by John Benteen
Of course, he thought, it could have been a legitimate cattle buyer—but it was damned early in the season yet for a man to be selling beef, especially a smart businessman like Clyde Kills Twice. And there were other possibilities that came to mind, ones he did not like ...
Toward the evening’s shank, he reached Wounded Knee. Here had been fought the last major battle of the Indian wars. Spread by a Paiute prophet from Nevada, the Ghost Dance religion had infected the Sioux and the Cheyennes. Soon, it was claimed, a new world would come, to replace the old one ruined by the white men, and then everything would be as it had been before—the buffalo would come back, the whites would be erased from the face of the earth. Meanwhile, specially blessed war shirts would render their wearers indestructible. Old Sitting Bull, the great Hunkpapa leader of the Sioux, had been one of the new religion’s promoters; and in an attempt to stamp it out, he’d been arrested and murdered by Indian policemen. His death had triggered the final violence. The cavalry, nearly panic-stricken by the thought of Indian war, had kept all major Sioux bands under close observation—and then had lost track of Big Foot’s Minneconjou, who had left their own reservation and were making either for the safety of the Pine Ridge Agency or for the Badlands to join the rebel Ghost Dancers there. But the Seventh Cavalry, still yearning for revenge for the mauling it had taken under Custer at Little Big Horn, had caught up with them along this little creek, surrounded, tried to disarm them. The Minneconjou resisted; shooting started; the result had been the killing of hundreds of Indians of both sexes and all ages, plus a handful of horse-soldiers.
Now, where twenty years ago that slaughter had taken place, all was peaceful. A hot, incessant wind blew across the humped plains; where the Hotchkiss guns had been now stood a small frame church, painted white, on a ridge crest. In the valley was a small trading post, more of those scattered, ramshackle cabins, usually with a teepee or brush ramada close by, where Indian families rode out the merciless summer heat. Fargo rode on by them, following his scrawled map, deeper into the reservation. It was getting late now, the sun dropping in a shimmering orange blur to the west. He was not far now from the headquarters of Kills Twice’s small ranch. It should, according to his calculation, lie just around yonder ridge, which was skirted by the wagon road he followed.
But he did not keep to the road. Instead, in the gathering twilight, he turned his mount, put it up the hill. Just below the ridge crest, he hitched it, went the rest of the way to the top on foot, crouched low, rifle in hand. The final yards he crawled on his belly, and then he had reached the top, and in the last of the light could scan the plains below. Sheltered by a scrubby growth of grass and juniper, he put his field glasses to his eyes, then let out a low sound of admiration.
After all the poverty and misery of the reservation, the layout down there was like an oasis of prosperity, competence, and hope in a desert of despair. The main house was a cabin, but bigger than any he had seen so far and soundly built; there were corrals and outbuildings, all neat and in good repair. Nothing ramshackle about any of them. And behind the cabin was the inevitable canvas teepee, its cover rolled up the poles to let the wind blow through. There were horses in one corral; in the distance a few Herefords grazed. Smoke curled up from the teepee, where a woman prepared an evening meal over a fire. But, Fargo noticed, there was no sign of a man around the place.
Which could mean much or little. He cased his binoculars, raised himself slightly on his elbows, a kind of warning bell ringing in his head. Grasping the rifle, he had got to his knees when, instinctively, he turned.
He never knew what made him do that. Maybe there had been a whisper of sound, maybe it was only the wolfish sixth sense he had developed over long, brutal years. But even as he looked around, the man diving at him was in mid-air, the blade of a long knife gleaming in the last evening sun, pointed straight at his throat.
There was no time to shoot; instinctively he brought up the rifle. The blade hit its fore-end, slid off. Fargo saw a round face, burnt almost black by prairie sun, obsidian eyes full of hatred, greasy black hair bound in braids. Then the weight of the squat, barrel-chested Indian, all two hundred pounds of it, slammed into him, knocked him on his back. He saw the knife upraised, ready for another stroke that would not miss this time.
Pinned against the ground, Fargo, with all his leathery strength, rolled desperately. The knife sank home into earth beside his neck. The rifle was laid like a bar between his own body and that of the Sioux sprawled on top of him, trying to cut his throat. With one hand on the stock, the other on the barrel, Fargo heaved.
Coming up, all the muscle in his arms behind it, the gun pried the Indian up and rolled him off. It bought Fargo a second—and his life. The Sioux hit the dirt and bounded up like a rubber ball and came at Fargo again with the knife. Fargo fended that stroke with the gun-butt, but the Indian seized the barrel, wrenched, and Fargo, now on his feet, let it go. His hand flicked back, his wrist snapped, and suddenly his own knife, the Batangas blade, was in his hand, grips back and locked, all ten inches of its steel exposed.
“Hunh!” The Indian grunted and threw the gun away and came in, crouched low, blade flickering. Fargo dropped instinctively into the knife-fighter’s slouch, and something flared in the black eyes of his opponent and the man lunged with the speed of a striking snake. Steel chimed on steel as Fargo parried, and for an instant, blades locked, they were face to face, eyes inches from each other; he could smell rank sweat, foul breath.
The barrel-chested Sioux’s strength was tremendous, matching Fargo’s own, holding his own blade locked as tightly as he held the other’s.
Then Fargo yielded, unlocked the blades, let Kills Twice’s—for it could be no one else—slide past between arm and torso. He pivoted as, quickly, Kills Twice recovered, wheeled, came after him low and tigerishly. As the Indian drove in, Fargo shifted hands, transferring his knife from right to left.
Once again he was using his gift of ambidextrousness. It changed his balance, threw his whole body into a different stance—and, more importantly, left the Indian’s guard wide open. Startled, Kills Twice faltered at the last moment, tried to renege, but it was too late. Fargo came in from the other flank before Kills Twice could turn to meet him, and suddenly he was behind the Indian, knife against the Sioux’s ribs, one arm locked around Kills Twice’s throat. The point of the Batangas knife probed through the Sioux’s shirt, found a space between the ribs. Fargo rasped: “Drop it.”
The Indian’s muscular body seemed to freeze, to turn to solid iron, motionless in Fargo’s grasp. Alert for a flying mare, the usual tactic against a neck grip from behind like that, Fargo rammed the knife a little deeper, slicing skin, to prove that Kills Twice would die before he could use it. “I said drop it.”
A second that seemed to stretch to eternity slid by. Then Kills Twice sucked in breath. His hand opened and he let the Bowie fall. “Better,” Fargo said.
“God damn you,” Kills Twice whispered. “Nobody ever took me with a knife before.”
“Somebody has now. You’re not the only one that’s cut a throat in his time, Slits-the-Throat. ”
He felt a kind of tremor run through the man. “My Indian name. How the hell you know it?”
“Billy told me.”
“Billy—”
“Yeah. Billy’s dead.”
“Dead?” Kills Twice’s body slackened. “Billy dead? You killed him?”
“No. He worked for me. The Badlands gang killed him. But not before he and I took a lot of ’em with me. My name’s Fargo. I hired Billy to help me deliver remounts to Cheyenne. They hit us southwest of Rapid, and—”
Now Clyde Kills Twice’s body was wholly slack. “Billy dead,” he said thickly. His shoulders slumped, and he muttered something in a liquid, rolling language that Fargo could not understand—the Lakota dialect of the Sioux language. Then he said: “You can let go. I ain’t coming after you—yet. First I want to hear about my brother.”
He made no at
tempt to resist as Fargo turned him, kicked the knife well aside. The Indian wore no gun. Releasing him, Fargo scooped up the Bowie, then the rifle. With the Batangas knife sheathed, the Bowie in his belt, he held the Winchester on the Indian. Kills Twice looked at it. “You don’t need that. I told you I wasn’t comin’ after you.”
“You just did. From behind. A second more and I’d’a been a dead man.”
The Sioux’s mouth twisted. “What you expect me to do when I find some big Wasichu gunny stretched out with a rifle looking down at my ranch. How many times you think the white people around here have shot at me already? God damn you, I said, tell me about Billy!”
“All right,” Fargo said, and there in the deepening dusk, he related what had happened. “So I left the others for the scavengers,” he finished, as Kills Twice stood like something carved from stone. “But him I did the best by I could. The closest to an Injun funeral I could make it.” And he described how he had lashed the body in the tree, wrapped in the blanket.
When he was done, Kills Twice stared at him, shoulders slumped. “I told him,” he said bitterly, not to Fargo, but to himself. “I told him a long while ago—not to go to work for any white man. But he wouldn’t listen. So you got him murdered. Everybody warned you about the Badlands gang. But you had to go ahead anyhow. You’re big and bad and bulletproof, you figure. But Billy, he wasn’t bulletproof.”
“All right. Maybe I’ve got that comin’. I over reached myself, it’s true. I made a mistake, Slits-the-Throat. But I—”
“Slits-the-Throat. That’s the second time you’ve used my Sioux name. Billy wouldn’t have told it to you unless he trusted you.” Again he spoke musingly. “As far as I know, he never told another Wasichu that.” He rubbed his face. “All right. You’ve told me about my brother. What else have you got on your mind?”
“Plenty,” Fargo said. “But suppose we go on down to your place before I say it.”
After a moment, Kills Twice nodded. “We can do that.”
“You lead the way.” Fargo jerked the gun barrel. “And if you break bad, I warn you now—I thought a lot of your brother. You, I don’t give a damn about so far. You understand?”
“I understand,” Kills Twice answered without expression. Fargo went to his horse, mounted, never taking his eyes off the Indian, then herded him down the hill. The Sioux’s gelding was cleverly concealed in the brush of a narrow winding draw near the foot of the ridge. Kills Twice mounted, put both hands on the horn where Fargo could watch them, and rode ahead, down to the wagon track and around the ridge, and thus to his small, neat ranch.
~*~
In the teepee behind the house, two women wailed—the mother and sister-in-law of Billy Kills Twice. Their voices mingled in a mournful, minor keening. In the kitchen of the ranch house, Kills Twice took a pot of coffee from the stove, poured two cups, and handed one to Fargo seated at the table. “So at least you buried him decent. For that much, I’m grateful to you.” The words came grudgingly.
“I did the best I could. I never said any words over him.”
Kills Twice’s mouth twisted. “Words. He’ll git where he’s goin’ without any white man’s words. Now go on with what you got to say.”
Fargo sipped the coffee, watching the Indian closely in the light of the kerosene lamp. He had been here half an hour now, first relating briefly what had happened to Billy Kills Twice, which had brought on the explosion of grief from the women. Clyde Kills Twice himself had listened impassively, the truce between them an uneasy one.
This Indian, Fargo thought, was as tough a nut as he’d ever had to crack.
“Well,” he said, “I’m goin’ after ’em.”
“After the Badlands gang?” Kills Twice’s eyes narrowed.
“That’s right. They stole fifty of my horses. They killed a man who took my wages. I don’t stand still for that.”
Kills Twice snorted. “You’re crazy as a locoed horse. One man alone? You figure you can go into those badlands after maybe fifty men and come out again?”
“I wasn’t aiming to go alone,” said Fargo. “I was hoping you’d come with me. You know the country. I don’t.”
“I see. First you got my brother killed to deliver horses to the white man’s army; now you want to get me killed, too. No, thanks. Fight your own battles, Wasichu.”
Fargo stared at him. “He was your brother.”
“I know what he was. And I told him a long time ago that he was a fool to get mixed up with white men. That nothing good could come of workin’ with ’em.”
“I know you quarreled. He told me. But he held no grudge against you. He admired you, looked up to you. But all right. If that means nothing to you, maybe this does.” He paused. “Ten thousand dollars would give this spread of yours one hell of a shot in the arm.”
The room was silent for a moment. Something glittered in Kills Twice’s eyes. “Ten thousand dollars?”
“Yeah. There’s reward money out for the return of the loot they got from the Rapid City bank. Ten thousand’s half of it—your cut, if we get it back.”
Kills Twice laughed shortly. “You white men,” he said contemptuously. “You think that’s the big, final answer to everything. Money. You think you hold out enough money, anybody’ll do anything—jump through a hoop like a trained dog.”
“The money’s on the side. Even if there wasn’t any, I’d still go. From what Billy told me, I thought you were the kind of man who would, too.”
“Maybe Billy was wrong.” Kills Twice shook his head. “No. If you go, you go alone, without me.”
“Damn it, Slits-the-Throat ...”
“You listen to me,” the Indian said fiercely. “I don’t give a fart in a windstorm about your cavalry horses. I don’t give one either about your white man’s bank money. Do you know what happened the one time I went to the white man’s bank for money—with plenty of security? They told me to get my red ass out of there, they weren’t about to lend money to Indian people to ranch for themselves and make all the white ranchers mad—the white ranchers, who want to grab what little land we’ve got left. You and all the other Wasichu can rot in hell for all I care. You got my brother killed; I ain’t about to let you git me killed, too. You’re the big fighting man, you tote all the artillery. You go after them alone. But I can tell you this—if the Badlands don’t git you in this weather, the people in it will. They’ll chew you up and spit you out. Now get out of here. You hear? Get out!”
Fargo stood up, towering over him, looked at him a moment. Then he shook his head. “It won’t work, Kills Twice. You haven’t got a chance.”
“What?” The Indian was startled, composure breaking.
“You can’t bring it off. I don’t care how much money and guns they give you. All you’ll do is get a lot of Indian people killed for nothing.”
“You’re crazy as hell. You make no sense at all.”
“Don’t I?” Fargo’s grin was cold, his gray eyes bleak. “Then what about the other white man, the big blond one that looked you up a couple of weeks ago. Who was it, Schmidt? Or one of the others?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” But there was a tinny ring in Kills Twice’s voice.
“I think you do. Billy told me, but I had to see for myself. You really do hate the whites, don’t you? So much that you’d still work with the Badlands gang, even though they killed your brother. Schmidt—he’s their leader, isn’t he? He was one of the ones that shot Billy down. You should have seen it, Kills Twice. They had him trapped behind his dead horse, circled him like wolves around a crippled bull. And still he fought ’em. Fought ’em with every bullet that he had and when he ran out of bullets jumped up, gave his war cry and charged ’em with a knife. And it was the big one—Schmidt, isn’t that his name?—that gave the order ... Cut him down! Even though he knew damned well that Billy was your brother.”
“You stop it,” Kills Twice said hoarsely. “You hear me? You stop—”
“But they don
’t care,” Fargo went on inexorably. “No matter what kinda song and dance they’ve given you, they don’t give a damn about the Indian people. The Germans are the only ones they care about. Sure they’ll arm any Sioux that wants to fight the white men still, and use people like you to seek out the ones that do and distribute the guns and ammo. But not for your sake—because they know you won’t have a chance in hell. But you’ll force the government to send more troops in, take that much pressure off the Krauts in France, which is all they want—and they don’t care how many of you get killed.”
“You don’t know—I haven’t—I said get out!”
“Don’t worry,” Fargo said, and this time it was his voice that held contempt. “I misjudged you. Kills Twice. Anybody that would sell out his own brother, his own people, to help a bunch of renegades like that Badlands gang ... After all, they’re Wasichu, too. But don’t worry. I’m going.” His lip curled. “This place stinks.”
“God damn you—” There was a rifle on pegs on the wall. Instinctively, Kills Twice stepped toward it, then halted as the .38 Colt appeared in Fargo’s hand as if conjured there.
“Just stand fast,” Fargo said, “and I’ll be on my way.” He edged toward the rifle, took it from the pegs. “This I’ll leave outside.” Then he was out the back door, as Kills Twice stood there motionless. He tossed the rifle into darkness, unlatched his horse’s reins. The wailing in the teepee was still going on as he rode away into the night.
Six
He camped that night on high ground, away from water, where no one could take him by surprise. If he were right, if he’d called Kills Twice’s hand, if the man really were in with the Badlands gang, this reservation was still hostile territory, as far as he was concerned. Other Indians might be in the conspiracy, and it was possible that someone would come after him. Anyhow, he was pretty sure he was right—and so was Donna Clyman. This was more than any bandit gang: a full-scale guerrilla operation was building up out here in this remote country, and a die-hard like Kills Twice was just the kind they’d recruit. Well, the hell with it. He still had fifty cavalry horses to get back and that twenty thousand to earn. Alone, it would not be easy, but nobody ever paid real money for anything that was.