by Clay Fisher
Moving toward the bull, he kept Antelope Boy’s Spencer hipped and on the cock. There was always the crazy chance that Sayapi was hidden behind the big body. His pony tracks led on past it, around the sandy shore of the little lake. But he could always have taken the ponies on, hidden them and Crow Girl in the stand of red cedars at the head of the lake, come back across the grass afoot, and lain up behind the young bull. Stretchy as the idea was, Kelly heeded it. Nothing was too quirky for Gall’s hotheaded nephew.
But Sayapi was not behind the buffalo.
When Kelly moved cautiously around the huge black-bearded head, the ground beyond the sprawling brute was innocent of any foreign tenant, save the flyblown pile of viscera Sayapi had pulled out of the bull to get the liver.
Kelly relaxed with an audible sigh. Propping the Spencer against one of the bull’s up-hooked black horns, he turned to find a ground-stone upon which to whet his skinning knife. He was six or seven days sick of rancid pemmican, and where Sayapi had taken the hump ribs and liver, he had thoughtfully left the tongue, and a man could not ask for any better fare than—
It was then that Kelly’s narrowing eyes noticed that Sayapi had not taken the liver. It was lying right there under a thick loop of intestine, not a foot from the whetstone rock for which his suspended hand was reaching. In the same second, he heard the little noise behind him and saw, above him, the sudden flare of the circling buzzards. He spun around in time to see Sayapi, slimed from head to foot with stringing buffalo innards, rise up and out of the disemboweled belly of the yearling bull.
“Hohahe!” barked the tall Hunkpapa youth. And closed the blood-smeared crook of his forefinger around the trigger of his Springfield trap-loader.
As Sayapi’s fingers pressed inward, Kelly’s were not the only eyes which went wide. The young brave’s did too.
There would have been no normal chance to escape the murderous pointblank blast. The muzzle of the Springfield, as Sayapi stepped from his ambush in the buffalo’s carcass, was no more than four feet from the white scout’s face. Kelly should, by all honest rights of superior stalking craft, have been dead in the next half breath.
Instead, he got a reprieve and a second chance all in the same following moment of futile sound—the leaden, plunking, lifeless snap of a released firing pin biting into a bad round. Ensued, the little percussion-cap “pip” of the primer discharging without igniting the defective powder-load. Then, the weak fizzling run and muffled “chock” of the barely released bullet lodging midway in the barrel, the delayed compressive whiff of acrid gray smoke leaking from the locked breech—and, finally, dead silence.
Sayapi’s brand-new Pony Soldier carbine and its handsome brass cartridge had malfunctioned in a grimly prophetic rehearsal of the same weapon’s and its issued ammunition’s coming failure to perform in the far more famous scene so soon to be played out on the banks of the Little Big Horn.
The dreaded, sickening “pip” of the misfire was as acutely familiar to Kelly as to any man alive. It was a sound which could mean life or death, depending on how fast one reacted upon hearing it.
Kelly struck back with the reflex speed of a prowling silvertip, surprised at a blind turn on a one-way mountain ledge and knowing instinctively he had but one way to go. He came up out of his half-crouched turn as he drove in under the plugged barrel of Sayapi’s carbine. The Sioux, recovering an eye flick later, reversed the weapon to drive its ironshod butt into the charging white man’s face.
But, save with the knife, the North Plains Indian was never the frontiersman’s equal at infighting. Particularly and obstinately did he fail and refuse to understand that the clenched fist can be a deadly weapon.
For the second time in ten days, Kelly’s hard-knuckled right hand smashed into Sayapi.
This time, however, it could not be to the jaw and did not end the encounter. It only caught the powerful young Sioux giant in the ribs, breaking three of them, exploding the breath out of him, and forcing him to drop the Springfield. Growlingly, he went for his knife, flashing it out of its sheath, whipping it back for an undercutting drive into his enemy’s unprotected belly. But as the glittering blade hesitated at the outer limit of its backswing, Kelly’s knee, blunt and brutal as a splitting maul, drove up and into the snarling Sayapi’s loin cloth.
Strangling with pain, the Sioux youth clutched instinctively at the bursting torture in his groins. The forgotten blade fell from his spasming hand, his tall body jackknifing forward in uncontrollable agony as it did. Kelly caught him coming in with a hooking left to the mouth, the jolting blow straightening his head for the crushing right hand which followed instantly and flush upon the jaw.
At this point the mortal memories of Sayapi, Red Paint, youngest of the hostile Sioux subchiefs, beloved chosen nephew of Gall, war chief of all the Hunkpapa—ceased.
He died as quietly as had Antelope Boy before him and by the same merciful method—the bullet placed carefully just behind the left ear. But he did not die as well. Looking down upon his slowly relaxing form, the flat echo of the Spencer’s single shot still slatting off across the surrounding ridges, Luther Kelly grimaced bitterly and turned away.
There was no peace upon Sayapi’s handsome face in death, as there had been none within his wild heart, in life.
30
The next two weeks began as a dream and ended as a nightmare for Kelly.
He found Crow Girl bound and gagged but otherwise unharmed, hidden in the cedar grove at the head of the lake. There also he found Phineas. And, upon the scarred pommel of Sayapi’s saddle, he found the knotted red grotesquerie which had once been Big Anse Harper’s hair.
The latter discovery put a cruel curb upon the joys of the reunion. Even while his sobbing Absaroka mate was still kissing and clinging to him, Kelly’s dark eyes were staring over her trembling shoulder, his black brows painfully knit in deep hurt and despair.
He had found his beloved, but at what cost!
Big Anse was horribly dead, butchered alive by Sayapi and his renegade band, sent to his Sioux slaughterers like a big dumb faithful ox by Kelly’s own thoughtless selfishness. And worse, far worse than that. His brave death had been in pitiful vain. The message he carried for Kelly—perhaps an empty warning, perhaps a true alarm which might save uncounted soldier lives—had failed to reach the white troops. As a result, with his Crow love just returned to him and what should have been a time of great happiness ahead, Kelly was faced with a decision which could have but one answer. An answer which could mean nothing but misery to the slender child-mother in his arms.
There might still be time to reach some troop commander in the field between Fort Buford and the Big Horn. While there was any shred of reasonable chance to do that, or, failing that, to go on to the fort itself, any white man’s instant duty was clear.
He tried in vain to explain his need to Crow Girl. The latter’s unwaveringly hostile Indian viewpoint had not been weakened by her ten days with the wild Hunkpapa. She was, if anything, more set than ever in her determination to despise all Wasicuns, save Lone Wolf Kelly. That would be Gall’s influence, Kelly thought, filling her simple mind full of war talk and the endless list of woes brought unto the red man by the white. He knew his gray-eyed bride openly admired the great Hunkpapa. How much or to what extent this admiration had grown in the days just past, he could not know. But the very thought of it was enough to send a sickening wave of jealous anger through him. He fought the feeling down with difficulty, and its lingering suspicion was not wholly destroyed at that. Yet there was no time for personal concern. A man must go on the best way he knew.
Failing to make headway in his attempts at putting forward reasonably his moral need for reaching the Pony Soldiers, he bluntly asked Crow Girl if she had been in the Park before. She at once answered that she had, many times, and knew its every trail like a brother, or at least a cousin. He then asked her if she was aware of any shorter wa
y to return to the branch trail than via the Gardner River route.
Again she replied that she did, although her affirmative this time came only after an appreciable hesitation to check the northwest skies where an ominous bank of thunderheads had been building all day.
Kelly should have caught the little pause and the object of its study, but he did not.
He left off questioning Crow Girl at once, satisfied with her allegations. There was yet a little time before they had to go. Kelly wanted the most of that moment.
They camped that night by the unknown lake, both full-fed with fresh buffalo ribs and drowsily content with the fragrance of the cedar fire and the arm-locked hour of happiness borrowed against tomorrow’s rude awakening. During the night the wind came up, driving the northwest cloud bank down over the Park.
Kelly slept nine hours, was up and packing Phineas with the misting five o’clock daylight. By six his little caravan, following Crow Girl on Gall’s gray mare, was on the move up and out of Gardner’s Hole.
The rain began in earnest an hour later. By eight o’clock Kit Carson himself could not have told north from south without a compass and some weatherproof matches to read it by. Shortly it became necessary to pass a picket rope between Crow Girl’s mare and the Appaloosa stud. It was literally so dark and the rain so driving that Kelly could not see distinctly Crow Girl’s small form ten feet in front of him.
It was as well that he could not. He would neither have liked nor understood the soft smile curving her full lips.
But despite his trusting blindness, Kelly was beginning to worry by nine o’clock. They were in a region of no timber and the most weirdly gigantic artemisia sagebrush he had ever seen. Where the average bush of this omnipresent western shrub seldom exceeded three feet in height, many of the surrounding specimens shot up to ten feet and the average was over the head of a mounted man. There was no other plant life in appreciable number, save the familiar white-flowered umbrellas of the wild buckwheat. It was utterly impossible to guess their direction, yet his repeated anxious queries to Crow Girl brought only further soft smiles and quick assurances that she knew exactly where she was going.
She did, too, but Kelly never realized it.
When they had not cut the Indian branch trail by ten o’clock, he suspected his tiny companion of whistling in the dark, at the very worst. By high noon, with the trail still unlocated, he was only sure she had been bravely bluffing and was in no way suspicious of any more devious motive. He thought simply that they should have found the north-south Indian trail two hours ago and that whether or not Crow Girl would bob her dear stubborn little head and admit it, she had lost them. It did not occur to him then, or at any later time, that his Indian sweetheart had deliberately led him astray.
It was not in Crow Girl’s uncomplicated mind to think of her act as anything but natural. Kelly’s concern with the Sioux gathering on the Greasy Grass meant less than nothing to her. All she knew was that her time was very near and that she did not want to have her baby in a Pony Soldier camp or at Fort Buford, where Kelly had said they would have to go if they did not find some of the mila hanska on the way there. It was further in her heart that this Land of the Smoking Waters was a sacred place and that any man-child born here would walk tall and strong and carry very big medicine for all of his life. It was in her heart, too, that she wanted Kelly to be with her when the little one came and to stay with her until journey’s end in her Absaroka homeland.
In the whole of this civilization-shy Indian thinking, she was fatefully abetted by a high-country summer storm which is still remembered by a handful of ninety-year-oldsters on a certain Montana reservation to this day.
For thirteen days and nights, the sun was not seen over the Land of the Smoking Waters. The winds blew first hailstone cold, then silver-thaw warm. The remaining snowpack melted downward into the east-west draining rivers, rendering north-south travel impossible. And for thirteen days and nights, Luther Kelly wandered the flooded canyon and river trails of the drowned Park, now lost by reason of the rain’s increasing torrent, now found by the deluge’s slackening or momentary cessation—only to be lost again in its returning violence or trapped in its brief thinnings by the thundering streams and inundated lowlands he must cross to get north with his message to Fort Buford. As best he might have salved his tortured conscience with the unguent that such a tremendous storm would be pinning down the Sioux as surely as it was him. Meanwhile, history had it written otherwise. The freakish downpour was not falling east of Clark’s Fork nor north of the Big Bend.
But on the morning of the fourteenth day, the sullen clouds broke away unexpectedly to show Kelly, immediately ahead of and below the dripping ridge upon which he sat the Appaloosa, the clean sun dancing on the unbelievably blue-green waters of an immense sheet of water which could only be the great headwaters lake of the Yellowstone itself.
An hour later he and Crow Girl had made camp on the lakeshore, hung out their molding blankets to cure in the hot breeze, and were themselves stretched naked upon the packed sands, letting the June 19 sun bake the bone-chill and trail-damp out of their aching, exhausted bodies.
They rested forty-eight hours, compelled to take the extra day and night not only by their own fatigue but by the poor condition of the ponies after two weeks of bloating, water-coarsened feed. Repacking their sun-dried blankets on the morning of the second day, they started north along the lake toward the Yellowstone’s seven-mile-distant outlet at about eight o’clock. A little over an hour later they reached the head of the lake. Here they came once more upon the Great Trail where it followed the west bank of the river northward. Another half hour and three miles along, they rounded a blind turn in the travois-rutted track and pulled their snorting ponies to a rearing halt.
Fifty yards ahead, their lathered mounts drawn up and blocking the trail from side to side, their expressionless silence so thick you could have sliced it with a stone tomahawk, waited Gall and two dozen picked Hunkpapa braves.
Kelly was thunderstruck.
He had completely dismissed the war chief the minute he had seen him gallop off down the Yellowstone in response to Crazy Horse’s summons. Now, here he was in the Park, big as life and twice as ugly. Wagh! What a shock!
What in the Lord’s good name could have happened to Tashunka’s intention to hit Old Red Beard on the Rosebud before going into camp over on the Greasy Grass? It was impossible that the plan to bluff Three Stars out of the big fight could have been carried out so soon. Gall must have backed out to come looking for Sayapi and Crow Girl.
But for all his years along the Yellowstone, Kelly still had a little something to learn about what was impossible for High Plains hostiles.
It was June 21. On the 17th Gall and Crazy Horse had caught Crook starting up the Rosebud, and it had gone exactly as Tashunka had predicted.
Three Stars was driven clear back to his base camp and, for all his big Apache reputation, so badly scared that he refused to leave it again. He deliberately ignored the projected rendezvous with Gibbon, Terry, and Custer, thereby insuring the latter’s date with destiny. By the later admission of his own troopers, had it not been for the inspired fighting of Washakie and his Utah Shoshone scout corps, the Battle of the Rosebud would have been Crook’s last command.
As it was, he was alive and would fight again.
Also as it was, Gall and twenty-four Hunkpapa friends had ridden from the Rosebud to Yellowstone Park in something like seventy-two hours, and were waiting now to have a little talk with Lone Wolf Kelly.
31
“Where is Sayapi?” asked Gall quietly.
“Dead,” said Kelly, as quietly.
“You killed him?”
“Of course.”
“Over the woman?”
“Why else?”
“Then you will fight for her.”
“Have you ever thought otherwise?”
“No, your heart is strong.”
There was a long pause during which the ponies shifted hips, pawed restlessly, shook out their hackamores.
Kelly had no idea where the conversation was leading but knew it was not aimless. Gall, unlike so many of his brother chiefs among the Sioux, was not enamored of his own voice. When he said something, you had better listen very hard.
“Well?” he demanded at length, unwilling to wait Gall out and impatient for his decision.
“Well,” echoed the latter simply, “then I will fight you for her.”
Kelly was taken completely aback. “You will what?” he gasped.
“Fight you for the Crow girl,” repeated Gall patiently. Then softly shrugged. “Hinmangas, naturally.”
Kelly was looking at Crow Girl when the Sioux chief added the sibilant qualification, and he saw the rich color drain away from her dark face. He remembered, too, the looks of fear on the faces of the Hunkpapa braves many moons before when their leader had threatened them with the word.
“Why hinmangas?” he asked, suddenly dry-throated.
“You know hinmangas? You have heard of it?”
“I have heard of it but do not know it. It is some sort of traditional duel, is it not? I understand the word itself means ‘you and I tear at each other with a knife,’ but that is all.”
“You have noticed perhaps that it makes men uneasy to hear it spoken?”
“Yes. Why is that?”
“Because it is a duel of manhood. The loser is deprived of his male pride.”
Kelly paled.
“That is a monstrous thing!” he declared angrily, his Christian mind and civilized mores revolted by the pagan thought. “It is a thing which is done to animals! An atrocious, barbaric thing!”
“Yes,” agreed Gall, not unpleasantly and clearly serious. “It is indeed a drastic law. But can you think of a more effective way to settle permanently a question of disputed love between two men for the same woman?”