The White Indian

by Max Brand

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Every day brought a forced march from dawn to dark. The dust kept twisting up in thin, acrid spirals. The sun pressed down harder and harder with the weight of its heat, wasting the flesh from the horses and thumbing out hollows in the faces of the riders. But they went on silently, enduring.

  They traveled rapidly, but sometimes they seemed to Red Hawk like so many ants painfully crawling beneath the vast blue arch of the sky. He was not of them. When he looked at them, an odd chill worked in his blood and he feared that he had begun to observe them with the spiritless eyes of a white man. Even the leaders were a grim sight. Dull Hatchet was considered a fine figure among the Cheyennes. He was in the full middle prime of life, when as a rule a white man is marked with some softness by the years. But Dull Hatchet had simply hardened in brutality. Even Standing Bull was no longer the handsome young hero of three years before. Lines had gathered about his eyes. The marks of savagery had collected about his mouth, although his expression could still soften when he looked at his friend.

  Hard as the Cheyennes rode, Wind Walker and his Pawnees still receded safely before them, out of the plains and into the hills. And at last the pursuers had full sight of the Pawnees in a position that was so entirely safe that the Cheyennes could merely gather on a hilltop and stare down at the picture with greedy eyes.

  Wind Walker had selected the camp, of course. His cunning appeared at once in the choice of the site, which was in the center of a huge bowl with highlands scattered around it. A twist of water ran through the center of the bowl, golden in the evening light. A few trees and shrubs offered fuel, but there was not enough for shelter behind which the camp could be stalked. An attack would have to sweep over a mile of open country to get at those Pawnees. And though there were fewer of them than of the Cheyennes, such an attack would lead to a senseless butchery, with no hope of success.

  In the midst of the Pawnee camp there was one figure of shining white that Red Hawk could not take his eyes from—White Horse.

  He said nothing to his companions, but rode straight down the slope. Standing Bull called out a word of warning, but the rest were still as Red Hawk advanced on his thin-shouldered mustang toward the Pawnee camp. He had left his rifle behind him, and he carried no other weapon except the knife with its sixteen-inch blade of fine steel. As he drew closer to the enemy, he lifted his right hand, palm out, and so advanced the horse at a walk.

  The Pawnees stood up and stared at him. He was quite close when a voice yelled: “The Red Hawk!”

  A young brave snatched up a rifle and leveled it. Wind Walker spoke, and the rifle gradually lowered from his aim. That was how Red Hawk rode into the camp of the Pawnees. They were chosen warriors, every one of those roach-headed wolves of the plains, but great and grim as they were, young and old shrank back from the path of this famous Cheyenne medicine man with the white skin.

  White Horse neighed suddenly, and came charging through the group. The stallion followed Red Hawk, nuzzling at his shoulder. The horses neighed again and again, like a great deafening horn.

  But Red Hawk could not take notice of the shining monster. He had to step forward as though he were unattended, not letting his eyes dwell on the bloody marks of the bit on the mouth of the great horse, no matter how his heart swelled. With straightforward eyes Red Hawk must approach Wind Walker.

  The white man stood with his hands on his hips, his hat off, his long hair pouring down over his neck in a dusty sweep. He said quietly: “Well, Cheyenne? A good many of these Pawnee hands are aching to get at your throat. Is it wise for you to be here? Sit down and eat something . . . and smoke, and tell me why you’ve come.”

  Red Hawk ate with them, and wondered why the food did not choke him. He smoked of the pipe that was passed around the circle afterward, and blew his portion upward toward the bronze of the evening sky. He took care not to look back over his shoulder at the gleaming image of White Horse as he said: “There can be no peace between Wind Walker and the Cheyennes, but even the snake and the owl may live in one house and fair exchanges make both the traders rich. You have a horse, Wind Walker, and I have gold, which is the white man’s god. Give me the horse and I will give you as much gold as you can lift from the ground. In the course of one moon, I shall bring the gold to an appointed place and take the horse. Do you listen?”

  “As much gold as a man can lift?” said Wind Walker. He gathered his brows and considered Red Hawk. “How many traders have you murdered, then, Red Hawk?”

  “The Great Spirit, Sweet Medicine, struck the ground before me, and the gold lay at my feet,” said Red Hawk.

  He heard a little intake of breath as the Pawnees listened, but the white man was smiling.

  “Well,” said Wind Walker, “if there were a thousand mule loads of gold on one side, and White Horse on the other, I would keep the horse. You know that there are a lot of good things in the world, my lad, but nothing that pleases me as much as Cheyenne scalps. And White Horse will help to shorten my time between scalps.”

  The Pawnees looked silently at the ground. A guest ought not to be insulted and threatened.

  Wind Walker’s speech was so very bad that Red Hawk stood up. Behind him White Horse snuffed at his hair and sent a tingle down his spine, but he could not notice the stallion even now.

  “In the Cheyenne lodges,” said Red Hawk, making his last appeal, “there are better things than gold. They are painted robes and new rifles and plenty of powder and lead. Name what you wish, and I shall bring you guns and robes and many bright new knives, and beads enough to cover a thousand pairs of leggings. I shall bring you, also, a whole horse load of sugar and tea. That is a good price for White Horse.”

  Wind Walker merely smiled again and pointed. “You have a belly full of meat and a brain full of smoke. Go back to the other Cheyenne dogs. The day will come soon when I shall tie your red scalp to the bit of White Horse . . . and make him like the smell of it.”

  Incredulity came over Red Hawk as he heard the brutality of this speech. But he said merely: “Even in the tall sky there is not room enough for two eagles to pass, if they have strong hearts. We shall meet again.”

  Then he turned and went back to his mustang. White Horse tried to follow. But many ropes snared him. He began to kick and plunge. As Red Hawk rode off, he shuddered, forcing himself to keep from turning. But it seemed as though the rawhide ropes that restrained the stallion were searing his own flesh.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Three days later the Pawnees vanished from the hills like a thin cloud from beneath the hot face of the sun. Dull Hatchet could find only the general direction of the flight. The reason of it was clear enough. No doubt Wind Walker had kept the band together all this time in the hope that the Cheyennes might walk into some ambuscade. Failing in that chance, the Pawnees had been sent off—the greater part of them, at least—to take the encumbering herd of stolen horses back to the Pawnee camps. They might return, then, and try to bait Dull Hatchet’s band with a greater force.

  The Cheyenne chief, learning how the many trails scattered to this side and that, picked out a northern landmark, a tall, bar-headed mountain. Then he scattered his entire troop, with directions to gather again on the southern slope of the mountain. On the way, one of the men might pick up the trail of the scattered Pawnees.

  That was how Red Hawk came to be riding alone on his scrawny down-headed mustang, through the narrows of a great defile. The sun was directly overhead, scalding him, when he heard a dull, bumping sound, and the horse dropped flat on the earth beneath him. An instant later the report of the rifle came welling down into the cañon as Red Hawk rolled away from the body of the dead mustang and into the shade of a boulder.

  Over the edge of that boulder he looked up and saw the silhouette of White Horse, racing on the verge of the cliff against the sky, with Wind Walker sitting huge in the saddle. The white man-slayer thought, no doubt, that the fall of the horse was what had flung Red Hawk out of the sa
ddle and behind the barrier of the rock. Perhaps he was looking now for a way to ride down the rough sandstone steps of the side of the valley, and so get at his victim.

  Then Red Hawk’s whistle, that had called White Horse many times, went up thin as the scream of a hawk. He saw the sound strike the stallion. He saw the shining form whirl and leap from the top ledge to a lower level, and again to another narrow platform of rock. Down came White Horse, with Wind Walker struggling vainly to arrest that descent. It was all the rider could do to keep his place.

  Red Hawk, his heart filled with laughter, snatched up his fallen rifle and leveled it. He would not shoot until that target was so close that there was no danger of striking the horse, instead of the man. Then, on the very lowest shelf of the descent, he saw Wind Walker slung sidelong from the horse. Down he came, his body spinning rapidly over and over, until he lay motionlessly on the red shale that covered the bottom of the ravine. And here was White Horse, at last, with a thin cloud of dust sweeping behind him as he galloped to his master, a red froth flying back from his torn mouth and onto his chest and shoulders.

  Red Hawk spoke one joyous word to the horse as he ran forward. Then he saw Wind Walker rise up from the ground. From a ragged tear in his scalp, blood ran down over one side of the white man’s face. He staggered on uncertain feet.

  Something in that gesture—the hopelessness of even those mighty hands warding away the flying bullet—made the heart of Red Hawk change. He remembered, suddenly, how once he had awakened from a death-like trance and found himself outside Wind Walker’s house. His life had been spared, then.

  And so he stood back, his rifle ready, but grasped only in his right hand while with his left he stroked the quivering neck of White Horse.

  Wind Walker came suddenly to his full senses. He dragged the back of his hand across his face, and, through the blood that was clotting on his forehead, he peered forth at his enemy.

  “I was once in your hands,” said Red Hawk. “Instead of killing me, you threw me out of your house. You let the life grow up in me once more. The Cheyennes have asked the spirits to let them have your scalp, but Sweet Medicine has given me back White Horse, and that is enough to take, even from a Great Spirit, in one day. Farewell.”

  He mounted White Horse. He could not believe that he was riding deliberately away from the glory of killing that great foe of the Cheyennes.

  When he looked back, he saw Wind Walker in the same place, no longer staggering, but with fallen head, like one whose spirit had been overwhelmed. Yet they would meet again, and the next meeting would certainly be the end of their feud.

  He felt no pride in that encounter. Chance and White Horse had brought Wind Walker to lie at his feet, and with a truly Cheyenne terseness he merely said to the others, that night at the camp: “Wind Walker is still alive.”

  His red brothers eyed the stallion with wonder, and said nothing.

  They had entered now into a deadly game of tiger-hunt-tiger. Through a labyrinth of cañons, broken mesas, sharp-sided hills, the hunt continued.

  But the patience of the Indians was soon exhausted, and one after another the Cheyennes melted away to return to the distant camp. At last there remained only a grim trio: men hard as metal and welded together like steel—Dull Hatchet, Standing Bull, and Red Hawk.

  The Pawnees, they knew, had scattered, also. There was only a small group of them remaining, but among those Wind Walker was sure to be found.

  They were in the jumble of a gigantic badlands. Water flowed in most of these gorges only after heavy rains, when the erosion went on rapidly. During the rest of the year only the wind was at work, with its chisels of flying sand hewing the rocks and wearing away more rapidly the clay slopes.

  Standing Bull said: “Here all the red tribes could be hidden so that even a hawk would have a hard time to find a single man. But we must search. Red Hawk, may your medicine be strong.”

  Wind Walker hovered like a hawk in all their minds, night and day.

  Dull Hatchet established a system that showed why he was war chief of the tribe. His method was slow, but it was sure. It consisted of placing one man on the highest eminence in sight so that he could act as look-out while the others scouted through the ravines below, ever and anon looking up toward their spy, who was ready to warn them, by signals, if he chanced to spot the enemy in the distance while they were working through the gorges.

  It was slow, painful, and anxious work, and they spent days at it. The weather was hot and windless. No water ran in the little valley; only now and again did they find water—usually scummed across with green—from which they could fill their leather water bags. They never ventured to build a fire, for the least gleam at night might be enough to bring the enemy upon them, and the slightest trace of vapor during the day would be seen from afar as it stained that clear air.

  Hence, for food they crunched parched corn and chewed jerked venison, washed down with the tainted water from the stagnant water holes. Every day their bodies burned dry and their eyes sank back beneath their brows, wrinkled pouches of skin gathering around the lids.

  Since the bright sheen of White Horse began to seem like a shining light that would be sure to take the eye of the enemy from afar, his coat was smudged over with yellow and brown clay. Sometimes they even considered the possibility of turning the horses loose, so that they could do their work more efficiently on foot.

  Altogether, they were in the badlands seven days. And in the late afternoon of the seventh, Red Hawk made his way stealthily down the bottom of a dry ravine. For some time he had not looked back toward the look-out that Dull Hatchet was keeping from the top of a flat hill behind him. Coming to a stretch of still water that had not the least film of green over it, he tasted it. It was strongly alkaline, therefore he drank only sparingly of it. Nevertheless, it was time that the empty water skins were refilled, so he turned back to signal the discovery to the look-out.

  Then it was that he saw on the top of the mesa, through the burning, golden haze of the slanting afternoon light, the brief and shadowy flickering of an arm. It said, almost as swiftly as speech: “Come in, enemy! Come in!”

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  The many days of hunting collapsed to a moment, only, on the instant that Red Hawk’s eye deciphered that signal. He turned and ran back, his body bent horizontally and in his ears the imagined clang of a distant rifle, the thin whine of a bullet.

  When he came to the foot of the mesa, Standing Bull and Dull Hatchet were already there, Dull Hatchet on one knee, loading his rifle. He had thrown off his deerskin shirt and flung away his leggings, so that he was in a breechclout only. To Red Hawk he looked the mightiest figure of a man he had ever seen. What was even Wind Walker compared with this copper-skinned giant?

  Standing Bull, stripped to the waist, was hardly less imposing. What he lacked in height and weight, he made up in an appearance of greater agility.

  Dull Hatchet stood up and pointed. “Over there toward the hill with the two tops,” he said, “there is a mesa with a flat top. On it I saw the shine of the sun on a medicine glass. It is a hunter, and the game he hunts is not deer or antelope or buffalo. He is hunting men.”

  Red Hawk had quite forgotten the possibility that Wind Walker might have with him a field glass.

  “We must go ahead quickly and carefully,” Dull Hatchet continued. “The white man may have seen me wave from the top of the rock. He may be waiting with others, and they may be loading their rifles with news bullets and smiling at one another. Ahead of us, a little distance, there is another high hill that looks out on two cañons. Let us climb it. Tether the ponies to White Horse, because he knows how to stand still.”

  “Suppose Wind Walker goes by us, following another ravine, and so comes out behind us and catches the horses,” said Standing Bull.

  “At a time like this,” answered Dull Hatchet, “one stupid mind is better than three clever ones. I have thought of one way to try to fight them . . . but we have no time
to talk about it. While we sit in a council, the white man is perhaps stealing toward us.”

  They did as he said, because the point of his last remark was perfectly patent. Standing Bull tethered the other ponies to White Horse, while Red Hawk stood in front of the stallion and talked to him quietly, moving his hand back and forth across the eyes of the horse. When they had left, White Horse stood fast, looking after them with his head canted a trifle to one side as though he strove to read the minds of these humans.

  Now the swift feet of the Cheyennes found the way down the cañon until they came to the foot of that hill that the chief had discovered before. All its lower slopes were deeply gullied red clay; above, there was a flat cap of rock, turreted like a castle, so that the place made a perfect citadel.

  They climbed until they had reached an upper brow of the rock. There were other hilltops not far away from which they could be seen, and so they crawled to the forward edge of the big stone platform. Lying flat over the edge of the rock, Dull Hatchet could see right down into the right-hand ravine where, coming toward them, were three men. He had a glimpse of one, then another, and another.

  “Back! Back!” said Dull Hatchet.

  They wormed back from the edge of the platform. Dull Hatchet was saying in a murmur: “Keep well in. From time to time I shall look over the edge of the rock. Did you see?”

  “I saw the roached heads of the Pawnee wolves,” said Standing Bull.

  “Good,” said Red Hawk. But to him Wind Walker was the great prize. When he thought of the fixed and savage light in the eye of the famous man-slayer, his breath left his body.

  Dull Hatchet went on: “There is a place where the ravine has no rough places . . . no brush, no rocks, and no hollows. If they cross that close together, they will all be in sight at once, and we shall try to shoot. Keep close here to the edge of the rock. Have your rifles ready. When I give the word, be ready to push the guns over and fire. I shall take Wind Walker. You, Standing Bull, take whichever of the Pawnees is on the right. Red Hawk, take the man on his left.”