The White Indian

by Max Brand

  “He’s not a Hercules,” said Lester, smiling. “Do you think you’d want to stay here until you could do that trick, Red Hawk?”

  Red Hawk lifted the hammer in one hand. “To do such a thing is medicine, not the strength of a horse or of a fool,” Red Hawk said slowly. He put down the hammer and waved his hand toward the blacksmith. “I shall stay with him till I learn,” he concluded.

  Sam Calkins said nothing; he merely grinned until his thick lips were pulled out thin, like rubber. “Ten dollars a month . . . and a man’s pay after he learns,” said Calkins. Then he added with a fierce scowl: “But if he tries to walk out before his time’s up, I’m gonna go after him . . . Injun or white . . . and have him back to his work. I gotta spend brains to make a blacksmith out of a damn’ young fool, and I ain’t gonna spend brains for nothing.”

  “This may be hard work,” said Lester to Red Hawk. “It may even be harder than you’ll want to do. But if you go through with it, you’ll be ready for a life among us. Do you want to try it? You hear what Sam Calkins says. If you start, you’ll have to finish to his satisfaction.”

  It seemed to Red Hawk that he stood again in the medicine lodge, that Running Elk, with a blood-dripping hand, had grasped him by the right breast and again asked him if he wished to endure the test that would prove him a man. That was why he cried out with a sudden eagerness that he would attempt this thing.

  “All right,” said Sam Calkins. “If there’s enough wear in you, you’ll be the man for me. If there ain’t enough wear, I’ll throw you out quick enough. You can stay in the shack with me and the old woman. We’ll feed you and board you, and you’ll get ten dollars a month for pay.”

  Red Hawk walked back to the door with Lester. “My brother, you have been very kind to me,” he said. “He who honors a stranger honors himself . . . and now you have given me to a great medicine man who will make me wise. What shall I give you? The gray stallion that carried me from the country of the Cheyennes . . . he is yours. I am to be a man who lives on the ground for a long time, and the horse is yours.” Red Hawk said no more, and he was astonished at Lester’s reaction.

  Lester protested, until he saw a darkness of incredulity and anger come into the eyes of Red Hawk. Then he realized that to refuse the present would be an unforgivable insult, so at last he went up the street. Once, however, he paused, turned, and looked back toward Red Hawk with an anxious and doubtful eye.

  Chapter Ten

  It was nearly all sledge-hammer work. Red Hawk raised blisters the first day, broke them the second, and, after that, worked for a week with bleeding hands. He had never been through anything like it. Gradually the skin toughened. The muscles of his arms and shoulders and back were drawn to agony from the second day forward, but even these relaxed.

  For three mornings he had known, when he dragged his eyes open, that on this day he could no longer stand at the anvil, swinging the heavy sledge while Sam Calkins’s light striking hammer tapped remorselessly on, pointing out the places where the ponderous sledge must beat, cursing in thundering tones when the blows that Red Hawk’s numb arms delivered fell awry.

  But every day Red Hawk managed to get his protesting body from the blankets by telling himself that this was better than being dragged by rawhide tied into his flesh around and around the medicine lodge. And every day there was one moment of grace when Maisry Lester passed by the blacksmith shop, morning or afternoon, and either paused to call out a greeting or else came in and talked for an instant. He hid the bloodstained handle of the hammer from her, on these occasions, and kept his hands from view.

  For the rest, there was nothing but a dark obscurity of effort, more than he could endure until he sat with Sam Calkins and his wife at meals.

  Mrs. Calkins had a nose like a beak, and the eyes of a bird set close in at the roots of it. She was as lean and dark as her husband was gross and fair, and, no matter what the talk, her rapid glances measured and counted the mouthfuls that Red Hawk lifted to his lips.

  At night Red Hawk always crawled into the icy waters of the creek that ran behind the house, washed himself, and took his trembling body back to the shack and up the ladder to the attic, where he slept on a straw pallet, in a twist of his own buffalo robe. He felt that he was being tried by cold fire, and hammered into a new shape, but he was young enough or human enough to accept this as something good for the soul.

  It was not altogether the brutality of Sam Calkins that forced his apprentice through these bitter times. There was also a great need, because Sam had undertaken to provide the ponderous ironwork for a number of prairie schooners. That was why the fire burned so big in the forge. If Sam demanded the labor of two men from his apprentice, he exacted the toil of four from his own great body.

  Then came the day when there arrived, instead of the men who were to pay for his heavy labor, a letter from them cancelling the order. Straightway disaster fell upon Red Hawk. There was no one else for Sam to curse and abuse except the pack of idlers who were generally gathered all day long about the doors to see the White Indian at work. It must have been the devil himself who put into the hands of the blacksmith the sheep shears, as he strode up and down the shop, grinding his teeth, staring at the heaped masses of the ironwork for which he would not be paid.

  Sam Calkins’s angrily working fingers made the blades of the shears grind back and forth with a slight twanging sound, which impelled him to look about for something to cut. A throat would have been more to his taste, but at last he saw the thick, ropy braids of the dark red hair of his apprentice, as that youth worked patiently, drilling holes for rivets through a flat slab of wrought iron. So Sam Calkins, with a gesture and a wink, drew the attention of the idlers to what he was about to do. He stepped up behind his assistant and, with a double snip of the keen shears, severed the two braids close to the head. Then he leaped back with a shout of derision.

  “That’ll cool your head for you in this hot weather!” cried Sam.

  A whooping chorus of mirth roared into the shop as Red Hawk turned and looked at the fallen braids, putting one hand on the naked nape of his neck. To be without long hair was hardly to be a Cheyenne; one was no more than a squaw in mourning.

  It took him two or three seconds to understand what had happened, but, when he fully knew the extent of the desecration, he snatched out his knife and went at Sam Calkins like a tiger. The flash of the sharp steel made Calkins bolt. There would not have been enough speed in his legs to escape; it was only chance that, as Red Hawk hurled the knife, Calkins stumbled. That was why the weapon shot past his ear in a long line of light that went out when the blade drove deeply into the wall and remained there, humming like a hornet.

  The sight of it made Calkins bound like a deer through the scattering crowd at the door and into the sunlight, before he recovered himself and turned to face his apprentice.

  Red Hawk, as he raced in, shouted out in exultation, for the test had come at last, and in his heart there was no fear of this huge man, but only joy. That cry was still on his lips when a bystander struck a blow for the blacksmith.

  The man simply grasped the loaded butt of the blacksnake that hung over his neck and caught one of Red Hawk’s ankles with the twining lash of it. Red Hawk dived into the dust, and Sam Calkins fell on top of him.

  That was all there was to the fight. One hammer-handed stroke rolled darkness over the brain of Red Hawk. He knew nothing of the blows that followed, battering his face and crushing his body, until he was roused from the trance by being soused in the tempering tub of dirty water. Then he was allowed to stand, wavering, while the pain from the many cuts and bruises stung his brain back to life.

  Little by little, he was able to know what had happened from the brutal outcry of pleasure that was still being raised by the people at the doors, and from the bawling voice of Sam Calkins as the blacksmith cried: “There’s one lesson for you! And the next time you raise the tip of your little finger, you damn murderin’ snake of a fake Injun, I’m gonna
twist the neck off of your shoulders! Pick up that there drill . . . and git back to work!”

  There was one cause for joy—the free Cheyennes had not seen him beaten like a dog. Only the eyes of the whites had observed him. Then, as lightning divides a storm, so another interpretation gleamed across the darkness of his mind. He had fled from shame among the Cheyennes only to find shame among the whites, and, therefore, it was clear, he was in the hands of the spirits. They had condemned him to pain that must be endured. They had permitted him to be overwhelmed at the very moment when he had assured himself that no matter how he had feared torture, at least he was not afraid of a fighting man. All the bulk of Sam Calkins had not overawed him, and then chance had put him down.

  As he thought of these things, and as the certainty of his fate came over him, he lifted his hands to the blinding radiance of the sun that gleamed through a rent in the roof of the shop.

  “Listeners Above, and my father, the sun,” he said in Cheyenne. “I am your child, and I accept the punishment. Do not be angry with me forever. I make this vow to you . . . for twelve moons no words shall pass through my throat, neither the white man’s speech nor the good Cheyenne. Only I must now warn this man who stands here. When the twelve moons have gone by, if you are pleased with me, give strength to my hands so that they may destroy this man.”

  He turned with a calm face toward the blacksmith, saying: “The Sky People are angry with me. They have made me a dog to be beaten. For twelve moons I shall continue to be the dog that you kick out of your way. At the end of that time I shall kill you if I can, my father.” His lips were sealed.

  That same afternoon Lester came to the blacksmith shop and spoke sternly and rapidly to Sam Calkins. The smith blustered at first, then stood red and silent. Afterward, Lester came to Red Hawk and made a gesture.

  “Come with me, my friend,” said the lawyer. “I’ve heard of what has happened. I can see it in your face, poor fellow. Come home with me and we’ll find a better place for you.”

  But Red Hawk, looking straight into the eyes of the white man, shook his head.

  He would not speak, and at last the force of his silence pressed Richard Lester backward out of the shop. He went off with a puzzled air, and at that Sam Calkins began to grin. The grin did not last long, however, for, when he examined the face of Red Hawk, he felt that the callow boy was dead, and that a man stood in his place.

  Maisry came the next morning. She did not so much as glance at the blacksmith, but, standing in front of Red Hawk, she said to him, anxiously: “Will you speak to me? Are you silent because you hate us? Do you think we sent you to work here because we wanted to get you off our hands quickly? Red Hawk, we are all very sad about you. Will you speak?” Her face was full of sympathy.

  He looked her straight in the eye. The very roots of his heart were torn with a desire to talk to her, but the oath of silence held him.

  At last she shrank out of the place as her father had done before her.

  Chapter Eleven

  After that point, it is necessary to think of the twelve months that passed over the body and soul of Red Hawk as of time dreamed away. His hands were busy enough, and so were his wits, for, if he had not studiously employed himself, he would have gone mad. There could not have been a more industrious worker, or one apparently more interested in all things that fell within his ken, from the delicate mechanism of a clock or the lock of a gun to the mere sharpening of drills with swift, drawing strokes of his hammer.

  Even in the night, sometimes the fierceness of his longing for the Cheyennes and the great plains and the happy, free life started him up from his sleep, and then he would pacify himself by going down in the middle hours of darkness to work in the shop at the forge. He came to know how to read the mind and heart inside of iron by the way its color changed in heating and cooling, and by the way his hammer sprang upward from a blow. In a month he had learned more than Sam Calkins had ever been able to teach any apprentice in two years, because the passion of his industry was the passion of his hatred for the whites and his yearning for the red men of the plains.

  There was only one flaw in the perfection of that detestation of white men, and that was the feeling he had for the Lesters. Yet when Richard Lester came into the shop regularly once a month, Red Hawk turned to him a face as cold and hard as iron, and kept his vowed silence. It was simply because he felt inside himself a womanish weakness that, if he made a single sign, might burst out as through a broken dam into a confession of loneliness and bitterness of heart. And so every time he defied and baffled the kind, patient inquiry in the eyes of Richard Lester.

  As for the girl, she came no more, and the thought of her drew on his heart with wonderful power. However, he found a way of seeing her without being seen, for one Sunday, when the music began to thunder in the church, he climbed among the branches of a pine tree near the building and looked through the window. There he saw the organist with pumping feet and rapid fingers; there he saw the chorus standing, with the girl among them. Only one face was not deformed by the making of song and that was hers.

  Every Sunday, after that, he lay among the branches of the pine tree and listened and looked. So she put out root in his heart, and the thought of her flowered in his mind until sometimes the songs she had sung worked in his throat and her image came between him and the white-hot shining of the iron on the anvil.

  He had come to the village a stranger. He grew more strange in it as time went on. Sometimes the keen edge of his vow roused him out of sleep choking with the desire for speech. All he could do was to fill his hands, so he would hurry down to the shop.

  When the heavy hammer began to ring in the smithy in the middle of the night, the neighbors would waken suddenly and stare at the blackness about them, with the feeling that a devil possessed the apprentice.

  A superstition is dear, above all, to the hearts of children, and the boys of Witherell picked Red Hawk out for persecution. Silence is a deformity, and children cruelly hate those who are in any way different. A mob of them once fell on him in the square and began to shower stones at him until he turned with folded arms and endured them, for it was obviously the will of the spirits that he should suffer, and therefore the suffering should be accepted with calmness. A stone struck his forehead, cut it open, and let blood run down his face, but Red Hawk merely smiled.

  It was the sight of that smile that sent a thrill of horror through the youngsters; panic fear of the unknown caught hold of them, and they fled, yelling. Thereafter, they avoided him carefully, only calling a few taunts from a distance.

  If he was a stranger to the entire village, he was no less a stranger to Sam Calkins and Mrs. Calkins. She, in a fury, had refused to sit at table with a tongueless beast, and dumped his rations for the day into a bucket.

  “The only way that swine had oughta be fed!” she shrilled at him.

  Because he accepted this silently and calmly, it became the custom. He would take the pail with whatever was thrown into it and, sitting cross-legged on the little back porch of the house, eat his food alone.

  As for Sam Calkins, he was never at ease when his back was turned to this silent apprentice. He took pleasure in showing an occasional feat of strength before Red Hawk, but, if he bent an iron bar with his naked hands or twisted a horseshoe, he found that the eyes of his assistant remained half blank and half vaguely smiling. Nervousness therefore grew in Calkins’s mind. He even talked the matter over with his wife.

  “Why should I have a damn’ Injun around to cut my throat some night?”

  And she answered: “Ain’t he three men for the work he does . . . at a quarter the cost of one? And ain’t you man enough to take care of yourself, you great hulk?”

  That was the only reason Calkins continued to employ him. As Red Hawk grew familiar with the work, his silence made a smaller handicap. He knew his tasks, and a few signs were all that was necessary in making his answers.

  It was midwinter when there walked into the b
lacksmith shop a huge man dressed in deerskin, with a knife at his belt and a gun in his hand. He had the flowing hair of the frontiersman, and in his face such savagery as Red Hawk never had seen before—not even in the withered, evil features of Running Elk, the medicine man. But with the cruelty, the set iron of that face, there was combined dignity such as goes with the endurance of pain. Sometimes it appears in the features of a priest or an ascetic, sometimes in the face of a devotee.

  Stepping close to Red Hawk, he paused there, towering above, his glance burning into the eyes of the lad.

  “Is this the Cheyenne?” asked the stranger suddenly.

  “He’s got a white skin, Mister Sabin . . . under the soot,” said the blacksmith. “But he’s got a damned red Cheyenne heart inside of him.”

  “When he grows long hair and puts on paint, I’ll find him again,” said Sabin, and strode out of the blacksmith shop.

  That was the way in which Red Hawk for the first time encountered the Wind Walker face to face, and, as he saw the giant stepping away, he knew that he had been closer to death than ever before in his life.

  The house of Marshall Sabin, who the Cheyennes called Wind Walker, was in the bottom of a small hollow at the edge of the town. Sometimes, in the very early morning or in the dusk of the day, Red Hawk would go through the trees and to the edge of the hollow and look down at the little shack. That was as far as his feet ever took him, but in his daydreams he often walked down the slope and beat on the door of the house and saw it opened by the giant. As an ordinary youth might have dreamed of becoming a king, so he dreamed of the glory that would come to the slayer of Wind Walker, the great enemy of the Cheyennes. But even in dreams he could hardly enlarge his mind to the thought of facing Wind Walker single-handed.