Return of the Tall Man

by Clay Fisher

  “He said it, sure enough,” nodded Ben. “What of it?”

  Go-deen ignored him, voice rising.

  “Where’s my horse. Lead him out here; show me the trail. I’m going. Goodbye, goodbye!”

  Ben grabbed him, putting a rough hand over his mouth.

  “Shut up, you featherhead! You want to get us winged before ever we get over the ridge? What the hell’s the matter with you!”

  “Satanta, that’s what!” answered Go-deen with the third groan. “He’s the other one of those three Kiowas! I won’t do it! I’m going back to Slohan. Eeh! My mother should have been an Osage.”

  “I think she must have been an O-sap,” said Ben. “Get the hell on that white plug, and quiet down.”

  They found their mounts and got on them. When they had done so, Ben noted for the first time that the Kiowa boy was leading two spare ponies.

  “For you and Frank,” explained the tall white Sioux. “Your own mounts couldn’t go the gait you’ll need to get out of Hunkpapa country. You had better use your old animals through the night, but change over first thing in the morning.”

  Ben put out his hand and the other white man took it.

  “Don’t waste time you haven’t got,” he told Ben, as the latter started to express his gratitude.

  “All right,” agreed Ben. “You want to give me your name?”

  “You wouldn’t know it,” said the other, shaking his head. “Just say I’m a Southerner like yourself.” He paused, looking off, then said with lonely softness, “Some of us take strange trails. I suppose we shall all blame it on the war …” Then, quickly, “Ride out, friend. Trust Yellow Bird to the river and Little Tree beyond it. You’ve got your guns and good horses. You will need both. And much luck beside.”

  Unconsciously, Ben touched the fingers toward him. He smiled, a little sadly, Ben thought, and returned the gesture.

  “God bless you, mister,” Ben muttered and kicked Malachi around and sent him into his ungainly lope after the other horses following behind Yellow Bird and Little Tree. At his side Lame John reined down his long-striding Appaloosa and looked back toward the tall figure still standing in the starlight of the creek loop.

  “Go-deen was wrong,” he said quietly. “That’s no white man back there.”

  Ben twisted in the saddle, taking his own long, thoughtful look.

  “Maybe you’re right,” he finally nodded.

  Yet somehow he felt compelled to stand in the stirrups and wave one more farewell to the motionless figure behind them. He could not be sure if his salute were returned or not, but he fancied he saw the lean arm lift in hesitant, mute reply.

  It was the last he ever saw or heard of the tall, gray-eyed Oglala.

  11

  South to Salt Fork

  Yellow Bird took them to the Musselshell by a new route strange even to Go-deen. It passed through the Little Belts west of

  Judith Gap, came out above the Coffin Butte crossing. The distance was approaching forty miles as near as Ben could reckon, and the hard-faced Sioux got them over it with the last of the starlight. Not pausing even to breathe the horses, he plunged his lathered mount into the stream where it narrowed between banks of sheet rock. It was swimming water all the way. Ben thought Malachi was going out from under him time and again, but the old brute kept going. He was a dripping last out on the far bank, and the look he gave Ben would have withered anything that was not wet with Musselshell snow water. When Ben reached to give him a rewarding pat, he bit him angrily on the forearm. Ben let it go. There were times when even a mule was right.

  Their Sioux guide now pointed south and said something to Little Tree. With that, and not even a look at the little group he had captained through the night, he put his pony back into the river. They watched until he had made the crossing and disappeared into the far-side timber. Then Ben turned to Little Tree.

  “What did he say?” he asked.

  The small Kiowa shrugged, grinned engagingly.

  “He said, ‘Ride like hell.’”

  Wondering where this button-eyed imp had picked up his civilized ways, Ben returned the grin.

  “I think he said right,” he nodded. “Lead out.”

  Go-deen was at once offended.

  “Now wait!” he demanded. “This papoose may be of some possible use down on the Arkansas, but as for a guide to that country, don’t be foolish. I have been down there more times than he has birthdays. We’ve got to go through Arapaho, Ute, Cheyenne, and Pawnee country to get to Kiowa. This is a bad spring for traveling. There’s a war summer coming. You want to ride seven hundred miles behind a boy? Pah! You wouldn’t get to the Republican River or the Smoky Hill, let alone the Arkansas. You wouldn’t even get to the North Platte following this child of three evil bloodlines. And if he did get you down there, he would only lead you right into an ambush. You can’t trust a Kiowa. It’s an old saying of the plains. Now why don’t you just quit all this talk and follow a man?”

  Ben winced wryly. “You’re right, Frank,” he said. “When will I learn to keep quiet. Lead out.”

  The breed gave Little Tree a punishing look, swung the old white gelding into the lead.

  “We will go a little ways into the timber,” he said, “then change to our fresh horses and keep going. We won’t stop for food until the sun goes.”

  There was no dissent, not even from the demoted Kiowa youth who now chose, for reasons of his own, to ride beside Ben. The boy, however, did have a comment on the new order of things. Examining Go-deen curiously and for a head-cocked moment, he said admiringly:

  “You know, Tall Brother, at first I was much taken with the size of his paunch. Now I see it is nothing compared to the bigness of his mouth.”

  Ben looked at him, suppressing his grin.

  “Little Tree,” he said soberly, “you’ll do.”

  It was a pleasant journey. Go-deen knew where he was going, and the luck held good. They met no hostiles, saw only a few parties from far off. They saw no wagon trains either, for Go-deen was right there, too. It was a war summer. The army was stopping all movement which it could control west of Laramie in the north and below Fort Bent in the south. After a few safe days on the trail, the little band relaxed and sought company in one another’s conversation.

  The Kiowa boy proved as bright as he had seemed and in no way reluctant to admit that his education in the words and ways of the white brother had come from spying for his tribe by attending the Washita Agency School outside Fort Cobb. He had hung around the soldiers all he could, and it was their rough manners which had impressed him most. As he put it to Ben, “I didn’t learn a damn thing at the school, except to say ‘excuse me’ when I used a cuss word.” He had been expelled, however, not for profanity or failure to learn, but for having been with a patrol of his friends from Fort Cobb who rode into a Kiowa trap for which it was quite generally understood—although never formally proved—he was the tender and tempting bait.

  It was for this reason the army had refused to take any action when Big Tree asked the soldiers to go after the Northern Sioux who had seized his favorite heir with an eye to fat ransom. “Good riddance!” had snapped the harassed commander to Big Tree’s loud cries of Hunkpapa trespass. “Tell the Sioux I’ll pay them fifty horses not to bring the boy back!” So, at least, ran Little Tree’s story of his chief claim to reputation among his people. Ben accepted the boy’s Texas-size history, wanting to get out of him other and more pertinent information—namely, what he might know of Amy Johnston. Wisely, Ben let the journey run on well toward its end before broaching this matter, figuring, meanwhile, to have won the boy completely over.

  Yet when he finally asked about her, referring to her as “the white woman with the Sioux,” the boy only looked at him in an odd way and said, “What white woman?”

  Ben made it more explicit, wanting to know how many of the
Hunkpapa squaws Little Tree had noted who had blue eyes and yellow hair?

  “Oh, that white woman,” said the Kiowa youth at once. “Well, there’s nothing to tell of her.”

  “What do you mean?” said Ben, curious to learn how the boy could so easily accept the presence of a non-Indian among his haughty captors.

  “Look at it this way,” said Little Tree. “You know that white man who rides with the Oglalas; the one you waved to twice when we came away that night?”

  “Sure, what of it?”

  “Well, he’s been with the Indians six months.”

  “What’s that got to do with the woman?”

  “She’s been with them twenty years. More, even.”

  Ben nodded slowly.

  “Go-deen was right then,” he said. “He warned me I wouldn’t find a white woman.”

  “You won’t,” promised Little Tree. “On a cloudy day or across a smoky fire at night, you couldn’t tell her from a Kwahadi Comanche.”

  “Thank you,” said Ben a little wearily and got up to rake out and bury the coals of the coffee fire they had paused to build on a nameless tributary of the Salt Fork of the Arkansas River, one hundred and twenty miles north of the Washita-Canadian buffalo pasture and the home hunting ground of Sitting Bear, the Sarsi-Kiowa chief known to the white frontier as Satank.

  There was some change now, an indefinable something difficult to describe but impossible to escape.

  The country grew quieter with each mile. Each new sunrise was greeted with apprehension, each day’s end met with gratitude. On June 5th, thirty days out from the Musselshell, they sighted the North Fork of the Canadian River. Crossing by the old Indian ford downstream of famed Gypsum Bluffs, they went on into the even greater stillness beyond.

  It was a brilliant morning, bright with sunshine, keen air, and the sweet songs of meadowlark and prairie quail. Yet the onus of foreboding rode with Ben as closely as the sun dance of his shadow on the short curl of the buffalo grass. After the day was only an hour gone, but the silence already wearing its blunt saw cuts deeply into his taut nerves, he reined in his Sioux pony and said quietly to Little Tree, riding with him, “How far now?”

  The Kiowa boy, who had been fresh and friendly as a newly minted penny all the way from Montana, suddenly looked at him as though he had never seen him before.

  “Ouachita one more sun,” he answered, blank-faced and abrupt as any adult hostile.

  Ben looked at him sharply but said nothing. Go-deen, riding directly behind them, caught Ben’s eye and made a sign of warning. At coffee fire an hour later, Ben got the breed aside.

  “What the hell was that all about?” he asked him. “Did you hear the little devil? He froze up on me like rim ice. Last night he’s chatting away like a magpie; this morning, out of the bright blue, he starts grunting like a damned blanket buck. What’s it mean?”

  “It means he’s home. North of the Canadian, he’s still on enemy ground. That’s Cheyenne and Arapaho country up there. On this side it’s pure Kiowa. The kid knows it; he feels it. Last night he’s a little boy having a fine time with older men. This morning he’s a Kiowa brave.”

  “We’ll have to watch him then.”

  “Like a hawk. If he gets away, our hair won’t be worth worrying about.”

  “You’re not serious?”

  “Not unless you’d call a Kiowa ambush serious.”

  “Oh, come on, Frank! This kid has been with us a whole month. We’ve been closer than sow bugs under a buffalo chip. We’re his friends!”

  “Sure we are. So were those cavalry soldiers from Fort Cobb.”

  Ben looked at him quickly, but Frank Go-deen was not making half-breed jokes that morning.

  “By the Lord, I think you mean it,” he told him.

  Go-deen nodded acidly. “Don’t waste time thinking,” he said. “Take it for a fact.”

  “All right, I’ll keep an eye on him. Let’s get back on the trail.”

  “No, wait a minute, brother.” Go-deen put out his hand, touching Ben on the arm. “One more thing. When he goes, shoot his pony. If you don’t, I’ll shoot the boy. He’s our last chance now.”

  “What do you mean ‘now?’” asked Ben uneasily.

  “We’ve had Indians on our trail since daybreak,” said Go-deen. “They’re not Arapaho or Cheyenne.”

  Ben glanced covertly at Little Tree.

  “You think he knows it?”

  “No, he’s looking ahead, not behind.”

  “What do we do then?”

  “Keep going. As long as we’re heading for the Washita, we’re going right where they want us to go. They won’t start anything till they’ve got us both ways, dear brother. That means front and rear.”

  “That means when we hit the Washita, in other words?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Ah, consistency!” said Ben. “Thou art a jewel!”

  “Do you insult me again?” growled his companion.

  “No, I merely comment favorably on the even temper of your ways—always cheerful and full of hope.”

  “Bah! You’re crazy like I always said.”

  “No,” said Ben, “for a fact I’m not. Truth is I’m one hell of a lot daffier than you ever said; I’m going on with this crazy chase. If that don’t prove it, they’ll never get me committed.”

  “What?” said Go-deen.

  “Nothing,” answered Ben. “Let’s brush out the embers and get along. I can’t wait to see how glad Little Tree’s daddy is going to be to see his boy.”

  They rode on, nor had Ben too long to deny his curiosity. It was not quite an hour after noon halt, the sun only beginning to wester when, five miles ahead, they made out the shadow-green line of tree growth marking a major watercourse. At once the half-breed raised his hand in the halting sign. In the bit-champing uneasiness which followed, he began uncasing his brass telescope.

  12

  The Loyalty of Little Tree

  Between the motionless travelers and the river, the gray waves of the prairie rose, fell, rose yet again before sloping off to stream’s edge. The short-grassed swales thus put across their line of approach and out of their line of sight could be hiding all the hostiles south of the Smoky Hill. Knowing this, Ben waited tensely for the breed to put down the telescope. When at last the latter had done so, he asked, low voiced:

  “Now what?”

  “Now,” replied the other, “we get ready to shoot the kid’s pony—or the kid.”

  “More Indian arithmetic?” inquired Ben anxiously.

  “Yes. If Satank is ahead of us, he will be between us and that water yonder. You can count on it.”

  “That’s the Washita already, you figure?”

  “There’s no doubt of it whatever.”

  “But Little Tree said one more sun.”

  “Well, call it a short sun,” snapped Go-deen impatiently. “That’s his precious Ouachita yonder. We’ve been pushing the ponies.”

  “All right, how do we figure to ride it from here?”

  “There’s no use trying to circle. Our best chance is to go right on ahead as though we smelled nothing.”

  “And what is it we do smell?” asked Ben.

  “Kiowas,” answered Go-deen. “Right over that last rise between us and the river. You want to bet, Tall Brother?”

  “Not hardly. You think we ought to tie the kid? Put his pony on lead?”

  “No, we got to wait for the kid to make his move. He still might stick with us. It’s a hundred to one the other way.”

  “If he does stay by us, then the Kiowas will be friendly, though. Is that it?”

  “Sure. They’re Indians. If they think they owe you something, they’ll pay it—either way.”

  “It’s up to Little Tree then.”

  “Yes.”

&
nbsp; “Anything else?”

  “Yes, you can’t trust a Kiowa.”

  Ben nodded tightly. He looked back at Lame John, riding with the Kiowa boy and alerted to drop him or his pony if he made a break to get away upon sighting his relatives. Lame John caught Ben’s look, nodded quickly. Ben waved to him, and they all started forward again.

  Twenty minutes later they topped the first of the two rises between them and the river. The swale beyond it stood empty. Nothing moved in it. Not bird, not beast, not even breeze. Ben relaxed, sighed audibly.

  “One down,” he nodded to Go-deen.

  The breed shrugged. “I said the last rise, not this one. Don’t let your air out yet.”

  “Frank,” said Ben, “I believe you’d ought to turn Christian. Jesus needs you for a sunbeam.”

  Go-deen glanced at Lame John and Little Tree, just then pulled up beside them. He ignored Ben, speaking to the Nez Percé.

  “How do you feel, brother? Good, bad, in between?”

  “I’m not well,” answered the Nez Percé, straight-faced. “This southern air disturbs me. It’s too close. I don’t care for it. What do you say?”

  “The same. Let all ride together from here to the river. Real near together. My people have a saying: ‘When ill, don’t get far from the fire.’ How about your people?”

  “They have a saying, too,” agreed Lame John. “‘Unhappiness fattens on solitude.’” They both looked at Ben, as though expecting some confirmation from the white camp and got it.

  “‘Misery loves company.’” Ben grinned. “That’s the way my folks put it, and I’m not about to argue the idea. Let’s stick like glue.” He caught the averted eye of Little Tree and added quietly, “How says our Kiowa cousin?”

  Little Tree bowed his head. Ben could see the blood come into his dark face. After a long moment of staring at his saddle horn, the Kiowa boy raised his eyes and faced Ben, his expression at once defiant and uncertain.

  “I say nothing,” he declared.

  “You sure, kid?” asked Ben. “We been pretty good friends, you and me.”

  The boy’s fierce gaze faltered under Ben’s steady regard. He jutted his small jaw, turned his face away from the tall white man. Ben waited him out, but Little Tree only looked over the prairie and would not turn around.