Return of the Tall Man

by Clay Fisher

  Go-deen eyed him suspiciously. But Ben’s expression was as cherubic as saddle-leather skin, slant gray eyes, and Indian-high cheekbones would allow. The breed nodded, satisfied.

  “I’m not so sure we couldn’t pass you off for Sitting Bull,” he said, “but I’m a reasonable man. I won’t ask you to go with me.”

  “What? You’re going into the lodges?”

  “Certainly. The Horse Creeks respect my brain, too.”

  “More likely your tongue, I’d say. What do they pay you for spying on the enemy? For letting them know how the wind blows on the rest of the prairie?”

  It was now Go-deen who fashioned the look of angels.

  “You’re wrong, Tall Brother. I don’t deal with these Horse Creeks. You can’t trust them. However, we Milk Rivers are another matter.”

  “How so?”

  “You’re forgetting Magpie. If she’s still alive, and I can get a word with her—”

  “But damn it,” Ben broke in, “you told me yesterday that you had talked to Crowheart three days ago. How come you didn’t ask him about Magpie, if she’s kin of yours?”

  “Why? Do I look foolish? She’s a sore subject with him, I would guess. She’s taboo. Like a mother-in-law. You just don’t mention such things.”

  Ben nodded.

  “I’m learning. Another two days with you, and I will be able to pass for Sitting Bull. Do all Indians think like you do?”

  “No, not all. That’s what is interesting about Indians. You can’t win any bets guessing against them.”

  “I can see what you mean,” said Ben, eying him. “And you’re only half Indian.”

  “You’re talking too much again. I’m going.”

  “Hold on,” said Ben, as the breed slid back from the boulders and stood up. “What you expect me to do?”

  “You go back and wait with our mounts. See that the wind doesn’t change and carry their scent to the pony herd. Keep your finger wet till I get back.”

  “You take too long, and it’ll be more than the finger. This is pretty close quarters here. I wouldn’t want to have to run them Horse Creeks for the river through these rocks. Not on what we’re riding.”

  “Squaw talk,” grunted Frank Go-deen and stepped into the mountain undergrowth and was gone before Ben could launch any more orations.

  Go-deen rode a gotch-eared white gelding, the easy match of Malachi for age and evil mind. Further, he was equally talkative. Ben spent a lonely two hours waiting for the sun to go down. With Indians he always felt more on even terms at night. Their dislike of the darkness was one of those things which filtered through to him from the blank page of his past. He simply knew it, as he knew all the other things about them. Knowledge, however, and despite the sages’ brave claim to the contrary, did not always dispel fear. So while he waited for the night and for Frank Go-deen, Ben enjoyed many a fresh doubt as to the entire sanity of his being where he was.

  Twenty-four years! Good Lord, that was as old, probably, as he was. And that was how long ago this little girl had disappeared from the Goose Creek burnout. She had been with the Indians since Ben was maybe two, three years old, and here he was sitting in the scrub pine and buckbrush of whiteless Wyoming—God knew how far from the nearest fort—holding his breath and the halter straps of two wolf-bait plugs, waiting for a half-breed he had known twenty-four hours to come back and lead him out of these Horse Creek bulrushes!

  “Well,” he muttered aloud to his companions, “confidence is the main thing. That’s what I always say. What do you always say?”

  The gotch-eared gelding said nothing. Malachi flagged his ears and snorted contemptuously.

  “Shut up, you damn fool,” said Ben. “You think them Horse Creeks won’t eat mule meat?”

  For reply, and as though to show what he thought of the threat and the threatener, Malachi spraddled and began to urinate. His stream, striking a hat-sized rock, sounded to Ben louder than pouring a chamber pot out a second-story window. In the utterly still twilight, it carried with the force of a hydraulic mining nozzle. Ben cursed and drove a bony knee into his flank, literally moving him over into a foot-deep bed of muffling pine needles. In the process he came out not unshowered.

  “You son of a bitch,” he said quietly. “You want to make a noise to bring them Indians down here, I’ll help you out.” He drew and cocked the Colt .44. “Understand?” he asked, gesturing with the revolver. “One more hilarious prank from you, and you get it right between your china-blue eyeballs. Now you make up your mind and, by God, quick.”

  Malachi studied the gun with interest. Whatever his conclusions, he kept them to himself. But he made no more noise. Ben put the Colt away. He sat down on a nearby boulder, searching the forest gloom, now grown suddenly black as pitchblende.

  “Damn!” he said uneasily. “I sure wish he’d get here.”

  At his elbow, squarely out of nowhere, a familiar rough voice growled softly.

  “Wagh! Are you still talking?”

  “Go-deen!” cried Ben. “Man, am I ever glad to see you!”

  “You had better be, Tall Brother. Had it been a Horse Creek, he would have greeted you with a knife blade between your spine bones. I am beginning to wonder if you have any Indian blood at all.”

  “It comes out even.” Ben grinned. “I’m beginning to wonder if you have any white. You’re about as noisy as a drop of oil running down a gun barrel.”

  “We have a proverb, Tall Brother.” The Milk River breed smiled. “Walk soft, live long. A simple idea, but it works.”

  “I’ll remember it. What did you find out?”

  “Many things. But for the sake of our situation, I will be brief.”

  “Wait a minute,” said Ben. “Let me find a rock. If you’re going to be brief, I don’t want to be standing through it.”

  “Never mind the rock. Try your saddle.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Let’s talk as we ride; I think Iron Eyes is behind me.”

  “You think!”

  “Well, put it this way—I know he is. You like that better?”

  “Much better,” said Ben. “Here’s your horse.”

  “Good. We’ll go down the middle of the creek for a ways. It’s a pretty fair bottom, and the noise of the water will cover our sounds as well as our tracks. Hookahey!”

  “Hook a what?” asked Ben.

  “Hookahey,” repeated Go-deen. “That’s Sioux for ‘let’s get the hell out of here.’”

  “A beautiful thought,” said Ben, swinging up on Malachi and turning him for the streambed. “Let us dwell upon it.”

  6

  Away from Wind River

  They followed the tumbling, noisy raceway of Horse Creek out of the meadowland below the Red Tops. After what seemed to Ben at least twenty miles in a foaming, swiftly falling watercourse—and was possibly two and probably one mile—Go-deen turned the white gelding bankward. Here a shelf of sheet rock came down solidly to stream’s edge, allowing them an egress which marked their mounts’ trails only with hoofprints of clear creek water. The last of these had dried long before daylight.

  With sunup they were back in their camp on Wind River, Go-deen satisfied they had, for the time, lost Iron Eyes. In consequence, and while they enjoyed a half-breed breakfast of buffalo jerky and stone-ground coffee, he gave Ben the substance of his conversation with Magpie.

  Yes, the childless Milk River woman had reared the white baby. It had grown up, knowing no life but that of an Indian, precisely as Go-deen had predicted. The child, now a full young woman, of course, had actually been given the most severe of Indian training, for her foster father was a renowned hater of the white eyes, while Magpie had the typical half-breed’s resentment of her white side—the side which would not accept her as one of its own. So the small one had grown to womanhood poisoned by the hatreds of her parent
s, trained in hardness by the life of the outlaw which Crowheart’s people were forced to live, twisted in her mind and toughened in her body in a way that few even of the purebloods among the horseback tribes were conditioned.

  Go-deen paused, scowling, the lance-blade scar across his broken nose darkening as he grew angry, or uneasy, with his thoughts.

  “I don’t know, Tall Brother,” he said to Ben. “Perhaps the best thing is to forget about her. Go back and tell her true father that you couldn’t find her. Or that you heard she had died long ago. I have seen a few of these white children—especially the girls—who were with the Indians since their earliest memory. It seems that being suckled by a squaw is no simple thing to be weaned away from. Something seems to get into the child along with the red mother’s milk. Something wild. Something very difficult to live with in the white way. Many have said before me that such ones are best left with their Indian parents.” He looked at Ben, ugly face serious for a rare moment. “Tall Brother,” he said, “hookahey, let’s get out of here.”

  Ben’s gray eyes shadowed over.

  “No, Go-deen,” he said, “I can’t do that.”

  “Nonsense! Come with me. We’ll go up on the Milk and run buffalo all summer. You’ll meet my people. Maybe you’ll like my sister. Younger and not so ugly as I. A little fat, but that is the best for cold weather. What do you say?”

  “I have to say no. If that girl—that young lady—is up yonder with the Horse Creeks, I’m bound by my word to go after her. Damn it, I haven’t got no choice.”

  “Well, that’s another thing. Maybe you have.”

  “Such as what?”

  “Well, you said it yourself—if the girl is up there, you’ve got to go up there.”

  “That’s what I said. What of it?”

  “Very simple. You don’t have to go up there.”

  “What?”

  “We can head for Milk River tonight. I know a good shortcut by Cow Island. No Pony Soldiers that way.”

  “What in the name of hell,” asked Ben, “are you talking about?”

  “The girl.” Go-deen shrugged. “The grown-up young white woman you seek. She’s gone; she’s not up there anymore.”

  “Good Lord,” said Ben, “she’s gone? You mean she’s dead?”

  “We could find her easier if she was.”

  “For the luvva Pete!” said Ben. “Will you quit stomping around the brush pile and shoot the rabbit?”

  “Sure.” The squat breed grimaced. “But you won’t like it. And I won’t go with you.”

  “All right, I’m waiting,” sighed Ben. “You can drop the other boot.”

  “The Slit Noses got her. Late last fall. Just before the big snows closed the trails.”

  “The Nez Percés?” said Ben. “I thought they were friendly?”

  “They are. To the white man.”

  “Well, then, the girl will be all right.”

  “Yes, she would have been.”

  “What the hell you mean, would have been?”

  “You remember I told you how the Sioux and the Slit Noses hate each other? Especially the Hunkpapa Sioux and the Wallowa Nez Percés? Now the Oglalas, my people, they sometimes get along with the other Nez Percés—say, like the Asotins of Looking Glass, the Salmon Rivers of old Toohoolhoolzote, and the White Birds of Peopeo Hihhih; but if you take one of Old Joseph’s Wallowa Nez Percé and one of Gall’s Hunkpapa Sioux—that’s Old Joseph now, not Young Joseph who is the white man’s good friend—and you put that Wallowa Nez Percé and that Hunkpapa Sioux on a narrow trail face to face, you are going to have one dead Indian, perhaps two, for neither will turn aside for the other; neither will step back and give way.”

  Ben clenched his fists and set his jaw, restraining his urge to do bodily harm in the direction of Frank Go-deen.

  “Listen, friend,” he pleaded, “I don’t give a damn about what one of Old Joseph’s boys and one of Gall’s bucks would do to one another meeting on a sheep path. That ain’t my problem; it’s theirs. What I want to know about is that girl; she’s my problem!”

  “Exactly what I was saying. This particular Wallowa Nez Percé who met this particular Hunkpapa Sioux on this particular sheep path of which I speak—if you will let me—was that same Wallowa Nez Percé who took the white squaw away from the Horse Creeks. Now whose problem is it?”

  “Oh, Lord!” groaned Ben. “Don’t tell me; let me guess: the Sioux took the girl away from the Nez Percé and they got her now!”

  “As far as the Horse Creeks know, yes. They were trailing the Nez Percés when they, the Horse Creeks, crossed tracks with these Sioux—a large band, three times the number of the Nez Percés. They set the Sioux upon the line of the Wallowas, and they watched the fight that followed. They say the Nez Percé were killed to the man, but the Hunkpapas claim the young chief who was leading the Wallowas got away. I don’t know; I wasn’t there.”

  Ben nodded, tight-lipped.

  “There anything else you do know? I mean that you’d like to tell me about this girl before we shake hands and go our different trails? Like maybe where could I find these particular Hunkpapas that got this particular white woman away from these particular Nez Percés on this particular sheep path we was just particularly talking about?”

  “Oh, sure, Tall Brother; do you have the time?”

  “I’ll take the time,” said Ben. “Keep going.”

  Go-deen hunched his sloping shoulders in deprecation.

  “There’s really very little more to tell … Let’s see … the name of the young Wallowa was Aluin Ueukie, John Lame Elk; the Hunkpapa was Slohan, Buffalo Ribs; the head of the Horse Creek trailers was Iron Eyes, of course. That’s about it.”

  “Why do you say, ‘Iron Eyes, of course?’” asked Ben curiously. “Because he was the old chief’s son?”

  “No, because he was the Indian husband of your white woman.”

  “No!” cried Ben. “Not that mean-looking devil!”

  “Well,” shrugged Go-deen, “argue it if you want. But they shared the same lodge since her sixteenth summer. Eight years and all wasted. The girl was the same as the foster mother before her, the exact same. Like Magpie, she would not grow Shoshoni seed.”

  “Thank the Lord for small favors,” sighed Ben. “At least I’m not trailing a mother.”

  “No, but Iron Eyes is tracking a wife. That’s why he’s following you. He knows you’re after the girl; he thinks you may lead him to her. Eh? How do I know? Indian arithmetic. Very easy. Iron Eyes came in from watching the horses just as I was leaving Magpie’s lodge. He saw me. And I, waiting in the pines, saw him. He dragged Magpie out of her lodge and beat the story out of her. I could read her signs of surrender. She told him about you. That’s a certainty.”

  “Wonderful,” said Ben acrimoniously, “just wonderful.” He looked witheringly at the paunchy breed. “Anything else you’d like to add before Iron Eyes cuts me down?”

  “Yes. Goodbye. Right now. I would add good luck, but it would be a waste of words. With Iron Eyes on your track …” Go-deen moved his shoulder again. “I will be merciful,” he said. “I won’t finish it.”

  He got up from the breakfast fire and went to his old white horse. Swinging up, he brought the bony gelding back to the fire. For a moment he studied the warming skies and growing light of the new day.

  “I ought to wait until tonight,” he mused, “but then he won’t follow me. Here,” he said impulsively, unhooking his grub sack from the saddle horn and handing it down to Ben, “you take this. You’ll need it. Which way you going?”

  “You haven’t told me yet,” said Ben. “Which way are those Hunkpapas of Buffalo Ribs?”

  “North.”

  “Then I’m going north.”

  “Good. I’ll go south.”

  “That suits me,” said Ben. “I want to thank you for th
e grub.” He eyed the greasy sack of jerky. “You sure you can spare it?”

  “Goodbye,” repeated Go-deen. “I’m going south. You still talk too much. If I stay here listening to you, neither one of us will need any food.” He gave the old white horse his head, heeled him around, downriver. Belatedly, Ben thought of his full debt to the Milk River breed.

  “Many thanks, brother!” he called after him. “I mean for getting me the story of the girl; guiding me in and out of that Horse Creek country.”

  “All very well,” called back Go-deen, turning in the saddle, “except that you’re not out of it yet. I mean the Horse Creek country. One more advice, brother. I said I didn’t think I would wait for night to travel after all. Did you hear me? Think about it. Apply it to your own case. Hookahey, you understand?”

  Ben grinned, albeit crookedly.

  He trotted, he did not walk, over to Malachi and swung up on him. Suddenly, he was as anxious as Go-deen to put the miles between himself and their Wind River breakfast fire. And for the same reason.

  To the old mule, he said sharply:

  “Hee-yah, hookahey, wolf meat! You savvy Sioux? Make tracks. Vamoose. Take out. Get scarce. Move!”

  Malachi shuffled obediently into a spine-jarring trot. The unexpected obedience jogged more than Ben’s backbone.

  “Damn,” he said, “that’s dismal. You’re scared, too, eh?”

  Malachi’s only answer was to shift from the trot into an even more punishing lope. Ben let him go the gait, nonetheless. Better to let his teeth rattle than to risk riding bald-headed, he told himself. Yet somehow the philosophy fell short of the situation. Especially when, at the first rise of ground, he looked back down the river and saw Go-deen and the white gelding had already dwindled to a small black dot. Even as he held there watching, they turned a bend in the bank and were gone altogether. Then things really got lonely and quiet along the Wind. Ben looked around apprehensively.