Once again he lifted his menacing gaze, hoping to find a clue in the red-bearded man's face, but all he saw was a widening of his eyes.
"More. .," the merchant whispered, "please."
Dances With Wolves unrolled another bill and slowly placed it next to the one already lying on the counter.
The shopkeeper was gripped with the notion that the stranger's eyes were looking through him. The man across the counter was staring with the unmistakably quiet, potentially lethal, expression of a wolf.
The merchant's heart began to pound audibly in his chest. His breathing became rapid.
"Mister," he gasped, "where are you from?"
Dances With Wolves blinked calmly and the shopkeeper recoiled at the heavy, mystifying words that marched out of his mouth.
"Far. . away."
His mouth agape, the perspiring storekeeper, certain that he was in the presence of something he could not understand, lurched backward, only to find his progress halted by the solid wall behind him.
He bobbed his head at the packet on the counter and tried to cry out but the words came in an urgent hush.
"Take it. . I give it to you for nothing. . take it. . take it!"
Dances With Wolves' serene and deadly gaze fell on the packet, then rose once more to the terrified man behind the counter. The storekeeper's hands now held the shelving at his side in a death grip.
"Take it," he gasped again. "Nothing. . you owe me nothing."
Dances With Wolves ran a couple of fingers through the twine, hoisted the parcel, and turned for the door. A few steps later he passed outside and his image disappeared in an explosion of blinding, morning light.
Pressed against the wall, in the throes of apoplexy, the shaken storekeeper struggled a few moments to recover. Then he hurried to the door, locked it and pulled the shade, then staggered for the sanctuary of his back room and the earthen jug of spirits he kept there. He was fully inebriated before noon, by which time Dances With Wolves and his newly outfitted children were on their way to the next settlement.
For more than a week they searched with no success. Unable to make inquiries without giving himself away, Dances With Wolves clung to the thin hope that he might catch sight of her. He talked to a few white people as they wandered from town to town, and his fluency in English improved. But as one futile day ran into the next, he despaired more and more.
At the same time the oddness of the dark-skinned man with the two shoeless, speechless children elicited notice wherever they went. It seemed only a matter of time before they would be found out, for no day could be completed without a near-disaster of one sort or another.
They tried to take their breakfast in a crowded eating place, but when a piece of beefsteak hit his palate for the first time, Snake In Hands spat it onto the floor and cried out in clear, concise Comanche, "It tastes awful, Father!"
Because Always Walking could not be deterred from defecating in public any time she felt the urge, Dances With Wolves was often accosted by irate citizens who demanded that he control his child.
On one hot morning, they had just entered a sizable village of several hundred souls when, drawn to the commotion of women screeching on a boardwalk, they saw a large rattlesnake, obviously in flight, slithering along a crease where the ground met the walkway. Townsmen were racing from several directions to aid the screaming women, but before Dances With Wolves could react, Snake In Hands had scissored off his pony, and, arriving first in the vicinity of the big snake, startled everyone in view by reaching down and deftly picking the serpent up by its tail. Then, with no more care than a boy might take to shuck an ear of corn, he pinched the snake's head between the fingers of his other hand, coiled it twice around his neck, and, cradling the reptile, pulled himself back into the saddle.
Snake In Hands was so intent on calming the snake with soft strokes along its back that he didn't realize the impact of his simple act until his father nudged him to attention and motioned for him to start moving. It was only then that Snake In Hands discovered that the handful of white people around him had ceased all activity.
Rattlesnakes were universally thought of as deadly pests, to be eradicated wherever they might be found, and the sight of a mere boy picking one up and fondling it in a way usually reserved for a favorite pet had produced looks of confused wonder on those who were watching. It also produced a quick exit from the vicinity for the odd trio.
The white man money was quickly used up and they had been surviving on a dreary diet of rabbits, squirrels, and other small game for several days when they reached the outskirts of a large settlement called Vernon.
Like his children, Dances With Wolves had grown weary of a search that seemed more implausible with each day's passing. He was tired of reminding his son and daughter not to behave in the way they were raised. He was sick of white man clothes, white man talk, squalid white man towns, ugly white man roads, and gameless white man country. Most of all he was sick of pretending. It made him feel dirty, and after repeating the distasteful chore of cautioning the children once again, he led them into Vernon with the thought that if they did not find Stands With A Fist in this place, they would turn for home and be done with it.
The outskirts of the town were strangely devoid of life, as were its main street and the mismatched collection of structures that fronted it. They were halfway down the muddy thoroughfare and had not seen a single resident when Dances With Wolves spied a large congregation massed at the far end of town. He halted his pony and listened to the faint hum of voices in the distance. Something special enough to interrupt routine life was happening up ahead.
What might be taking place was no clearer when they pulled up at the fringes of the crowd, whose animation was strangely muted. Men sat their horses in little groups, gangs of children roosted on wagons, while others milled aimlessly through a considerable crowd of pedestrians who had gathered in front of a strange edifice which provided the center of attention.
Traders moved through the throng, promoting the sale of drinks, fans, and colorful flags, but their excitement was strangely muted, too, and it occurred to Dances With Wolves that the people were like children at play, fearful of raising their voices lest they wake some powerful entity sleeping nearby.
The hushed buzzing of the crowd rose as a small group of men ascended a flight of steps attached to the platform and faced the onlookers. One of them, a huge man with black skin, stood still as the others, who were white, scurried about performing small chores of readiness.
A white man wearing a metal star on his breast stepped forward, and, looking at a sheet of paper in his hand, began a short talk which silenced the audience.
The man with the star was quickly followed by another man, dressed in black, who clutched a book of the same color. As he spoke, a loop at the end of a stout rope hanging from a beam was slipped over the black-skinned man's head and tightened against his neck. The white man who did this stepped back a few paces, gripped a lever and, at a signal from the man with the star, depressed the long stick.
Suddenly the black-skinned man fell straight down, and when his feet were just inches from the ground, the rope went taut. As he had dropped the crowd moaned, but as his neck broke with an audible crack, all breath seemed to go out of the audience. Spontaneous cheers erupted from some of the watchers as the black-skinned man hung lifeless. Others broke into applause, and shortly after the casual chatter of friends and neighbors filled the air as a handful of somber men, working in the shade beneath the wooden platform, fussed around the body of the black-skinned man.
It had happened too fast for Dances With Wolves to analyze, but as he watched the incongruous scene before him he remembered the thing called hanging. It repulsed him to see men, women, and children kill a man without fighting him, and he instinctively turned to his children. They were sitting, ashen-faced, on their horses, their expressions helpless, and at that instant Dances With Wolves decided they should go home.
But before he could mo
ve, something extraordinary happened. The breeze, which had been lifting and falling all day as if it could not decide what to do, suddenly made up its mind in the spectacular form of a titanic surge that knocked both children off their horses and nearly sent Dances With Wolves to the ground.
For a split second he saw his children up and chasing their horses, but he was already in the air and, as he pitched to and fro on the bouncing, stiff-legged pony, the refuse that the audience had scattered over the ground filled the space about his head.
At the same moment he got his pony under control the wind inexplicably died, and when Dances With Wolves looked up, trash was still flying, the crowd was gathering itself in stunned disbelief, and the children had recovered their ponies. He was as dazed as anyone and was wondering where such a wind could come from when a stiff aftergust shuddered past.
Again refuse swirled up and a broadsheet of newsprint wrapped itself around his pony's face. Before the pony could explode, however, Dances With Wolves reflexively snatched the paper off his animal's eyes and was about to toss it into the breeze when his glance fixed momentarily on the paper.
A drawing of a woman stared up at him. It was Stands With A Fist. Stays Quiet was sitting on her lap.
Chapter XXXI
For the next three days, Dances With Wolves ruminated over what to do. He studied the article under the drawing of his wife and daughter, reading it constantly in hope that he could fully understand it.
But eleven years had elapsed since he had read words. The jumble of names and places and events tumbled like confetti in his mind, and he could make little sense of what was written. Though he could not be certain, he felt reasonably sure that the writing did not tell where she was and, with no other option than to risk discovery he decided to step forward.
After bathing and grooming themselves to present the most convincing front possible, the three rode into Vernon at mid-afternoon and tied their ponies in front of the town constable's office.
Dances With Wolves whispered a final reminder to Snake In Hands and Always Walking. They should stay near at all times and under no circumstances utter a word. Then he climbed a few steps to the uneven boardwalk and knocked at the door.
It opened and a scruffy-looking white man with a puzzled expression asked, "What?"
"I want to see the constable," Dances With Wolves stated.
As soon as the word came out he knew it was somehow wrong. But he could not remember how to make it right.
"Wait here," the man said, receding into the darkness of the office.
Inside, the constable, his feet propped up on his desk as he reclined to enjoy a good chew, peered up at his deputy.
"There's a fella standing outside with two kids who says he wants to see the constable. He knocked at the door. ."
The constable stopped chewing when he heard the odd pronunciation of his tide and was interested enough to rock his chair forward when he was informed that the visitor had knocked on a public door instead of coming inside. Something strange was afoot.
Unlike his peers on the frontier, the constable of Vernon was constantly on the alert for the tiniest ripple of intrigue that might cross his path. He had held his position for several seasons and performed the duties of his office well, but his true ambition was to master what he called the "science of criminality." He considered himself to be rather more intellectual than the average frontier lawman, and prided himself on being the only man within a hundred miles to possess a subscription to The Police Gazette. Normally, he read each issue from cover to cover, embracing the most lurid aspects of crime in his quest for expertise. The magazines were so precious to him that they were secured with lock and key and read by others only within view of the owner.
The constable shifted the tobacco in his mouth and resumed chewing. Folding his hands together on the desktop, he briefly drifted off in thought.
"Have them come in," he said at last, too consumed in the mechanism of weighing clues to make eye contact with his deputy.
A moment later, Dances With Wolves came inside with the children in tow and was ushered to the constable's desk, where he met the lawman's look with his implacable, unsettling Comanche gaze.
The constable, faced with an unknown presence, narrowed his eyes slyly.
"What can I do for you today?"
Dances With Wolves reached into his white man pocket and pulled out the sheet of crumpled newsprint.
"I am looking for. .”
He spread the paper on the constable's desk, flattened it, and jabbed a weathered finger at the image of Stands With A Fist.
"The white captive."
The constable leaned forward and stared down at the drawing for a long time. Of course he knew about the woman in the paper, but he wanted a few extra seconds to think. The man before him was quite out of the ordinary and the constable, ever eager to throw light on darkness, was already turning suppositions around in his active mind. The most obvious explanation was that the man standing on the other side of the desk was a family member of some kind. But there was something so odd about his visitor that the constable decided to conduct a careful, yet casual, interrogation.
"Christine Gunther," he said with the lightest touch he could manage. "What do you want with her?"
"I want to find. . Christine Gunther."
"Uh-huh. . And who are you?"
Dances With Wolves had noticed half a dozen loose cartridges lying on a corner of the constable's desk when he first came in, and one word sprang into his mind like a huge sign.
"Bullet. . Gunther."
The constable's eyes narrowed even more.
"Bullet? That's your name."
"Yes," Dances With Wolves answered placidly.
"Well, who are you, her brother?"
“Yes."
Suddenly one of the children, whom the constable had already noted were extraordinarily quiet, startled him by stepping up to the desk and grabbing one of his spare revolvers. The girl, who couldn't have been more than seven or eight, walked nonchalantly to the center of the floor, the revolver swinging in her hand with practiced ease, squatted in front of a large scorpion, and smashed it with the butt of the gun. Apparently, the insect was not dispatched with the first blow and the little girl hit it again, this time with more force than might have been expected of a child. Then she rose off her haunches, retraced her steps to the desk, returned the revolver to the spot where she had found it, and resumed her place next to the boy.
Evidence was mounting, and though it was still too soon to draw a conclusion, the constable suspected he was dealing with people who had suffered some unknown trauma of the severest type. The actions of the little girl were disturbing, and the dull-witted behavior of her father was even more alarming. To the practiced eye of the constable, the look of the man who called himself Bullet Gunther was one of the most predatory he had ever seen, and were it not for the presence of children, he could easily have imagined his visitor as a habitual killer.
"Where are you from?"
“The east."
"And where in the east would that be?" the constable questioned.
Dances With Wolves' memory whirled in his head and suddenly stopped at a place called St. David's Field, the place where he had tried to end his life during the Great War.
“Tennessee."
The constable whistled.
"You're a long way from home."
"Very far from home."
The words were so remote, so cold and chilling, that they seemed to pass straight through his body. The constable recoiled as he tried to remember if trauma could induce dementia. The constable rose out of his chair and faced Dances With Wolves at eye level.
"Have you lost someone?" he asked bluntly.
“Yes."
The constable glanced cagily at the unmoving children.
"Did you lose your wife?"
"Yes."
The constable was certain that the clever line of questioning he had adopted would bring him to the t
ruth. He leaned forward.
"Did you lose her to the Comanches?"
Dances With Wolves blinked for the first time. He was trying to think of what to say when he was seized with an urge to follow where the white man led.
"Yes."
"Your name isn't Bullet Gunther, is it?"
“No."
"And you want to find Christine Gunther?"
As if he had solved a difficult combination lock, the constable was thrilled to feel the tumblers in his mind click into place and marveled at the simple answer he had formed to what had seemed a complex riddle.
He had never encountered a "revenger" before, but they were not uncommon and he had studied several cases that had come to his attention during conversations with other lawmen scattered along the frontier. Revengers were difficult to deal with because of the universal empathy for families who had been victimized by marauding Comanches. So many were so deeply disturbed that the revenger's true intent was nearly impossible to ascertain. That's what made them dangerous.
To the constable's agile mind, the visitors in his office fit the profile to perfection: homicidal gaze, halting, twisted speech, children rendered numb through barbaric brutality. He remembered reading about some cases in which repatriated captives were murdered. An eleven-year-old boy had his skull crushed by a revenger bent on destroying not only Indians but anyone who had had contact with them. On more than one occasion, former captives had been kidnapped and tortured for information as to the whereabouts of an abducted family member. He even remembered reading a celebrated case in which a revenger whose entire family had been slaughtered in his absence, persistently courted a former captive, a fourteen-year-old girl, in a misguided quest for matrimony.
He felt profound sympathy for the shattered family standing in his office, but at the same time he was thrilled — in a professional sense — to have a firsthand encounter with a revenger to add to his lexicon of criminal experience. But a higher calling superseded these emotions. The constable's oath was sacred. Law and order must be upheld, and the presence of a revenger was a clear threat to the peace. The unwritten rule in managing such individuals was to employ a firm hand. Revengers were best controlled by keeping them moving, and that tried technique would be employed with this one.
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