The White Indian

by Max Brand

  Kate Sabin lies here,

  Killed by the murdering Cheyennes of dull hatchet.

  Red Hawk sprang to his feet. “Wind Walker!” he cried.

  The name made even Standing Bull leap aside as though to dodge a lance thrust from behind.

  “Wind Walker,” repeated Red Hawk. “This is the grave of his squaw. This is where he buried the woman for whose sake he is still hunting the Cheyennes. For this is how they bury a squaw or a brave . . . in the dark and the wet and the cold of the earth, instead of leaving them wrapped on a platform where the sun can shine on them and the wind blow on them, with a good horse killed beneath, so that its ghost can still carry the ghost of the master. But here the woman lies.”

  He fell into such a long pause that his friend at last said gently: “What is rising in you? Your throat works. Shall we sing a chant?”

  Gradually Red Hawk extended his left arm. “There should be corn land yonder,” he said suddenly.

  Standing Bull went instantly to the indicated place. “There is nothing here,” he said, trailing his moccasins over the ground to feel the face of it through the grass. “Ha! Now I find some small bumps . . . now others. And in rows, do you see? Yes, this must have been corn land, long ago.” He came back and looked into the dreamy face of Red Hawk. “This is a strange thing, brother,” he said in an awed voice. “When your eyes look inside of you, what do they see?”

  “Nothing,” said Red Hawk. “Only shadows and dimly moving things. But I can hear something.”

  “What do you hear?” asked the warrior.

  “A voice that says a thing that has no meaning. Besides, it is a woman’s voice. Standing Bull, is it the voice of the buried squaw? It is sounding deeply inside me.”

  “What is the sound?”

  “There is no meaning to it,” said Red Hawk. “But she calls in me ‘Rusty.’”

  “That is a word in the speech of the white men. It is not Cheyenne,” suggested Standing Bull.

  “It is a word of the whites,” agreed Red Hawk.

  “This is a dangerous thing,” said Standing Bull very gravely. “When ghosts speak out of the ground, old men say that death is near to us.”

  “Ride on down the creek. I must stay here for a little time,” answered Red Hawk. “Either this inside me is the voice of a ghost, or the ghost of a memory, and how could I remember a thing that has never been? If it is a ghost, it is a friendly one.”

  “Why do you say so?” asked Standing Bull.

  Red Hawk answered, “Because I feel now a sorrowful happiness . . . like that which I feel when I think of the lodge of my father, now that I am far away from it. It is happiness to remember, and it is grief to know that it is lost to me. It seems to me that I am eating sorrow, and drinking it . . . till I am full of grief. Ride down the creek, my brother. Leave me alone here, and I shall follow soon.”

  But he did not follow quickly, according to his promise. Instead, he remained for long hours, wrapped in his buffalo robe, seated cross-legged beside the white stone of the grave. Sometimes he put out his hand and touched it, hot as it was with the sun, and it seemed to him like the touch of flesh. But all the while, images were rising up in his mind like bubbles in a dark fountain, so that he could never see their faces. Headless ghosts. At last he stood up and climbed again into the saddle.

  Standing Bull asked no questions, for he saw in the face of his friend a thing that was beyond speech.

  It was because of this delay that they did not pass through the hills into view of Witherell until the sunset had dwindled to a smudge.

  As they paused in the dark throat of the little valley and looked down on the lights of the town that lay in the hollow, it seemed to Red Hawk that he was looking through dim water, at strange spots of sunlight on the bottom of a stream. There was no moon. They stood in silence so long that he could mark the updrift of the stars above the eastern hills.

  Standing Bull said: “I go back to the tribe now . . . and you go forward to your people. I shall come again.”

  Chapter Eight

  What Red Hawk said to his friend he could never remember, though he would not forget to his death the sound of the hoofs of Standing Bull’s horse as it went back through the pass.

  Then he saw that the last of the sunset had died out to a muddy yellow, while the night, like a shadow cast upward from the ground, rose and closed over him in a cold flood. Each light before him meant a lodge, he supposed, and to one of them he would have to go for shelter. As for the choice among them, it must be left to his medicine. So he made medicine, simply by picking up a small portion of dust from the trail and blowing on it until only the little pebbles remained in the palm of his hand. With the cautious tips of his fingers he counted four grains of rock, therefore he would pass four lights, and at the fifth he would try to enter.

  He rode on down the trail until he came to an opening that clove straight through the camp of the white men. The lights, he now observed, shone very clearly out of the sides of the lodges and out of their faces, but he could not see the dancing, wavering glow of flames. He counted one light on the left and three on the right, and straightway turned toward the next light on the left. A wooden fence stopped him, so that he was forced to dismount. He started to explore the place on foot, leaving the gray stallion tethered to the fence.

  All was strange. Apparently there were no scouts abroad. Though a dog barked now and again, there was no prowling crowd of them, such as continually washed across an Indian camp. There were innumerable new scents. Even the odors of cooking foods were a strange mixture of unknown sweets, sours, and pungencies, awakening appetite and killing it in the same breath. The sounds were also novel. Sometimes he heard dim choruses of laughter that came not out of the throat, but high from the nose. He heard the jingling of pots and pans; he heard speaking voices, near and far. But all of these noises were separated by pauses, and the effect of it all was unlike the continuous uproar of an Indian camp.

  Against the stars, he studied the outlines of the lodge that was before him. It was peaked at the top, spread out to great, square shoulders, and dropped down straight at the sides. In compass, he calculated, it might be large enough to accommodate a hundred or more men around the sides, yet out of its immensity came only a small and drifting current of noises from the rear—chiefly the voices of talking women, with the deeper tones of a man sounding through at intervals.

  He leaped the fence and landed on soft cultivated ground. He found a hard path to the right, covered with masses of small stones, the sharp edges of which he could feel through his moccasins. To walk silently over such a surface was almost impossible.

  Out of the dullness of star shine before him rose steps that the touch of his hand proved to be of wood leveled wonderfully smooth, and with that it began to be more apparent to him that the medicine of the white man was indeed strong. These wooden steps were inclined to make groaning noises, so that it required all of five minutes for him to mount them in the necessary silence.

  To his left the light shone through a square hole in the wall, and, as he stood before the opening, he looked into a mystery indeed. What he saw was a chamber of about the size, say, of an eight-skin lodge—but the place was not rounded, it was square! At one side stood a solid mass of black iron, as high as his breastbone, with a tube of black rising from the top and vanishing through the roof.

  Around the walls were what appeared to be books, for they were very like the volume owned by Lazy Wolf. The brain of Red Hawk ached when he considered the incalculable swarms of words that must be required to fill them—more than all the buffalo that ever he had seen blackening the plains as far as the eye could reach. There might be, he estimated, as many as twenty twenties of these books.

  The floor, strange to say, was not of beaten earth, but of wood smoothed over, and polished with brown paint. How long would it take a man to hew down logs to such a level, and then polish them, one by one? But in the center of the room, on a small, raised floor of wood
that was supported by four legs, stood the chief miracle of all—a small flame that burned inside a gleaming transparent cylinder, larger at the bottom than at the top. Most mysterious of all was the nature of the flame itself. It neither leaped nor shrank. It seemed at first sight as solid as though it were a bit of incredibly luminous paint, though narrowed eyes revealed that it was constantly trembling with life and slight motion. It seemed to spring, moreover, out of nothingness.

  When Red Hawk had considered this mighty marvel for a time, he moved forward to lean through the hole in the wall of the lodge and observe what was still hidden from him. But his nose, his chin, and his mouth struck in the invisible air something as cold as ice, and as hard.

  He lurched back. Then, with the tips of his fingers, very cautiously, he examined the surface of this marvel that was something and yet was nothing. It was, in fact, a sort of dry ice, and it permitted the eye to glance unimpeded into the interior of the lodge. Awe came upon Red Hawk. He felt that he was staring at a temple, and that this was a sacred fire that, through the dreadful magic of the white man, fed upon the thin air instead of any substance.

  When his mind had tasted these immensities for some time, he left the front of this great, square, wooden lodge, and went to the rear. He was now closer to the voices, and, again advancing with infinite caution up the wooden steps, he came closer to the white magicians.

  Again the light streamed upon him, through another partition of the dry ice, emanating from just such a flame, enclosed in a similar crystal tube. What manner of people were these who could keep in a single lodge two marvels, each of which was enough to make the fame of a great medicine man? He could not look into their faces at once. Instead, he glanced toward a corner where stood another mass of black iron. Out of this iron came flickerings of yellow fire and the noise of shuddering flames.

  Now he was able to see that two women and a man sat about the four-legged structure that supported the steady flame in the crystal tube. They were not worshiping. No, they were talking and laughing, their pale faces wrinkling and opening with mirth as though their bellies had been filled after long fasting. For this there was small cause of wonder, since it was apparently a mighty feast. Not out of wooden bowls with horn spoons did they feed, nor upon stewed meat and boiled corn; they ate from rounded, flat stones, very white and shining.

  What seemed the ham of a small deer appeared on that altar, in some places whittled down to the bone with slices lying at random beside it. Strangest of all, these mighty white magicians ate grass of the fields, like so many buffalo. Yes, at this very moment the man lifted a small quantity of entangled greens to his lips, engulfed them, chewed them, and, instead of spitting them out as one might do after performing such a disgusting ceremonial act, he could be seen to swallow what was in his mouth.

  Other marvels appeared on that lighted altar, and not the least were seven knives. To be sure the handles of them were absurdly small, yet they were apparently steel of good quality.

  Then it could be noted that these people sat on stools that had backs to them, against which they leaned like mighty enchanters, secure in the presence of their magic fire. And last of all, Red Hawk observed their faces, and he felt the difference between the whites and the Cheyennes more than ever he had when he looked at the sun-browned traders who he had seen in the camp.

  The face of the man was sharp below the eyes; the eyes themselves were large, well-opened, calm, with the shadow of thought constantly on them. But the forehead rose lofty, wide, and shining. The face was, in fact, triangular, and the beard and moustaches only disguised its outline.

  The squaw was not very different. In spite of the fact that they seemed now to be carelessly feasting upon at least six kinds of food, it was apparent that the man and the older woman fasted often, for she was as lean of feature as the master of the lodge. Her hair was gray; her eyes were misty blue; from the thinness of her shoulders it was plain that she would be of small use in shifting camp or carrying water or fleshing hides. Yet she looked about with the calm demeanor of the young and favorite squaw of a mighty chief.

  Last of all Red Hawk looked at the girl, though he had been aware of her from the first, as one is aware of distant music, no matter where the eyes and mind may be. She fitted into the days of his life like a blue lake among the iron mountains. The light remained in her hair, and he could not tell whether he wished to follow the motion of her hands or the brown beauty of her face. Unlike the others, it was plain that the sun loved her and dwelt much on her.

  She put back her head in laughter, at this moment, and her mirth tilted her from side to side a little. Then her eyes suddenly rested on the window where Red Hawk stood. The laughter vanished. She sprang up with a scream, pointing.

  The two other heads turned. The other woman cried out, also. As Red Hawk stepped back, he heard a trampling of hasty feet, and the older woman’s voice crying: “Don’t go out, Richard!”

  “Stuff and nonsense,” said the man, and cast the door open. The shaft of light flashed along the barrel of the rifle that the man held, and then struck fully on his form.

  Red Hawk drew himself up slowly. One should always move gently when guns are pointed. Lifting his hand he gathered his dignity into his voice, saying: “Hau.”

  “It’s a friendly redskin,” said the bearded white man.

  “There’s no such thing!” cried his squaw from the inside of the lodge.

  “Do you speak English? What you want?” asked the man.

  “I speak English,” said Red Hawk. “I come from the Black Hills to live among the white men, because my skin is also white.”

  “The devil it is,” said the other. “Come inside.” He stood back, making a gesture of invitation that Red Hawk accepted, stepping lightly over the threshold. The two women were in a corner—the mother with a hand thrown up across her face, ready to shield her eyes from the sight of a monstrosity, and the girl, all eyes with fear, but with her chin thrusting out in a determined way. She held a big revolver in both hands.

  Red Hawk, having printed their faces on his mind, looked down at the floor.

  “He can’t stay here,” said the squaw. “I won’t have him under the same roof with us. We’d wake up to find the place in flames. I don’t know what you’re thinking of, Richard Lester.”

  “I haven’t said that I’m thinking of it,” said Lester. “He speaks English, my dear, so ask him to sit down. Take this chair, my friend. Maisry, set a new place at the table. Put the meat and the beans back into the oven to heat, and make some more coffee.”

  It was a hospitable speech, and the voice was warm and kindly, with more delicacy of inflection than Red Hawk ever had heard from a human throat before, except when some ancient chief told stories of the days of his childhood, or the ancient legends of the race.

  The older woman suddenly cried out: “Merciful heaven, Richard! It’s true! His skin is white . . . or almost white. Make him sit down. He must have been stolen away from his family by the red devils! Ah, Dick, think of his mother! What is your name, young man? Who were your people? Were the members of your family murdered?”

  “Hush, Martha,” said Richard Lester. “Let him take his breath.”

  The eye of Red Hawk swung to the side to watch the girl open a door in the hot iron monster and put meat and a platter of beans inside it. Then he answered: “My father is Spotted Antelope, a brave man who has taken five scalps, two of them from white men. He has counted coup of three living men, and on twelve dead ones. My mother is Bitter Root. She has been a medicine lodge woman . . . her hands are never still all day long, and . . .”

  “Murder!” cried the white squaw. “Five scalps! And two from white men. . . .”

  “Martha,” said Richard Lester, “if your tongue must keep joggling along, I’ll have to ask you to leave the room. This man is our guest, and he understands every word you speak. My friend, will you sit down?” Again, he pushed forward one of the stools with the high backs, but Red Hawk, unfamiliar
with this medicine, threw back from his naked shoulders his buffalo robe and squatted cross-legged on the floor.

  “Your father is a white man who joined the Indians?” said Lester. “Is that it?”

  “My father is red. He is Cheyenne, and his name is Spotted Antelope.”

  “Ah,” said Lester, his voice hard. “And he has a white squaw, then?”

  “My mother is also red,” said Red Hawk. “Her name is Bitter Root, and . . .”

  “But if both your parents are red, how does it come that your skin is white?” asked Lester.

  Red Hawk answered: “My father is Spotted Antelope. My mother is Bitter Root. That is all I know.”

  “He was taken as a child. He doesn’t remember,” said the girl. “And all of these questions will embarrass him. Offer him something to smoke. That’s the best way.”

  “It is,” said Lester. “Well . . . are you comfortable on that cold floor, my friend? And what is your name?”

  “My name is Red Hawk. The floor is as warm to me as piled buffalo robes, because the voice of my white friend is kind.”

  “Thank you,” said Lester. “My name is Richard Lester.”

  Red Hawk stood up.

  “This is my wife . . . this is my daughter, Maisry,” Lester continued.

  Red Hawk looked at them both, and then sat down again on the floor. Lester took a chair opposite him. Mrs. Lester began to clear the table, keeping enchanted eyes on the visitor and seeming afraid lest the dishes should make a noise.

  “So you’ve left the Cheyennes and you’ve come to live with the whites?” said Richard Lester. “And what will you do? What work will you undertake?”