The White Indian

by Max Brand

  But the strength had run out of Red Hawk, and he was weak. His knees bent under him as he strode out into the light of the bonfire and saw about him, once again, the thick circle of the listeners. As he dropped the robe from his shoulders, a murmur rose. Hands pointed toward the painting on his breast. He saw a young squaw lift up her son so that the boy could see the prodigy.

  “The sign of Sweet Medicine,” she said.

  With his head thrown back, Red Hawk looked at the stars, and a great silence fell over the camp, except where the wives of Dull Hatchet lamented, far away. The voice of their grief entered rhythmically into him, and it seemed to be his own soul that was crying out.

  At last he said: “There is grief in me like the sorrow that puffs up the body of a small child. I must go away. My father waits for me . . . his blood calls to me. I go out among the white people. I must eat their food, but the spirit behind my teeth will always be Cheyenne. Every day I shall turn toward you and pray to Sweet Medicine to give you happiness. The white people have given me a new name . . . but keep one place in your heart, and let Red Hawk be there. I hope the sadness that fills me now is a sorrow that I shall take away from the tribe. Sickness and famine, and the longing for peace . . . that is what I carry away. I leave joy behind me. Let me touch all of you with my hands. Oh, my brothers and my sisters . . .”

  He could not talk any longer. He walked like a blind man, slowly, with Standing Bull at his side, guiding him through the crowd.

  Then the Cheyennes forgot dignity to press in on Red Hawk and receive his touch like a benediction, and with every touch something more went out from Red Hawk, and the strange weakness grew in his knees and in his heart.

  At the edge of the village the crowd halted as though at a wall. Only Standing Bull took three forward paces, and stood beside the sheen of White Horse and the departing man. He gripped the hands of Red Hawk and repeated the old formula of the blood brothers: “Your blood is my blood . . . my blood is your blood. Your life is my life . . . my life is your life.”

  Red Hawk spoke the same words. He could only whisper them. When he had mounted, White Horse seemed to understand, and went away on soft, careful feet. Behind them the tribe began to sing, with the great voices of men and the sweet voices of the women and children, the lament for the missing:

  One arrow . . . one arrow . . . one arrow . . .

  One arrow has gone forth . . .

  Return, oh, arrow! Return to me!

  Red Hawk never once turned his head, but, when the singing died away in the distance, it seemed to him that the night grew suddenly darker.

  Presently Wind Walker loomed out of the darkness and rode beside him and a little to the rear. Even Wind Walker seemed to understand, for he was silent.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  On that long journey across the plains, bright and bare as the sea, the father and the son rarely spoke to one another. They were constrained and self-conscious; they used toward one another a scrupulous politeness.

  Sometimes, when Rusty Sabin looked at his father, he felt a sudden sting of pity in his eyes. For he could feel that the mere fact of blood had made Marshall Sabin love him, and in his own heart he was sure that he never could feel a natural affection for Wind Walker, the slayer of his red brothers.

  Yet it was Rusty who stopped, on the way down Witherell Creek, at the obscure ruins of the shack, and it was Rusty who dismounted from White Horse and stood beside the white gravestone. Then he told his father how he had first found the place.

  Marshall Sabin pulled off his hat. He was perfectly calm as Rusty talked about her. All the way across the plains the elder white man had not once mentioned his dead wife, but only now was Rusty conscious of the omission.

  He heard how Marshall Sabin, on that day those years ago, had left the small house and the cornfield, and how he had returned in the dusk of the day to find his house was half wrecked, his cornfield trampled as though by blind beasts, and on the earth floor the body of his dead wife.

  “But there was no pain in her face, Rusty,” said Marshall Sabin. “She looked even younger than she had when I married her. And it must have been because of that look on her face that the Cheyennes did not scalp her. She had long red hair, Rusty, the same color as yours. Yet they hadn’t scalped her,” he repeated.

  “And you were gone. Of course I thought you were dead. I kept on thinking that till I saw the green beetle hanging from your neck the other day. She used to wear that beetle on a cord that passed around her hair. It looked pretty there . . . the green against the red.”

  It seemed to Rusty Sabin that there was not enough air in the world for him to breathe. When his mind cleared, afterward, it was as though the Cheyennes had withdrawn to a distance. Yes, it was as though the great red tribe had been seen marching off into the horizon, with the White Indian, Red Hawk, among them.

  Looking into Marshall Sabin’s face, so marked by the long years of pain, he saw Wind Walker no longer. In his place was the big-shouldered, fearless young man who had leaned over his dead wife in the cabin with terrible resolves growing up in his brain like the smoke of a sacrificial fire.

  “I pick up these years one by one,” said Rusty at last. “I put them behind me. I begin again at that time when you came home and found the empty house, Father.”

  They left at once, and rode on toward Witherell. They could talk, now. There was that matter of the gold, about which Marshall Sabin was naturally very curious, but the mention of it brushed a swift shadow across the face of his son.

  “I have turned my back on my people. They are lost to me,” said Rusty sadly. “Do not ask me to send my thoughts back to them for the sake of gold.”

  Marshall Sabin said no more. He permitted the conversation to run on to the subject of the girl, a theme that grew like a river in flood, with Rusty talking. And it did not fail until, in the dusk of the day, they entered the town and came to the house of Richard Lester.

  “Go in to them, Father,” said Rusty. “I am ashamed to see them because they know that I have offered them money and that I came for the girl, to make her my squaw. Talk to them, and then let me know what they say.”

  Said the father: “I know a good deal about this thing. Lester has talked to me because he knows of the night you came to my house. He will let the girl be as free as the wind. She may do as she pleases.”

  “Good,” said Rusty. “But since her father is sick and her mother is weak, he must come with us. And you, also, my father. Because of her parents, we must go to a southern land, where there is more sun and where the wind cannot blow cold. Only go in quickly and speak to them. Tell the girl that White Horse is here, and that I am waiting with the horse.”

  Marshall Sabin, for a moment, rested his hand on the shoulder of his son. Then he strode up the path and passed around to the rear of the house.

  Rusty heard the knock of the hand against the door, the creak of the hinges, the sound of voices, the shutting of the door, and silence again. His mind went back to the tribe, to the gleam of the campfire on the many wild faces, to the singing lips in the chant, and to the sheen of eyes, and to the honor that was now his among the Cheyennes. Then, listening closely, he could hear inside the house his father’s deep, swelling voice. He heard tingling outcries break in upon that voice, but he gave little attention to them.

  At last the deep voice paused, and presently the front door of the house opened. He could not see who came down the steps; in his ears there was a mighty rushing, like the thunder of a cataract in the Sacred Valley that the White Indian had heard.

  Stepping back, he leaned his right arm up on the neck of the stallion. Then a hand touched him.

  “Rusty,” said the voice of Maisry Lester. “Come into the house.”

  He closed his eyes. “No,” he said, “because you have come to stay with me . . . forever.”

  If she stepped back now, he felt, she was lost to him. So, with his eyes still shut, he put out his left arm, found her, and drew her in close
to him. Then he opened his eyes. She had said nothing, because she needed to say nothing. Neither of them moved. But Rusty felt that they were rushing together, out of the world of flesh, and that they were sweeping through a measureless domain of the spirit.

  He took one of her hands in his and felt its smallness, its warmth and strength. It seemed to fit exactly his grasp, as though he could compass her, body and soul. . . .

  They sailed on the next river steamer that left Witherell. The plan was to take Richard Lester as quickly as possible down the Mississippi to New Orleans, and then trek westward into the land of bright skies and little rain about which Rusty had often heard.

  It was easily arranged. That gold that Rusty had brought in had, in fact, almost the power of a god, and it enabled them to start at once on the journey. On the day when they sailed, the entire town knocked off work to see the departure, and there were cheers when White Horse went up the gangway with dainty steps, shuddering as he found himself above the strip of water, and making a final spring onto the deck that sent out a sound like a great drum beaten.

  Rusty was busy quieting the horse. Later on, the stallion could be worked back to the stall that had been prepared for him. In the meantime, steam was gotten up and the ship began to tremble with the life of the raging wood fires that sent the sparks rushing high into the air and sent blazing cinders blowing out toward the dock. The horse stood with the people at the end of the deck, sometimes throwing up his head to look about him with terrified eyes, and again sniffing for reassurance at Rusty’s face.

  Mrs. Lester, in tears, was waving frantically to her many acquaintances. Richard Lester, a fragile form leaning on the arm of the gigantic Marshall Sabin, made an occasional gesture toward a friend. He was very happy, but, even if he had been sad, the bursting joy of Marshall Sabin would have been enough to scatter the darkness from the mind of his friend.

  The ropes were cast off. The stern paddle wheel began to groan and turn, dashing into the water. The sky began to move slowly overhead. The voices of the crowds died out. The great engine was carrying Rusty out toward a new life.

  He looked toward the girl. She leaned against the rail, at a little distance. Her glance shifted slowly, calmly from White Horse to Rusty Sabin. She smiled a little. It was typical of her that she should stand there at a little distance, with the look of one who has plucked a wild bird out of the sky and has made it her own forever.

  THE END

  About the Author

  Max Brand is the best-known pen name of Frederick Faust, creator of Dr. Kildare, Destry, and many other fictional characters popular with readers and viewers worldwide. Faust wrote for a variety of audiences in many genres. His enormous output, totaling approximately thirty million words or the equivalent of 530 ordinary books, covered nearly every field: crime, fantasy, historical romance, espionage, Westerns, science fiction, adventure, animal stories, love, war, and fashionable society, big business and big medicine. Eighty motion pictures have been based on his work along with many radio and television programs. For good measure he also published four volumes of poetry. Perhaps no other author has reached more people in more different ways.

  Born in Seattle in 1892, orphaned early, Faust grew up in the rural San Joaquin Valley of California. At Berkeley he became a student rebel and one-man literary movement, contributing prodigiously to all campus publications. Denied a degree because of unconventional conduct, he embarked on a series of adventures culminating in New York City where, after a period of near starvation, he received simultaneous recognition as a serious poet and successful author of fiction. Later, he traveled widely, making his home in New York, then in Florence, and finally in Los Angeles.

  Once the United States entered the Second World War, Faust abandoned his lucrative writing career and his work as a screenwriter to serve as a war correspondent with the infantry in Italy, despite his fifty-one years and a bad heart. He was killed during a night attack on a hilltop village held by the German army. New books based on magazine serials or unpublished manuscripts or restored versions continue to appear so that, alive or dead, he has averaged a new book every four months for seventy-five years. Beyond this, some work by him is newly reprinted every week of every year in one or another format somewhere in the world. A great deal more about this author and his work can be found in The Max Brand Companion (Greenwood Press, 1997) edited by Jon Tuska and Vicki Piekarski. His website is www.MaxBrandOnline.com.