by Jon E. Lewis
Cold-seated in Little Belly’s reason was the knowledge that one determined charge into the trees would end everything; but a voice whispered, If the medicine is good.
Signalling peace, Little Belly rode alone toward the trees. The Broken Face came alone to meet him.
“Before the sun dies I will fight Broken Face here.” Little Belly made a sweeping motion with his hand. He saw blood on the sleeve of the white man’s shirt, but Broken Face held the arm as if it were not wounded. Little Belly knew that fear had never lived behind the maimed features of the man who watched him coldly.
“When you are dead the Blackfeet will go away?” Broken Face asked.
“If the white men go away when you are dead.”
Broken Face’s mouth was solemn but a smile touched his eyes briefly. “There will be a fight between us.” He went back to the trees.
When Stearns knew what had been said, he grinned. “High diplomacy with no truth involved.”
“That’s right,” Yancey said. “But killing Little Belly will take a heap of steam out of the rest.”
“If you can do it.”
Yancey was surprised. “ I intend to.”
“Your arm is hurt. Let me fight him,” Stearns said.
Yancey bent his arm. The heavy muscles had been torn by a hunting arrow, but that was not enough to stop him. He looked at his packs, at mules and horses that would be fewer when the Bloods swept past again. Something in him dragged at the thought of going out. It was foolish; it was not sound business.
Casually he looked at his trappers. No matter what he did, they would not doubt his guts. Jarv Yancey’s courage was a legend in the mountains and needed no proving against a miserable riled-up Blackfoot war chief. The decision balanced delicately in Yancey’s mind. A man died with his partner, if the time came; and a man in command fought for those he hired, or he should not hire good men.
Yancey shook his head. “ I’ll do it.”
“I thought so.” Stearns put his arm around Yancey’s shoulder in friendly fashion, and then he drove his right fist up with a twist of his body. Yancey’s head snapped back. He was unconscious as Stearns lowered him to the ground.
“It’s my fault that Little Belly is still alive,” Stearns said. He looked at Mandan Ingalls. “You might take a look at Yancey’s arm while things are quiet.”
Ingalls spat. “For a while after he comes to, you’re going to be lucky to be somewhere with only a Blood to pester you. If you don’t handle that Blackfoot, Stearns, you’d just as well stay out there.”
Stearns laughed. He took his horse from the timber with a rush. Once in the open, looking at the solid rank of Blackfoot cavalry across the grass, he leaped down and adjusted his cinch. He waved his rifle at them, beckoning. He vaulted into the saddle and waited.
The song of the dead medicine was in Little Belly’s ears. It mocked him. Once more he had been tricked. Stearns, not Broken Face, was down there waiting. The power of the stolen medicine had gone through the air back to the man who owned it, and that was why the great one who laughed was waiting there, instead of Broken Face.
Silent were the ranks of Blackfeet and silent were the rifles of the trappers. Little Belly hesitated. The fierce eyes of his people turned toward him. In that instant Little Belly wondered how great he might have been without the drag of mystic thinking to temper his actions, for solid in him was a furious courage that could carry him at times without the blessing of strong medicine.
He sent his pony rushing across the grass. He knew Stearns would wait until he was very close, as he had waited for the bear, as he had faced the wounded buffalo. Riding until he estimated that moment at hand, Little Belly fired his musket.
He saw Stearns’ head jerk back. He saw the streak of blood that became a running mass on the side of the white man’s face. But Stearns did not tumble from his horse. He shook his head like a cornered buffalo. He raised the rifle.
Stearns shot the pony under Little Belly. The Blackfoot felt it going down in full stride. He leaped, rolling over and over in the grass, coming to his feet unharmed. The empty musket was gone then. Little Belly had only his knife.
There was a second voice to the white man’s rifle. The silent mouth of it looked down at Little Belly, but the rifle did not speak. Stearns thrust it into the saddle scabbard. He leaped from his horse and walked forward, drawing his own knife. The shining mass of blood ran down his cheek and to his neck. His lips made their thin smile and his eyes were like the ice upon the mountains.
It was then that Little Belly knew that nothing could kill the white man. It was then that Little Belly remembered that his own medicine had not been sure and strong. But still the Blackfoot tried. The two men came together with a shock, striking with the knives, trying with their free hands to seize the other’s wrist.
Great was Stearns’ strength. When he dropped his knife and grabbed Little Belly’s arm with both hands, the Blackfeet could do nothing but twist and strain. The white man bent the arm. He shifted his weight suddenly, throwing his body against Little Belly, who went spinning on the ground with the knife gone from his hand and his shoulder nearly wrenched from its socket.
A roar came from the trees. The Blackfeet were silent. Stearns picked up Little Belly’s knife.
Then, like the passing of a cloud, the cold deadliness was gone from Stearns. He held the knife, and Little Belly was sitting on the ground with one arm useless; but the white man did not know what to do with the knife. He threw it away suddenly. He reached out his hand, as if to draw Little Belly to his feet.
The trappers roared angrily. Stearns drew his hand back. Little Belly was no wounded buffalo, no charging bear; there was no danger in him now. Stearns did not know what to do with him. Seeing this, the Blackfoot knew that the greatest of white men were weak with mercy; but their medicine was so strong that their weakness was also strength.
Stearns went back to his horse.
“Shoot the stinking Blood!” a trapper yelled.
Stearns did nothing at all for a moment after he got on his horse. He had forgotten Little Belly. Then a joyful light came to the white man’s eyes. He laughed. The white teeth gleamed under the streak of red beard. He drew his rifle and held it high. Straight at the Blackfeet ranks he charged.
For an instant the Bloods were astounded; and then they shouted savagely. Their ponies came sweeping across the trampled grass.
Stearns shot the foremost rider. Then the white man spun his horse and went flying back toward the trees, laughing all the way.
Wild with anger, the Blackfeet followed too far.
They raced past Little Belly and on against the rifle fire coming from the island of trees. They would crush into the camp, fling themselves from their ponies, and smash the white men down! But too many Blackfeet rolled from their ponies. The charge broke at the very instant it should have been pressed all the way.
Little Belly saw this clearly. He knew that if he had been leading there would have been no difference.
His people were brave. They took their dead and wounded with them when they rode away from the steady fire of the trappers’ rifles. They were brave, but they had wavered, and they had lost just when they should have won.
For one deep, clear moment Little Belly knew that medicine was nothing; but when he was running away with the rest of the warriors old heritage asserted itself; medicine was all. If the power of Stearns’ round object, which could not be stolen for use against white men, had not turned Little Belly’s bullet just enough to cause it to strike Stearns’ cheek instead of his brain, the fight would have been much different.
Little Belly knew a great deal about white men now. They laughed because their medicine was so strong, so powerful they could spare a fallen enemy. But he would never be able to make his people understand, because they would remember Little Belly was the one who had been spared.
As he ran from the field he knew it would have been better for him if Stearns had not been strong with mercy, whic
h was medicine too.
JACK SCHAEFER
Emmet Dutrow
JACK SCHAEFER (1907–1991) was born in Cleveland, Ohio, and educated at the Oberlin College, Ohio, and Columbia University, New York. He worked as a reporter, publisher and editor before Shane, published in 1947, made his name as a writer of stellar Westerns. (His career was undoubtedly helped by George Steven’s remarkable film of the novel, starring Alan Ladd, Van Heflin, and Jean Arthur). Like Shane, Schaefer’s subsequent frontier fiction has been written in a highly economical style, and rooted in the real history of the American West. In particular, Schaefer was influenced by Frederick Jackson Turner’s The Significance of the Frontier in American History, which explored the different phases of the evolution of the West. Schaefer’s Western novels, in addition to Shane, are: First Blood (1953), The Canyon (1953), Monte Walsh (1963), Company of Cowards (1957) and Mavericks (1967). He has also written three volumes of short stories: The Big Range (1953), The Pioneers (1954), and The Kean Land and other stories (1959).
“Emmet Dutrow” is from the The Big Range.
THREE DAYS HE was there on the rock ledge. I don’t think he left it once. I couldn’t be sure. I had things to do. But I could see him from my place and each time I looked he was there, a small dark-clad figure, immeasurably small against the cliff wall rising behind him.
Sometimes he was standing, head back and face up. Sometimes he was kneeling, head down and sunk into his shoulders. Sometimes he was sitting on one of the smaller stones.
Three days it was. And maybe the nights too. He was there when I went in at dusk and he was there when I came out in early morning. Once or twice I thought of going to him. But that would have accomplished nothing. I doubt whether he would even have noticed me. He was lost in an aloneness no one could penetrate. He was waiting for his God to get around to considering his case.
I guess this is another you’ll have to let me tell in my own way. And the only way I know to tell it is in pieces, the way I saw it.
Emmet Dutrow was his name. He was of Dutch blood, at least predominantly so; the hard-shell deep-burning kind. He came from Pennsylvania, all the way to our new State of Wyoming with his heavy wide-bed wagon and slow, swinging yoke of oxen. He must have been months on the road, making his twelve to twenty miles a day when the weather was good and little or none when it was bad. The wagon carried food and farm tools and a few sparse pieces of stiff furniture beneath an old canvas. He walked and must have walked the whole way close by the heads of his oxen, guiding them with a leather thong fastened to the yoke. And behind about ten paces and to the side came his woman and his son Jess.
They camped that first night across the creek from my place. I saw him picketing the oxen for grazing and the son building a fire and the woman getting her pans from where they hung under the wagon’s rear axle, and when my own chores were done and I was ready to go in for supper, I went to the creek and across on the stones in the shallows and towards their fire. He stepped out from it to confront me, blocking my way forward. He was a big man, big and broad and bulky, made more so by the queer clothes he wore. They were plain black of some rough thick material, plain black loose-fitting pants and plain black jacket like a frock-coat without any tails, and a plain black hat, shallow-crowned and stiff-brimmed. He had a square trimmed beard that covered most of his face, hiding the features, and eyes sunk far back so that you felt like peering close to see what might be in them.
Behind him the other two kept by the fire, the woman shapeless in a dark linsey-woolsey dress and pulled-forward shielding bonnet, the son dressed like his father except that he wore no hat.
I stopped. I couldn’t have gone farther without walking right into him.
“ ’Evening, stranger,” I said.
“Good evening,” he said. His voice was deep and rumbled in his throat with the self-conscious roll some preachers have in the pulpit. “Have you business with me?”
“There’s a quarter of beef hanging in my springhouse,” I said. “I thought maybe you’d appreciate some fresh meat.”
“And the price?” he said.
“No price,” I said. “ I’m offering you some.”
He stared at me. At least the shadow-holes where his eyes hid were aimed at me. “I’ll be bounden to no man,” he said.
The son had edged out from the fire to look at me. He waved an arm at my place across the creek. “Say mister,” he said. “Are those cattle of yours—”
“Jess!” The father’s voice rolled at him like a whip uncoiling. The son flinched at the sound and stepped back by the fire. The father turned his head again to me. “ Have you any further business?”
“No,” I said. I swung about and went back across the creek on the stones and up the easy slope to my little frame ranchhouse.
The next day he pegged his claim, about a third of a mile farther up the valley where it narrowed and the spring floods of centuries ago had swept around the curve above and washed the rock formation bare, leaving a high cliff to mark where they had turned. His quarter section spanned the space from the cliff to the present-day creek. It was a fair choice on first appearances; good bottom land, well-watered with a tributary stream wandering through, and there was a stand of cottonwoods back by the cliff. I had passed it up because I knew how the drifts would pile in below the cliff in winter. I was snug in the bend in the valley and the hills behind protecting me. It was plain he didn’t know this kind of country. He was right where the winds down the valley would hit him when the cold came dropping out of the mountains.
He was a hard worker and his son too. They were started on a cabin before the first morning was over, cutting and trimming logs and hauling them with the oxen. In two days they had the framework up and the walls shoulder high, and then the rain started and the wind, one of our late spring storms that carried a lingering chill and drenched everything open with a steady lashing beat. I thought of them there, up and across the creek, with no roof yet and unable to keep a fire going in such weather, and I pulled on boots and a slicker and an old hat and went out and waded across and went up to their place. It was nearly dark, but he and the son were still at work setting another log in place. They had taken pieces of the old canvas and cut holes for their heads and pulled the pieces down over their shoulders with their heads poking through. This made using their arms slow and awkward, but they were still working. He had run the wagon along one wall of the cabin, and with this covering one side and the rest of the old canvas fastened to hang down the other, it formed a low cavalike shelter. The woman was in there, sitting on branches for a floor, her head nearly bumping the bed of the wagon above. I could hear the inside drippings, different from the outside pattern, as the rain beat through the cracks of the wagon planks and the chinks of the log wall.
He stepped forward again to confront me and stop me, a big bulgy shape in his piece of canvas topped by the beard and hat with the shadow-holes in the eyes between.
“It’s a little wet,” I said. “I thought maybe you’d like to come over to my place where it’s warm and dry till this storm wears itself out. I can rig enough bunks.”
“No,” he said, rolling his tone with the organ stops out. “We shall do with what is ours.”
I started to turn away and I saw the woman peering out at me from her pathetic shelter, her face pinched and damp under the bonnet, and I turned back.
“Man alive,” I said, “forget your pride or whatever’s eating you and think of your wife and the boy.”
“I am thinking of them,” he said. “And I am the shield that shall protect them.”
I swung about and started away, and when I had taken a few steps his voice rolled after me. “Perhaps you should be thanked, neighbour. Perhaps you mean well.”
“Yes,” I said, “I did.”
I kept on going and I did not look back and I waded across the creek and went up to my house and in and turned the lamp up bright and tossed a couple more logs into the fireplace.
I tried
once more, about two weeks later. He had his cabin finished then, roofed with bark slabs over close-set poles and the walls chinked tight with mud from the creek bottom. He had begun breaking ground. His oxen were handy for that. They could do what no team of horses could do, could lean to the yoke and dig their split hooves into the sod and pull a heavy ploughshare ripping through the roots of our tough buffalo grass.
That seemed to me foolish, tearing up sod that was perfect for good cattle, getting ready for dirt farming way out there far from any markets. But he was doing it right. With the ground ploughed deep and the sod turned over, the roots would be exposed and would rot all through the summer and fall and by the next spring the ground would be ready to be worked and planted. And meanwhile he could string his fences and build whatever sheds he would need and get his whole place in shape.
We ought to be getting really acquainted, I thought, being the only neighbours there in the valley and more than that, for the nearest other place was two miles away towards town. It was up to me to make the moves. I was the first in the valley. He was the second, the newcomer.
As I said, I tried once more. It was a Saturday afternoon and I was getting ready to ride to town and see if there was any mail and pick up a few things and rub elbows with other folks a bit and I thought of them there across the creek, always working and penned close with only a yoke of oxen that couldn’t make the eight miles in less than half a day each way. I harnessed the team to the buckboard and drove bouncing across the creek and to their place. The woman appeared in the cabin doorway, shading her eyes and staring at me. The son stopped ploughing off to the right and let go of the plough handles and started towards me. The father came around the side of the cabin and waved him back and came close to my wagon and stopped and planted his feet firmly and looked at me.
“I’m heading towards town,” I said. “I thought maybe you’d like a ride in the back. You can look the place over and meet some of the folks around here.”