“Make your medicine!” he said. “Why are the white men not blind? Is the medicine bad to-day?” And he whipped his son’s horse to the right, and to the left he slashed the horse of Two Whistles, and, whirling the leather quirt, drove them cowed before him and out of the stream, with never a look or word to the white men. He crossed the sandy margin, and as a man drives steers to the corral, striking spurs to his horse and following the frightened animals close when they would twist aside, so did old Pounded Meat herd his son down the valley.
“Useful old man,” remarked Stirling; “and brings up his children carefully. Let’s get these prisoners along.”
“How rural the river looks now!” Haines said, as they left the deserted bank.
So the Sioux went home in peace, the lieutenants, with their command of twenty, returned to the post, and all white people felt much obliged to Pounded Meat for his act of timely parental discipline—all except one white person.
Sol Kinney sauntered into the agency store one evening. “I want ten pounds of sugar,” said he, “and navy plug as usual. And say, I’ll take another bottle of the Seltzer fizz salts. Since I quit whiskey,” he explained, “my liver’s poorly.”
He returned with his purchase to his cabin, and set a lamp in the window. Presently the door opened noiselessly, and Cheschapah came in.
“Maybe you got that now?” he said, in English.
The interpreter fumbled among bottles of liniment and vaseline, and from among these household remedies brought the blue one he had just bought. Cheschapah watched him like a child, following his steps round the cabin. Kinney tore a half-page from an old Sunday World, and poured a little heap of salts into it. The Indian touched the heap timidly with his finger. “Maybe no good,” he suggested.
“Heap good!” said the interpreter, throwing a pinch into a glass. When Cheschapah saw the water effervesce, he folded his newspaper with the salt into a tight lump, stuck the talisman into his clothes, and departed, leaving Mr. Kinney well content. He was doing his best to nourish the sinews of war, for business in the country was discouragingly slack.
Now the Crows were a tribe that had never warred with us, but only with other tribes; they had been valiant enough to steal our cattle, but sufficiently discreet to stop there; and Kinney realized that he had uphill work before him. His dearest hopes hung upon Cheschapah, in whom he thought he saw a development. From being a mere humbug, the young Indian seemed to be getting a belief in himself as something genuinely out of the common. His success in creating a party had greatly increased his conceit, and he walked with a strut, and his face was more unsettled and visionary than ever. One clear sign of his mental change was that he no longer respected his father at all, though the lonely old man looked at him often with what in one of our race would have been tenderness. Cheschapah had been secretly maturing a plot ever since his humiliation at the crossing, and now he was ready. With his lump of newspaper carefully treasured, he came to Two Whistles.
“Now we go,” he said. “We shall fight with the Piegans. I will make big medicine, so that we shall get many of their horses and women. Then Pretty Eagle will be afraid to go against me in the council. Pounded Meat whipped my horse. Pounded Meat can cut his hay without Cheschapah, since he is so strong.”
But little Two Whistles wavered. “I will stay here,” he ventured to say to the prophet.
“Does Two Whistles think I cannot do what I say?”
“I think you make good medicine.”
“You are afraid of the Piegans.”
“No, I am not afraid. I have hay the white man will pay me for. If I go, he will not pay me. If I had a father, I would not leave him.” He spoke pleadingly, and his prophet bore him down by ridicule. Two Whistles believed, but he did not want to lose the money the agent was to pay for his hay. And so, not so much because he believed as because he was afraid, he resigned his personal desires.
The next morning the whole band had disappeared with Cheschapah. The agent was taken aback at this marked challenge to his authority—of course they had gone without permission—and even the old Crow chiefs held a council.
Pretty Eagle resorted to sarcasm. “He has taken his friends to the old man who makes the thunder,” he said. But others did not feel sarcastic, and one observed, “Cheschapah knows more than we know.”
“Let him make rain, then,” said Pretty Eagle. “Let him make the white man’s heart soft.”
The situation was assisted by a step of the careful Kinney. He took a private journey to Junction City, through which place he expected Cheschapah to return, and there he made arrangements to have as much whiskey furnished to the Indian and his friends as they should ask for. It was certainly a good stroke of business. The victorious raiders did return that way, and Junction City was most hospitable to their thirst. The valley of the Big Horn was resonant with their homeward yells. They swept up the river, and the agent heard them coming, and he locked his door immediately. He listened to their descent upon his fold, and he peeped out and saw them ride round the tightly shut buildings in their war-paint and the pride of utter success. They had taken booty from the Piegans, and now, knocking at the store, they demanded ammunition, proclaiming at the same time in English that Cheschapah was a big man, and knew a “big heap medicine.” The agent told them from inside that they could not have any ammunition. He also informed them that he knew who they were, and that they were under arrest. This touched their primitive sense of the incongruous. On the buoyancy of the whiskey they rode round and round the store containing the agent, and then rushed away, firing shots at the buildings and shots in the air, and so gloriously home among their tribe, while the agent sent a courier packing to Fort Custer.
The young bucks who had not gone on the raid to the Piegans thronged to hear the story, and the warriors told it here and there, walking in their feathers among a knot of friends, who listened with gay exclamations of pleasure and envy. Great was Cheschapah, who had done all this! And one and another told exactly and at length how he had seen the cold water rise into foam beneath the medicine-man’s hand; it could not be told too often; not every companion of Cheschapah’s had been accorded the privilege of witnessing this miracle, and each narrator in his circle became a wonder himself to the bold boyish faces that surrounded him. And after the miracle he told how the Piegans had been like a flock of birds before the medicine-man. Cheschapah himself passed among the groups, alone and aloof; he spoke to none, and he looked at none, and he noted how their voices fell to whispers as he passed; his ear caught the magic words of praise and awe; he felt the gaze of admiration follow him away, and a mist rose like incense in his brain. He wandered among the scattered tepees, and, turning, came along the same paths again, that he might once more overhear his worshippers. Great was Cheschapah! His heart beat, a throb of power passed through his body, and “Great is Cheschapah!” said he, aloud; for the fumes of hallucination wherewith he had drugged others had begun to make him drunk also. He sought a tepee where the wife of another chief was alone, and at his light call she stood at the entrance and heard him longer than she had ever listened to him before. But she withstood the temptation that was strong in the young chief’s looks and words. She did not speak much, but laughed unsteadily, and, shaking her head with averted eyes, left him, and went where several women were together, and sat among them.
Cheschapah told his victory to the council, with many sentences about himself, and how his medicine had fended all hurt from the Crows. The elder chiefs sat cold.
“Ump!” said one, at the close of the oration, and “Heh!” remarked another. The sounds were of assent without surprise.
“It is good,” said Pretty Eagle. His voice seemed to enrage Cheschapah.
“Heh! it is always pretty good!” remarked Spotted Horse.
“I have done this too,” said Pounded Meat to his son, simply. “Once, twice, three times. The Crows have always been better warriors than the Piegans.”
“Have you made water boil
like me?” Cheschapah said.
“I am not a medicine-man,” replied his father. “But I have taken horses and squaws from the Piegans. You make good medicine, maybe; but a cup of water will not kill many white men. Can you make the river boil? Let Cheschapah make bigger medicine, so the white man shall fear him as well as the Piegans, whose hearts are well known to us.”
Cheschapah scowled. “Pounded Meat shall have this,” said he. “I will make medicine to-morrow, old fool!”
“Drive him from the council!” said Pretty Eagle.
“Let him stay,” said Pounded Meat. “His bad talk was not to the council, but to me, and I do not count it.”
But the medicine-man left the presence of the chiefs, and came to the cabin of Kinney.
“Hello!” said the white man. “Sit down.”
“You got that?” said the Indian, standing.
“More water medicine? I guess so. Take a seat.”
“No, not boil any more. You got that other?”
“That other, eh? Well, now, you’re not going to blind them yet? What’s your hurry?”
“Yes. Make blind to-morrow. Me great chief!”
A slight uneasiness passed across the bantering face of Kinney. His Seltzer salts performed what he promised, but he had mentioned another miracle, and he did not want his dupe to find him out until a war was thoroughly set agoing. He looked at the young Indian, noticing his eyes.
“What’s the matter with you, anyway, Cheschapah?”
“Me great chief!” The raised voice trembled with unearthly conviction.
“Well, I guess you are. I guess you’ve got pretty far along,” said the frontier cynic. He tilted his chair back and smiled at the child whose primitive brain he had tampered with so easily. The child stood looking at him with intent black eyes. “Better wait, Cheschapah. Come again. Medicine heap better after a while.”
The Indian’s quick ear caught the insincerity without understanding it.“You give me that quick!” he said, suddenly terrible.
“Oh, all right, Cheschapah. You know more medicine than me.”
“Yes, I know more.”
The white man brought a pot of scarlet paint, and the Indian’s staring eyes contracted. Kinney took the battered cavalry sabre in his hand, and set its point in the earth floor of the cabin. “Stand back,” he said, in mysterious tones, and Cheschapah shrank from the impending sorcery. Now Kinney had been to school once, in his Eastern childhood, and there had committed to memory portions of Shakespeare, Mrs. Hemans, and other poets out of a Reader. He had never forgotten a single word of any of them, and it now occurred to him that for the purposes of an incantation it would be both entertaining for himself and impressive to Cheschapah if he should recite “The Battle of Hohenlinden.” He was drawing squares and circles with the point of the sabre.
“No,” he said to himself, “that piece won’t do. He knows too much English. Some of them words might strike him as bein’ too usual, and he’d start to kill me, and spoil the whole thing. ‘Munich’ and ‘chivalry’ are snortin’, but ‘sun was low’ ain’t worth a damn. I guess—”
He stopped guessing, for the noon recess at school came in his mind, like a picture, and with it certain old-time preliminaries to the game of tag.
“‘Eeny, meeny, money, my,’” said Kinney, tapping himself, the sabre, the paint-pot, and Cheschapah in turn, one for each word. The incantation was begun. He held the sabre solemnly upright, while Cheschapah tried to control his excited breathing where he stood flattened against the wall.
“‘Butter, leather, boney, stry;
Hare-bit, frost-neck,
Harrico, barrico, whee, why, whoa, whack!’
“You’re it, Cheschapah.” After that the weapon was given its fresh coat of paint, and Cheschapah went away with his new miracle in the dark.
“He is it,” mused Kinney, grave, but inwardly lively. He was one of those sincere artists who need no popular commendation. “And whoever he does catch, it won’t be me,” he concluded. He felt pretty sure there would be war now.
Dawn showed the summoned troops near the agency at the corral, standing to horse. Cheschapah gathered his hostiles along the brow of the ridge in the rear of the agency buildings, and the two forces watched each other across the intervening four hundred yards.
“There they are,” said the agent, jumping about. “Shoot them, colonel; shoot them!”
“You can’t do that, you know,” said the officer, “without an order from the President, or an overt act from the Indians.”
So nothing happened, and Cheschapah told his friends the white men were already afraid of him. He saw more troops arrive, water their horses in the river, form line outside the corral, and dismount. He made ready at this movement, and all Indian on-lookers scattered from the expected fight. Yet the white man stayed quiet. It was issue day, but no families remained after drawing their rations. They had had no dance the night before, as was usual, and they did not linger a moment now, but came and departed with their beef and flour at once.
“I have done all this,” said Cheschapah to Two Whistles.
“Cheschapah is a great man,” assented the friend and follower. He had gone at once to his hay-field on his return from the Piegans, but some one had broken the little Indian’s fence, and cattle were wandering in what remained of his crop.
“Our nation knows I will make a war, and therefore they do not stay here,” said the medicine-man, caring nothing what Two Whistles might have suffered. “And now they will see that the white soldiers dare not fight with Cheschapah. The sun is high now, but they have not moved because I have stopped them. Do you not see it is my medicine?”
“We see it.” It was the voice of the people.
But a chief spoke. “Maybe they wait for us to come.”
Cheschapah answered. “Their eyes shall be made sick. I will ride among them, but they will not know it.” He galloped away alone, and lifted his red sword as he sped along the ridge of the hills, showing against the sky. Below at the corral the white soldiers waited ready, and heard him chanting his war song through the silence of the day. He turned in a long curve, and came in near the watching troops and through the agency, and then, made bolder by their motionless figures and guns held idle, he turned again and flew, singing, along close to the line, so they saw his eyes; and a few that had been talking low as they stood side by side fell silent at the spectacle. They could not shoot until some Indian should shoot. They watched him and the gray pony pass and return to the hostiles on the hill. Then they saw the hostiles melt away like magic. Their prophet had told them to go to their tepees and wait for the great rain he would now bring. It was noon, and the sky utterly blue over the bright valley. The sun rode a space nearer the west, and the thick black clouds assembled in the mountains and descended; their shadow flooded the valley with a lake of slatish blue, and presently the sudden torrents sluiced down with flashes and the ample thunder of Montana. Thus not alone the law against our soldiers firing the first shot in an Indian excitement, but now also the elements coincided to help the medicine-man’s destiny.
Cheschapah sat in a tepee with his father, and as the rain splashed heavily on the earth the old man gazed at the young one.
“Why do you tremble, my son? You have made the white soldier’s heart soft,” said Pounded Meat. “You are indeed a great man, my son.”
Cheschapah rose. “Do not call me your son,” said he. “That is a lie.”He went out into the fury of the rain, lifting his face against the drops, and exultingly calling out at each glare of the lightning. He went to Pretty Eagle’s young squaw, who held off from him no longer, but got on a horse, and the two rode into the mountains. Before the sun had set, the sky was again utterly blue, and a cool scent rose everywhere in the shining valley.
The Crows came out of their tepees, and there were the white soldiers obeying orders and going away. They watched the column slowly move across the flat land below the bluffs, where the road led down the river twel
ve miles to the post.
“They are afraid,” said new converts. “Cheschapah’s rain has made their hearts soft.”
“They have not all gone,” said Pretty Eagle. “Maybe he did not make enough rain.” But even Pretty Eagle began to be shaken, and he heard several of his brother chiefs during the next few days openly declare for the medicine-man. Cheschapah with his woman came from the mountains, and Pretty Eagle did not dare to harm him. Then another coincidence followed that was certainly most reassuring to the war party. Some of them had no meat, and told Cheschapah they were hungry. With consummate audacity he informed them he would give them plenty at once. On the same day another timely electric storm occurred up the river, and six steers were struck by lightning.
When the officers at Fort Custer heard of this they became serious.
“If this was not the nineteenth century,” said Haines, “I should begin to think the elements were deliberately against us.”
“It’s very careless of the weather,” said Stirling. “Very inconsiderate, at such a juncture.”
Yet nothing more dangerous than red-tape happened for a while. There was an expensive quantity of investigation from Washington, and this gave the hostiles time to increase both in faith and numbers.
Among the excited Crows only a few wise old men held out. As for Cheschapah himself, ambition and success had brought him to the weird enthusiasm of a fanatic. He was still a charlatan, but a charlatan who believed utterly in his star. He moved among his people with growing mystery, and his hapless adjutant, Two Whistles, rode with him, slaved for him, abandoned the plans he had for making himself a farm, and, desiring peace in his heart, weakly cast his lot with war. Then one day there came an order from the agent to all the Indians: they were to come in by a certain fixed day. The department commander had assembled six hundred troops at the post, and these moved up the river and went into camp. The usually empty ridges, and the bottom where the road ran, filled with white and red men. Half a mile to the north of the buildings, on the first rise from the river, lay the cavalry, and some infantry above them with a howitzer, while across the level, three hundred yards opposite, along the river-bank, was the main Indian camp. Even the hostiles had obeyed the agent’s order, and came in close to the troops, totally unlike hostiles in general; for Cheschapah had told them he would protect them with his medicine, and they shouted and sang all through this last night. The women joined with harsh cries and shriekings, and a scalp-dance went on, besides lesser commotions and gatherings, with the throbbing of drums everywhere. Through the sleepless din ran the barking of a hundred dogs, that herded and hurried in crowds of twenty at a time, meeting, crossing from fire to fire among the tepees. Their yelps rose to the high bench of land, summoning a horde of coyotes. These cringing nomads gathered from the desert in a tramp army, and, skulking down the bluffs, sat in their outer darkness and ceaselessly howled their long, shrill greeting to the dogs that sat in the circle of light. The general sent scouts to find the nature of the dance and hubbub, and these brought word it was peaceful; and in the morning another scout summoned the elder chiefs to a talk with the friend who had come from the Great Father at Washington to see them and find if their hearts were good.
The Second Western Megapack Page 135