Ride to Valor

by David Robbins

  “You speak the white tongue good,” James said.

  “That surprises you, does it? An Indian who can use the white tongue as well as his own? I learned it many winters before you were born from a white man who came to our land to trap beaver. He was a good man. He had a good heart.”

  “How are you known?” James asked.

  “Does it matter?” the old warrior again rejoined.

  “If I ask you what you are doing here, will you say the same thing?”

  The suggestion of a smile touched the wizened oldster’s lips. “I have come here to die.”

  “Here?” James said in considerable surprise. To his knowledge no tribe had lived in that immediate area.

  The old warrior raised his gaze to the magnificent vista of forest and snowcapped peaks and a bright blue lake. “I have always loved what you whites call Yellowstone. I came here often when I was young to hunt and to seek visions.”

  “Where is your family? Your friends?”

  “Dead and dead.”

  “Your tribe?”

  “On the reservation where your people put them,” the old warrior said.

  “So you left it to come here? Are you aware that any Indian caught off a reservation is to be taken back to it?”

  The warrior looked at him. “I am old, bluecoat. I am not stupid.”

  “Yet you came anyway?”

  Bowing his head, the old man sighed. “Because he has many guns, and because there are more of him than there are of us, the white man can tell us where to live and how to live. He can tell us what we must eat and make us go to his schools so he can tell us how to think.” The old warrior raised his head and his voice. “But he will not tell me where to die.”

  “I’m not supposed to let you,” James said.

  “Even this the whites would deny me,” the old man said sadly.

  “I have my orders.”

  “Then shoot me.”

  “What?”

  The old warrior placed a gnarled hand on the hilt of a knife on his hip. “I will attack you. Shoot me so I can die where I want to die.”

  “It means that much to you?”

  “I am here,” the old man said.

  A gust of wind brought a chill to the air. James pulled his coat about him and said, “It will be winter soon.”

  “I will be dead before the first snow.”

  “Would you like some water? Or anything to eat?”

  “Do your orders say to feed me before you drag me off?” the warrior asked.

  “The only thing that might drag you off is a bear,” James said.

  The old man was quiet awhile. “I thank you, bluecoat. You are the second white man I have known to have a good heart.”

  “A lot of whites have good hearts.”

  “If they do they hide it well.”

  James grinned. “At least tell me your name.”

  “I am Eagle Soaring. My days here are finished. I go to the next world happy to be done with this one.”

  Rising, James stared to turn, and stopped. “I never wanted to fight your kind. I never wanted to kill any of you. I did it to protect others.”

  “You have counted many coup?”

  “I guess you could say that.”

  The crags on the old man’s face deepened. “We are warriors, you and I. Once there were many of us, but now there are few. Our time is over. My people and yours will plant seeds and sell goods and drink whiskey and our ways will be forgotten.”

  “There will always be a need for warriors,” James said.

  “Will there?” the old man said. His chin sank to his chest and he closed his eyes. “I am tired, friend. Leave me. It will not be long.”

  James climbed down and accepted his reins from the sergeant. “Mount up.”

  “What about the Indian, sir?”

  “What Indian?”

  James made it a point to return by the same route. The old warrior was gone, nor could James find any trace of where he had gotten to. Off into the forest, James imagined, to die far from anywhere, all alone. James wished his spirit a peaceful rest.

  55

  The turn of the century came and went.

  James retired from the military, and they bought a house in the foothills near Denver. From his front porch he could sit and see far out over the prairie he so loved.

  Why he took it into his head to visit New York one last time, he would never know. Peg was curious to see his old haunts, but there was nothing to show her. Five Points had been razed. His old neighborhood had ceased to exist. In its place were prosperous businesses and homes. So much had changed, he had trouble finding the street he had lived on. Where his tenement had been now stood a bakery.

  The slum was no more, but the poor were still there. Most had moved to the Lower East Side, existing in the same squalor as before.

  The old gangs had gone the way of Five Points.

  It was as if none of it had ever been. James stood at the intersection of Worth and Baxter and reflected that his life and that old warrior’s had more in common than he thought.

  Peg passed on to her reward before he did. She was eighty-three when she succumbed. He was at her bedside, holding her hand, and after she had breathed her last, he buried his face in the blankets and cried.

  James outlived her by another seven years. His two sons and two daughters had eighteen grandchildren between them, and his last days were spent in the company of loved ones.

  Then, on a warm evening in the spring, he was on his porch in his rocking chair, sipping coffee, when the pain struck. He dropped the cup and clutched at his chest. He tried to rise, but his legs wouldn’t work. Sinking back, he felt the pain lessen. His oldest daughter was supposed to visit in an hour and he thought that if he sat there quietly, he would recover and she could get him to a doctor.

  Then his chest seemed to explode. His last sight was of the prairie, golden in the glow of the setting sun. He felt as if part of him was flying toward it.