “if he fills the south pass with snow, your friend who is as big as a bull buffalo will not be able to return with the mule, as I heard you planning it. We will not be able to escape then.”
Kelly forced a grin, reaching for her forehead to check the fever. “If the snow fills the south pass, will it not also fill the north?” he asked her quietly.
Crow Girl brightened. “Hau, tahunsa!” She actually laughed it, her gray eyes lighting up for the fleeting moment of her little pleasure. “I see! I see!”
What she had seen, before the pain darkness dulled her eyes again, was that if the snow was too deep for Big Anse and Phineas, it would be too deep, as well, for Gall and his blue roa
n gelding. What she meant by “hau, tahunsa” was “Yes, cousin,” and the unthinking use of the generic term for anyone the Sioux have accepted into the tribal group pleased Kelly greatly.
But what he was looking at pleased him not at all.
The knee was very bad again. Worse than he had expected. Still there was nothing to do but go ahead with the girl’s own heathen suggestion. His Pony Soldier medicine had fallen flatter than the wind-muffled report of a mile-distant rifle shot. Perhaps her pagan Kangi Wicasi witchcraft would do better.
But that was impossible. More than that, it was preposterous. The treatment Crow Girl had remembered from her wild childhood, and for the main ingredient of which he had just spent the past five hours hunting, was the product of a disordered red imagination.
The hot paunch of a young bull elk killed at midnight in the first quarter of the new moon?
God forgive a man for lending his heart to such heresy and for surrendering his good Christian mind to such heathen mumbo jumbo. Still, he could not forget what testy old surgeon John K. Blake had repeatedly roared at his orderlies when one of the post hospital’s ignorant country-boy patients would request some unorthodox medical therapy for the relief of urgent pain. “I don’t give a continental damn what it is!” the irate doctor would explode. “If it helps the poor son of a bitch to rub the back of his ear with a corncob, order him a load of cobs!”
Kelly grinned twistingly at the army memory, took his hand from Crow Girl’s brow, shed his wry smile. The poor little thing was burning up. God help her. If her Kangi Wicasi medicine did not work, she would be dead before another sundown.
“If I do anything wrong, you will tell me.” He forced the reassuring calmness, arose quickly, went to the doorframe where he had hung the young wapiti bull, his mind turning desperately.
Maybe—just maybe—the whole crazy luck of the last twenty-four hours would hold. It had been fantastic. Getting his gun back from Sayapi after bungling on the horse guard. Bluffing Gall right down to his breechcloth with nothing but a fancy Winchester. Getting his four friends safely away before the snow set in. Gambling that Gall would find Sayapi and that both would go to the Musselshell before returning to the cabin clearing, and apparently winning the gamble hands down. Lastly, getting this weanling bull out of a stray herd which had accidentally yarded up not a mile from the meadow at the first smell of snow. And getting him at night, quartering away, with one shot which had gone clear through him, flag to fore-chest, without so much as nicking the precious stomach! He-hau! Incredible would be a better word than fantastic.