by Max Brand
But now he thought of other tales, of whole armed caravans that had been wiped out by a single attack. He saw more than he thought; he used his eyes and drew deductions. A lot of these Indians before him were as naked as Mother Nature, except for a small covering about the loins, and the sunlight played over muscles of solid bronze. Indians are supposed to be strong in the legs and weak in the arms and shoulders, but these fellows looked as though they were professional wrestlers, every one of them.
They made a pretty picture—for a man on top of a hill. It would have been a nice sight—if the red men had been going the other way. But they came on horses made beautiful by speed. Most of the riders had rifles; some extended lances. A few carried in their hands nothing but short sticks.
Bill Tenney knew about the ones who carried sticks. They were the hot-blooded young devils who had sworn that they would touch a living enemy with the coup stick before they drew a weapon. Thereby, they would achieve the highest of all honors—for a mounted man to touch an armed footman who was uninjured.
Queer devils, these Indians—a little too queer for Bill Tenney’s taste. Like all thieves, he was essentially a practical man. Now he dropped the butt of his rifle to the ground and, leaning on the barrel of it, waited for the charge to drive home.
Some of the riders did not go straight at him. Half of them swerved to the side and charged the steep bank up which White Horse had plunged, but none of them gained the top. Two or three pushed their struggling ponies halfway to the crest of the rigid slope, and then were rewarded with handsome tumbles that stretched them on the flat of the ravine floor below. But they rose, remounted, and seemed unharmed.
The half dozen who remained in the charge against Bill Tenney swooped about him. They came close so that he could see the silver glistening of the tribal scars on their breasts. Those scars came from the initiation festivals about which he had heard, when thongs were torn through the pectoral muscles by iron-willed young initiates.
The bodies all seemed young, all equally young, and the merest youth of the party had a face cast in a savage mold. The older men were like cruel masks, things designed to strike terror to the heart. Bill Tenney was afraid, but he was also resigned, watchful, ready for any chance if it was offered.
They weren’t giving chances, however. Four of the fellows who bore the coup sticks rode about him and gave him smart whacks as they went on. The rest pulled out their horses in a swirl of dust. One of them threw a noose of rawhide rope over the neck of Tenney, pulled the loop taut, and seemed ready to drag the white man to death. Yet, with his horse turned, he waited for a moment.
The oldest-looking brave of the party, the one with the longest hair flowing down his back, came up and made his face more hideous with speech. He tried a harsh, rapid, guttural tongue, at first. But when Tenney shook his head the fellow growled: “White Horse . . . where get him?”
“Rusty Sabin give,” said Tenney. “Red Hawk give.”
“Give?” exclaimed the warrior. He took a stride nearer and grasped Tenney’s throat.
“Red Hawk no give!” he declared vehemently.
Tenney shrugged his shoulders as he repeated: “Red Hawk give.”
The elderly brave glared at him for a moment. The face of the old man was a living horror. The mouth kept twitching so that deep furrows sprang in and out along the cheeks. His nostrils kept flaring and contracting with each breath.
“Lie . . . lie,” he muttered. “White men all lie.”
“Red Hawk is white,” said Tenney.
The brave fetched out a long knife with the look of one ready to use it. However, he shoved it reluctantly back into its sheath. He wore only the belt and the loincloth, but his body was as young as that of any of the other Herculean figures around him—full of slope and shine and the bulging of mighty muscles.
After that, he mounted, took the rawhide lariat from the hand of the fellow who had lassoed Tenney, gave the captive a jerk that half strangled him, and told him to start moving.
Tenney started. Walking would not do. These devils trotted their horses, or even loped them gently, and Tenney had to run uphill and down dale.
He ran till the soft green waves of the prairie washed up into the blue sky, and the sky rippled like blue water along the ground at his feet. He ran till his lungs were filled with flame. Finally he stumbled. The rope rubbed his throat, dragged him a dozen feet before he managed to scramble erect, and then he had a bad few minutes after he had loosened the rawhide around his neck. Those minutes were spent in trying to catch his spent breath again. He kept on catching it, but it would not really come back, and, all the while, the cruel old devil at the head of the party would not so much as turn in the saddle, and all the rest kept their backs likewise turned upon Bill Tenney.
He was gone, staggering in his stride, almost done in every way, before the warriors dropped the pace of their horses to a walk. And Tenney, at that, could still go on, held toward a straight direction by the tugging of the lariat every time he reeled to this side or to that.
But he uttered no complaint. He felt that it would be as silly to waste breath complaining to these men as to utter laments to hungry wolves.
After a time, his knees had strength once more. And also he was able to see that over the horizon the peaked tops of a group of Indian lodges were appearing. That was what made him think of White Horse. These fellows were likely to take him into their village and torture him to death. But if White Horse had been under him, a pale thunderbolt of speed, he could have galloped away from the best of them. He could have laughed at the best mounted of the warriors. As it was, he had to trudge on foot, into whatever trouble waited for him.
As the troop came nearer, a cloud of naked young boys rushed out of the camp on racing ponies and swirled around the returning war party, screeching. Nearly every one of these young devils carried a weapon of some sort. Knives, clubs, axes were brandished over the head of big Bill Tenney, and some of the rascals had arrows with blunted heads. With the latter they thumped his body soundly. When the blows fell on the raw of his still naked back, they gave intense pain. However, this was not yet death, such as he expected. He wondered, when the flames of the fire began to consume him, if he would be able to endure that agony, too, without screaming. And an immense pride and resolution filled his heart and swelled in his throat as he swore that he would die like a man.
In that moment he looked back along his life as a traveler sometimes looks back along a great road, and it seemed to him that he had never stopped at an inn of importance. It seemed to him that he could spend future days better, that he could find men of greater significance, that so far his work had consisted of idle gestures. He had been a thief, but a thief cannot really take anything. He can only steal money or worldly valuables—baubles. What is worthwhile is something else. He wondered what that something might be.
They went still closer to the Indian village. Then a cloud of the smallest children, intermixed with howling dogs, poured out around him, and the dogs leaped high and snapped their teeth close to his throat. They seemed to be howling, even when they were closing their teeth. He could feel the teeth in his flesh, as it were. But to be torn with teeth would be nothing compared with the soul-searing bite of the fire.
Then he was on the verge of the camp, and he saw that all the lodges were arranged in circles. Some of them were new and glistening white. Some of them were tanning with time, from rain and with sun. Thin cracks seared the leather, here and there. And the gaudy, childish paintings that decorated the tents were sometimes garishly fresh and sometimes crackling away to obscurity.
Here and there, he saw braves standing at the entrances to their lodges, cloaked in buffalo robes, sometimes with their faces almost completely hidden, and often with their stark features seen only through deep shadow. He saw the squaws, the old ones who were time-bent and work-worn, their hands dangling from their sides like the hands of laboring men—big hands, with fingers too thick to suggest femininity.
There were the young squaws, also, still with the unmistakable signs of life upon them. And last of all, there were the girls. Cruelty was in their smiling, no doubt, and their beauty was not that of white girls.
White men only look at faces. They may joke about the bodies of women, but they only look at faces. Put the face of a saint on the body of a cripple, and the girl will marry well.
Well, it was different, here. These girls were modestly clad, and yet the supple flow of young bodies was apparent under the thin deerskins. And the picture was a whole. Those faces, often blunted, wide, too round, were to be observed rather for the expression than the fact. Tenney, near to death, noticed those women. And he held himself a little taller and stepped with a lighter and a longer stride.
He was ashamed of the red gorings on his back that told that he had been flogged. He was ashamed of the lariat that clasped his neck and led him along like a dog. Despite these things, he told himself that he could die like a man, if there were such women as these to watch while he was being tormented. He felt that he would be able to laugh in the midst of the flames as, windblown, they rotted away his body a little at a time.
Then, before one of the lodges, the party halted. He was dragged through the entrance flap. A strong jerk on the lariat laid him flat on the ground, and he was wise enough not to try to stir, not to struggle to sit up.
Chapter Sixteen
He lay for a long time. He was aware that there were two young braves in the teepee. They never spoke to one another. They kept watching his big body. Sometimes, as dust worked into the whip wounds in his back, the anguish it caused him blotted out everything in his mind, and sometimes the cold force of thought made him forget his torment.
Hanging about the neck of one of the braves was what seemed to be a dried up mouse skin. The other wore a shapeless pouch that could not be identified. One carried a short truncheon with a spearhead on it. The other was unarmed except for a knife at his belt. But Bill Tenney knew that he could not escape. Among white men he was almost a giant. But among these Indians, he was hardly more than a peer. He had seen scarcely a single mature man in the camp who he would not have considered at least his equal.
After a time, the tent flap was raised, and another man entered. At sight of him, Tenney started to a sitting posture, though one guard instantly balanced his javelin for the cast, and the other jerked out a thin-bladed knife. But they held their hands. Perhaps they understood the excitement of their captive, who saw before him another white man.
Not that the white man was capable of much active interference. He was old. His beard flowed softly and loosely. It was the beard of a man who is too lazy to shave. And his body had almost the same loose contour.
He was dressed like an Indian, below, and above the hips like a white man. Yet he was not a half-breed. The blue of his eye was too clear, and his skin, where it showed on the hands and about the eyes, was apparently merely darkened by a tan. He held in his hand a short, curved pipe. No weapon was on his person.
Behind him, there was a scuffle at the entrance. Then an Indian girl broke in. No, she was not all Indian. She had blue eyes, like the man, and her skin, instead of the dull copper, was a paler tint with a deeper glow shining through it. She was breathing hard; hands reached after her through the tent flap, and a savage face showed for an instant until the white man spoke.
He took the girl by the arm. She chattered at him, half savagely and half appealingly, until he released her. After that, her step was like a spring as she moved to the place where big Bill Tenney sat upright. The guards, he noticed, had lowered their weapons, strange smiles appearing on their harsh faces. And she, leaning over Tenney, burst out at him: “Is it true? Did you have White Horse? Did you get it from the Red Hawk? Did you get it from him? Did you lie, and say that Red Hawk gave you the horse?”
He had to think for an instant. It was hard to think. The dusky beauty of the girl closed up his throat. She was trembling, and, like hers, Tenney’s flesh and spirit vibrated. He looked like a half-wit as he sat there. But he managed to nod his head and say: “Yes, he gave it to me.”
“You lie!” cried the girl. “You murdered him! You killed him and took the horse! You sneaked up like a coward and killed him in his sleep. You could not have faced him. He would have laughed, and the breath of Sweet Medicine would have blown you away like a dead leaf. You could not face him . . . you must have killed him in his sleep.”
Tenney shook his head. Words were still hard to come at. He merely said: “We were chased. My horse pegged out, and he gave me White Horse.”
“Gave you?” cried the girl incredulously.
“Wait a minute,” said the white man. “You know, Blue Bird, that Rusty is always the one for giving and giving.”
“You look like a wolf. You look like a white wolf. Why would he give the horse to you?” exclaimed the girl.
“I dunno,” said Tenney. “He’s queer. I’d hauled him out of the river one time . . . out of the Tulmac. That’s all I know about it. But he gave me White Horse, all right.”
“And what happened to him?” she demanded. With this she clasped her hands and crooked a knee, and seemed to be sinking down toward the earth, in the ecstasy of her entreaty.
“I dunno,” repeated Tenney. “The soldiers were after us. Major Marston and his lot. I guess they grabbed Rusty Sabin. There wasn’t no fighting. They just sort of come up and took him. I seen it while I was riding away.”
“You rode away and left your friend?” said the girl. “You rode off and. . . .”
She looked ready to go at his eyes with her hands made into eagle talons, but the white man caught her and pushed her rudely toward the exit. He called out, because her struggles were almost too much for him, and big dark-colored hands reached through the flap of the lodge and mastered her, bearing her away.
Still her outcries, and then her sobbing, reached Tenney’s ears from a distance. And something in his thought magnified the sounds and multiplied them. He was full of ears. He could close his eyes, and to the end of time, he knew, he would remember clearly the sheen of her blue ones. He had been touched—and far deeper than the skin.
He heard the white man saying: “Well, it kind of looks mean for you, stranger. What might your name be?”
The fat white man with the beard was sitting cross-legged on the ground near him, stuffing his pipe full of tobacco.
“Bill Tenney is my name. What’s yours?” he answered.
“I’ve got another name,” said the white man. He finished filling his pipe, sprinkled some light-colored dust over the tobacco, and then picked a coal out of the fire that burned in the center of the tent and laid it on the bowl of the pipe.
Tenney noticed that, like a real Indian, the man blew four ceremonial puffs of smoke to the quarters of the compass before he settled down to the enjoyment of the pipe.
“I’ve got another name . . . somewheres,” went on the fellow, “but among the Cheyennes I’m called Lazy Wolf. It’s not a name I’m proud of, but I reckon it has to stick. Lazy Wolf is what you might as well call me.”
“All right.” Tenney nodded. “But what’s all the excitement about Rusty Sabin, up here? What’s it all about? Or is it because I had White Horse? Or is it because I let White Horse get away from me?”
Lazy Wolf puffed smoke out of his fat lips. He pulled down from his forehead a pair of spectacles that had been riding high, and, as they settled over the bridge of his nose, he took on an owlish aspect. Gravely he considered Tenney.
“I’ll tell you plenty of things about Rusty Sabin and this tribe,” he remarked. “But first I better get your straight story. How did you come by the welting, and who gave it to you? How did you come by White Horse? Tell me the whole yarn.” He added: “I wanna do you some good, stranger, and it’s going to be a mighty hard thing to wangle. These redskins want your hair, and they’ll likely take it. But if you got any chance, it’s because I’m willing to talk for you. Talk to me like I was wearing your own pair
of ears.”
Tenney blinked. He liked the truth little more than he liked justice and its courses. He was a good, thoroughgoing liar, as a rule, and the temptation was to start lying now. Yet an instinct worked in him to make him understand that this was the time for the naked truth, no matter how much shame there might be in it. So he simply said: “I stole twenty pounds of gold out of a trading post down on the Tulmac. I got up to Fort Marston. I seen a steamer coming in, and a white horse was lost off of it, a man diving in after the horse. I managed to fetch them both out with a canoe I grabbed. The man was Rusty Sabin. He shook hands with me and said he was my friend. Afterward, I was caught with the gold on me. They took me into the fort and tied me to a post and flogged me.”
His lips pulled back far enough to show his teeth, as he said this. “Then Rusty and a brace of Cheyennes showed up and got me away from the major,” he went on, “and we rode away across the plains. The soldiers followed on, with dogs to light the way for ’em, and my mustang pegged out. Then Rusty climbed down off White Horse and gave it to me. And I took it and rode away till this gang of Injuns stopped me.” He paused. His face was hot and his breathing fast. A queer agony of shame, an entirely unfamiliar sensation, was burning through his blood. “Back there at the fort,” he muttered rapidly, “they’d knocked the hell out of me. Anyway . . . I dunno . . . anyway, I took White Horse and I rode off . . . and I left Rusty behind me, there. . . .”
Here he jerked up his head and glared at Lazy Wolf in defiance, but the calm consideration in the eyes of the older man overwhelmed him, and by degrees he found his head sinking until his chin was on his breast.
“Well,” said Lazy Wolf, “I’m gonna do my best for you. I believe what you’re saying, by the shame that seems to be in you. But will these Indians believe you? I don’t know. Let me tell you, these are Cheyennes. Rusty is the biggest medicine man that ever walked the ground, as far as this tribe is concerned. And that leads me on to tell you the other half of the story that you ought to know. The Cheyennes felt pretty mean when Rusty left them and found his father and went back to the white people . . . and not long after he went away, a sickness hit a lot of the people. The medicine men danced themselves black in the face and wore their craziest masks and whooped and hollered and ordered up steam baths every day, with plunges in cold water afterward, but the sick men got sicker and sicker.