He was halfway through the songs he knew from H.M.S. Pinafore—the little musical troupe that traveled with Bill Tourney’s show had been performing parts of it for a couple of years now—when they topped a rise, and he caught sight of the camp. For some reason he’d expected a fire pit and some pulled-up logs, the kind of camp he and Jed had been making every night for almost two weeks now.
He hadn’t expected a home.
Clearly though, that was what this was, a native town tucked up along yet another winding bend in the Snake River. Tall teepees stood in a loose half-circle around what could only be called the public square. Well… public circle. He grinned, amused at his own wit. Permanent buildings ambled away from the teepees, some as familiar to Gideon as any settler’s cabin. Other buildings looked like workshops, all of them made of wood and earth, and two big barns stood a little away from the rest. Wagons, a few of which looked brand, spanking new, were lined up beside the barn. Ponies dozed in a fenced corral, and Gideon couldn’t wait to get a look at them. Indian ponies were captured or bred from the wild mustangs that roamed the prairies out here, and he’d heard tell they were fine horseflesh, some of them.
The last thing in the world he wanted to do, though, was gawk like so many paying customers did at Bill Tourney’s show, eyes wide and mouths open, dumbstruck and looking like ignorant hicks for it. So he set his jaw firmly, concentrating on keeping his teeth together, tugged his hat a little lower down on his head, and shut up with his singing as they all approached the town. A rutted wagon path led up from the south, and when the braves reached it they turned onto it, picking up their pace like horses to stables the closer they got to home. Gideon was jogging along and Star had kicked into a trot by the time the eight of them—well, the seven men plus Star—reached the square.
People came out to meet their party, women and kids mostly, and an old man who must be the chief, the way the hunting party collected around him. Lots of words, not in any language he could understand—apparently not in any language Jed did either, because he came back to stand beside Gideon with the one brave who Gideon guessed had been assigned to watch them. After a time, the old man raised a hand, and Jed stepped forward. Gideon was still holding Star, so he figured he could just keep being useful like that and stay out of Jed’s way until somebody asked him to do something. The chief nodded at Jed and asked something in that tongue both tribes knew. Jed answered it, his voice smooth and low even if he did go slowly with the words. Whatever he said seemed to satisfy the chief, who nodded once more and turned back to the man who had been leading the hunt. Jed came back to stand beside him while the locals talked on, gesturing to each other and to the deer that the braves had laid down, pointing at the sky and the hills to the east. Gideon wished like hell they’d talk English, because this was the longest and most animated conversation anybody’d had around him since—damn, he thought, resisting a low whistle, since Livingston.
Gideon looked around the village, silently doing the math. There must be a couple of hundred people here, and most of them looked thin and tired. Five young men sat back, away from the milling crowd, and their hair was all cut short, shorter than Gideon’s was now. “They get in trouble?” Gideon asked Jed. He pointed to the men with the short hair. They looked sullen enough, maybe hair cutting was some kind of punishment in these here parts.
Jed sighed, shook his head, and turned to the brave who still carried their guns. After a brief exchange, Jed went back to using English. “They traded their hair for supplies,” he said flatly. “Those two new wagons, bags of flour for winter. The government….” He sighed again. “Your people, they do not understand. They think if they make us look white and dress white, we will become white.”
“Huh.” Gideon had actually seen a lot of pictures, conversion pictures they were called, of Indians who he’d always thought had taken up the Christian religion, or white society. It hadn’t occurred to him that the government had been bribing them to do it. “So, what? They’ll grow their hair back out now?”
“Of course,” Jed said, and shot him an annoyed look. “Would you not?”
It was Gideon’s turn to shrug, because while he understood a little more about Indians and their hair than most folks did, he clearly still didn’t understand enough. “So why did they cut their hair for supplies?”
This time, Jed actually turned and looked at him, his eyes wide and his face showing more distress than it had since they’d met up with the Shoshone. “Look around,” he hissed before drawing a deep breath and schooling his features back to stoniness. But his eyes were still wide and angry, and Gideon felt guilty without knowing why.
So he looked around, paying closer attention than he had before. Thin and tired, he thought again as he looked at the people, but more—thin to the bone, some of them, with the dark circles under their eyes and deep shadows in them. More than tired, they looked exhausted, and weary of the world.
He looked closer at their surroundings and saw the way the hide on the teepees was worn and patched, as was the clothing the Indians wore. The buildings were rough and more than a few had holes between the boards that needed filling in, and gaps in the wood itself.
“Jed?” he asked in a whisper. “What’s… why are they so…?”
Jed’s face tightened. “Because they are Indians. Because your people think it is better to confine us to land that is dying, that you have robbed of game and forests and fish, so that we might die as well.”
Gideon frowned, looking back at these Shoshone. The chief and the older man who had led the hunting party here were moving away from each other, and the group around them was shifting as well.
“His name is Tendoy,” Jed said as the older man came toward them, followed by the braves who had traveled with them earlier and a larger crowd of stone-faced onlookers. Gideon was used to being looked at, so he just smiled and nodded at those people who met his eyes, mostly the women, and waited on Jed to finish filling him in. “Tendoy is honored here. We are his guests. We will be treated well.”
Tendoy came close, holding up a hand to Jed. He spoke again in the tongue that Jed understood, and Jed answered. Then Tendoy turned and spoke in a loud voice to the braves who’d walked them to this village.
Jed whispered, “He is telling them that we are to eat well and to sleep on furs as warm as their own. They killed two deer today.”
Gideon frowned as he looked at his companion. “They got no call to feed us. Tendy here already told us they didn’t have enough game on their land for us to be huntin’ on it.”
“‘Tendoy’,” Jed corrected. “It is the way of the Newe, Gideon. If they have welcomed us as guests, then that is how they will treat us.”
“Well, I’ve got some white ways I’m pretty fond of, too,” Gideon said stubbornly. “And one of ’em is not taking from folk who can’t afford to give it. Hell, Bill Tourney lowers the price on tickets a little when we run across a town that’s hard up, and he loves money more than he loves his wife.”
Jed didn’t have a chance to answer him, because Tendoy took that moment to call to Jed, drawing him away. Gideon stepped back, rubbing Star’s neck as she nudged him with her nose looking for treats, but Gideon quieted her with a word while he watched the village folks going about their day.
Tanning racks lay on the ground not far from the road they’d walked in on, but there weren’t many hides tied to them. An old woman with two little kids, a girl and a boy it looked like, skillfully scraped one hide that they’d laid out in the sand by the river’s bank. From this distance he couldn’t tell what the hide was from, but it sure was bigger than a deer. Still, it was only one. The low building that was clearly a smokehouse, he’d expect to see sides of carcasses hanging, drying meat to get ready for winter, but to Gideon’s eye, too many of them hooks were empty. Some of these men had cut their hair for supplies. Gideon felt his mouth tighten, thinking on how important it had been to Jed that somebody carried his hair for him. Whatever barber had cut those braves
’ hair wouldn’t know nothing about that, would have just swept it out with the rest of the trash at the end of his work day.
There must be a couple of hundred people here, but the garden down by the river didn’t cover more than an acre, and it had damned little in the way of row crops, mostly corn and beans. Mule deer were big enough animals, but them two were going to go fast. He eyed the geese still tied behind his saddle, and hoped Jed wouldn’t mind. “Star, you be still now,” he said quietly, and dropped her reins to the ground. Sliding a hand over her flank, he reached to untie the cord that they’d used to tie all three birds’ necks together from the saddle strings.
Tendoy was still walking to Jed, and Gideon thought maybe it wasn’t proper for him to just go up and interrupt one of the old folks, so he looked for and found the brave who’d carried his Colt and Jed’s rifle on the walk back here. “My name’s Gideon Makepeace,” he said as he walked up to the brave. “What’s yours?”
The man looked at him for so long, Gideon thought maybe he wasn’t going to answer. But then he said, “Cowhatocowait.”
Gideon wanted to groan. Why didn’t these folks have white names, too, like Harold Crowe and the other Indians in the show? Hell, maybe they did and just weren’t inclined to tell him. “Ka-ha-do…” he tried and frowned. “Beg pardon?”
That actually brought a smile to the brave’s face, and he repeated his name, slow and careful: it sounded like Cowhad-to-cowait to him, so he said it back, just to be sure.
The brave nodded, then raised his hand, palm to the ground, and waggled it side to side. Gideon grinned, reckoning that “close enough” translated fine for just about every kind of person he’d ever run across. “We appreciate you having us as company. My folks taught me that we should always have a gift to give when we visit.” He held out the three geese. “Don’t know if I’m s’posed to speak to the older feller over there. It okay if I give ’em to you? You could maybe pass ’em on from Jed and me?”
Cowhatocowait’s face softened some, and he nodded. “I do not give them for you. You give.” He pointed to where Jed and the old man stood, so Gideon squared his shoulders and prepared to do this all over again. He came up behind Jed, trying to be quiet enough but failing, because Jed turned to glance at him before he got within ten feet of the pair.
“Here,” he said, taking a step past Jed and holding the geese out to Tendoy. The older man drew back, maybe in surprise, and a couple of men from the camp moved fast, coming in close like Gideon was gonna—what, knock him in the head with three dead geese? Still, he held them out and waited, looking away only long enough to check that Star was minding, ground-tied right where he’d left her. Her ears were swiveled toward the corral and the other horses, but she stayed put, and when he turned his head back around, Tendoy was frowning at the geese, then up to his face.
As Tendoy met his eyes, he said, “I got us five of these Canada geese a few days from here. My family and I, we bring something when we come visiting. Specially seeing as how y’all weren’t expecting us, and you’re still doing us the kindness of letting us stay here tonight.”
Tendoy stared at him before his eyes went to the geese. Then, he turned slowly to look at Jed. “You took them,” he said, tilting his head toward the geese.
Gideon frowned in confusion until Jed nodded and said, “Gideon did, with my rifle and his bullets. He speaks for us both. There is another, also, cooked. We will share that as well.”
Tendoy looked back to Gideon, but Gideon was watching Jed. The corners of those thin lips twitched just a little, not a smile, but the start of one. Gideon smiled for both of them and held the geese closer to Tendoy, glad when the old man took them because they’d been getting damned heavy. Fifty pounds of gooseflesh wasn’t as good as a mule deer, but it was more than these people’d had before, and Gideon was glad to do it—glad Jed was, too, after what Tendoy had said.
From there, everything went easier. He and Jed were ushered away, surrounded by men who wanted to share their tobacco and company. Gideon had to explain three times that he needed to take care of his horse before Cowhatocowait understood that he wasn’t gonna let nobody else do it for him, and had two teenaged girls walk him over to the corral.
“Any stallions in there?” he asked, peering around the corral for balls beneath long, bushy tails. He wasn’t willing to take the chance that she might be amenable to company.
The girls frowned at each other and at him, until Cowhatcowait caught up to him, and he could ask again. “Need my mare to be ready to perform when we get to San Francisco. Last thing I need from her right now’s a foal growing inside her. Just wanted to make sure you didn’t have any studs mixed in here.”
Cowhatcowait smiled and pointed up the river, where a lean-to and a much smaller corral had been built right into the water’s edge. They didn’t even have to carry water for the horses kept there. “We have three stallions. But your horse is not in season.”
Gideon shrugged. “I spent the last four months on a breeding farm, and I swear some days it seemed like most of my time was took up keeping the studs away from her, or her away from the studs. I just don’t want to take any chances.”
“She has good lines. Why do you not wish to breed her?”
“I work for a wild west show,” Gideon said, wondering if he’d get invited to tell some of his stories. “I think she’ll make great foals, too, but she’s only four years old, and I ain’t ready to ruin her for show work just yet.”
Cowhatcowait shrugged and shook his head. “She is safe here. Kimane and her brother sleep at the lean-to, to care for our stallions. The horses have never escaped before.”
Gideon nodded and started pulling Star’s tack and saddlebags. She’d had a long day and a fast one, compared to most, so he borrowed a burlap sack and rubbed her down good, smoothing her hair and looking for hot spots from her saddle or the bags, but she was fine. He dug in his carpetbag for a crab apple and held it out, enjoying the feel of the soft hairs and softer lip as she nibbled it out of his palm before, with a scritch for her ears, he set her loose in the corral.
“Star is well?” Jed asked him when Cowhatcowait escorted him back to a big fire pit between the teepees.
Gideon squeezed Jed’s shoulder in thanks. It had taken Jed some time to accept just how attached to his horse Gideon was, and more time to appreciate why.
“She’s good. They even let me treat her with some oats, and in the morning I’ll let her loose with the mares and the geldings to graze. Be a nice break for her, too.”
“For her, yes,” Jed said, his face still and sober, but his eyes were dancing. Jed was teasing him again.
“Yep. Now me, I’m itching to be moving, but I suppose I can suffer with the break,” he said, and smiled when Jed shook his head, grinning fondly.
“Come to the fire, Gideon.”
Gideon followed Jed to the big fire pit where three circles of logs, like theater seats, surrounded a big open space and the fire in the center. Cowhatcowait directed Gideon into the second row, and Gideon settled down next to Jed. A minute later Tendoy joined them, settling into a squat on Jed’s other side. Gideon came to appreciate the bonfire as darkness fell and the night cooled down. There was a lot of talk, and some of it was even in English so he could understand it.
As the smell of cooking meat started to fill the air, Gideon felt a change in the people around them. Voices rose and there was more laughter. Someone started playing drums, thin hides stretched over wooden frames, and before long a brave in the front circle peeled off his shirt and started dancing. Others followed suit, and soon enough most of the people from the inner circle were doing the same. It wasn’t dancing as Gideon was accustomed to, not paired-off couples doing reels and twirls around the floor; instead, it was mostly men, stepping to beats of their own, a little like what Harold, Thomas, Aaron and the others did for the paying audiences in Bill Tourney’s show. They moved in a wide circle around the fire, stomping their feet and clapping their hands, chan
ting like Jed but louder, their voices and the women’s in the crowd blending with the rhythm from the drums. This dancing showed him more than anything else just how much of a put-on Harold and his kin did, and how much of their real dances they hid or saved for their special occasions.
As the dancing went on, more of the men stripped off their shirts, twirling about with their skin glistening in the glow of firelight. A few went a step farther, dancing only in thongs and moccasins, their legs muscular and defined, sweeping upward to curves of ass and waist that made Gideon have thoughts he knew he ought not to be having right now. He wondered if Jed would take offense that these writhing bodies were affecting him.
After a while, as the speed of the music changed, Tendoy leaned toward Jed and said something. Jed frowned, his eyebrows drawing together. He glanced to Gideon then turned back to Tendoy who said something else and smiled. As with Jed, it was a slight shift of the corners of his lips, but his eyes lit with amusement, and Gideon wondered how bad this was going to be.
“Jed?” he murmured, leaning in close to his friend. “Everything all right?”
Jed said something else to Tendoy, who nodded, before Jed turned and said just for Gideon, “I have been asked to dance. It is an honor, to share the dancing circle.”
Gideon looked to the dancers near them. “They, uh, ain’t gonna ask me to join in, are they?” he asked. Not that he hadn’t danced with his Indian friends before, when he’d been drunk enough.
Jed snorted. “No, they will not.”
Gideon tilted his head Jed’s way, examining the way his eyes followed the dancers’ movements, certain Jed wasn’t thinking the things Gideon had been a moment ago. “You want to dance?” he asked.
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