“Yuh,” assented Stacey. “That is true.”
“I know things about the girl too. A small bullet was fired into her throat, and then a thin knife was stabbed into the same place. She died, I think, not too late last night. And all three of you have been at her camp.”
“All three of us have been there several times,” said John quietly. “Do you think, David, that all three of us killed her?”
“I think one went alone to her and killed her and made both the wounds,” replied David. “I think that one hid his tracks and that you went together and found her dead this morning. I think the killer has not told his two good friends what he did.
“If these things are true we can believe more things. Of you three, one knows who killed Rhoda Pleasant because he is the killer. Of the other two, each knows that one of his two friends killed her, and he wants to help whichever of the two it may be. I can see that much, because I know who you are and what you do and what Rhoda Pleasant was trying to do here.”
“She came smiling and flattering and asking for our songs,” Dolf Buckskin admitted.
“Ahi,” went on David, “she was a pretty girl, prettier than any on this reservation. Three men, living alone together, find it easy to look at that sort of girl and to like her. Now I come to the place where I am not sure what to think. I cannot say surely which of several reasons the killer had to do that thing.”
“Every killer has a reason,” said John weightily, handing the pipe along to Stacey.
“It was about the songs, anyway,” David ventured.
Stacey smoked the pipe to its last puff, tapped out the ashes, and began to refill it. “Perhaps it was none of us, David. Perhaps some other man, someone who wanted to steal from her.”
“No,” said David emphatically. “Her face showed no fear or wonder. She had no trouble with the one who came to kill her, and she must have seen him, for the wounds were in front. Nobody else lives near here, anyway. I think the killer is right here.”
John’s grin of mockery found its way back. “Why don’t you arrest the guilty man?” he challenged. “Nobody will stop you.”
“But,” added Stacey, rekindling the pipe, “you can’t take the wrong man. The government courts would set him free and pay damage money for false arrest. Probably, the policeman who guessed so foolishly would be discharged.”
“I’ll get the right one,” promised David. “The two innocent men won’t be bothered.”
“Ahoh—thanks,” said Stacey deeply, and he passed the pipe to Dolf.
“Ahoh from me, too,” echoed Dolf.
“And from me ahoh,” chimed in John. The pipe traveled around the circle again, David smoking last. Finally he rose to his feet.
“If you don’t hinder me I want to search the tent,” he said.
“What you wish,” granted Stacey, receiving the pipe from him.
David went to the tent and inside. Sunlight filtered brownly through the canvas. Three pallets, made up of blankets spread over heaps of springy brush, lay against the walls. David examined with respectful care a stack of ceremonial costumes, bonnets, and parcels in a corner, then turned to the personal property of the three singers.
John’s bed could be identified by three flutes in a quiverlike buckskin container, slung to the wall of the tent. David pulled out the flutes one by one. Each was made of two wooden halves, cunningly hollowed out and fitted together in tight bindings of snakeskin. Each had five finger holes and a skillfully shaped mouthpiece. At the head of the pallet lay John’s carving tool. David slid it from its scabbard—an old, old knife, its steel worn away by years of sharpening to the delicate slenderness of an edged awl. It showed brightly clean, as from many thrustings into gritty soil. Someone had scoured it clean of Rhoda Pleasant’s blood.
On another cot lay Dolf’s ceremonial drum of tight-cured raw buckskin laced over a great wooden hoop and painted with berry juices in the long ago—strange symbols in ocher and vermilion. David looked for the drumstick that he had often seen at public singings, a thing like a little war club with an egg-sized pebble bound in the split end of the stick. It was not in sight, and he fumbled in the bedclothes.
His fingers touched something hard, and he brought it to light—not the drumstick but an old-fashioned pocket pistol barely longer than his forefinger. David broke it and glanced down the barrel, which was bright and clean and recently oiled.
His exploration of Stacey Weed’s sleeping quarters turned up a broad sheath-knife but no gun. He emerged from the tent with John’s slender carving tool and Dolf’s pistol.
“You found them,” said Stacey, hoisting his rangy body from its squat. “Which killed her?”
“Both,” volunteered John, but David shook his head.
“Either wound would have been fatal,” he said, “but the bullet went in first, and the knife followed. That changed the shape of the round bullet hole. As I say, she was struck down from in front, and she knew her killer and had not feared or suspected him.”
“That bullet must have struck through her spine at the back of the neck,” said Stacey at once, “or she would have looked surprised, at least, before she died.”
“Ahoh, Stacey,” David thanked him. “That is a helpful thought. Now, Rhoda Pleasant smiled on you all, but who did she like best?”
“She wanted only the songs,” replied Dolf.
“And did she get any of them?” demanded David quickly.
Stacey shook his head. “I don’t think so, David. We sang when she first came, but when we saw her writing on that paper lined out to make music-signs on, Dolf said to stop singing. That was the first day she visited us and cooked our noon dinner.”
David tried from those words to picture the visit. Rhoda Pleasant had tried to charm and reassure the three by flattery and food. She had almost succeeded; they had begun to perform. When they grew suspicious and fell silent, had she concealed her disappointment and tried something else? He hazarded a guess, though guessing had been discouraged by his instructors.
“Then she tried paying attention to one of you alone. Which?” He waited for an answer, and none came. “Was it you, John, because you could play the songs on the flute?”
John shook his head, and Stacey spoke for him. “It was I. She wanted both words and music, and I knew them. She whispered for me to visit her camp. That was two days ago.
“I went,” Stacey continued, “but she tricked no songs out of me. She tried to get me off guard by singing songs she had heard on other reservations, and the best of them was not as good as our worst. I sang nothing in exchange. Yesterday she came back and tried her tricks on John instead.”
“We went riding together,” said John. “She talked about songs to me, too, but I only said I had forgotten to bring my flute.”
“Then she hunted out Dolf?”
“Wagh!” Dolf grunted out the Tsichah negative like an ancient blanket Indian and scowled more blackly still. “Why should she pay attention to me? I am a drummer, and drum music is easy. The one time she heard us all together was enough to teach her what she wanted to know about my drum.”
More silence, and David examined these new grudging admissions. Rhoda Pleasant had, very practically, concentrated on the two singers whose secrets were hardest to learn. On their own showing, John and Stacey had kept those secrets loyally. “This brings us to last night,” said David at last.
“I will say something,” John spoke slowly. “You think the pistol killed her, and it’s Dolf’s pistol. But perhaps he didn’t use it. Perhaps Stacey did, or I, to make it look like Dolf.”
“Perhaps,” granted David. “Perhaps not. I think the stab in the wound was to change the shape of the bullet hole. It covered the killer’s trail, as the scratching away of the tracks at her camp did.”
“But it hid nothing,” reminded John.
“Perhaps it pretended to hide something,” pursued David. “The killer might have thought that he would give the wound a disguise—but one easy to see through
.”
“Ahi,” replied Stacey gravely. “You mean that the bullet hole would mean Dolf’s pistol and make him guilty—because the knife is John’s and the pistol is Dolf’s. Perhaps you want to say that I stole them both and killed Rhoda Pleasant.”
“Perhaps he wants to say that I used my own pistol to kill,” threw in Dolf, “and did the other things to make the pistol wound look like a false trail.”
“There is a way to show who fired the shots,” David informed them. “A white man’s laboratory trick, with wax on the gun hand and then acid dripped on to show if there was a fleck of powder left on the hand from the gun going off.”
“My hand would show flecks like that,” Dolf said readily. “I fired the gun for practice yesterday.”
“I saw him,” seconded John. “Anyway, David, you promised that you would take only the guilty man. That means you must find him here and now, without going to the agency for wax and acid.”
“It was a promise,” David agreed, “and the Tsichah do not break their promises to each other.” He held out the thin-ground knife. “This was bloody, and now it is clean. Who cleaned it?”
“Whoever used it,” said Stacey.
David put the knife on the ground. “You were telling me a story, John. You stopped where you and Rhoda Pleasant went out riding and came back yesterday.”
“She left me here at camp and rode on alone,” John took up the account. “Dolf and Stacey saw her go away. We three were here together for supper, and together we went to sleep early. Then—”
“Then, this morning, I went to her camp alone,” said Stacey. “Last night, when she came back past here with John, she made me a sign, like this.” He demonstrated, a scooping inward to beckon Indian fashion, then a gesture eastward. “Come after sunrise, she told me by that sign. I thought she would beg again for the music. I would let her beg, then laugh at her and say she was wasting her time with us. But I found her lying face up in the trail.”
“As I found her,” finished David for him. “Well, you probably are telling the truth. If you were questioned long in this way, any lies in your stories would trip each other up. This much is plain as your tracks at her camp: the killer went to her alone, with the knife and the pistol. He did not want his friends to know—”
“His friends do not ask to know,” said Dolf, with an air of finality.
“Because,” amplified John, hugging his thick knees as he squatted, “his friends know, like him, that Rhoda Pleasant was a thief of secrets. Nobody here is sorry she died, though we would be sorry if one of us suffered for killing her.”
“Nobody is sorry she died?” repeated David, and he tried to study all three of their faces at once. They stared back calmly.
“But all three went to her camp,” said David again. “Not Stacey alone.”
“I came and got them to see her,” Stacey told him. “We had to decide what to do. We saw everything there you saw. We talked as we waited there. Finally we agreed we must carry the news, after we all took sweat baths.”
“Sweat baths?” echoed David. “Why?”
“We are medicine men, and we had all touched a dead body,” John answered him coldly. “Sweat baths are purification; or have you forgotten the Tsichah way since you learned the policeman’s way?”
“I have forgotten neither way,” was David’s equally cold response. “Who said to carry the news, and who said to take the sweat bath?”
“I thought of both those things,” Dolf volunteered.
“No, I think I did,” argued Stacey. “I built the fire anyway and gathered the rocks to heat.”
“But I took the first bath,” insisted John, “for I touched her first when we saw her together. Then Stacey took his, and then Dolf, who had not finished when you first came.”
David pointed to the slim knife he had brought from the sleeping tent. “This went to the lodge with you, John?”
“If you expect to find prints of guilty fingers, you will not,” said John. “Yes, I took the knife into the sweat lodge—to purify it from the touch of that dead Piekan squaw, ahi,” and he put out his palm and made a horizontal slicing motion. “I finish. That is the end of what I will say.”
There was silence all around. David stooped and took the knife, wedging it into the sheath with his own, then put Dolf’s pistol into his hip pocket.
“Something here I have not yet found,” he announced. “And I have wondered about it all the time we were talking. I think I know where it is now. I, too, am going into your sweat lodge. Can any of you say why I should not?”
They stared, neither granting nor denying permission. David walked past the Sibley tent to the close-blanketed little structure, pulled away the blanket that sealed the door, and peered in through the steam that clung inside. It billowed out, grew somewhat thinner, and he could see dimly. Under his breath he said a respectful prayer to the spirit people, lest he be thought sacrilegious in hunting there for what he hoped to find. Then he dropped to all fours and crawled in.
On the floor stood an old iron pot of water, still warm. In it were a dozen of the stones that had been dropped in at their hottest to create the purifying steam. David twitched up his sleeve and pulled out one stone, then another and another. They were like any stones one might find in that part of the reservation. He studied the ground, which was as bare and hard as baked clay, then rose from all fours and squatted on his heels. His hands patted and probed here and there along the inner surface of blankets until he found what he was looking for.
He seized its little loop of leather cord and pulled it from where it had been stuck between the blankets and one of the curved poles of the framework. A single touch assured him, and he edged into the open for a clear examination of it.
The thing was like a tiny war club of ancient fashion. A slender foot-long twig of tough wood had been split at the end, and the two split pieces curved to fit around a smooth pebble the size of an egg. Rawhide lashings held the stone rigidly in place. It was the ceremonial drumstick he had missed when searching Dolf Buckskin’s bed in the tent, the absence of which he had been trying to fit into the story of Rhoda Pleasant’s death. He balanced it experimentally, swung it against his open hand, carefully bent the springy wooden handle.
Then he thrust it inside his shirt, standing so that the three watching singers could be sure of what he handled and what he did with it. He walked over to where his pony cropped at some grass.
“I’m going to look at Rhoda Pleasant once more,” he announced. “That look will be all I need to tell me everything.”
Mounting, he rode slowly up the trail to the silent camp of the dead girl. He dismounted once again and took the cover from the expressionless face.
Again he put out a finger to touch, this time at the side of the head, where Rhoda Pleasant’s hair was combed smoothly over the temple. He felt the other temple, and this time his finger encountered a yielding softness.
“Ahi,” he grunted, as if to confirm everything. “The thin bone was broken.”
He returned to his horse and lounged with his arm across the saddle, quietly waiting.
Hoofbeats sounded among the brush in the direction of the singers’ camp. After a moment Dolf Buckskin rode into sight. He had pulled on trousers and a shirt, as though for a trip to the agency.
“I am waiting for you,” called David to him.
“I knew you would be,” replied Dolf, riding near. “Maybe I should have told you all about it when you brought my drumstick out of the sweat lodge, but it was hard to speak in front of my two friends who were trying to help me.”
“You need not tell me much,” David assured him, as gently as he could speak. “I knew the answer when John told of purifying his carving knife in the sweat lodge because it had touched the dead body of Rhoda Pleasant. Your drumstick was missing. I reasoned that if the drumstick was also in the sweat lodge, all was clear. And it was. Why should you have taken the drumstick into the lodge? Only to purify it, as you yourself must be purif
ied. Why should it need purifying? Only if the drumstick too had touched the dead body. Why should it have touched the dead body? Only if the drumstick were the true weapon.”
David paused. “You’re a good drummer, Dolf. By long practice you can strike to the smallest mark—even the thin bone of the temple—swiftly and accurately, with exactly the strength you choose. That pebble-head is solid, the handle is springy. It was a good weapon, Dolf, and easier to your hand than any other.”
“She did not even hear me as I came up behind her,” Dolf said with something like sorrowful pride. “You were wrong about her seeing the killer and not fearing him. She never knew.”
“You used your own gun and John’s knife to hide the real way of killing. They were the false trails. But you could not break the old ceremonial rites. The true weapon had to be purified—and so I knew the truth.”
Dolf raised his head and looked at the still form. “It’s strange to think of what I did. I wanted her so much.”
“Yuh,” and David nodded. “You wanted her. She would not look at you, only at John and Stacey. You were left out, and your heart was bad. Perhaps if you explain to the court that for a time your mind was not right, you will not be killed, only put in jail.”
“I don’t think I want to live,” said Dolf slowly. “Not in jail, anyway. Shall I help you lift her and tie her on her horse’s back?”
“Ahoh,” said David. “Thank you.”
When the three horses started on the trail back, David glanced down at his silver-plated star. It was dull and filmy—from the steam of the sweat lodge. An agency policeman’s star should not be dull at the end of his first successful case. It should shine like all the high hopes of all young warriors. Proudly David burnished the metal with his sleeve—until it shone with the wisdom of the Shining Lodge and the strength of the white man’s star.
MANLY WADE WELLMAN (1903–86) is one of North Carolina’s most beloved storytellers, writing books and short stories in many genres, including history, folklore, mystery, science fiction, and travel. In 1955 he won the Edgar Allan Poe Award for nonfiction from the Mystery Writers in America, and in 1978 he received the North Carolina Award for Literature.
Tar Heel Dead Page 5
