by Win Blevins
“True,” said Pine Leaf. “That is for him. For every other horny man—they all want Pine Leaf, so they can maybe so send her to war for them and save their own scalps—I have made a different condition.
“Someone must bring me Leg-in-the-Water’s war horse. But not one of them has the courage to get it.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
If music be the food of love, play on
—Twelfth Night, I.i
It was true.
Pine Leaf had told half a dozen Crow men that she would marry them if they brought her the horse that Leg-in-the-Water, chief of the Cheyennes, used in battle. Tal found that out from Yellow Foot, one of Pine Leaf’s suitors. Everyone knew the horse, a big sorrel that Leg-in-the-Water always kept staked by his lodge. Almost every day he renewed the medicine painting on the horse, a hand on the neck and a ring around one eye.
“You’ll see the horse at Fort Cass,” said Yellow Foot. He was a slender young man with skin smooth as a girl’s and a languid way about him. “Leg-in-the-Water likes to camp by the fort for a while in the fall. It’s an ordinary looking horse, but brave in the charge.”
Leg-in-the-Water cherished that horse. To steal it would be to wound the entire Cheyenne nation. And win hosannahs from the entire Crow nation.
But who could steal a horse tied by the lodge skirts of its owner, in the middle of a village of hundreds of watchers and listeners? So Yellow Foot, leaving Tal and Hairy’s fire for his own lodge, asked rhetorically.
Watching the embers die, Tal thought on it and judged he could. He thought. Maybe. At the risk of a tail full of arrows.
He’d need Hairy’s help. He looked at Hairy dozing, and bugling, in the lean-to. Hairy would go along if the plan sounded a little crazy and a lot of fun. Sure, Hairy was his partner.
Tal mulled on a plan while the three were out trapping.
They had to take at least some beaver, Jim insisted. Otherwise, how would they get powder and ball, much less the baubles that the women like, from the trader at the fort? Hairy didn’t want to trap. He could get a bale of plews, he said, playing the shell game with the Crows. (He had a walnut shell that nearly matched his ruined fingernail, promoting confusion.) Stalking the big water rats, in Hairy’s opinion, was unseemly.
Jim gave him a nasty look. “You’d best ease off tricking your hosts,” he commented. Hairy had been using the shell game, and his skill at ventriloquism, and even an occasional spot of mesmerism to build his reputation and fatten his purse. “Besides,” said Jim, “I’m on salary.”
“On what?” said Tal.
“Salary from American Fur,” Jim allowed. “This child lets the company pay him for making sure the trade of the Absaroka people goes to American Fur, and not Rocky Mountain Fur. So he’s obliged to set an example and trap a few beaver.”
These were the two substantial firms of the mountains and plains, not counting the Britishers over to Oregon. Rocky Mountain Fur was the outfit Fitzpatrick and Frapp were partners of. American Fur was owned by John Jacob Astor and some rich French families in St. Louis.
“The tribe will go down in about a month,” said Jim. “And you coons absolutely got no plews to trade, like this nigger.”
So Tal and Hairy and Jim worked both forks of the Stinking Water, taking beaver aplenty. They went without Pine Leaf, who disdained such working for the white man.
“‘Put money in thy purse,’” Hairy recited sententiously, “quoth the immortal Iago.”
They did. They had an excellent month. Meanwhile Tal was raising his courage about that horse.
They couldn’t tell Antelope Jim, Tal and Hairy agreed, because he’d either squash the adventure or insist on coming along.
And they couldn’t steal the horse by the fort, where both tribes would be camped. By custom the fort was neutral territory. But they could sneak off from the tribe and follow the Cheyennes and…
“And do what comes naturally,” Hairy said mischievously, like a three-hundred-pound imp.
It almost misfired.
The Crows were late getting down to Fort Cass that year, and as they came over Pryor’s Gap, the Cheyennes were packing up to head back to their wintering quarters.
Tal got all roiled when he heard. Hairy went to Yellow Foot and offered him something nice to help out. Hairy would give Yellow Foot a nice tin of ochre paint, he said, if Yellow Foot would ride with them and point out Leg-in-the-Water and his war horse, and not give away their intention. Hairy showed Yellow Foot the little tins of greasepaint he kept from his acting days, every color in the rainbow. Afterwards Hairy laughed and told Tal he could have gotten a wife for each tin, Yellow Foot was so fascinated.
The identification was no trouble. The huge Cheyenne village rode down the Yellowstone Valley openly—warriors at both ends, women and children in the middle with travois laden with trade goods, dogs romping and yapping everywhere. Yellow Foot led Tal and Hairy to a knoll where they could see the entire procession. Leg-in-the-Water was toward the front with other members of his warrior club. He rode a paint and led a big sorrel.
Tal feasted his eyes on the horse, and studied it in his spyglass. Leg-in-the-Water himself was an unimpressive-looking Indian.
“His tomahawk will make an impression on your head if you don’t watch out,” Yellow Foot said as they rode back. He said it idly, gently, in his fashion. Tal liked Yellow Foot and his doe-eyed style and strange, giddy sense of humor. Antelope Jim, Yellow Foot’s particular friend, said Yellow Foot wanted to marry Pine Leaf and to become chief after Rotten Belly. Despite Yellow Foot’s gentle ways, said Jim, he was a man to be reckoned with.
Back to the fort they went. Tal hated the delay, but Hairy pointed out that the village would be easy to follow, and the Cheyennes would keep a particularly careful watch until they got further from the Crows.
“Bide your time,” said Hairy. “That’s the mark of the hunter.”
So they traded. Tal didn’t want anything but enough of DuPont’s powder to fill two horns and some Galena lead for balls. He didn’t like all the foofooraw the trader got the Indians’ plews with—bells, mirrors, vermilion, blue cloth and red, bolts of silk (very expensive), combs, and beads of every description. Tal didn’t mean to go courting with gee-gaws but a fine stolen horse.
Tal traded his extra plews to Jim for another pack horse. Jim had plenty of horse flesh, dozens of animals, and pointed out that Tal was a poor man in the mountains indeed, with only one horse and one mule. Tal wished he was mountain-rich enough for a buffalo runner or a war horse, but…Rosie was a comfortable old shoe.
He would have bought Pine Leaf something nice, but she insisted she wanted nothing. She did wear Tal’s silk handkerchief, his coat of arms, in her hair every day, and said that was plenty foofooraw for her. She wrapped a taja around Tal’s waist and exclaimed how smart it looked. It was a woven sash the Spaniards wore for dress-up. Tal flushed and studied himself in the mirror but allowed as how he had better things to spend his plews on.
It was tempting, though. Robert the Bruce and Launcelot and Don Quixote and such like-probably put on the dog. Hairy said they even wore tights, and pulled a pair out of his theatrical trunk to show.
Tal decided he’d get a sash some day, and a pleated shirt, too, for showy occasions, but the idea of tights made him blush.
Hairy was a crafty trader. He resupplied his firearms readily enough, but did a lot of talking with Mr. Tulloch, the head man, about what else he wanted. Then he went back to camp and traded with Yellow Foot for a war club—a heavy cudgel-like affair with a spike, lifted from a scalped Blackfoot. Hairy seemed quite pleased with that. Then he lazed a while, and went back to haggle with Tulloch twice more. Before finally striking his deal, he got Tulloch to indulge in a game of chance for the final haggling margin. Naturally, Hairy won.
He didn’t show everything, but Tal saw he got a nice bagful of pony beads, a fill-up for his whisky keg, and a small keg of powder. For some reason Hairy seemed unreasonably pleased with that keg.<
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Tal went up on the ramparts, where he could gaze outside the stockade across the whole vista of the valley of the Yellowstone, a sweep of plains framed by distant blue mountains. The Crow camp was in the near distance, by the cottonwoods near the river. Hide lodges pointed at the sky. Indian braves strolled in skin clothing ornamented by feathers, ermine tails, porcupine quillwork, and scalps. Squaws tended fires cooking buffalo roasts and tongues. It had grandeur. It had romance.
He thrilled at himself, Tal Jones of St. Louis, plain old Missouri, dwelling among these splendid barbarians as one of them, living a life of heroic legend. He stuck his hand in his shot pouch to feel for the grizzly claws lying in there, his first trophies.
“Hoss?”
It was Antelope Jim’s voice. He was on the ladder. Tal motioned him up. “Didn’t want to disturb your reverie,” Jim allowed. He was holding something behind his back.
“Grand, ain’t it, Jim?”
Jim looked around at the plains and the mountains and the camp and smiled handsomely. “It be, hoss, it be.
“Got something for you.” Jim held out a long, slender shape wrapped in deerskin. “Open it.”
Tal unfolded the skin and beheld…a sort of flute, it looked like. It was made from two pieces of wood hollowed and glued together, and decorated with small carvings of animals and an eagle feather. The mouthpiece was shaped like a bird’s head.
Tal stuck it in his mouth, got a nod from Jim, and blew. It made an eerie sound in the emptiness of the evening. Finger holes gave him different tones, a full scale, but the pitch wobbled plaintively.
Touched, he smiled shyly at Jim.
“It’s a maverick kind of flute,” Jim explained. “Tulloch’s daughter Ginny made it, looking like what the Sioux make, but sounding like what white folks make. Ginny’s a breed, and gets her kinds of music confused. I traded old Tulloch out of it.”
“What’s Ginny like?”
“Pretty girl, ’bout your age.”
“Maybe she’ll teach me to play it.”
“May be, but she’s off with her mother’s folks now. You maybeso can teach yourself. This child would cotton to a little music around the camp fire.”
Tal blew a few notes melismatically—forlorn, sad notes they seemed in the Western twilight.
“Thanks,” said Tal, and rubbed the wood.
“You’re welcome, hoss. Truth is, I thought your daddy would like you to have a flute, mountain-style, to make praises to Coyote on.” And Jim circled his shoulders with a big arm.
CHAPTER TWELVE
to feats of broil and battle
—Othello, I.iii
Fortune and destiny were with them.
Leg-in-the Water had told Mr. Tulloch, said the trader, that the Cheyennes would winter on Powder River. But the season was early, the start of November, Tulloch pointed out, so they still might break up to hunt first. When the Cheyennes headed east, Tal and Hairy lazed two days, promised Jim and Pine Leaf to see them back at the forks of the Stinking Water, and set out on their adventure. Their first real escapade, Tal thought.
In half the night plus half a day they caught up with the main body. They watched through the spyglass, and waited.
They were glassing from a couple of miles back when their quarry split off from the main group and headed up the Tongue River. A dozen lodges went along. Tal had eyes for nothing but that horse. Leg-in-the-Water never let go its lead rope.
The two cut across and struck the valley of the Tongue well ahead, keeping to the high hills bordering the river valley, three or four miles in front.
“Don’t want the scouts to pick us up,” Hairy said. “That lot will scout well.”
Tal thought they’d size things up for a couple of days and then make their move.
“Nay, lad,” rumbled Hairy, “we’ll not play Hamlet. Away with doubt. We strike tonight.”
“All right, jolly,” murmured Tal, “let’s do it.”
The Indians made camp at mid-afternoon in a wide meadow by the river, among some tall, dead-leaved cotton-woods.
Tal and Hairy hid their own horses in a thick grove about a mile upstream and lay quiet in some rocks and watched, alternating with the spyglass.
The horse was hobbled with others in some good grass a hundred yards from camp, under guard. Not long before sunset Leg-in-the-Water himself brought the horse in and picketed it next to his lodge. The day was getting cool, and smoke rose from the lodge flaps.
Your dinner and a warm fire, Leg-in-the-Water, thought Tal, while I am cold and have to eat pemmican. After tonight you are a dishonored man.
The plan was easy. They’d walk from here—couldn’t risk a whicker from the horses. Hairy would take out the pony guard. Tal would sneak in, pull the picket, and bridle the horse right off. Then lead it ever so gently out of camp. That would make a certain amount of noise—perhaps the Cheyennes would sleep through it or ignore it. If not, Tal could jump on the horse and be gone into the dark before anyone could bother him. Once the horse was bridled—that was the key.
And maybe Hairy would spook the entire pony herd, just to keep the Cheyennes off their trail.
In any case the two would meet back at their horses and travel all night.
“She’s a mite tricky, lad, but she should come out.” He looked sharp at Tal. “Faint heart never won fair maiden.”
True enough. Tal wanted that horse. There was nothing to do now but wait. And wait.
Tal fished in his possible sack and came out with his flute.
Hairy fished in his and came out with actor’s paints, red, white, and black. He took off his shirt, exposing sheet-white belly and back and arms.
Tal dared not actually play the flute, for fear of the sound’s carrying to enemies. He hummed a fast, tricky tune and practiced fingering it on the instrument.
“That’s a love flute, you know,” Hairy said. He was spreading white paint all over his front, liberally. It made him gleam.
“A love flute?”
“Yeah, the Sioux claim one of those will charm a girl right out of her drawers. No sense in trying to resist one of those, Sioux women say.”
Tal looked at it anew. Could he charm Pine Leaf with this? Would he need to, once he stole Leg-in-the-Water’s war horse? “Won’t fetch the warrior woman, this child don’t believe,” Hairy put in, reading Tal’s mind.
Tal flushed. “How come?”
“It’s Sioux, for one thing, not Crow. Medicine to the goose may be p’isen to the gander. For another thing, it was made by Ginny, and not by a medicine man, as should be. And if it had the medicine for Pine Leaf, Antelope Jim would have used it his own self.”
Tal wrinkled his nose.
Hairy took off his pants and started rubbing his legs shiny white.
“Also,” Hairy went on, “it makes white-man notes, not red-man notes.”
Hairy now was finger-painting vertical black stripes from head to toe.
Trying to finger the flute and figure what the heck Hairy was doing, Tal was getting flustered. He decided to pay Hairy no mind.
“What’s Ginny like?” Tal asked casually.
Hairy smiled, thinking back. “’Bout your age, I guess. A year ago she was built like a willow, but coming graceful like a woman. And inde-e-ependent? That girl don’t pay her father no attention.”
“How would I charm a girl, if I wanted to?” Tal asked.
“The way it works, you get the flute and a song at the same time from a medicine man. Trade for them. Costs handsome ’cause it’s powerful. Then you play the song, and the girl melts.” Hairy made his ogre grin.
“The warrior woman didn’t actual promise you to marry if you got the horse, did she?”
“No,” Tal said softly.
“I wouldn’t count on the flute, lad. And I don’t believe the lady has eyes for you.”
Tal knew Hairy thought that. So did Antelope Jim. And Yellow Foot and the rest. They didn’t take his courtship seriously, on account of he was young.
> But Tal thought different. He thought Pine Leaf was interested. Why else would she always dally and talk to him? What did it mean that she always wore the blazon of the House of Jones, the color of fire and the color of sky? Maybe she was going to fool them all. So it was up to Tal to make bold and ask for her hand.
Hairy had taken off his wig and was rubbing the top of his head scarlet. He reddened his stub of ear, too.
Tal resolved to pay him no mind. He fingered a song of love, and hummed it to Pine Leaf, his inamorata.
It was cussedly light. The moon was flooding the grass and lodges and trees and river bright enough to read, nearly. Tal could see Hairy plainly, down to a gleam on the spike of his war club. Hairy was creeping, one careful step at a time, back from the station of the pony guard. At least that must have gone well. Tal hadn’t heard a thing, and Hairy was coming back alive.
Tal was darn irked at Hairy. Besides putting on that body paint, he’d smeared his face white as linen and put on a white fright wig. Above his dark blanket, under which he wore nothing, his face shone like a shaggy moon.
“Magic,” Hairy had said. “Power.”
Something other than magic, too—Hairy was hiding something under the blanket.
Tal wasn’t going to let Hairy’s antics stop him. He’d blacked his face and hands, to be less visible.
Hairy motioned forward with a hand, and Tal moved out. He walked silently but quickly—there was no cover from here to the camp. It was three or four o’clock in the morning, so everyone should be asleep.
Near the first lodge he circled a little back toward the hill and went into a clump of boulders and stood perfectly still in the shadow of the big one, watching. His heart was thumping like a bird’s.
He could see Leg-in-the-Water’s lodge in front of the big cottonwood, and the horse on the left of the door flap. Leg-in-the-Water and his woman were asleep inside, alone.
No movement in camp, and not a sound.
What?
A human shape pitched off the boulder above, and flumped onto the ground.
