Dan Younge kept his own voice steady. It wasn’t easy to do. It was hard not to sound angry or afraid or almost anything but steadily self-confident. “I come in peace,” he said. “To lead you to the killers of your people.”
The Indian said, “You lie.”
“All right,” Dan Younge said. “Then kill me. And the Shoshone will never find the men who killed their people.”
“Huh.” This was followed by a series of dialogues in Shoshone. Their tone was not too favorable. One of the young men broke away and came over to Dan Younge. A long knife flicked from the Indian’s waist and slashed. It cut through Dan’s vest and shirt and just stung the skin on his chest. Then the brave turned back to the argument around the fire.
Good? Bad? Dan was still alive; that they hadn’t killed him at once might be a sign that they believed him. Or, it might only mean that the Shoshone, usually peaceful, liked to work up a little heat before they murdered a man.
Then he was forgotten. The arguments all stopped, the Indians all turned. One of them quickly kicked sand on the fire, and three others trotted off into the night.
There wasn’t any great mystery about it; their superior ears had heard someone coming.
The news wasn’t good. If it had been one of the war parties—best of all, if it had been Nate Allen, the squawman—they would have been told in advance by the drums. He didn’t know if Indians had passwords, but they probably did. They wouldn’t have sneaked out to surround another war party.
So it was someone from town—Beer, a townsman, Sydnor or Romayne?—and anyone from town that Dan Younge could think of meant bad news.
He didn’t have a gun with him; if he had the Indians would have taken it away. But he wondered, if he’d had a gun, would he have blown his brains out now?
The fire still smoldered. The Shoshone men had gone away from it a little way so as not to be targets. They had left him pretty near the fire, unable to move because of his bound ankles. Well, his bound hands were one reason why he wouldn’t have committed suicide.
Unexpectedly, laughter sounded out on the prairie, and the three young men came back, pushing Blanket Moe before them. This was the visitor that had so alarmed them, that had scared Dan Younge into wondering about self-destruction!
It was bad enough for life to be violent and treacherous, it didn’t have to be a low-comedy joker, too.
One of the men who had stayed with Dan Younge chunked some chamisa roots on the fire and it flared up. In the new light, Dan could see that the young men were laughing now. One of them pushed Blanket Moe in front of Dan.
“Tobacco, mister? Gimme nickel?”
Dan Younge couldn’t help it, under the circumstances it was too much. He began to laugh. The Indian grins turned to chuckles and then to roars. Shoshone sense of humor, never far under the surface, had broken through. Dan Younge said, “Loosen my hands so I can get a nickel out.”
The boy who spoke English said something in Shoshone, and added, “Gimme nickel,” in fair imitation of Blanket Moe’s mumble, and then they were all trying to say it.
When the laughter died down, the kid—no longer murderous, they weren’t young braves or warpath Indians or warriors but just kids, boys—asked Blanket Moe something. The whiskey bum answered in Shoshone. The one who could speak English said, “Says you’re a gambler.”
Dan Younge said, “Sure. I gambled you people would listen to me.”
“No, a money gambler. Y’ever play the stick game?”
“Mister, I’ll gamble on anything.”
The boy said: “I’m White Buffalo.”
Dan Younge said: “I guess I’m Black Suit.”
White Buffalo said: “You sure got guts like Indian.” He flicked out his knife, cut the thongs on Dan’s wrists and ankles. “Aw, we already drum’ fer Bowlegs, you call’m Nate Allen. We jus’ have fun with you while we wait.”
He added something in Shoshone to his friends. The grunts were not at all threatening now. From outside the circle of firelight, a blanket was produced, more wood was thrown on the fire, some of the boys brought little sticks and bones from out of their breech clouts.
White Buffalo sat down at one side of the blanket, motioning to Dan Younge to sit down at the other. Imitating his host? captor? advisory?—Dan pulled the blanket over his knees. White Buffalo began to sing in a deep bass voice, quite different from the war chants Dan Younge had heard over the prairie. He broke off, “Two bits?”
“Sure,” Dan Younge said. “But I don’t know the game. You tell me, you speak pretty good English.”
“I use’ work at agency. You gotta guess what other guy holds.”
He went back to chanting, moving his hands under the blanket, weaving back and forth. The other Indians had taken up the chant, too; it seemed to be part of the game. Suddenly White Buffalo flashed a clenched fist above the blanket.
“Two blue sticks and a white bone,” Dan Younge said. White Buffalo opened his hand. There were three bones in it.
Dan Younge fished a quarter out of his pocket, and threw it on the blanket. White Buffalo handed him the sticks and bones, and two other boys slid their legs and hands under the blanket.
Dan Younge hid his hands. He did his best to take up the Shoshone chant; it had a value in distracting your opponent’s eyes from your hands. He shuffled awhile, clenched one red stick in his fist, and thrust it out.
“One red stick,” White Buffalo said. “You got some funny words in a song, but you sure make a lotta noise. Give the stuff to Kills-two-birds, there.”
Dan Younge passed the sticks and bones to the Indian on his right, and went on chanting while he threw another quarter to White Buffalo. Apparently each man played only against the one opposite.
No money except Dan Younge’s appeared. This seemed to be a credit arrangement.
They were chanting so hard that Nate Allen—Bowlegs—and his party had ridden up before any of them heard.
The squawman was with the same small group of old chiefs he’d interpreted for at the Agency parley. He dropped off his horse, spat in the roaring fire and said: “You sure went Injun in a hurry, gambler. Never can get the people to put out night guards, but you oughta know better.”
Dan Younge started to get up, and the pile of quarters in front of White Buffalo jingled. Nate Allen grinned his tight, tired grin and said: “Betcha you didn’t win onct. I was playing th’ peyon game five years afore I won.”
“I ought to take you up on that bet,” Dan Younge said. “I won two out of seven throws.”
“Yeah?” Nate Allen chuckled and said something to the two old chiefs who still sat their horses. They laughed, and one of them said something to White Buffalo that made all the Shoshone laugh.
Dan Younge was counting heads. There were almost forty Indians here now. Three or four times more than there were miners, he figured, even with Sydnor and Romayne and maybe one or two more townsmen thrown in. But the chiefs and some of the other riders were pretty old to be fighting.
He said, “Nate, I didn’t come here to gamble. The lieutenant sent me out. He declared military law in Rock Spring. We had a fight, some of us, with the men who killed your Shoshone, murdered some wagon people, white people, too. He’s given me authority to tell your people that they can have these men, they’re outlaw miners, and he’ll call it square.”
“White men turning white men over to the Indians?”
“The lieutenant’s got his back against a wall and he knows it.”
“It’s not up to me,” Nate Allen said. He turned and the firelight was strong on the curved legs that had given him his Indian name. He talked to the two chiefs.
Dan Younge watched White Buffalo’s face. He felt, somehow, that he and the young Indians were friends, now. I learned from him, he thought. Do me a lot of good. That peyon game would go over big in San Francisco.
Th
e chiefs were talking now, first one and then another. Dan Younge felt in his pocket, brought out his sack of makings, creased a paper carefully. From out of nowhere, Blanket Moe was at his side. “Tobacco, mister?”
“Gimme a neekel,” Dan Younge said. White Buffalo’s eyes were on him. He finished building his own cigarette and passed the sack across, and White Buffalo took it, fished a smoking stick—just a straight hollow tube of willow—out of his waistband and filled it with Dan Younge’s tobacco.
As they bent to get coals to light up, White Buffalo said softly—the chiefs were still pow-wowing—”We gamble good together, Black Suit. Maybe we fight good together, too.”
And that was how Dan Younge knew that the Shoshone had agreed to the deal.
CHAPTER XXVIII
Now a watery, pale crescent of moon rose in the prairie sky. A light wind came with it, crosswise to the path of their journey, and in the pale moonlight Dan Younge could see as he rode with bent head the breeze whipping the dust away from their horses’ hooves.
He swung his reins, and his horse rode closer to old Nate Allen. Despite the violent rush of their passage, the old squawman rose like a staff from his ancient flick-forked saddle. His neck and back were both stiff, exposing his unblinking eyes to whatever sand and grit and wind the night might bring them.
Dan Younge said, “There’s this passage way under the rock. They’ll come out of there, if they haven’t already, and they’ll come out in single file. If we start shooting too soon, they’ll go back in, which is too bad.”
“Go back in and be murdered by the people there, shot by the Army?”
“Rock Spring’s a nest of scared men, the Army’s down to a handful. We know these miners are going to tie up with a couple of townsmen who’ll tell them that. No, once they know the Indians are out here, they won’t be afraid to go back in. So—if your Indians could just use their bows and arrows on the first few, keep it quiet, we’d stand a better chance.”
Nate Allen didn’t answer.
Dan Younge looked up, looked around. “We’re drifting a little to the West.”
He was sure that the old man heard him, because Nate Allen’s horse moved in the right direction. They were leading the column, Nate and Dan and White Buffalo. The old chiefs had stayed behind, leaving the war party to the braves.
Suddenly Nate Allen spoke. “These are Shoshone. They’re not Pawnee or Apache or Comanche. Ah, they fight, but they don’t like it, like some other people do. Naw, we gotta let them work ’emselves up, with whooping, an’ shootin’ off guns an’ riding fast in a circle. Does something to an Indian, all that foofaraw, changes him into somethin’ different.”
“I don’t even have a knife with me,” Dan Younge said. “Not to mention any kind of gun.”
Nate Allen spat again. Then he sighed, and shifted for the first time in the ride in his saddle. “Injuns is funny,” he said. “Sometimes I think mebbe so I woulda made a better life with the whites. Don’t know. Never tried it. I’ll git you a knife, an’ you better do like’n I say. Happen you don’t, these people are likely to git so worked up they forget your good advice an’ guiding, an’ they’ll finish the battle with no white man lef’ in the saddle. They don’t think of me as white, often.”
He raised his voice and called something in Shoshone. The words were repeated back down the loping column of ponies.
White Buffalo rode into Dan Younge from the other side, and reached out to hand Dan Younge a hunting knife. “Chief!” he said. “Big Chief!”
Now the country was breaking up a little, becoming choppy instead of rolling. They couldn’t be far from the back of the big rock. There was even a slight smell of water in the air from the municipal spring.
Dan Younge said, “We’d better wait here.”
Again Nate Allen passed the word back and the party halted. There were none of the noises made when a party of white men stopped on the prairie. If any of the Indians owned metal bits, they had discarded them for the warpath. No bridle jingled, there were no shod horses to stamp. Dan Younge leaned forward and rested his hand on his horse’s nose, as he saw the Indians doing, to stop any whickering.
It was nervy, waiting. He said to Nate Allen, “I thought Indians didn’t fight at night.”
“Some tribes don’t. This one does. Hush up, now.”
It was the pony that warned him first that company was coming. The smooth nostrils under his hand wrinkled as the animal was urged to greet his kind.
“Now,” he said. “Now.”
White Buffalo said: “Ya!” His voice was as soft wind over young grass.
They came, then, the renegades, and they were noisy and bold in their coming. Perhaps they too believed that Indians didn’t fight at night, which proved the danger in regarding an Indian as an Indian and not recognizing his differences…
Dan Younge’s party was down in a little swale. The miners passed them on a ridge. More than one of the passing silhouettes had a bent arm and a bottle to catch the weak moonlight.
If Charley Sydnor was among them, Dan Younge couldn’t tell. Some of the miners were fat men, too. And if Jack Romayne was there, he couldn’t be sure, for there were straight-backed young miners, too.
But then a passing rider lifted an arm, and Dan Younge gasped. The sleeve of no miner’s riding habit ended in a frothy lace cuff, the bosom of no renegade swelled so interestingly.
It was obvious that Sydnor had brought or sent a woman out with the miners, as a bribe or because he really thought a woman would be safer in a renegade camp than in besieged Rock Spring.
But what woman? Dan Younge had no way of knowing anything that had happened in town after he rode out. Ellen could have listened to Jack Romayne; he didn’t think so, but few people want to die, and the spirit of Rock Spring had been one of certain death.
The riders were still passing on the skyline, but there was a petering out. Soon it would be time to strike, and the Shoshone expected him to render the first blow. If he didn’t, the Indians would consider that he’d been trying to lead them into a trap, and they’d drift away. Undoubtedly they’d kill him first.
It probably wasn’t Ellen Lea up there, but it was a woman. Phyllis Sydnor had been his lady for several months; it was impossible to erase past tenderness from his memory.
Impossible to erase other things, too. Stories heard over the table of what Indians did to white women. They were harder on them than on white men, because women gave birth to more whites, to drive the Indians from their land…
Nate Allen turned to him. “That’s all of ’em, gambler.”
White Buffalo’s hand came out of the dark. “Strike hard, Black Suit.”
It was now. It was himself or a woman up there, a woman—either one—who did mean or had meant a good deal to him. It was the way a man felt about women, when all the cynicism of a gambler’s life was stripped away.
It was—hell—the people of Rock Spring, and it was time to ride.
He pulled his fingers back from his horse’s nose, swung his legs hard back into the animal’s flank, and was up the ridge in one long bound almost before he could get his knife from his rein hand to his right one.
The man to strike was the last one in line. Leave the Indians to head off the column, keep it from escaping into the malapie.
He was in among the stragglers on the horse’s third bound, his spurs still raking back, his legs swinging. He had a glimpse of a white moustached face, surprising under a dark hat brim. He smelt the reek of cheap whiskey, and then his knife hand swung down, and the miner screamed.
Listen to that, Shoshone! Hear that, Bowlegs and White Buffalo and all the rest of you Indians. Hear that, and figure out whose side I’m on.
His knife was still in the miner. It was a good knife White Buffalo had given him, it pulled out easy. The renegade was falling from the saddle, and Indian ponies were drumming up th
e ridge and he rode hard and slashed at the next miner and missed and nearly went out of the saddle.
It saved his life. A pistol went off close enough for the powder to burn his rein hand.
The Shoshone should have been among the miners by now, killing, helping him kill. But they weren’t, and he was in bad trouble, and he knew why.
The Indians were circling the column, tying it down, riding around and around the stalled-up renegades. The braves had gone down on the far side of their ponies, hanging on by one leg and a grip on the mane.
Well, that was fine, but he had their enemy stopped for them and…
He remembered what Nate Allen had said. They needed to work themselves up. Killing didn’t come easy to Shoshone people.
He had not been still while he thought, he’d been kneeing his horse away from the milling renegades. Maybe in the dark and at a little distance, he’d pass for a miner himself.
The Indians were whooping now. Come on, you braves, come on, White Buffalo, Nate Allen! Cut in here!
He was, he found, comparatively safe from the miners. Their attention was all on the encircling warriors. The renegades were pulling their horses in, facing out, and he got himself into the pattern.
Occasionally a miner would fire out at the galloping ring around them. He couldn’t see that any damage was being done. No pony faltered in his stride, and even an Indian pony would stop that circling if his rider was knocked off.
He couldn’t understand why the Indians were holding their fire. They had herded the miners into a tight and easy target. Then suddenly an Indian cut away from the war band and dashed into the knot of whites. His arm was a flash of silver in the moonlight, up and down, and then up again.
He was trying to get a renegade with his blade!
Dan Younge had heard, someplace, sometime, that some Indians—it was as vague as that—got merit or coup or whatever they called it only for enemies killed by hand, not by arrow or rifle. He hadn’t known it was these, the Shoshone. If he ever got out of this, he was going to make an awful close study of Indians, and how to tell one tribe from another, and what to expect.
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