Yellowstone Kelly

by Clay Fisher

  Again the white scout was stunned.

  “Do you mean Crow Girl?” he cried unbelievingly. “That is impossible! Do you deny that she is already my true mate?”

  “She was another’s before she was yours.”

  “That is a lie! She told me she had not yet taken the ceremony of living outside and alone when you captured her.”

  “I believe that.”

  “Then what are you saying? Are you blind? Can you not see she is carrying my child? That she is happy to be with me and to stay with me?”

  “Perhaps she was not unhappy with me,” said Gall. “Why not ask her?”

  Kelly looked around at Crow Girl, but to his amazement she dropped her eyes and would not look at him. He could not ask her then and got no later chance.

  “But the child—” he resumed lamely with Gall.

  “The child,” rumbled the war chief, “is no more yours than it is mine. Has she not told you that it will be an Indian child, that she wishes to rear it as a Shacun?”

  “Yes, yes, we have talked of that and agreed. But the child is mine! That I know.”

  Gall shook his head regretfully, and Kelly, for all his own confused excitement, could not help but note the shadow of sadness which passed over the great warrior’s face. “Let us say no more about it, my brother. We shall fight for her, hinmangas. That is all. Nohetto.”

  When Gall said nohetto, that was truly the end to the matter. The grim preparation for the manhood duel over H’tayetu Hopa, the gray-eyed child squaw of the Absaroka, went forward with deadly quietness.

  While others of the braves were marking out a twenty-five-foot circle in the dust of the Great Trail, Frog Belly came over to Kelly and explained to him the rules of the Hunkpapa hinmangas. They were short, sinister, uncomplicated.

  A single ceremonial knife was driven to the hilt into the ground in the middle of the circle. The contestants were stripped to their breechclouts, placed facing each other on opposite edges of the circle, the knife exactly between them. At a given signal and with the starting word, hopo, the fight was on. The entire simple idea was to get to the knife yourself or to keep your opponent from getting it.

  Once possession of the knife was gamed by one of the fighters, the duel’s motif became a little less basic, far more artistic. The purpose of the knife-wielder then was to weaken and wear down his adversary by a classic, difficult series of minor wounds to the point where he could be brought to a weaving, helpless stand or fixed in any other posture of defenseless exhaustion for delivery of the inhuman hinmangas coup de grace; the entire mold and intent of the skilled passage being precisely the same as the matador’s in debilitating the bull with cape and dart before placing him for the moment of truth with the espada.

  The unarmed fighter could use any ruse or tactic, while staying inside the circle, to wrest from his enemy the vital knife. Yet if either fighter mortally wounded the other with it, rather than using it in the traditional method of literally “cutting the other to ribbons” without killing him, then that fighter himself must face the death penalty from the duel’s impartial judges. It was a necessary safeguard, Frog Belly explained seriously, to assure a classic hinmangas and not a common ordinary knife fight. It made the duelers honest, put them to their best and most artful efforts, guaranteed the impartial ends of hinmangas justice being served in place of any personal vengeance.

  With a bobtailed nod and half a dozen eloquent Sioux grunts, Kelly signified that all this was clear to him. All clear, that was, up to the point where the victor had possession of the knife and the vanquished was fixed and helpless, waiting for the unspeakable climax. What happened then? What about the “manhood” part of the thing?

  Frog Belly looked puzzled for a moment, then brightened.

  Eh? What was that Lone Wolf wanted to know?

  Oh, yes, the manhood part. One almost forgets that. It is merely a matter of form after the real fight. Like paying a gambling debt after a pony race. Nothing more. Six or eight braves hold the loser down while the winner uses the knife on him. And in that respect, Lone Wolf was going to be especially fortunate. Gall had expected to fight Sayapi hinmangas for stealing the girl again. So he had brought along the medicine kit to seal the wound after the cutting.

  Lone Wolf could surely see, the fat brave concluded, that the way it was fought, the hinmangas was essentially a contest of animal strength without the artificial equality of weapons; a mating battle between rival human males, based on bone and muscle and primeval brute cunning—as of course such a thing should be.

  Kelly looked at Frog Belly, his dark face pale but composed. He shook his head, level black brows contracting in helpless, angry repugnance.

  “It is a heathen, wicked, inhuman thing,” he said, white-lipped. “God forgive me my part in it …”

  They faced each other across the circle, crouched motionless as two carved marble statues awaiting only the touch of the magic word to spring them into animate, terrible life. Off to one side, Black Fox held the plummet of eagle feathers fastened to a small stone, which he would drop to the ground with the starting word. Meanwhile, the combatants had to watch him while at the same time watching both each other and the all-important knife.

  The Hunkpapa braves stood ranked behind their chief, adding their hostile, slant stares to his. On the edge of the circle opposite Black Fox, Frog Belly now stood guard over Crow Girl. The tiny Absaroka squaw was huddled down beside a large boulder, trembling hands covering her face, thin shoulders racked repeatedly by the convulsive nerve shudders she could not repress. Kelly looked at her again and again—pleading, demanding, desperate looks, begging unashamedly for acknowledgment and return of the deep love he bore her. But there was something beyond understandable nerves wrong with Crow Girl. She would not look at her erstwhile white lover. Either she did not see his silent entreaties, or she was deliberately refusing to admit that she did. Kelly called out to her, urgently, compellingly. She did not answer him or even indicate that she had heard him. Yet he knew she had. His heart turned and writhed within him. He grew literally sick with the hurt of the rejection and the jealous fear of its meaning in relation to Gall’s dramatic reappearance. Perhaps it was a blessing that he had not followed the war chief’s quiet advice to ask the girl how she felt about being with him and the wild Hunkpapa, compared to walking with Kelly in the white man’s way. Perhaps it was—

  But the time for such torturing doubts was suddenly run out.

  Across from the sobbing Absaroka girl, Black Fox was raising aloft the lean hand which held the starting token. In the little moment remaining now, a man would never find out the answer to the questionable loyalty of Crow Girl’s love. And he had better forget about trying. Kelly made a wordless, deep-hurt sound. He tore his eyes from his Indian mate’s slender form, swung them, narrowed and glittering, back upon Gall his mind cleared and concentrating upon but one thought—the hinmangas.

  He had no idea whatever how this brutal duel would be best fought by one such as himself, completely unfamiliar with its traditional techniques. But its rules held one apparent hope—anything went, so long as you stayed inside the circle. If that were true, it gave him a chance. A lone, lethal, long-odds chance to be sure. But a chance.

  It was simply to keep Gall from ever getting his hands on the knife: to gain and retain possession of the terrain which held the blade, beating the Hunkpapa to death or into utter senselessness as he strove to come to it. That way—

  “Hopi!” shouted Black Fox, and dropped the eagle-feather plummet.

  The order, for all his nerve-strung anticipation, caught Kelly unready. His crouched limbs uncoiled smoothly but a fraction of a second slower than Gall’s. The Sioux chief had hurled his powerful body across the intervening space and seized the knife’s protruding haft a full second before the white scout’s delayed leap carried his lean form to the center of the ring.

  But
the lethal blade never left the ground.

  Gall’s hand was still on its haft when Kelly’s cruelly malleted fist came down between his tensed shoulder blades with a blow that would have separated the vertebrae of an Oregon Trail ox. Yet all it brought from Gall was a surprised grunt, a stubborn headshake, a momentary reflex slackening of his grip on the knife. Kelly asked no more.

  The bottom of his bare foot, callused into a sole of oaken density by eight years of western wilderness trails, smashed into the side of Gall’s huge neck with the force of a hand-swung fence post.

  The Sioux chief was driven bodily back away from the knife, face down into the dirt beyond it.

  Kelly did not follow his advantage. He did not dare to.

  He was afraid to get within hand’s reach of the Hunkpapa Hercules and was forced to let him regain his feet unmolested. Gall did so, to find his adversary waiting for him, feet widespread over the contested knife. Followed a five-second lull—a brief moment’s silent checkmate while the fighters looked again and more carefully at one another.

  What Gall saw was encouraging. Lone Wolf, in the naked flesh, was a strong man. He had very long arms, big hands, a good flat belly and shoulders so wide they made him look deformed. But even for that, he was not nearly as strong or big or experienced a man as Gall. Waste, it was a good thing.

  What Luther Kelly saw was demoralizing.

  Gall, though not as tall as his nephew, was a tall man. He may have been just over six feet, Kelly thought, and built like a burnished dark bronze reproduction of the drawing he could remember in his geography book of the black African Congo gorilla. Thick legs short and bowed, trunk long, heavy, flat-torsoed, chest broad and deep, shoulders and arms enormously boned and muscled; he was a tremendous man, weighing at least thirty pounds more than Kelly’s lean, dry one hundred sixty-five and moving every ounce of that awesome physique with the deceptive celerity of a ninety-pound prima ballerina.

  But the fleeting instant of mutual assay was past.

  The die of the contest was irrevocably cast in its first movement. It was to be the skilled white boxer against the immensely strong Indian wrestler. At stake was a grisly trophy. Dearer than a scalp, if not so deadly. A trophy which would not cost the vanquished his life but would only make him wish that it had. Gall came back for Kelly like a hurled buffalo lance. He left his feet at the last moment, throwing a vicious savate kick at the latter’s head. Missing their intended mark, his murderous feet slashed into the Irish scout’s chest, ripping open the white skin and red flesh to the rib-ends of the prosternum and knocking him flat upon his back.

  He recovered his feet barely in time to drive Gall away from the knife with a crushing series of lefts and rights into the bones of the face. Gall did not go down but staggered backward, allowing Kelly once more to take foot-spread possession of the precious ground over the hinmangas knife.

  Again and again Gall came in.

  Again and again Kelly’s slashing fists drove him back.

  They fought without a sound or more than ten seconds surcease for thirty-five minutes, and when that time was gone, Gall was down on his face in the dirt, and Kelly sagged to his knees over the unremoved knife.

  The white man’s hands and the Hunkpapa’s face were alike broken and bloodied beyond human recognition. The Sioux could scarcely see, the scout barely move. It seemed, then, that the fight was over and sheer animal exhaustion the only winner. Yet in that last moment, Gall tottered once more to his feet, groped stumblingly forward toward Kelly.

  The latter tried to get up and could not. Gall’s reaching hands found him. Gathered him up. Raised him high overhead. Flung him down and away and into the sodden ground. He fell with the jarring, loose-limbed laxness from which there is no further rising.

  Gall, swaying, fumbled for the knife, found it, drew it from the trampled earth.

  He felt with his feet painfully along the ground until he found Kelly’s sprawled body. Behind him there was no sound from his followers. No man moved to help him. There was no need. Lone Wolf would not require any holding.

  Gall stood over him with the knife, staring blindly down. He stood like that a long, quiet time.

  And then he did a thing unheard of in all the legend and tradition of the hinmangas manhood duel.

  With his last strength, he threw the knife far out and away from him, into the passing current of the Yellowstone. He touched the fingertips of his left hand to his blood-caked forehead, waving them weakly downward toward Kelly. “Woyuonihan!” he croaked hoarsely. And, turning away from the motionless body of his enemy, took two faltering steps and pitched forward, unconscious, into the puddled dust of the Great Trail.

  BOOK FIVE:

  TONGUE RIVER

  32

  When Kelly came awake, the sun was standing straight overhead.

  The stillness of the mountain midday lay like a fragrant benediction over the drying red and yellow earth, pungent meadow grasses, and tall dark cedars. The puzzled scout let his eyes study his surroundings, holding his head motionless after his ingrained Indian habit. Presently, it came to him where he was and how he had gotten there, and that the Sioux who had left him there were gone. He made no effort to move with the discovery.

  He was still lying flat on his back where Gall had flung him. It felt quite warm and pleasant there in the centuries-old dust of the Great Trail. Behind him the murmuring splash of the Yellowstone was a compelling sedative. All about him the bright twitter and whistle of the Park’s songbirds bubbled through the clear champagne of the June sunlight. Nowhere in this peaceful summer noontime was there any least hint of human urgency for Luther Kelly. Then he tried to move.

  Instantly, his wandering mind leaped back to reality.

  He sat up, the effort bringing a stifled cry as the pain it induced knifed through his dorsal muscles. Gritting his teeth, he rolled to his hands and knees, staggered to his feet. He stood a moment, swaying.

  His legs were all right. His hands would heal. But the pain in his back was enormous. Every movement shot a wave of sickening hurt from sacrum to shoulder blades. He refused the dread thought of a spinal fracture. Forced himself to move, told himself that only time and tooth-set trial could say whether the injury was muscular or vertebral. The thought of what tortures might lie ahead made him wince with its direct reminder of his present strange escape from the grim disfigurement usually meted out to the loser in hinmangas.

  Why had Gall spared him? Why had the Sioux band left so soon? How long had they been gone? In which direction? At what pace? Toward what destination?

  These answers lay in the downstream line of departing Hunkpapa pony tracks or might lie there if a man were purely lucky. Starting to limp toward the Sioux pony sign, Kelly was startled to hear behind him a familiar high-pitched mustang whistle. Turning painfully, he was astonished to see, watching him curiously from across the Yellowstone, the outlandish, flop-eared figure of Spotted Eagle. Now, by thunder! This passed belief. But a man in Kelly’s moccasins was in no position to deny a gift horse.

  At first he was only glad to see the friendly little Nez Percé scrub, as a man would be glad to have a faithful lost dog turn up unexpectedly. Then his awakening brain began to work.

  The Appaloosa was barebacked and bridleless, his saddle, headstall, and Kelly’s precious Winchester stripped from him by the voracious Sioux. But from his stringy neck dangled a shred of frayed Hunkpapa horsehair rope, and there was your suddenly hopeful clue. Add to it the fact Spotted Eagle was on the other side of the river and you might have the story of the Sioux retreat.

  If you did, it would read close to this:

  Somewhere downstream between you and the heading of the Yellowstone’s grand canyon was an Indian crossing not shown on the white charts of the Park. From that crossing, undoubtedly, led a northeast Indian trail which had allowed Gall to get into and out of the Park despite the high water. Natura
lly, your only proof of this was the hank of Sioux rope on Spotted Eagle’s scrawny neck. But if the little Appaloosa stud had not broken indignantly away from being led off by some rough-handed Hunkpapa buck and made his way back upstream to the gentle white master who had replaced Antelope Boy in his dumb brute heart, Luther Kelly had completely lost his touch for interpreting telltale Indian signs.

  The fact the homely rascal was across the river proved he had been taken across. That in turn established beyond doubt where the Hunkpapa had gone, and let a man know, as quickly, where he must follow.

  Gall was across the Yellowstone heading for the Little Big Horn.

  He traveled slowly and under great pain at first, his course taking him down the west bank toward the distant booming roar of the Fourth Canyon’s upper and lower falls. Spotted Eagle, whickering querulously, kept pace with him along the far shore. Gradually, as he forced himself, his hurt back began to loosen. By the time he found the Sioux crossing several miles north, he was trotting a little.

  The Indian ford was created by the nearly twin junctures of opposing streams coming in from the east and west. The cross currents of these tributaries had created a submerged half-moon sandbar from bank to bank, quieting the river above and making the crossing safe for a strong swimmer even in high water. Kelly plunged in without hesitation.

  Minutes later he was clambering out on the east bank, calling to Spotted Eagle who was watching him from a grassy rise above with intent interest. When he whistled and waved him in, the little stud whickered happily, slid down the bank, trotted up to him arch-necked and proud of himself as a pomponned circus pony.

  Kelly laughed at him, then gave him a bear-hug squeeze of welcome, swung up on him, and gave him the heel. They cut the emerging Sioux trail a hundred yards north. Kelly studied it a moment, nodded, pressed the Appaloosa with his right knee to turn him along it. The little horse snorted his understanding, took out along the Hunkpapa pony tracks, due northeast.