by John Norman
But she knew that Drum would do as he wanted, for he always did.
The thought crossed her mind that she might be able to save the white man, if she could warn him, and he could run away, before Drum came to kill him.
But Drum must never find out.
"I must go," said Drum.
Awkwardly it seemed that he would reach out to touch her arm, but he did not do so, but turned and saying nothing more left Winona standing outside the cabin.
How fine is Drum, she thought, and how fortunate am I that he would think of bringing horses to the lodge of my father.
She could hear the Ghost Dance, the stamping of the feet, the rise and fall of the wailing chant.
But Joseph Running Horse, she thought to herself, he has danced the Sun Dance.
He has not ridden his pony in the high grass and painted his face. He has not stolen horses nor taken a scalp, nor counted coup nor burned the lodges of his enemies, nor led their women bound behind his pony, but he has done more than all these things–more than all–he has been alone, and he has danced the Sun Dance.
* * *
Kicking Bear gingerly fished a piece of beef from the kettle with his left hand and began, his head thrown back, to feed it into his mouth.
Chance, with his knife, pinned a piece of beef to the bottom of the kettle and then pulled it out.
Sitting Bull, having satisfied himself, was smoking his pipe.
Running Horse, who had eaten rapidly and heavily, sat to one side. He did not speak much, as befitted a young man in the presence of older men.
In another part of the room Sitting Bull's wives and children ate from another kettle, one long since removed from the fire.
The kettle before Chance rested on a platform of rocks, and bubbled over a small fire, set in a hole in the middle of the dirt floor. Chance's eyes stung from the smoke. Not enough smoke, from Chance's point of view, found its way out the smoke hole in the roof.
Chance looked at Kicking Bear.
"I would like to learn about the Ghost Dance," said Chance to Kicking Bear.
Kicking Bear dropped the last of the beef down his throat and swallowed it.
Kicking Bear seemed to hold no particular grudge against Chance for the wound of his hand, about which there was wrapped a long strip of scarlet flannel.
Chance had offered to treat the wound but Kicking Bear had assured him loftily that he himself, Kicking Bear, was a great medicine man and would handle the matter, so Chance had not insisted, and then Kicking Bear had let him look at the hand anyway.
After he had done what he thought he should, Chance carefully bandaged the hand, and told Kicking Bear that he would not be likely to close the first and second fingers of his right hand from that time on.
He had then watched Kicking Bear, with his teeth and left hand, carefully undo the bandage he had placed on the wound, take something from his own medicine bag, which contained among other things, a small, dead bird, place this something–Chance saw now it was a leaf–on the wound, drop the white bandage in the bag, and then, patiently, with difficulty, rewrap the wound with the original strip of red flannel.
"Why?" asked Chance.
"Make it get well," had said Kicking Bear.
Chance thought maybe that was supposed to explain the leaf. Then he pointed to the flannel wrapping.
"Why this?" he asked. "Why not the white bandage?"
"More pretty," had said Kicking Bear.
Chance had begun to explain the theory of infection, but Kicking Bear would have no nonsense of this sort, and so he had desisted.
Yet from this time Kicking Bear had tended to regard Chance as a practitioner in his own trade, and worthy of respect in that regard, if not in any other.
It was well known that white men, though evil and untrustworthy, were shrewd and cunning, and knew many secrets.
It was undeniable their medicine had great power.
In particular Kicking Bear had been impressed with the stinging, brownish liquid Chance had poured on the wound from the tiny glass vial in his mysterious black leather bag, for the liquid had burned horribly and that had convinced Kicking Bear that it must be extremely efficacious.
For that liquid, in fact, Kicking Bear, not to be outdone, had given Chance in return two small leaves, from a plant Chance did not recognize, and six narrow bark-peelings, each about three inches long, from what was probably an aspen. These Chance had gravely wrapped in paper and put in his bag.
It was thus, all this done, that Chance felt it might now, following the meal, be permissible to question Kicking Bear on the theological complexities of the Ghost Dance.
"So tell me about the Ghost Dance," said Chance.
Kicking Bear looked at him, glaring, but not a glare of anger, rather one of righteous impatience with Chance's obvious lack of information.
"You can read it in your own Holy Books," said Kicking Bear.
"I don't understand," said Chance.
"Many, many years ago," said Kicking Bear, wiping his mouth with the flannel cloth wrapped about his wounded hand, "the Great Spirit so loved the white men that He sent His only Son to live among them and teach them the good trails and the true medicine, but the white men were white men, and they took the Son of the Great Spirit and foolishly nailed Him to a big wooden cross and killed Him."
"This is true," said Running Horse. "The woman who lives with the teacher at the school has told us these things, and so have many others, like the men in the black dresses."
"But," Kicking Bear went on, "the Great Spirit did not like this, which is easy to understand, and He is not so easily shamed by the white men, not Him, and He has appointed a time for the ending of the world and the great judgment. At this time the Son of the Great Spirit, the same One who was nailed to a cross and would not stay dead for the white man, will come to judge the white men and destroy them."
"Yes," said Chance, "I have read these things, or at least something like them."
"Well," said Kicking Bear, "the time of the judgment is spring. When the grass comes again and the trees are fresh with leaves, the Messiah is coming–the Second Coming, it is called–but this time He is coming to the Indians."
"I see," said Chance.
"The Indians," said Kicking Bear, "will not take the Son of the Great Spirit and nail Him to a tree. They will be happy to have the Son of the Great Spirit come and live among them, and teach them the good trails and the true medicine. They will give Him a fine buffalo-skin lodge, and good wives and good horses. They will treat Him as a chief."
"Where are the white men all this time?" inquired Chance innocently.
"Dead," said Kicking Bear. "In the spring the Messiah will come and the earth will roll up and cover the white men and their railroads and soldiers and big brick buildings. But the Indians who dance the Ghost Dance, only those, will dance on the top of the rolling earth and by the mystery of their dance be saved, and when the earth has covered the white men and their stone cities the earth will once more be new and beautiful. On the prairies the grass will grow waist high, and be green, and the streams will be swift and clear, and the antelope and the buffalo will come back to their country and with them will come all the dead Indians, and their horses and dogs, and there will be much singing and the making of medicine and much feasting and talking and hunting and being friends, and no white men."
Chance was prepared to suppose that there might be more between heaven and earth than was dreamed of in his philosophy, but he was reasonably sure that most of these things were not among them.
"Do you really believe that?" asked Chance.
Kicking Bear looked at him. "Yes," he said.
"Why?" asked Chance.
"Because I have talked with the Messiah," said Kicking Bear simply, "and He has told me it is true."
Chance felt a shiver move along his spine.
"You talked with the Messiah?" asked Chance.
"Yes," said Kicking Bear, "in the country of the Yellow Stones, wher
e the water is like steam and the rivers burn, the Messiah came to me in a vision and He taught me the Ghost Dance and the Ghost Songs, and told me to teach these things to His children."
"How do you know what He said was true?" asked Chance.
"Does the Son of the Great Spirit lie?" asked Kicking Bear.
"I suppose not," said Chance.
"Look," said Kicking Bear. "I will show you." He got up and went to the corner of the cabin where he had leaned his Winchester. Carrying the weapon in his left hand he returned to the fire. "The Messiah," he said, "taught me to make the Ghost Shirts and I have taught this to the Hunkpapas." To Chance's surprise, Kicking Bear handed him the weapon. The Indian then went to a bundle of his belongings, containing his medicine bag, which lay near the door of the cabin. With his left hand Kicking Bear rummaged about through a blanket of items and drew forth a large buckskin shirt, dyed scarlet. He shook the shirt out and held it up for Chance to look at. There was a half-moon on the chest and the image of a buffalo on the back. It was a Ghost Shirt.
"When I wear this shirt," said Kicking Bear, "no bullet or knife can hurt me. The medicine of this shirt is strong."
"You should have worn the shirt this afternoon," said Sitting Bull, between puffs on the pipe. Chance thought he detected the faint glimmer of a smile in the chiefs eyes, but he could not be sure, for the expression of Sitting Bull was now as apparently imperturbable, as impassive, as expressionless as before.
"Yes," agreed Kicking Bear. "I should have."
Then Kicking Bear held the shirt before his body. "I will show you," said Kicking Bear to Chance, and motioned for Chance to pick up the weapon and fire at him.
"I don't want to shoot you," said Chance. No sixteenth of an inch of deerhide was going to stop a Winchester bullet, and Chance had enough troubles without worrying about shooting down Kicking Bear, prophet of the Ghost Dance. Grawson was enough to have after him. There was no point in having the entire enraged Sioux nation on his trail as well. Chance smiled to himself. "No thank you," he said to Kicking Bear.
"Shoot!" demanded Kicking Bear.
All Chance could think about was the dead bird in the medicine man's medicine bag, the leaves Kicking Bear had given him, the peelings of aspen. "No," said Chance, very firmly, "no thank you."
"I will do it," said Running Horse, and before Chance could stop him, Running Horse had pulled the rifle from his lap and discharged it point-blank at the chest of Kicking Bear.
"God!" yelled Chance, springing to his feet. The cabin was still ringing with the report of the Winchester and the smoke from the expended cartridge burned Chance's eyes and nostrils.
He expected to rush to the side of Kicking Bear but the Indian was still on his feet.
Running Horse could not have missed at that range, but there seemed to be no mark on the shirt, or Kicking Bear.
"I have seen this before," said Running Horse, handing the Winchester to Chance, who took it numbly.
"Now you see," said Kicking Bear, folding the Ghost Shirt on his knee with his left hand, "the Ghost Shirt is Big Medicine."
There was not even a powder stain on the shirt.
"In the spring," said Kicking Bear, "when the Messiah comes, the white men may try to stop Him, or try to kill Him again. That will be bad for the white men because then the true children of the Messiah, the Indians, will have to fight. They will have to take to the warpath to protect the Messiah." Kicking Bear now had the shirt half folded, half wadded up. "In the fight the Ghost Shirts will protect the Indians, but the soldiers will die, because they have no Ghost Shirts."
On an impulse Chance cocked the Winchester and, firing from the hip at the porcelain mug on a shelf across the room, pulled the trigger.
The bullet burst the mug into a thousand gleaming white porcelain fragments and sank two inches into the beam log behind the shelf.
Chance handed the weapon back to Kicking Bear and sat down, wanting to think things out.
Then Sitting Bull spoke. "The soldiers," he said, "may try to stop the Ghost Dance. That will be trouble. That will be war. My people will fight."
"Do you want that?" asked Chance.
Sitting Bull looked at him stolidly. "No," he said. "But my people will not stop the Ghost Dance."
"Why not?" asked Chance.
"Because they believe it is the will of the Great Spirit," said Sitting Bull.
"Do you believe it?" asked Chance.
"I do not know," said Sitting Bull. "Maybe it is true. I think it is hard to know the will of the Great Spirit."
"What will you do if soldiers come to take you away?" asked Kicking Bear.
"I will go with them," said Sitting Bull, taking a tiny twig and pushing it into the fire under the kettle.
"The Hunkpapa will not let their chief be taken away," said Running Horse.
Sitting Bull took the twig, now burning, and put it in the bowl of his pipe, relighting it, and then threw the twig away. He puffed once or twice on the long-stemmed pipe. "That is bad," he said, "for then many men will die." He puffed some more and then looked at Chance. "Then there will be war," he said.
Chapter Eight
It was the twelfth of December, 1890.
Winter, though its signs occasionally made themselves felt, was still holding off. On the whole it had been a strange, warm dusty fall. There had been no snow as yet.
When winter comes, thought Chance, it will come fast and hard.
For more than a month Chance had shared the quarters of Running Horse, a small one-room cabin which Running Horse had occupied alone since the death of his mother, two years earlier. There had also been a younger sister and two brothers, one younger and one older, all of whom had died of smallpox in 1866. Running Horse himself, Chance had observed, in tiny, scarcely noticeable pitted scars on his face and neck, bore the marks of the disease.
It takes a people time, thought Chance to himself, to build a resistance to disease, time for the disease to weed the stocks, leaving behind the surviving, the hardy. The fair resistance of the whites to this disease, still not adequate, had been purchased cruelly over centuries, generation by embattled generation.
Chance wondered if wool blankets from smallpox wards still found their way as gifts and trade goods to Indian encampments. Probably not, he thought, the Indians are no longer dangerous. And that was in the East, he told himself, when we were more barbarous, or more frightened.
And maybe it's not true, he said to himself, maybe it's not even true.
It's time I left, Chance told himself, I've stayed too long.
That night, as they shared their kettle, Chance decided to speak to Running Horse.
He wanted to give Running Horse something to thank him for the hospitality he had been shown, but he didn't know what. He knew Running Horse well enough to know that he would not accept white man's money, and Chance had nothing much else of value. Perhaps his watch, he thought. He could buy another.
But then Running Horse would want to give him something else, of comparable value, and what did Running Horse have of suitable value that he could really afford to spare? And if the gifts were not of somewhat equivalent value Running Horse would be shamed. Perhaps my shaving mirror, thought Chance, but that didn't seem right. This requires thinking, said Chance to himself. The whole problem is preposterous perhaps, but not here in this cabin at this time. This matter will be important to Running Horse, said Chance to himself, and thus it is important to me.
While he was ruminating these matters, the affairs of the world, in the figure of Joseph Running Horse, impinged on his meditations.
Running Horse, having finished the meal, was smoking across from him.
"Today," said Running Horse, "Sitting Bull gave me this. It was brought to him from the agency."
From inside his shirt Running Horse produced a paper, it was Harper's Weekly, and a handbill.
Chance took them quickly.
"There is your picture," said Running Horse, pointing to the handbill.
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br /> For an instant Chance's hand felt like shaking, but did not, and he was glad it did not.
Rather, saying nothing, he looked over the materials. After he had read them, he said, "You must thank Sitting Bull for me. It was good of him to see that I got these things."
Chance would be moving out in the morning.
In Harper's, there was a feature story, picked up from an Omaha newspaper, which had perhaps received it from a weekly in Good Promise, or perhaps the story had drifted in, carried by a homesteader, moving eastward, sold for fifty cents or so. It told of an outlaw surgeon, who had shot a soldier in Good Promise, South Dakota, and then treated his wound and disappeared. There was no picture but the description was not bad. Chance realized he must wrap the medicine kit inside the blanket roll from now on. The other item, the handbill, was a wanted poster, with his picture, a description, and the information that he was wanted for murder and that there was a reward of one thousand dollars, not for capturing or killing him, but simply for information leading to his arrest.
Grawson, thought Chance, he's saving me for himself.
The address to which the information was to be sent was an office number in a government building in Washington, D.C.
Why doesn't it just say Lester Grawson, Chance asked himself.
Chance clenched his fists, wadding the handbill in his right hand.
He was damn sure he was not wanted for murder, and if he was, there was no thousand-dollar reward. That was a fantastic sum of money–for anything–let alone for information.
There would be no reward.
Grawson might say so, but the reward would never be forthcoming, never. Still its promise might get him for Grawson. The promise would be sufficient. Chance could bitterly imagine the meaningless check drawn on the State of South Carolina which Grawson might, taking his prisoner into custody, bestow on some duped, grinning homesteader or bounty hunter, a custody that would end probably with a bullet in the back of Chance's head.
The resources of the law belong to Grawson, thought Chance, infuriated. Grawson, with his badge, his credentials, his forged warrant for arrest.