Copyright 1994 by Nancy Bartholomew. First printed in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, mid-December 1994. Reprinted with permission of the author.
A Star For A Warrior
Manly Wade Wellman
Young David Return half-ran across the sunbright plaza of the Tsichah Agency. He was slim everywhere except across his shoulders, his tawny brow, his jaw. For this occasion he had put on his best blue flannel shirt, a maroon scarf, cowboy dungarees, and, on his slim toed-in feet, beaded moccasins. Behind his right hip rode a sheath-knife. His left hand carried his sombrero, and his thick black hair reflected momentary blue lights in the hot morning. Once he lifted the hat and slapped his thigh with it, in exultation too great for even an Indian to dissemble. He opened the door of the whitewashed cabin that housed the agency police detail and fairly bounded in.
“Ahi!” he spoke a greeting in Tsichah to the man in the cowskin vest who glanced up at him from a paper-littered table. “A writing from the white chiefs, Grandfather. I can now wear the silver star.”
The other man lifted a brown face as lean, keen, and grim as the blade of a tomahawk. Tough Feather, senior lieutenant of the agency police, was the sort of old Indian that Frederic Remington loved to paint. He replied in English. “Reports here,” he said austerely, “are made in white man’s language.”
David Return blinked. He was a well-bred young Tsichah and did his best not to show embarrassment. “I mean,” he began again, also in English, “that they’ve confirmed my appointment to the agency police detail, and—”
“Suppose,” interrupted Tough Feather, “that you go outside, and come in again—properly.”
Some of the young man’s boisterous happiness drained out of him. Obediently he stepped backward and out, pulling the door shut. He waited soberly for a moment, then re-entered and stood at attention.
“Agency Policeman David Return,” he announced dutifully, “reporting for assignment as directed.”
Tough Feather’s thin mouth permitted a smile to soften one of its corners. Tough Feather’s deep-set black eyes glowed a degree more warmly. “Your report of completed study came in the mail an hour ago,” he told David, and he picked up a paper. “They marked you ‘Excellent’ everywhere, except in discipline. There you’re ‘Qualified.’ That’s good, but no more than good enough.”
David shrugged. “The instructors were white men. But you’ll not have any trouble with me. You’re my grandfather and a born chief of the Tsichah.”
“So are you a born chief,” Tough Feather reminded him, “and don’t forget it. This police work isn’t a white man’s plaything. We serve the government, to make things better for all Indians. Ahi, son of my son,” and forgetting his own admonition Tough Feather himself lapsed into Tsichah, “for this I taught you as a child and saw that you went to school and to the police college. We work together from this day.”
“Nunway,” intoned David, as at a tribal ceremony. “Amen. That is my prayer.”
From a pocket of the cowskin vest Tough Feather drew a black stone pipe, curiously and anciently carved. His brown fingers stuffed in flakes of tobacco. He produced a match and struck a light. Inhaling deeply, he blew a curl of slate-colored smoke, another and another and others, one to each of the six holy directions—north, west, south, east, upward, and downward. Then he offered the pipe to David.
“Smoke,” he invited deeply. “You are my brother warrior.”
It was David Return’s coming-of-age. He inhaled and puffed in turn, and while the smoke clouds signalized the directions, he prayed silently to the Shining Lodge for strength and wisdom. When he had finished the six ritualistic puffs he handed the pipe back to Tough Feather, who shook out the ashes and stowed it in his pocket. Then from the upper drawer of the desk Tough Feather produced something that shone like all the high hopes of all young warriors. He held it out, the silver-plated star of an agency policeman.
Eagerly David pinned it to his left shirt pocket, then drew himself once more to attention. “I’m ready to start duty, Grandfather,” he said.
“Good.” Tough Feather was consulting a bit of paper with hastily scribbled notes. “David, do you remember an Indian girl named Rhoda Pleasant who came to the agent last week with letters of introduction?”
“I remember that one,” nodded David. “Not a Tsichah girl. A Piekan, going to some university up north. She’s pleasant, all right,” and he smiled, for Indians relish puns as much as any race in the world.
“Not pleasant in every way,” growled Tough Feather, not amused. “She’s been here too long, and talked too much, for a stranger woman. Plenty of young Tsichah men like her even better than you do. They might finish up by not liking each other.”
“Then she’s still here on the reservation? I met her only the one time, and the next day she was gone.”
“But not gone away,” Tough Feather told him. “Gone in. She borrowed a horse and some things to camp with. You know why, don’t you? She wants to learn our secret Tsichah songs.” The hard-cut old profile shook itself in conservative disapproval.
“Ahi, yes,” said David. “She talked about that. Said she was getting her master’s degree in anthropology, and she’s hoping for a career as a scholar and an Indian folklore expert. She told me she’d picked up songs that Lieurance and Cadman would have given ten years of their life to hear and get down on paper. But I couldn’t tell her about our songs if I wanted to. We hear them only two or three times a year, at councils and ceremonies.”
“The songs are like the chieftainships, passed from father to son in one or two families,” reminded Tough Feather. “Right now only three men really know them—”
“And they’re mighty brash about it,” broke in David, with less than his usual courtesy. “I know them. Dolf Buckskin, Stacey Weed, and John Horse Child. All of them young, and all of them acting a hundred years old and a thousand years smart, out there in their brush camp with a drum—the kind with a pebble-headed stick—and a flute. They think we others ought to respect and honor them.”
“And you should,” Tough Feather replied stiffly. “They’re young, but their fathers and grandfathers taught them songs and secrets that come down from our First People. Those three young men are important to the whole Tsichah nation. Too important to be set against each other by Rhoda Pleasant.”
“You mean she’s out there seeing them?” David was suddenly grave, too. “I see what you’re worried about. They’d not pay any attention to a man who asked rude questions, but a young woman as pretty as that Piekan—ahi! She’d give anybody squaw fever.”
“Go to their camp,” commanded Tough Feather. “It’s off all the main trails, so you’ll have to ride a pony instead of driving a car. Tell the girl she must report back here and then go somewhere else.”
David frowned. This was not his dream of a brilliant first case for his record. Then he smiled, for he reflected that the ride back from the camp of the singers would be interesting with a companion like Rhoda Pleasant. “Where is that camp, Grandfather?”
Tough Feather pointed with the heel of his hand. “Southwest. Take the Lodge Pole Ridge trail, and turn at the dry stream by the cabins of old Gopher Paw and his son. There’s no trail across their land, but you’ll pick one up beyond, among the knolls and bluffs. That branches in a few miles, and the right branch leads to where the singers are camped. Take whatever pony you want from the agency stable.”
“The paint pony?” asked David eagerly.
“He’s not the best one,” and Tough Feather eyed his grandson calculatingly. “Not the best traveler, anyway.”
“Now about a saddle,” went on David, “will you lend me the silver-mounted one that Major Lillie gave you ten years ago?”
Tough Feather smiled, perhaps his first real smile in twenty or thirty days. “All right, take it and take the prettiest bridle, too. You’re probably right, David. You’ll have less trouble bringing that girl back if you and your pony are good to look at.”
; The paint pony was not the best in the agency stables, but he was competent on the narrow rough trail that David had to take. His light-shod feet picked a nimble way through the roughest part of the reservation, over ground even less fit for farming than the poor soil of prairie and creek bottoms. It was rolling and stony, grown up here and there with cottonwood scrub and occasional clumps of willow or Osage orange.
Once or twice rabbits fled from the sound of the hooves, but not too frantically: animals felt safe in the half-cover of this section; long ago they had escaped here from the incessant hunting enthusiasm of Tsichah boys with arrows or cheap old rifles.
David followed the right branch of the trail that his grandfather had described and went down a little slope, across an awkward gully where he had to dismount and lead the pony, and beyond among scattered boulders.
He felt that he was getting near his work, and in his mind he rehearsed the words, half lofty and half bantering, with which he would explain to Rhoda Pleasant that she must cease her troublesome researches and head back with him. She was a ready smiler, he remembered, both bolder and warmer in manner than any Tsichah girl he knew. And she wore her riding things with considerable knowledge and style, like a white society girl.
Suppose she elected to be charmingly stubborn, to question his authority? He decided to stand for no nonsense and to admit no dazzlement from her smile and her bright eyes. He would be like the old warriors who had no sense of female romance or glamour, who took sex, like all important things, in their dignified stride.
Then he rode around a little tuft of thorn bushes and saw that Rhoda Pleasant was beyond hearing arguments or considering authorities.
Here by the trailside was her little waterproofed tent, with a canvas ground cloth and a mosquito bar. Near it was picketed the bay horse she had borrowed at the agency. A fire had burned to ashes, and a few cooking utensils lay beside it. On the trail itself lay Rhoda Pleasant, grotesquely and limply sprawled with her face upward.
Her riding habit was rumpled, her smooth-combed black hair gleamed in the sunlight like polished black stone. She looked like a rag doll that some giant child had played with and dropped on tiring of it. Thrown away, that was how she looked. David Return knew death when he saw it.
He got off his pony and threw the reins over its head, then squatted on his heels beside the body. Rhoda Pleasant’s neck-scarf had been white. Now it was spotted with stale blood, dark and sticky. David prodded her cool cheek with a forefinger. Her head did not stir on her neck. That was rigor mortis. She had been dead for hours, probably since before dawn. Fully dressed as she was, she might have died before bedtime the night before.
David studied her clay-pale face. The dimmed eyes were open, the lips slack, the expression—she had no expression, only the blank look he had been taught to recognize as that of the unexpectedly and instantly stricken.
Gingerly he drew aside the scarf. The throat wound was blackened with powder but looked ragged, as if a bullet and a stab had struck the same mark. Someone had shot Rhoda Pleasant, decided David, then had thrust a narrow, sharp weapon into the bullet hole.
Rising, David turned his attention to the trail. Its earth was hard, but not too hard to show the tracks of moccasins all round the body, moccasins larger than David’s. More tracks were plain nearer the tent and the fire, of the large moccasins and of a companion pair, long and lean. Here and there were a third set of moccasin prints, this time of feet almost as small as Rhoda Pleasant’s riding boots.
Three men had been there, apparently all together. And there were three tribal singers camped not far away.
David broke bushes across the trail on either side of the body and from the tent brought a quilt to spread over the blank, dead face. Mounting again, he forced the paint pony off the trail and through thickets where it would disturb no clues. When he came to the trail beyond, he rolled a cigarette and snapped a match alight. Before he had finished smoking he came to another and larger camp.
In a sizable clearing among the brush clumps, by a little stream undried by the summer heat, stood an ancient Sibley tent like a square-bottomed teepee. Behind it was a smaller shelter, of bent sticks covered thickly with old blankets in the shape of a pioneer wagon cover. It was big enough for a single occupant’s crouching or lying body, and entrances before and behind were tightly lapped over. Near one end burned a small, hot fire, with stones visible among its coals. As David watched, a hand poked out with rough tongs made of green twigs, lifted a stone, and dragged it inside. Strings of steamy vapor crept briefly forth.
“Sweat lodge,” said David aloud. The old Tsichah had built and used sweat lodges frequently, but he himself had seen only a few and had been in one just once in his life, as part of the ceremony of joining the Fox Soldier society two years back. He called in Tsichah: “Ahi, you singing Indians! Someone has come to see you!”
From the Sibley tent came Stacey Weed. He was taller than David and leaner, with hair cut long for a young Indian. All that he wore was a breechclout and moccasins. In one hand he carried a canvas bucket, and he turned at first toward where the camp’s three horses were tethered on long lariats downstream from the tent. Then he pretended to notice David and lifted a hand in a careless gesture of greeting. “Ahi, nephew,” he said, also in Tsichah.
To be called nephew by a Tsichah can be pleasant or unpleasant. An older man means it in friendly informality; a contemporary seeks to patronize or to snub or to insult, depending on the tone of his voice. Stacey Weed was perhaps two years older than David, not enough seniority to make for kindliness in the salutation.
“John,” called Stacey back into the tent, “we must be important. A boy with a new police star has ridden in.”
John Horse Child followed Stacey into the open. He too was almost naked, powerfully built, and just under six feet tall. His smile was broad but tight. “I heard that David Return had joined the police,” he remarked to Stacey, as though discussing someone a hundred miles away.
David kept his temper. He spoke in English, as he judged his grandfather would do. “I suppose,” he ventured, “that Dolf Buckskin’s in the sweat lodge.”
John and Stacey gazed at each other. Their eyes twinkled with elaborate mockery. “They say that policemen get great wisdom with those stars they wear,” said John, carefully choosing the Tsichah words. “They can tell who’s in a sweat lodge and who is not. It’s a strong medicine. They learn things without being told.”
“Then why tell them things?” inquired Stacey brightly.
The two squatted on the earth, knees to chin. John began to light a stone pipe, older and bigger and more ornate than the one Tough Feather had shared with David earlier that morning. It was part of the ceremonial gear these tribal singers used in the rites they knew. John smoked a few puffs, passed it to Stacey, who smoked in turn, then handed the pipe back. Neither glanced at David, who got quickly out of his saddle and tramped toward them. He still spoke in English, which he knew they understood, but he used the deep, cold voice of unfriendly formality.
“I’m as good a Tsichah as either of you ever dared to be,” he told them. “I’m a good American citizen too, and whether you like it or not this ground is part of a government reservation, under police authority. If we’re going to have trouble it will be of your starting. I want to ask—”
A wild yell rang from the sweat lodge. Out scuttled Dolf Buckskin, slimmer and shorter and nuder than either of his friends. He shone with the perspiration of the lodge’s steamy, hot interior. Even as David turned toward him, Dolf threw himself full length into the widest part of the stream and yelled even louder as the cold water shocked his heated skin. He rolled over and over, then sat up and slapped the water out of his shaggy hair.
“Come here, Dolf,” called David, and Dolf pushed his slim feet into moccasins, tied a clout about his hips, and stalked over, with a grin as maddening as Stacey’s and John’s.
“Rhoda Pleasant,” began David, “came and camped nearby, with the idea of
tricking you into teaching her our tribal songs.”
“We know that,” said Dolf.
David decided to go back to the Tsichah tongue, since they refused to drop it. “She made eyes and smiles at the three of you,” he went on. “She half promised all sorts of things if you would tell her your secrets.”
“We know that,” Stacey echoed Dolf, and the three of them looked at each other knowingly, like big boys teasing a little one.
Dolf sat down with his friends, and David stood looking down at them. He pointed trailward with his lifted palm.
“Rhoda Pleasant lies dead back there,” he went on, “within a little walk from here.”
Then he reflected silently that it is not good to stretch your face with a mocking grin, because when something takes the grin away you look blank, almost as blank as somebody who has been suddenly killed. The three singers betrayed no fear or shock, for they were Indians and steeped from boyhood in the tradition of the stoic; but they succeeded only by turning themselves stupidly expressionless.
John Horse Child broke the silence finally. “We know that, too,” he said.
Stacey offered David the ceremonial pipe. It was still alight.
“Smoke,” urged Stacey. “We will joke with you no more.”
David squatted down with the three, puffing as gravely as when he had smoked with Tough Feather. Then he handed back the pipe and spoke in Tsichah.
“First, let me tell what I know already. You’re all tribal singers, medicine men, and when you think your knowledge is big and your position strong, you think the truth. Nobody among the Tsichah can replace any one of you very well. You are keepers of knowledge that should live among the people. You,” he tilted his chin at John Horse Child, “play the flute. You,” and he indicated Dolf Buckskin, “beat the drum with the pebble-headed drumstick. And Stacey, you are the singer and dancer. Without one, the other two are not complete. Besides, you are close friends, like three brothers.”
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