Yellowstone Kelly

by Clay Fisher

  Perhaps he had misinterpreted the girl’s disturbing little antic back there in the sheep gully. Perhaps there was some Indian connotation to the neck-bite which he did not understand. Perhaps he had only imagined she had wantonly thrust her body against his. Perhaps the whole thing had been simply a thoughtless child’s spontaneous impulse of meaningless gratitude.

  Yes, surely, that last explanation was the right one and he, Luther Kelly, was a man who had been too long alone.

  This little Indian miss could not be over eighteen, the same credulous age he had been when first he topped the Missouri’s bluffs behind Fort Berthold and stood like stout Cortez, “silent upon a peak in Darien,” stricken senseless with the wonder of a land that was like another planet to him. That must be the way it was with this poor little thing; she was just overcome with being the lodge guest of the great Lone Wolf, awed at having been so devotedly cared for by a feared and famed Wasicun scout, wrongly taken with the honor, even though entirely without connubial reward, of serving as the woman of the legendary Yellowstone Kelly.

  Assuredly, without putting any great strain on one’s own modesty, this reaction was understandable.

  And add to the Indian girl’s certain knowledge of his frontier reputation the fact that, one way or another, the army’s stolen surgical kit or the green elk paunch, she owed him her leg and her life, why then you had your reasonable answer.

  By thunder, the more a man thought of it, the more sense it made and the clearer it became to him that the girl was not going to follow in the body-fawning footsteps of her red sisters in his past. The average young Indian woman, when it came to winning blanket privileges in a decent white man’s bedroll, had no more moral compunction than a Mandan camp dog trying to tail-wag her way into her red master’s roundhouse in mid-January. But this gray-eyed Absaroka child was different. He had said so from the beginning, and it was still true.

  Outside, now, he heard the quick, light tread of her returning footsteps. His thoughts interrupted, he turned his expectant glance toward the doorway.

  She came in without a sound to stand just within the elk hide, waiting for her eyes to adjust from the outer splendor of the dying sun to the warm inner gloom of the cabin. As she posed there in the gaudy wrappings of Sayapi’s scarlet Four Point, Kelly thought she looked exactly like one of the beautiful little hanpospu hoksicala, the miniature gaily blanketed buffalo hide ceremonial dolls carried by the Sioux Wiyan Wakan, or Holy Women. Either that, or like the elfin, delicate women of Old Nippon in their butterflied kimonos, which he recalled seeing pictured in his geography book the last year he had attended school at Lima Academy back in New York. Yes, that last was it, and he could even remember the heading on the page above—Captain Matthew Calbraith Perry Voyages to the Land of the Rising Sun.

  Well, regardless, she was something out of a picture book.

  Her auburn-black hair, that peculiar coppery red over blue-black sheen which was encountered occasionally among the Plains tribes, particularly the Crow and the Oglala Sioux, was piled atop her head in Empress Eugénie fashion, secured there with a bit of polished elk horn she had apparently had with her when captured by the Hunkpapa. That effect, alone, when a man was eight years accustomed to seeing all Indian women (and most whites!) with their hair either in down-hanging plaits or not groomed at all, was stunning. It gave Crow Girl, standing with the blanket swept moldingly about her, revealing only her slim hands and dainty bare feet, the appearance of having just stepped from the most modern and elegant of baths.

  Which, as the complacent Kelly was shortly to find, was an illusion only in detail.

  Crow Girl swayed toward him and toward Phineas’ canvas pack cover which he had spread before the fire in lieu of a buffalo robe or some better floor cover for them to dine upon. As she came, and instinctively, Kelly found his feet, backing away from her in sudden nameless alarm.

  But he had not far to back. He was against the log wall in one step, and she was between him and the cabin’s sole exit in two. For the first time in nearly a decade of skillfully dodging red warriors, Lone Wolf Kelly found himself Indian-cornered by a slip of a girl who did not come up to his shoulder and weighed no more than a weanling antelope fawn!

  Trapped, he tried to bluster. But no sound came from his frantically moving lips.

  Several did, however, from the freely curving lips of Crow Girl.

  “Do not be afraid, Lone Wolf,” she laughed softly. “It is only that I have been snow bathing. It is an old custom among my people when one has been long ill and confined to the lodge in wintertime. It cleans the body and sends the fire racing through the blood. It returns one to usefulness among her tepee mates or to her loved one.”

  With supreme effort, Kelly broke his eyes from hers, managed a step toward the slab of sheep ribs he had hung across the room. “That is good,” he mumbled thickly. “Waste, waste. Now we will broil the ribs and then—”

  He got no farther, either with the evasive maneuver to reach the ribs or the stated intent to rack them for cooking.

  Crow Girl did not move a muscle, save to let Sayapi’s blanket slip a calculated six inches. It was enough to bring into eye-corner view a rounded copper shoulder and, below that, the ripely curving lusciousness of a farther sight designed by a bountiful nature to stop any normal man squarely in his tracks. Luther Kelly was normal. He stopped. And swung his head around and stood and stared, trembling like a leaf, at the first uncovered breast he had ever seen.

  Crow Girl smiled at him.

  It was not a wicked or a wanton smile but a sweet and womanly and almost shy smile, an ages-old unspoken promise of warm surrender which in three seconds put more crazy hammer and wild flutter into a man’s heart than all the abandoned smiles of sheer lusting could have done in a hundred years.

  “I have made myself ready for you, Lone Wolf,” was all she said, and dropped Sayapi’s blanket away.

  Beneath it she stood as God had made her.

  They lay before the fire, burned very low now, the garnet glow of its hard-pine coals exaggerating their shadows and projecting them across the packed earth floor to dance with fitful grace upon the rough log walls beyond. It was very warm and still in the far corners of the little cabin, out past the fireplace. And very calm and peaceful and languorous beneath the lamb’s-wool nap of Sayapi’s fine blanket, there in front of it. It was a time and place for that halting smalltalk with which lovers—who have never mentioned love—are wont to cautiously explore or painfully explain the awkward (yet wondrous!) fact of a physical fait accompli. And to get around, better late than never, to asking one another those few little overlooked personal statistics so convenient to a friendly understanding; such as true names, birth dates, honorableness of intentions, and the inconsequential like.

  “Are you happy, Lone Wolf?”

  “Ummmmmm.”

  “You are not angry with me?”

  “Nnnnnnn.”

  “You are not ashamed?”

  Kelly checked his drowsy mumble. He would have to consider that. He actually did not know whether he was ashamed or not. It had not come to that yet in his mind. He looked into the fire, thinking it over.

  “Niye osni tona led?” he finally asked her in Sioux, meaning, “How many colds—how many winters—had she been there? How old was she?”

  “Wance zaptan,” she smiled, watching him out of the corner of her eye, knowing he would be shocked.

  He was, and rightly.

  Good Lord! Crow Girl was not the eighteen he had guessed, after all. She was not even seventeen. Nor, God forgive him, sixteen. She had just told him she was only fifteen!

  “Then I am ashamed,” he answered humbly, breaking his unhappy pause and not having the courage to look at her as he did.

  “You need not be, Lone Wolf. I was to have had my tanke yanke isnati in another moon.”

  “Yes,” he insisted glumly
, “but you did not have it. That is the point.” She had referred to the tribal ceremony in which a young girl lives completely alone outside of the family lodge for a given period upon reaching sexual maturity, and prior to which no young man may look upon her seriously. Had he but known, he started to tell himself, then shook his head angrily. Had he known it would have made no difference at all. When Crow Girl let that blanket fall, no man in Montana could have … He abandoned the apology abruptly but kept his eyes on the fire. “I am still ashamed, yet I am happy too,” he admitted hesitantly. “It is a hard thing for me to say it. I am not a good talker with women.”

  “You don’t have to say it,” shrugged his slender companion encouragingly. “A woman can tell without talk.”

  “A woman, perhaps,” muttered Kelly, overcome by his pseudo moroseness.

  “But I am a woman!” she cried. “A full woman!”

  She came up on one slim elbow, startling him into a stolen side-glance as she slipped the blanket from her shoulders to support her indignant claim of nubility with the thrusting evidence of her proud breasts. “Will you look at me and say I am not!” she demanded of him, her anger as specious as his regret.

  Kelly decided he would do neither. At such a time, a man would do well to keep his eyes on the fire, his thoughts on the future, his opinions of female maturity to himself.

  She laughed, reading his mind aloud for him.

  “You are afraid to look! The great Lone Wolf is frightened by a woman’s body. And the Sioux call you ‘The-Little-Man-With-A-Strong-Heart.’ They should call you ‘The-Little-Boy-With-A-Weak-Heart!’”

  “Cover yourself,” said Kelly sternly. “To be bold and brazen with her body is no test of a real woman.”

  He hoped she would agree, was vastly relieved when she did.

  “I am sorry, Lone Wolf.” Her blush of contrition was as genuine as had been her flash of indignation, but before Kelly could take advantage of it, she was away again. “It was only that you made me feel like a full woman. Ha-a-u! Pte h’caka!”

  It was one too many for Luther Kelly.

  The social mores of New York were still too far from those of the Yellowstone. East was east and west was west. Even eight years on the River had not prepared a man to accept gracefully from an unclad fifteen-year-old Indian girl the glowing compliment that she considered him “the real bull buffalo.”

  There had to be an end to this fireside tête-à-tête at once. Because a man had been crazy for five minutes did not mean he had to make a career of it. The time to start getting that idea across to the reckless talking Absaroka girl was right now. It must be made plain to her that this had been a single accident of surprised passion, not a habit pattern for their enforced future together. Still, at the same time, a man could be kind about it.

  “I have been calling you Crow Girl,” he announced with studied soberness, deliberately ignoring her eager, waiting smile and addressing the fire as though he had far more important things on his mind than those which had just now been recovered by Sayapi’s blanket. “But what is your true name? The one by which your people call you.”

  She looked at him quickly, then shrugged. It was all right with her if Lone Wolf wanted to change the subject. One could still hope this did not mean he really wanted to change it.

  “H’tayetu Hopa,” she replied demurely. “It came about because my father said my eyes had the color and coolness of a clear summer twilight. Do you like it? Do you think it is pretty?”

  “‘Beautiful Evening!’” he exclaimed, genuinely moved as he always was by the Indian art in painting names. “It is lovely, very lovely.”

  “I like ‘Crow Girl’ better,” she said flatly. “It is the most beautiful name I ever heard.”

  “Now how in the world can you say that?” laughed Kelly, beginning to feel and be grateful for the margin of smalltalk safety growing between them. “It is a very clumsy name for one so slight and graceful.”

  “Of course,” she said. “It is only because you gave it to me, Lone Wolf.”

  “I?” he echoed, surprised, thinking he had gotten the name from Gall.

  “Yes.” She dropped her eyes, suddenly and confusingly shy now. “In the little shelter the Hunkpapa made for me. Where you first came to see my leg. Do you remember? You asked if my heart was good for you, and you called me Crow Girl. Since that moment my name was changed.”

  “Do you really want me to call you that—Crow Girl?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then will you do me a favor in return?”

  “When I do not do as you wish, I will be dead.”

  He turned away when she looked up at him and said it, but not quickly enough. The fire’s light was not so low, but he caught the warning glimmer of the tears again brimming those great black-lashed eyes.

  “Then call me Kelly,” he requested hurriedly. “I do not like Lone Wolf, nor Little Big Heart, nor Man-Who-Never-Lays-Down-His-Gun, nor Little-Man-With-A-Strong-Heart, nor any of those other foolish Indian names I have been given by your people. Do you understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can you say Kelly?”

  “Yes.”

  “Let me hear you.”

  “No.”

  “Why is that?”

  “I would rather say it my way.”

  “And what is your way, you stubborn minx?” He smiled condescendingly, led into the trap so beautifully he never saw nor suspected it.

  “This way—!” she whispered fiercely.

  And brought her lean body meltingly into his, sealing his surprised lips with the clinging hunger of her kiss and receiving the answering wildness of his embrace as deeply and easily as the warm sands receive the angry sea.

  22

  From that hour, the relationship between the white scout and the Indian girl deepened with the high-country snows. Beyond the understandable enjoyments of being young and strong and alone and in love, the first-time physical fun of “keeping house,” as it were, nearly every day brought some new surprise of subtler, more lasting appreciation.

  For his part Kelly, who would have wagered a factory-fresh Winchester against a seven-dollar Hudson’s Bay smoothbore that he knew what there was worth knowing about the wild Plains Indians and his way of life, discovered that his knowledge was superficial. It was all concerned with trailing and tracking, hiding and seeking, hunting and being hunted, ambushing and avoiding ambushes, shooting and getting shot at, bluffing and calling, stalking and being stalked, and, in continuing kind, limited strictly to the mastery of the main article of Indian war—the holding down of your own or the lifting of the enemy’s hair. And to Kelly, quite naturally, as the owner of one of the most sought-after scalp locks in Siouxland, the Indian had always been “the enemy.”

  Oh, he had learned much of the community life of the tame Mandans, Arikaras, and Gros Ventres who made of their windowless roundhouses virtual mud-wattled cottonwood parasites to the palisaded hosts of the white man’s trading forts up and down the east bank of the Big Muddy. And he had many a fine red acquaintance among the humbled people of the peaceful tribes. Men like Bloody Knife of the Arikara, for instance, a hunter and warrior as famed and fearless as any Oglala or Hunkpapa. But these civilized Indians, driven into the protecting arms of the white brother by the merciless persecution of their own wild cousins, did not count in the frontiersman’s coldblooded scale of values. They were simply “friendlies,” well tried, if not to be trusted.

  Quite another matter were the Indians who still ranged west of the Missouri. These unhaltered “mustang” bands of Sioux, Cheyenne, Arapahoe, Crow, and Blackfeet were proven and predictable “hostiles.” They were “the enemy,” not only to Kelly but to every white man and every white man’s Indian north of Fort Laramie or west of Fort Lincoln.

  For eight years Kelly had accepted this standard Montana version of the rebellious horseback
tribes, applying it in particular to the Sioux with whom he was most familiar. Still, he did not let lack of familiarity breed carelessness. While he had had very little contact with the Crows and Blackfeet, whose home camps in general lay westerly and northerly of his beloved lower Yellowstone Valley, he regarded them as no better risks than their Sioux, Cheyenne, or Arapahoe cousins. It was true that the Blackfeet had never come back from their almost total decimation by the great smallpox epidemic earlier in the century, and could at this late date be practically discounted as a power on the plains. But the Crow, called Absaroka by themselves and Kangi Wicasi by the Sioux, were numerous and great travelers. Kelly many times heard but never listened to the story that they had taken the white man’s path. Only one tribe ever had done that and stuck with it. That had been old Jim Bridger’s adopted people, the Shoshones, or Snakes, and they made a careful point of staying out of Sioux territory. As for the Crow, if he met a party of them on the trail, he was just what he would have been with a band of Oglala Dirt Throwers or Hunkpapa Border People—The-Man-Who-Never-Lays-His-Gun-Down.

  Now all that past prejudice was being badly shaken.

  During the silent, swift winter months of 1875-76 in the little cabin at Crow Girl Meadow, H’tayetu Hopa, the gray-eyed Absaroka child-squaw, gave him a new sight of Indian life, setting to grow in him a seed of sympathy and understanding for her nomad people which was to bear a strange bright fruit in the destiny of her Sioux cousins where history lay tragically in wait for them along the icebound banks of Tongue River.

  From Crow Girl he learned the silently total obedience to the male, to the hunter, to the provider, which is the whole instructed purpose, from the time she is old enough to walk and to bear wood and water, of the Indian woman’s life. This discovery, alone, was enough to make a renegade of any man. His own society, based upon the diametrically opposed philosophy of the sacred cow or the queen bee—“all hail the fertile female”—had not prepared a fellow for any such service as Crow Girl had been trained to provide.