“It was the Sparrowhawks,” Sam said, using that word instead of Crows so that Charley would not boil over. “I expect I’l1 take my vengeance and I thought they just as well know it. I thought mebbe you’d like to tell them. You can tell them this, if you want to, that if the ones who did it will come out and face me, three at a time, all of us with no weapons, I’ll leave the others alone. If the chief won’t send the murderers out I intend to make war on the whole nation.”
Charley took the pipe away from his teeth and left his mouth open. “The whole nation. Jist you?”
“Jist me,” Sam said.
“So that’s why ya have Mick’s bay.”
“Mebbe.” Sam rose to his feet. “I figger the sooner you let the chief know the better it will be. I don’t intend to give him much time for medicine and powwows.”
Charley stood up. “Wall now, Sam, ain’t ya a little onreasonable? The Sparrowhawks are good fighters. Ya know that. I figger ya will be gone beaver almost before ya git to the
Yellerstone.”
“I might be gone beaver before the next Canada geese come over but there will be some bones for the wolves to pick; And don’t forget to tell the chief that I’ll leave my mark. I don’t want anyone blamed for what I do.”
“A mark,” said Charley, looking at Sam. He seemed fascinated. “And what,” he asked softly, “will the mark be?”
“I’ll take the right ear.”
“The right ear,” said Charley, staring.
“Besides the skelp,” Sam said.
“Wall, I’ll bc doggone,” said Charley.
13
IT WAS FOUR redmen that he saw sitting by a camphre after dark, three days after he had left Charley. Sam had sensed the presence of Indians an hour earlier and had hidden his beasts in a thicket and gone forward as the wolf goes—among whitemen of the West the scout was known as the wolf. On each foot he had three moccasins of different sizes. He thought a small war party was there by the fire, on its way to another tribe to steal horses and take scalps; or that it was returning, with a scalp or two at its belt. The warriors would be smoking their pipes and thinking of themselves as very brave men. Perhaps they had feasted on buffalo loin. If their bellies were full they might be a little sleepy ….
As soundless as the wolf, Sam went forward. When a half mile away he could tell that the party was encamped on a small stream that flowed down a hillside through an aspen thicket. To the left was a tableland, from which he hoped to get a clear view of the camp. On reaching this he was delighted: the four warriors, sitting by a fire, were in plain view, in a small clearing by the streambank. It was a poor campsite for men who expected to see the next sunrise but they probably thought there would be no enemies in this area so early in the season. The mountain men would be heading for the posts with their packs; the redmen would be feeling only half alive after the long cold winter.
Sam stood in full view of them but he knew that in the dark they could not see him. He wished that somehow the Almighty could let him know if these were the men who had killed his wife and child. Wondering if Charley had taken the message to the chief, he studied the physical situation below and around him, until he knew the nature of the soil and plant life. It was still early spring; the old grasses and weeds along the stream and above the patches of snow were sere and whispering, like a million insects. It would not be easy to make a soundless approach through such grass but the soil was in his favor, for it was moist and soft. His three layers of moccasin skin would sink against it as if it were cotton. To learn if there were more than four of them Sam became a man who, to the impartial observer, would hardly have seemed human. He had drawn on his five senses for all the information they could give him and was now like a man intently listening, though actually he was consulting what he thought of as his danger sense. His physical posture was exactly that of the wolf when it felt itself in the presence of an enemy and stood stock still, trying to measure the danger.
Sam now doubled back a mile and scouted the area east and north of the camp. He thought it unlikely that there were other Indians within miles of this spot but the men who had accepted the unlikely as fact were all dead. He went two miles east by north, striding swiftly but softly along the crests of aspen-covered hills. Time and again he stopped to listen and sniff. After two hours of reconnoitering he knew the direction from which these warriors had come and the direction in which they were headed. He knew they had no horses, no dog, no fresh scalps, and that they were the kind of party that had killed his wife. If only the one who struck Lotus down were there!
He came back down the hills and took a position south of the camp. His revolvers he had hidden near his horses; his rifle he now set by a tree; and he adjusted the Bowie’s sheath on the left side of his belt, two inches forward from his hip-bone, so that he could seize it instantly. Then he went forward. For two hundred and fifty yards he followed a buffalo path along a stream. A strong breeze was blowing against him; the odor of the campfire and of the four men around it was in his nostrils. How well he knew that Crow odor! A hundred yards from the men he stopped, and stood a few moments, sensing. One of them seemed to be lying on his robe. The other three still sat and smoked, with dying firelight playing over the face of the one on the north side. Sam wished that he was the one lying down. The warrior facing him seemed to have no sense of danger; he did not peer into the dark or listen or glance round him. Sam knew he could advance no farther as long as the man sat there. He would have to wait.
While waiting he again went over his plan. At the instant when he was ready to strike the first blow he would give the dreadful Crow battle cry; with all the power of his lungs he would explode it in their ears. A sliver of moon had come up. It cast a little light but not much. There was a little light from the fire but he could no longer see the Indian’s face. An hour later the last of the four had lain down. Again Sam went over his plan: when six feet from the man lying on the south side he would give the cry, with enough rage in it to arouse the dead. At the same moment he would paralyze the man with his right heel. The next instant he would smite with his clenched fist the man on the east side; and swing and bury his knife in the man on the west side. The man on the north side might by that time be on his feet. Sam’s plan was to seize him by the throat and with one powerful wrench snap his spine. He figured the whole thing would take no more than seven seconds. He began to move forward. Against the moist earth his moccasins made no sound but he had to move with extreme care when thrusting a foot forward through the dead grass. He supposed that the four of them were now asleep. They were dreaming dreams of murder and bloody scalps and young women wildly acclaiming them. When thirty feet from them Sam paused to study their positions. Then he crept forward until he stood almost above the man on the south side. He took a few moments to settle his big tensed body into quiet. Then he soundlessly inhaled air until his lungs were filled and in the next moment exploded it:
“Hooo-kii-hiiii!”
The sound shattered the night. The man next to him had no time to move before a tremendous blow paralyzed him. The man on the east was struggling to sit up when Sam drove his fist against his windpipe. A moment later the twelve-inch blade went all the way through the chest of the man on the west side, who at that moment was on his knees, reaching around him. The man on the north was on his feet, as Sam had expected him to be, and was making a move to flee when Sam’s huge hands closed round his throat. Sam heard the neck snap and released it, and at the same moment with a thrust of his foot struck the man in his belly and sent him plunging for fifteen feet.
His next move was to draw the knife from the man and plunge it through the heart of each of the two he had knocked unconscious. With the skill of one who had studied the work of professionals he took the four scalps and cut off the right ears. He looked at the dead men but none of them seemed to have Lotus’s Bowie. Then he hastened to his rifle. There he waited. If there were other warriors in the area who had heard his cry they would come slinking an
d skulking, their black eyes like jewels in the moonlight. But no warriors came.
Settling the scalps and ears in the forks of a tree, Sam took his rifle and went to the bodies, to see if on them or in their trappings there was any sign of his wife—her scalp or a utensil or a weapon. He could find none. Taking each by an ankle, he dragged the corpses into position, side by side, and flung their weapons across them. If other warriors found these bodies before the wolves got to them they would see that the right ears had been sliced off close to the skulls. They would know that Sam Minard had left his mark.
Returning to his horses, he rolled into a robe for three or four hours of sleep. His last thoughts before the night closed over him were of his wife, whose bones, in the blanket behind the saddle, were within reach of his hand.
14
THE NEXT MORNING after eating a hard dry breakfast he patted the blanket over the bones and said, “Don’t you worry, Lotus-Lilah, I’ll get the son of a bitch.” He felt such contempt for his enemy that he shot a deer in the heart of their country and roasted the loins and both hams. Three days later he met Wind River Bill close by the Yellowstone. Bill said he had been up to see how the woman was. He guessed she was all right. All winter he had felt powerful oneasy about her, for he had figgered she would be dead hump-ribs before spring; but doggone it, there she was, lugging water up the hill to her plants and sitting by the graves long after dark. Were the four skulls still on the stakes? Doggone if they warn’t. Jist looking round up there had made Bill feel as the Indians felt when ole Belzy Dodd yanked his skelp off. Had Sam heard that one? Dick Wooton told it. Belzy had a head as bald as a buffalo skull after thirty winters in the blizzards. He covered it with a wig. One day at Bent’s Fort when a lot of sneaky Rapahoes were snooping around Belzy rushed among the Injuns making loud and blood-curdling whoops and waving in all directions with his weapons. At the top of his war tantrum he yanked his wig off and shook it at them. Every last redskin fled in terror because he thought that with one stroke Belzy had scalped himself.
When Bill asked Sam what in the doggone creation he was doing with four new scalps Sam told him the story. After staring at Sam as a few days earlier he had stared at Kate, Bill reached for pipe and tobacco. Tamping tobacco into his pipe, he said, “Ya kallate to terminate the hull doggone nation?”
Sam said dryly, “Only as many as I have time for.”
“Doggone it, Sam, you shorely ought to reconsider. Thar muss be two thousan them Crows and thar ain’t a devil as hisses won’t be after yore skelp.”
“That’s how I figger it,” Sam said.
“Godamighty!” Bill said. He now was staring at four ears hanging on a leather string. “Cuttin their ears off, Sam? Why, doggone it, ya might as well cut their balls off. Ever see a wasp nest laid open?”
“Many times,” Sam said.
“That’s the way the hull Crow nation will be, I shorely think so. How many have ye kilt?”
“Only four but I’m not through.”
Bill puffed his pipe and looked at Sam for half a minute.
“Why for ya cut their ears off?”
“I want them to know you didn’t do it. That’s my mark.”
“Wall now, that’s mighty nice of ye, Sam. I shorely wooden want them two thousan devils after me. Tell the truth now, how long ye figger to live?”
“About fifty years.”
Bill pondered that a few moments, his eyes full and incredulous. “Why didden ye tell the chief ta send the killers out?”
“I told Charley to tell him but he won’t do it.”
“No, he never would. This is what he’ll do.” Old Twenty Coups, Bill said, would call all the braves into a big powwow and he would say to them, “Brave warriors, the bravest on the hull earth, one sleep, two sleeps, is a bad one; sleep he do not and hate he do and kill he do; like a ghost he is; a sharp knife he is and his gun is shore as shootin. Ye gotta raise his hair; let not the sun set nor the moon rise before this varmint is dead and skelped and cut up in little pieces.“They would cut Sam loose from himself, they shorely would. The chief would call for volunteers and all the hottest bloods would step forth, eager to kill Sam Minard so they could wear an eagle feather as long as an elk horn. There was another thing that had just occurred to Bill, that itched him like wood ticks on his johnny. The Blackfeet, who already hated Sam, would be out to take him, alive, so the squaws could squat all over him, dropping their urine and dung; and so they could ransom him to the Crows for ten times a king’s ransom. God alive, he could see a thousand Blackfeet warriors after Sam, he shorely could. Was Sam keeping in mind the fact that the Crows were the best shots in the country with bow and arrow?—that in fact some of them could shoot straighter with it than most whitemen with a rifle? And there was another thing: had Sam ever seen the way the Dakotas and Assiniboins hung from the ceilings of their lodges? They cut through the muscles on their backs and chests and pushed leather ropes through the holes; and by these they were lifted off the ground, and by God they hung there for days and nights and you could hear their screams for miles.
Yes, Sam said, he had heard about it. He knew that Bill was trying to suggest the hazards and horrors but Sam did not want his brotherly concern or any man’s. He changed the subject.
“You think the woman on the Musselshell is all right?”
“I shorely do, Sam.” She was wearing, Bill said, the same clothes she wore last fall; she looked stooped and seemed to be turning white; but all afternoon he watched her carry water up the hill. He expected that she was as crazy as a hoot owl but would get along. He expected that she would live a lot longer than Sam Minard.
“Anyone heard of her man yet?”
“Ner hair ner hide. He was gone beaver long ago.”
“The red devils haven’t bothered her?”
“I didden find a sign anywheres.”
Sam said, “I expect I better go up and see what I can do. I have some things for her.”
When the two men parted, one to swim the Yellowstone and ride north, the other to go up the valley of the Bighorn, Bill put forth a hand, as Jim Bridger had done. He squeezed Sam’s hand and said: “Watch your topknot.”
“Watch yours, Bill.”
Before Sam reached the river he surprised two Crows chasing a bull buffalo and shot one off his horse. The other fled. Sam took the scalp and right ear. Wall now, he knew as well as Bill or any man that the chief would call his braves to a council of war. He would tell them that a terror was loose in the Sparrowhawk nation. Sam thought that possibly the old chief himself, as brave an Indian as ever went forth to battle, might take the warpath, though it was more likely that he would choose ten or fifteen of his bravest and pledge them never to rest until the enemy was dead.
Maybe Sam Minard’s days were numbered.
As the mountain men put the story together from Charley and others, the chief took his medicine men into his confidence and they agreed on the warriors most eligible for the honor. Because, like most primitive peoples, the chief counted by his fingers, the number he chose was ten. After a second powwow it was raised to twenty, but only to the shame and distress of every Crow brave: how absurd to think it would take twenty great warriors to bring down that clumsy and cowardly killer! The chief told them that any one of them could easily do it—old man that he was and full of winters, he could do it; but he wanted to give as many as possible a chance at the glory and two eagle feathers—for there would be two. Hundreds of warriors had clamored to be chosen.
The twenty picked for the glory were bold but not equally bold; wary but not equally wary; and skilled in hunting and war but not equally skilled. Wily old Twenty Coups knew that no two warriors were ever the same. His plan, therefore, was to call on all the skills of his people. Night Owl had so assiduously aped his totem that he was known as the ablest of the night hunters; it was believed that in pitch-darkness he could see as clearly as the owl. The chief knew this was not so but it was good for his people to think it was so. Red Feather was
possibly the ablest strategist among the younger men; he had the cunning of the serpent, the craftiness of the fox, the resourcefulness of the wolf. Will Win was, in the chief’s opinion, the best tracker in the nation; he had such a powerful sense of smell that on hands and knees he could follow the scent of man or beast across geest or a talus slope. Mad Wolf was a reckless one and might be the first to die, if any were to die. Ever since his initiation into manhood he had wanted to go alone to take Blackfeet scalps. Medicine Bird was as expert as any with bow and arrow and had one of the fastest horses. Coyote Runs was the fleetest warrior in the nation; in a race of a mile or two, over hill and down, there was no other brave who could touch coup on his flying heels, Eagle Beak was of those men born and dedicated to the profession of killing; he had counted coup at seventeen, and by the age of twenty-two had scalped two Blackfeet and three Cheyennes. The chief thought he had no warrior who could go in a straighter line to the enemy. Wolf Teeth was one of the most skilled horsemen in a nation whose horsemen were the best on earth; with only a foot and a hand showing to his enemy he could, while his horse was on a dead run, hit an object the size of a man at a distance of a hundred yards. First Coup was a sullen and grimly tenacious brave who as a boy had, with incredible intrepidity, repeatedly risked his life to touch an enemy, before cutting him down with tomahawk and knife.
Those were nine of the warriors chosen. There were eleven more, all with special talents.
Twenty Coups, the mountain men learned, called his people into meeting, and after the evil powers were propitiated and blessings invoked, he told the multitude that a dreadful killer, a paleface and a mad dog, had vowed to kill every Sparrowhawk brave he could find. To justify his bitter malevolence he was telling this absurd and outrageous lie, that a party of braves had gone a whole moon down, where the Little Snake flowed north, and had killed the mad dog’s wife and unborn child. His medicine men had told him that the Cheyennes did it, urged on by the Arapahoes, who lived on coyote bones and bugs. The Sparrowhawks had always been friends of the palefaces, had fought side by side with them against their common enemies. This thing, this terror, was mad; he was the dog when it slobbered and drooled and clicked its teeth; he was like the hundreds who had flung themselves off precipices because their women and children by the tens were dying of the paleface diseases. He left his mark as a taunt and a challenge by cutting off the right ear.
Mountain Man - Vardis Fisher Page 16