by Clay Fisher
Yet beyond her unbelievable anticipation and eager submission to his least lordly whim or lowest male passion, the Indian girl amazed him with her practical abilities.
Did he need a new pair of calf-high, flesh-out, wolfskin winter boots, he had them within the week; and of the most beautiful workmanship in design, beading, and delicate quilling he had ever seen. Did he, on the other hand, make an exceedingly heavy killing at one of his strychnined baits and need an extra hand at skinning out, the tiny Crow girl could strip and flesh out the pelt of a hundred-pound buffalo lobo as swiftly as any man he had ever hunted with. Or she could gut a buck, pack eighty pounds of meat up or down the mountain, build a fire in any weather, with or without flint and steel. Make a pine bough bed or a willow thatch wind shelter. Or a wolf set, or a rabbit snare, or a grouse net. Or do any other of the thousand-and-one things a skilled scout or hunter could do to live and be happy in the wilderness.
As for herself, Crow Girl simply thanked her Absaroka gods for letting her be Lone Wolf’s woman. Past serving him, she delighted mostly in listening to the many strange and wondrous stories of the white man’s world beyond the Minnisoso, the big muddy river, which her Wasicun mate had to tell her. If, from Crow Girl, Kelly learned much about the Indians he had not known before, Crow Girl learned from him everything she was ever to know about the white man. Yet, unlike the Irish scout, the Indian girl did not change. She loved this one paleface with a devotion and a blindness and a loyalty of passion which was beyond measure. But as for any other white man, or all other white men, Crow Girl did not yield a single one of her red prejudices.
Though she listened to Kelly read his books before the fireplace and even learned to recite for him in her halting new English the entire soliloquy from Hamlet, as well as scattered bits and pieces of Poe’s “The Raven” and sundry of his favorite isolated lines from Burns, sic those from “To a Louse on a Lady’s Bonnet”—“Oh wad some power the giftie gie us to see oursels as others see us!”—she never understood what she was saying except that it made her man and master cry out with delight or give her a quick kiss or squeeze, for any one of which small favors she would gladly have died or have done anything else within her Indian comprehension.
Yet it was precisely the limitations of that same comprehension which, in the end, very nearly defeated Kelly. As the winter wore on and Crow Girl began to show her child, he became increasingly aware of her growing discontent. Still, he was helpless either to stem or understand it.
The wolfing had gone beautifully. There had been no trouble making good bait kills, sheep, elk, blacktail deer, and even stray wintering buffalo being plentiful, and he had taken up to twenty-two grown wolves from one strychnined carcass in a single night. As February and March wore away into April, he had a great load of prime pelts cached in the fur shed against the coming spring runoff and the opening of South Pass down into the Basin. He quit baiting, then, to give his full time to Crow Girl, now six months heavy with child and badly needing attention.
But nothing he could do or say seemed to penetrate her deepening melancholy. Shortly, he knew that he must do so, must somehow reach her retreating primitive mind or stand to lose her. And there was that in the increasingly far-eyed quality of her depressed restlessness which warned him that the latter possibility was no idle chance.
As May burgeoned and the spring melt began in earnest, Luther Kelly realized that any next morning might open the pass. That morning, when it came, would be the one when he would awaken to find the pine bough bed by his side empty, its soft blankets long cooled of the fragrant warmth of H’tayetu Hopa’s dear form. He must not let that happen. He must find out what was troubling her and find it out before it was forever too late.
As is usual with young men in love, the obvious did not occur to Kelly until well past the eleventh hour.
Then it struck him as the greatest inspiration ever received by mistreated man.
He would ask her what was the matter!
Kelly got his answer in almost as little time as it took him to ask for it.
Crow Girl burst into tears and told him she was homesick. That she wanted to go back to the lodges of her people. That she could not face going into the white man’s settlements with Lone Wolf and living there in the shameful way of a Mandan or a Big Belly. That she wanted, above all, to have her baby among her own free kind. It would be an Indian and should be born and reared as an Indian. Could not Lone Wolf see that?
Kelly nodded that he could and put his arm comfortingly around her.
Actually, her odd statement that her baby would be an Indian did not catch at his conscious thoughts. He let it pass as a figure of red speech, not a literal announcement of heredity. She would naturally think of her child as an Indian. The fact that it was as much his as hers would not have entered her wild mind. Well, he had no argument with that. Let her see it that way and be happy.
He had no argument, either, with her wish to go home.
He understood that and, moreover, it fitted into the thought which had been growing of late in his own mind—he could not and would not, in the final hour, take this unspoiled child of nature into the filth and degradation awaiting any of her dark blood in the settlements.
At the same time, he realized, she could no longer follow him upon the hazards of the hunting and scouting trail. Not with the little one to come so soon now.
What more natural, then, than letting her return to her people? And what more reasonable than his returning with her to live out his life as an adopted member of the tribe?
This last was not as melodramatic as it sounded.
Other white men had done it and successfully. There was Cetan Mani, Walking Hawk, of the Oglala Sioux, for example. He was rumored to have been a full colonel in the Confederate army come to the frontier in ’66, but two years before Kelly, and living now with his Indian mate, North Star, as a full war chief with Crazy Horse’s band. It was a thought which, once faced, actually fired the imagination. And he, Kelly, had seldom been caught short on that commodity.
Eagerly, he told the sobbing Crow Girl of his decision, pledging her that he would never depart from it and that they would live out their lives as Indians. He further promised that they would leave for her Kangi Wicasi homeland the moment the trails were clear, tarrying at Reed’s Ranch only long enough to leave a message for Big Anse to go up and bring out the furs.
The way the Absaroka girl looked at him, the way she kissed him through her tears, the way she crawled into and curled up in his arms and went to sleep like a trusting, happily tired puppy there in front of the fieldstone fireplace, was all the reward any man could have asked for his small sacrifice of white superiority.
The following morning, May 27, Kelly glassed the south pass from the granite outcrop above the cabin and decided it was open enough. After all, they were in no position to be taking their sweet time about getting out. The first day they could travel would be the best day for them to do so. From what he could see through the field glasses, this was that day.
He aroused Crow Girl, telling her to make ready for the trail. He, meanwhile, would go out while it was still early and drop a fat buck for fresh meat on the march. He would be gone no longer than half an hour. Not sighting game in that time, he would return, and they would go out on black coffee and cold bread.
Crow Girl’s delight was candescent enough for a man to warm his hands by. Kelly left the cabin with his heart as high as the turreted snows of the distant Big Horns. He had cut his sign and downed his buck within ten minutes. Had skinned and quartered out the saddle he wanted within ten more. Was topping out on the landmark rock behind the cabin within the third ten.
And was throwing himself flat on his belly in the slushed snowpack within the following five never-to-be-forgotten seconds.
Below him lay a sight he would remember to the grave.
Thirteen winter-ragged Sioux ponies stan
ding hipshot in the morning sun just outside the open elk-hide door of the little cedar log cabin in Crow Girl Meadow.
23
Kelly thought fast, faster than at any time in the previous eight years of necessarily quick Indian thinking. Yet each new trail along which his racing mind leaped hopefully led only to some new dead end of despair. There it wound up trapped by a swiftly growing circle of inescapable facts.
Inescapable and frightening.
Sayapi had badly outguessed him on the vagaries of Montana weather. The youthful subchief had anticipated the melt-off by at least seventy-two hours, giving himself the exact time to come from the lower elevations along the Musselshell to the mouth of South Pass just as the trail to Crow Girl Meadow opened. He must also have defied the Sioux taboo against night traveling to have gotten up the pass into the meadow so early in the morning. Furthermore, his presence here without his brooding uncle almost guaranteed there had been another break between the two and that young Sayapi was once more running unhaltered, on his own.
These were very dangerous conditions.
They let you know you had seriously underestimated Gall’s nephew both as a man and as an enemy. Now, too late, you realized the headstrong Hunkpapa youth did not carry his uncle’s fighting blood in vain. He had more of Gall in him than a quirky temper, an inbred distrust of wandering white scouts, and a constitutional hatred of home-building Wasicun breakers-of-the-buffalo-grass. He had that rarest of Indian inheritances—a quality shared to Kelly’s knowledge among the major Sioux only by Crazy Horse, Gall, and Sitting Bull—the ability to put together a plan of campaign and to follow it out in painstaking military detail.
Now the young devil had Crow Girl and twelve hard-memoried friends along to make sure that he kept her.
The next move was Kelly’s. The moody Sioux youth would know that. Would be waiting down there right now for him to make it.
Well, at any rate, Kelly thought grimly, it was nice of him to wait. He might just as well have set out to run him, Kelly, down on his way back to the cabin.
Might have? The thought put the flattened scout’s scalp to tingling eerily. Might have, bushway! He almost certainly had! There was no one down there in that cabin right now but a bound and gagged Absaroka girl with a minimum bodyguard of at most three or four warriors. Sayapi and the rest of his boys would be out doing the same thing Kelly had just been doing. Hunting. Only they would not be hunting a fat young blacktail buck. They would be hunting a fatheaded young black-haired bull. A white one about twenty-six years old and mortal apt not to get a great deal older.
Kelly lay still for another two or three seconds, long enough to flash his eyes right and left in that flicking ninety-degree head-motionless viewing arc, the trick of which white scouts who survived their first season in Sioux country had quickly acquired from their friendly settlement-Indian instructors. He saw nothing.
The next move was academic and made faster than the twist in midair of a falling cat to put its feet beneath itself.
He had five shots. There was one shell in the Winchester’s chamber, four more in its magazine. He had used a round on the blacktail buck, had loaded but six to begin with, a happy carelessness which he was regretting even as he whirled, got his knee propped under his sling-arm, and began dropping running Indians.
They had been in a soundless crawl-up behind him, working their ways out from the backing timber forest’s edge across the boulder-strewn surface of the granite outcrop. The moment Kelly came up off his flat-muscled middle and slewed around to face them with the Winchester shouldered, they sprang into full charge, Sayapi fearlessly leading the wild yelling rush.
This Indian, Kelly remembered thinking as his trigger finger tightened for the squeeze-off, is a very brave and a very foolish and a very dead Indian. A man almost hated to center him, but this was no time for moral regrets. Sayapi had a gun too. And was very clearly bent on using it. Kelly crooked his finger on in, setting his cheek for the jump and slap of the .44-.40 recoil.
The heavy charge boomed, belching forth its characteristic mouthful of greasy smoke and fat orange flame, and the white scout’s eyes widened in disbelief.
Somehow, in some fantastic way no truly just God would ever have sanctioned, the best offhand shot in the Upper Missouri drainage basin had missed an Indian on foot with a knee-braced, deliberately aimed shot from less than sixty feet!
Fortunately, for at least one famous general officer and several hundred unsung troopers of the US Army who had not yet had the anticipated pleasure of meeting him, Yellowstone Kelly’s next four snaps were all meat-in-the-pot shots.
A different kind of outcry at once overlay the triumphant closing yells of but a moment before; the agonizing, stricken-animal sounds men make when a big-caliber bullet slams into them at pointblank range. For some it is a high crazy whimper, for some a low angry growl, for some only an explosion of released air from smashed chest cavities, for some no sound at all beyond that of the leaden slug’s own soapy smack of going home in deep-hit flesh.
But your Indian, Kelly knew, would cry out if possible when seriously hurt. A stoic in most other realms of suffering, sneering at wounds which would make the strongest white man weep with fear, the red warrior wanted his companions and his enemies to know when he took a real coup in open battle. There were two reasons for this. First, his inordinate pride in having taken a dangerous wound, second, his desire to signal his brothers that while still alive, he was out of action. Hence, Kelly was sure, as he saw his subsequent four targets grab their bellies and go down, that Sayapi’s original twelve were now eight.
But the young Sioux himself, an impossible target with his weaving pantherine speed, was on top of him while the last of the four braves was still falling.
The finger-sized bore of the subchief’s brand-new .50-caliber Springfield trap-loader gaped yawningly as the mouth of a twelve-pound howitzer not eight feet from Kelly’s face.
The white scout did what he could; threw his empty rifle slashingly at the other’s head.
Sayapi had to duck and shoot or not shoot at all. His off-balance discharge went four feet over Kelly’s hunched shoulder, whined harmlessly out and away across the empty meadow air: Sayapi saw the white man’s powerful body hurtle toward him. Saw the long, thick-boned arm snake back for the leaping blow. Tensed, too late, his own great strength. His foe’s clenched fist, gnarled and knotted as a black oak burl, exploded alongside his heavy Sioux jaw with a crack like a breaking ridgepole, and Gall’s magnificently muscled six-foot nephew dropped forward into the ground-slush to feel his way about on hands and knees, helpless as a cradleboard infant, until his ringing ears could clear and his sightless eyes uncloud.
Kelly did not wait for the adjustment.
Leaping over the stunned Hunkpapa youth, he scooped up his rifle on the run and turned to speed southward down the treacherous decline of the granite outcrop. He had not taken three steps when the solitary bowman among Sayapi’s band of modern gun-bearers rose up from back of a rock-based snowbank six pony lengths off his left flank.
The Sioux had his arrow nocked and drawn to eye on the noiseless rise. There was nothing Kelly could do, save throw himself twistingly aside on the run. He heard the familiar venomous hum of the shaft behind him as he did. Then, for the second time in his frontier life, felt the numbing shock of an arrow wound. He staggered, regained his balance, drove on. The arrow, pinioned slantingly through six inches of meat and muscle just above his hip, tore at him with gasping pain at every straining leap.
Behind the cursing bowman the other four of Sayapi’s trailing crew burst from their boulders, loading on the run and yelling down to their three companions, left to guard Crow Girl, to race down the meadow and cut the trapped scout off when he sought to come off the rock. The guards, who had dashed out of the cabin at the first sound of firing, shouted back their understanding, headed for the lower edge of the open grass
land belling for all the world like three lean red hounds on a hot track.
Kelly, however, had no intention of going near the meadow, the cabin, or the cabin’s captive occupant.
Sayapi had clearly won this round. Crow Girl was his—for the time. Kelly’s only chance of getting her back alive and unharmed lay in saving his own life. His only chance of saving his own life lay in precipitous flight.
With a little longheaded Irish wit mixed in.
Toward both ends he knew of a hidden declivity in the outcrop just ahead. This blind gully had a good bottom of packed detritus and led not down toward the meadow but back up into the timber. In another moment he had plunged over its eight-foot lip and was running for his life along its smooth floor. He was out of it, into the shadowed line of the first trees, as the pursuing Hunkpapa drew up on its edge and fell into an excited palaver over the clear line of his moccasin prints in the rock dust below.
When they did that, Kelly knew he had a chance.
It was true he could not gamble on waiting for Sayapi to come up and join the powwow. But he was positive what would happen once the subchief took over the discussion. After a suitable round of argument in which every brave would take a different tack—that god-given Indian genius for delaying to debate in the face of action, which perverse trait alone accounted for the white man’s survival on the frontier—all of them would fall in with their leader’s orders, precisely as they had intended to do from the first. There was no doubt, either, that in his pain and anger, Sayapi would order them to spoor down the wounded Lone Wolf, run him to final cover, move in, and shoot him down like a crippled animal. With this certainty that his pursuers would follow wherever he led them, Kelly’s heart leaped with a last wild hope.
If, in the excitement of their immediate hunting eagerness to run his blood-flecked track and be the first to count a coup on such a renowned quarry, he could draw all the Sioux away from the cabin, then double back—
