Bent said, “It isn’t so many years since you were running off their horses and killing their young men. Indians have long memories.”
“They paid me back,” Jim said softly, and got up.
“Where are you going?”
Jim made the sign for Talk and started toward the door. Rich’s voice stopped him.
“Will you wait till I sober up?”
“No.”
“I’ll try and buy your scalp back,” Rich said dreamily.
Pegleg said, “He’s too drunk, and I ain’t drunk enough. Wait a little till I work up some fight.”
“There won’t be any fight,” Bent said curtly. “I’ll do the talking, Jim.”
Jim nodded. “They’ll come asking for the Crow, and you’ll refuse to give him up.”
“Naturally. You’re safe here.”
Jim looked through the doorway at the enormously thick high walls, with towers at two of the corners where men could sweep all the approaches with rifle fire, and he laughed. “Sure. Only I ain’t fixing to settle here permanent. What’ll you do, send a hundred of your men with me when I leave?” He gestured at the warriors. “All they have to do is wait, and in the meantime two things happen. They get a grievance against you for protecting an enemy. That’s what started the whole Arikara war, remember—when some trappers wouldn’t give up a couple of Sioux they had with them. And—”
“My Cheyennes—” said Bent.
“Your Cheyennes will think I’m scared of them,” Jim said, “and they’ll rub me out the way they would a dog, the very first time they catch me in the open.”
“He thinks like an Indian,” Rich muttered. “Rather get killed than let somebody think he’s scared. Can’t argue with him. Tried.”
Jim looked at Bent. “You know I’m right.”
“In theory, yes. But in practice—”
“Kiowa, Comanche, ’Pache, ’Rapaho,” said Jim. “I wouldn’t try it. These are Cheyennes. They’re like the Crow. They’re men.”
Bent shrugged. “It’s your scalp.”
“Try to buy it back,” Rich murmured again. Jim went over and dropped the little poke of gold coins that was his share of the horses into Rich’s hunting shirt.
“Don’t waste it on hair,” he said. “Buy cattle.” He turned to Bent. The whisky was burning in him and he felt reckless. “Tell you what, I’ll make a bet with you. If I don’t come back, I lose. If I do, you take me on. Rich can have his rancho, but I ain’t ready to settle yet.”
“If you come back,” Bent said, “I wouldn’t think of losing you.”
They shook hands and Jim went out and walked across the wide courtyard to the tall Cheyennes who waited there.
In sign language he said, “I am the Crow.”
They answered, “We know.”
“I am going to your camp. I wish to speak to your warriors.”
Their eyes glittered darkly in the sunlight. “They know you. They are coming now.”
“I will meet them,” Jim said. He turned away, leaving them to follow if they would. He felt the way he had felt the day he fought the Blackfeet with Rainbow and his Shoshoni, when his medicine was strong and he knew it, and knew that he could not fail. He mounted and rode out of the great gate, onto the scorched plain above the river bed. He rode toward the Big Timbers with the two Cheyenne braves behind him. He knew that every man in the fort was up on the wall to watch him. He did not once look back.
He saw a dust cloud coming toward him. He rode to meet it. There were twenty-three warriors painted for war, carrying their round shields with the covers off so that the blazons shone. Several of them wore bonnets of eagle feathers. When they saw him approaching they looked at each other in surprise and pulled up their horses, waiting. Jim rode up to them and stopped. The two Cheyennes who had come with him spoke to the party, but he paid no attention to them. He sat as tall and impassive as the warriors. The wind ruffled their white plumes and shook the pennons on the lances. He looked them one by one in the face, and he had an Indian’s eye and an Indian’s memory.
“Cheyennes!” he said. “I am the Crow. I am the Antelope, the Bloody Arm, the Enemy of Horses. You know me. Many times we have met.” He spoke aloud in Crow, but his hands spoke the universal language of the Plains. “You!” he pointed to a warrior. “On the Medicine River we fought.”
The warrior said, “I am the Bob-tailed Horse. I remember.”
“Did I fight strongly that day, like a man? Or did I run away?”
“You fought strongly. You captured a gun.”
Jim turned to another. “You came to run off Crow horses. With eight warriors you came. Three of these warriors did not leave Absaroka. Silent they remained. Crow horses you did not get.”
“I am Leg-in-the-water. That was the first time as leader that I signaled a loss. I remember.”
“Did I fight strongly, or did I run away?”
“You fought strongly, you did not run.”
“Cheyennes! I am here. I do not run. Formerly I was your enemy. Now I am your enemy no longer, though your warriors have made my lodge empty and my hearth cold, so that I may no longer live in Absaroka. Kill me if you wish, run from you I will not. If you do not kill me, then I will be as your brother and the brother of the Little White Man. I will bring the goods of the Little White Man to your villages to trade, and I will not cheat you. Cheyennes! I have said.”
He waited. The wind blew over the plain where the stiff yucca stood, and the prickly pear. The Cheyennes sat like statues on their horses, considering.
Leg-in-the-water said, “The Crow is a brave man. I will not kill him.”
The white plumes nodded, the wind-blown pennons shook.
“He speaks like a warrior. Let him live.”
Bronze faces in the hard sunlight, men giving judgment.
“Had he run away I would have killed him. But he did not run.”
The Bob-tailed Horse spoke to Jim. “Crow! The Cheyennes have said. They are men, they do not break their word. From this time we are no longer enemies.”
Jim answered, “It is well.”
They rode back together to the fort, remembering old battles and comparing their coups.
The next day Rich and Pegleg rode south over the mountains to Taos and Jim did not see Rich again for a long while. Messages came up with the wagon trains from Santa Fe and Jim got them, sometimes at the fort, more often in some far-flung village of the Cheyennes.
Rich had bought a small ranch. He had some horses and some cattle, chiefly draught oxen for the trade. He had trouble with Indians, but he could still shoot plumb center and they did not push him too hard. He was more worried about the Mexicans. They seemed to like foreigners less and less. After the Texians tried their march on Santa Fe the citizens threw Charles Bent into the cárcel for nothing, and for a while it looked like war. Between one thing and another he slept with one eye open and his rifle loaded, but it was better than setting traps for beaver that didn’t come. He was taking good care of Jim’s investment and in a little while it would pay off. Meantime, the fandangos in Taos were some for getting the stiffness out of a man’s bones!
Jim was always glad to hear these things. He was not tempted to go and share them. He was living Indian again and he was happy. In a way it was better than going home. The Cheyennes accepted him and even honored him. He danced with them, hunted with them, joined the Dog Soldiers society and fought with them, but he did not have any family or clan ties with the endless responsibilities that went with them. He came to the Cheyennes as a trader from their brother, William Bent, the Little White Man, and that was his position with them. He could have the best of both worlds.
This relationship, which did not involve his emotions too deeply, made it easier for him to do something he could not have done with the Crow, and that was sell whisky. The Cheyennes had had it for a long time and there was nothing he could do to change this. He sold it more or less without compunction, only insisting that the women should trade their
robes first for the things they needed, so that only a portion of the village wealth was squandered.
There were times when he thought of marrying again. The Cheyenne women were beautiful and renowned for their chastity. He would have liked to have a lodge of his own once more. Only he kept remembering Cherry and what had happened to her, and thinking how easily it could happen again. The war went on, as it always had and always would. Crow, Arapaho, Comanche—there were enemies on all sides. He did not take another wife.
Word came to him from Absaroka, the first direct contact he had had with his people since he left. Bridger brought it to him. Old Gabe, the Blanket Chief, was a power among the Crow, not as Jim had been but as a white man they liked and respected. One day he came into the village where Jim was staying, and after the greetings were over he said, “I have a message for you, Jim. From Young Bear.”
“How is he?” Jim asked, a great pang of homesickness running through him.
“Fine. He’s a good man, respected in council. He says to tell you that they know you’re with the Cheyennes now.”
“What do they think about that—the Crow?”
“They’re pleased. They think the Antelope is doing a smart thing, spying out their enemy. They think that when you’ve counted their warriors, mapped their trails, and tallied up their horses, you’ll come back and show them how to rub out the whole Cheyenne nation.”
Jim considered that. “What does Young Bear think?”
Bridger looked at him with those blue eyes that seemed to have gotten lighter and sharper with the years until they pierced like spearpoints.
“Young Bear says the Antelope must go where his medicine tells him. Every year he builds a small sweat lodge for you and prays to the Ones-who-make-things-happen. I guess he figures you’ll come back when your medicine says it’s time. He says to tell you Big Bowl and Captures-white-horses are well but getting old, and your son is a man now. He’s taken the war trail twice against the Dakota.”
He let Jim consider that too, for a while, in silence. Then he said, “The Dakota are moving west, Jim. Really moving, the whole nation. They’re driving the Crow back into the Big Horn Basin.”
“I know,” Jim said bitterly. “I do some trading with the southern bands. They’ve bragged to me about it. But they say the white men are driving them, moving all the time from the east. They say all the land treaties and the promises ain’t worth the price of a dead horse.”
“It’s true,” said Bridger.
“Does Young Bear think if I was there we could keep the Dakota out?”
“I think he reckons it might help.”
Jim shook his head. “We both know better than that. The Crow are a small nation. The Dakota are like the leaves on the trees. We couldn’t stop them no matter who was leading.”
“It’s the buffalo they want. Where the white man comes everything else goes. Not men like us, Jim, we live with the country like the Indians. I mean the kind that build houses and tear up the ground and chop the forests down, and make a damned cow pasture where there used to be game. You can’t blame the Dakota. They got to have meat.”
“You know what?” Jim said. “Right from the beginning, with Lewis and Clark, people that came west of the Mississippi made a bad mistake. We made it. We had to brag how good we were, breaking that trail along the Platte, and pretty soon every jackass with a mule and a dozen traps was heading out to take the beaver away from us. Nobody should have told anybody where they went or how. Then only the people that had a right to go could have gone.”
Bridger sighed, a tall, big-shouldered, broad-jawed man staring into a fire and feeling a faint breath blowing from the east, a breath with a bad smell in it, the smell of towns. “They’re talking Oregon now. They’re even talking California. There’s already been two things go over the Rockies I never thought to see, and that’s wagons and women—white women. Well, the country’s still mighty wide. I reckon it’ll take some time to fill it, more time than you and I have got.”
He stayed a few days, then shook Jim’s hand and rode west.
A few months later Rich came in. He had a thin small poke of coins for Jim, his share of the profits from the ranch.
“It ain’t much,” Rich said cheerfully, “but even poor bull’s better’n nothing.” He ate fat cow at Jim’s fire and sniffed the air, the Indian smell of smoke and leather. “I reckon to go on up to the Snake and see how Grass and the girls are doing.”
He looked well. He seemed to have got over his rheumatism, not having to wade all the time in ice water. He was full of talk about Mexico and the settlements, the pretty girls and the Taos whisky. Pegleg had torn the town up so bad that his friend had had to drag him away and lock him up for a while. There were hints of trouble flying through the air all the time, but it didn’t pay to listen to them. If a man minded his business and kept his powder dry he could make out nearly anywhere.
“When are you coming down?” he asked. “I’d like you to see the place. ’Sides, I figure you’re young yet, with a lot of hard work left in you.”
“Sometime,” Jim said carelessly. “Give Grass my regards, and I’ll ride a piece with you on your way.”
He rode with him. They came out on the low bluffs above the Platte and saw a long, long string of wagons moving on the flat land below, beside the shallow river.
They stopped and sat their horses and looked and did not say anything for a long while.
The wagons crawled steadily forward, the teams leaning patiently into their collars. They were very big wagons, with tilts of canvas to cover them. There were men with them, and women, and young ones. There were loose horses and cattle and a mighty amount of dust. And out of the wide still river bottom where once there had been countless buffalo, there rose now a creaking and a clattering and a bawling and the shrill thin sound of human voices.
“I’ll be goddamned,” Rich said softly at last. And again, “I will be goddamned!” He struck his hand on the saddle horn. “There’s the end of us, Jim. The good people are coming, the women and the preachers, the ones that shut the windows and lock the doors.” He stared down, hating them. “Look at ’em, Jim—with their petticoats and corsets, and pots and pans, and plowshares and washtubs, and all that goes with ’em. You know how I feel? I feel like a Blackfoot wanting hair.”
Jim said, “They ain’t about to settle here. They’re only passing through, to Oregon.”
“Jim,” said Rich, “that’s just how it happens with the smallpox. One case, passing through.”
Jim was silent. There was something about the slow, remorseless pace of the wagon train that appalled him. It was like the creeping of time, that could not be stopped nor turned.
TWENTY-ONE
Movers, they were called. They came from everywhere, the failures, the shiftless, the impoverished, the impractical, people who had nothing where they were and who hoped for better things beyond the mountains. Year by year they came in their increasing hundreds until the valley of the Platte was filled all summer long with an endless procession of wagons. Where there had been the lines of buffalo trails and the Pawnee Trace there was now a great churned and rutted track running like a raw scar clear across the country, from the jumping-off places in Missouri to the Pacific Ocean.
There were other signs to show where the movers had passed. They ate up the grass and stripped the groves of cottonwood trees. They slaughtered and drove away the game. They left behind them a three-thousand-mile-long scattering of garbage and broken wheels, worn-out animals, cast-off clothing and discarded junk, and their own dead.
Watching them, Jim was moved to a bitter kind of laughter. He had worked so hard to open that road.
There began to be trouble. The Indians whose lands were being invaded and defaced became resentful, and then alarmed. Jim wanted no part of that trouble. Fitz and Clyman and others of the mountain men had laid by their traps and hired on as guides for the wagon trains. Jim would have nothing to do with them.
“First p
lace,” he said once to Fitz, “they’d never hire me.” He had ridden into camp one evening to sit by the fire and talk. The wagons were drawn up in a circle and the people were getting their suppers, looking weary and dragged-out. Children squalled and mothers yelled at them. The men sat with the lumpishness of exhaustion. “They think they’ve got it hard,” Fitz said, and laughed. “If we’d had all these wagons and supplies when we came this way, and our wives and families with us, we’d have thought we were living like kings. And you know another funny thing about ’em, Jim? They’ve never been here before, but they’re pretty sure they know more about it than I do, and they’re mighty sure they understand Indians better than I do. They get uneasy and suspicious when I talk to Indians—they figure that a man who can get along with savages has just got to have something the matter with him. These are good Christian folk, Jim. I hear a lot about the children of Satan and the disgustingness of marrying squaws.”
“You’re welcome to ’em,” Jim said. “Anyway, the kind of stories I’ve heard told about me, I’d never last out to Independence Rock with a crew like this. They’d shoot me down the first time they saw six Indians coming, figuring the old renegade had already sold their scalps for a dollar apiece.”
Jim left the Platte, and the Cheyennes, before any of the spilled blood could splash onto him.
He went south over Raton Pass to Taos and spent some time with Rich, helping to build another room on the tiny adobe hut that passed for a ranch house and planting cactus fences for the corrals. It was beautiful country, high and clean, with mountains jagging the blue sky. Taos itself was a nice town, sun-bitten and wind-worn like all these Mexican towns in this dry blazing country. He liked it, and there was a girl there, another Amelita with high cheekbones and lithe brown legs. He began to think, just a little in odd moments, about settling on his share of the ranch.
Follow the Free Wind Page 18