The Steel Box

by Max Brand

  VIII

  A treble dignity invested Standing Bull when the war party returned to the village, so that even he could dispute with Rising Hawk the honors and the dignities of the expedition, though all that he had done was to be delivered from the hands of the Dakotas.

  But, in the first place, he it was who had brought Torridon to the Cheyennes, and at second-hand, as it were, all the wonders that Torridon had worked since his arrival. Again, Standing Bull had taken prominent part in the first unfortunate expedition against the Sioux and duly counted his two coups before capture. Thirdly, the big man had the credit that comes of entering the jaws of death and escaping.

  When the multitudes poured out from the Cheyenne camp, they yelled the name of Standing Bull louder than all the rest, except for a continual roar that lasted from the time the party was first met by fast-riding young men until the whole band had conducted the warriors to the center of the camp, and the burden of that roaring noise was the name of White Thunder. They called upon him, however, as they would have called upon a spirit. But they called upon Standing Bull as upon a man.

  When that warrior returned, therefore, he found all in order with his reputation, but all out of order in his lodge. His favorite wife was a wracked and helpless woman, lying stretched on her bed, too weakened by a debauch of grief that had followed the tidings of the loss of her lord to do more than raise her head and smile weakly in greeting. Her shaven head glistened repulsively under the eye of her husband; her body was slashed and torn; her scalp was crossed with many knife slashes, and, beyond this, she had given away practically everything in the lodge and the entire horse herd of her husband in the midst of her grief in order to propitiate the Sky People and to give more lasting rest to the spirit of Standing Bull. In all this, she had acted a most pious part, but it left Standing Bull a beggared man.

  For that, he cared not at all. There were many gifts from his friends. White Thunder alone gave ten horses to make a handsome beginning of a horse herd for his old friend, and High Wolf donated a store of provisions. In a day, the lodge was well supplied with all the necessaries. So fluid was prosperity in an Indian tribe. It ebbed and flowed like the sea.

  The entire stage was left to be monopolized by Rising Hawk and Standing Bull. White Thunder had withdrawn to his teepee, where he lay on his bed and slept longer than any warrior should, and the whoopings and the yellings only made him turn from time to time and exclaim impatiently.

  Young Willow, grown suddenly tender beyond her wont, watched over him. With a new-cut branch she waved the flies away from him, and with ambidextrous skill saw to it that he slept and that food was ready when at last he wakened.

  He lolled at ease against the most comfortable of his backrests and ate of the meat that was placed before him—not simply dried flesh of the buffalo, but stewed venison, freshly killed, and roasted venison, turned at the fire on a dozen small spits and handed to him bit by bit by the squaw.

  With burning eyes of pleasure she regarded the man of the lodge. “So,” said Young Willow, “you rode out groaning, and you have come back famous!”

  “Fame is noise,” said Torridon sententiously—and wearily, also, for he was still tired from the long ride.

  “Noise?” cried Young Willow, growing angry at once. “Fame is all that men live for and all that the dead are remembered by!”

  “The people shout today, they yawn tomorrow,” sighed Torridon.

  “Good fame is better than a handsome face,” said the squaw.

  “It is a breath,” said the man.

  “It is to men what their breath is to the flowers,” said the squaw.

  “The flowers soon wither,” said Torridon, “and so what becomes of them?”

  “The sweetness they have left on earth is remembered,” replied Young Willow.

  He felt himself fairly beaten, and, acknowledging it by his silence, he smiled almost fondly on that grotesque face, and she smiled back at him, gently.

  “From the time we left until the time we returned,” said Torridon, “I fired my rifle only twice.”

  “And then?” she asked him hungrily.

  “Then,” he admitted, with a lift of the head, “I saw a Sioux jump his height into the air each time.” He added, chuckling: “They must live on springs, because they die in the air.”

  Young Willow laughed, like the cawing of a crow. “That is a good thing to remember,” she said. “How many spirits, White Thunder, came down at your call?”

  An honest man would have shrugged his shoulders and declared that there was not a spirit in the air on that day of bloodshed. But Torridon had discovered that honesty availed him nothing. If he put all on a common-sense plane, it was simply believed that he was deceiving the people and hiding the truth, and veiling his powers.

  He said as gravely as possible: “There was a spirit in front of every man. There were eighty Sioux, and yet all their bullets could not find a single Cheyenne. I shall tell you why . . . I had placed a spirit in front of every warrior. The ghosts turned the bullets away. Some of those bullets went back and killed the men who had fired them.”

  At this prodigy, Young Willow opened her eyes and her mouth. She drank, as it were, of the mystery. Doubt was far from her. This was a story that would thrill the very hearts of the men, the women, and the children, and she could be fairly sure that White Thunder would not tell the story himself. It was in her hands. Beads and shells would be showered upon her for the telling of such a miracle. In fact her housekeeping for the white man was turning out a sinecure of great value, in her eyes.

  “You saw them, White Thunder?” she breathed.

  “I alone,” he said. “There is a veil before the eyes of other men. A spirit like a great bat flew before Rising Hawk. Bullets glanced from its wings and made sparks of bright red light.”

  There was a little more of this fantastic conversation. Then, when Torridon went to sleep again, the squaw slipped from the lodge, fairly bursting with her tale. She went back to the teepee of her husband to find that High Wolf was in serious conversation with Standing Bull.

  The old chief turned on the squaw with a harsh voice. “What of White Thunder?” he asked.

  She concealed the miracle that had just been confided to her. She preferred to retell it herself to small gatherings. “He still sleeps.”

  High Wolf made a gesture of impatience. “The Sky People have sent us a pig in the form of a man,” he declared scornfully. “Has he done no boasting?”

  “Only that two Dakotas fell under his rifle”

  High Wolf and Standing Bull exchanged glances.

  “That is nothing to him?”

  “He sleeps again.” Young Willow smiled.

  “He neither has danced nor sung?”

  Young Willow shrugged her shoulders. “He has had a few Dakotas killed, and taken a few scalps to make the Cheyennes proud. But what is that to him? If he wished, he would wash the Dakotas into the rivers so thickly that the Father of Waters would be choked on his way to the sea. The Cheyennes come home and sing like children over a few beads. White Thunder sleeps so that he may dream of happier things.”

  The two warriors listened to this speech with the deepest attention.

  “He is not happy, then?” asked High Wolf.

  “He is as always. I spoke to him about fame. He turned my words into the thinnest air.”

  High Wolf gestured toward the door, and the squaw departed. After she had gone, High Wolf said: “From the time you first brought him to us, I knew that he was a gift from the heavens. But I never knew until now what his powers could be.”

  “Use him now, while he is with us,” said Standing Bull. “Use him like a magic rifle that will soon be gone. For he is unhappy among us. I cannot tell why, but he is unhappy.”

  “I, however, know the reason,” returned the chief. “It is because of a woman.”

  “Ha?” cried Standing Bull. “If it is a Crow, a Blackfoot, if it is even a Sioux, there are enough horses in the tri
be to buy ten girls for him.”

  “Tell me,” said the old man, “how often do the whites sell their women?”

  Standing Bull made a face of disgust. “A woman to a white man,” he admitted, “is like a child to a mother.” He added: “Is it a white girl?”

  High Wolf nodded. “It is a white girl,” he said.

  At that, the big man threw out his arms. “It is she who lives at Fort Kendry, I saw her. She is no bigger than a child. In twenty days she could not flesh a robe. She has no more force in her hands than there is in the claw of a sparrow. Why should a man want her?”

  “This is not a man. It is a spirit,” said High Wolf.

  The warrior made no answer.

  “Heammawihio,” went on the chief gravely, “has given power to you in this matter. It was you who brought us White Thunder. It was you, also, who followed him to Fort Kendry and brought him to us a second time. Therefore, it is plain that the Great Spirit wishes to work through you in all of these things. Perhaps it was to free you that we were given this last great victory over the Sioux. At any rate, it is clear that you must do what is necessary to keep White Thunder happy . . . that is, to keep him with us. You must bring to him the white girl that he wants.”

  Standing Bull groaned. “Twice in the trap makes a captured wolf,” he said.

  “Look over the tribe,” said High Wolf. “Take the finest horses and the strongest braves, but fix this in your mind . . . that you must ride to Fort Kendry and bring the girl here.”

  IX

  For a whole week, Standing Bull purified himself every day. It became known throughout the village that he was about to attempt some great and secret thing. For every day he went to the sweat house and there he had water poured over red-hot, crumbling stones until the lodge was filled with choking, blinding fumes. In these he remained for a long time, and then came out, staggering and reeling like a drunkard. He would run down the hillside naked, the steam flying up from his body, and plunge into the cold river. In this manner he was driving out evil and preparing himself for a great deed.

  He fasted, also, eating sparingly only once every second day, and he never smoked, except ceremonially. With his hands he touched no weapons. He was much alone, and used to sit on a hill overlooking the camp and the river for hours and hours at a time. Sometimes he was seen there in the midday. Again, the growing dawn light discovered Standing Bull on the hill. Perhaps he was wrapped in a buffalo robe. Perhaps he was half naked, as though unaware of heat or of cold.

  His poor wife, Owl Woman, cured by the return of her husband, was up and about the camp, frightfully worried by the procedures of her spouse. She had harried herself until she was a mere caricature of a woman, but she was honored throughout the village because of the extremity of her devotion. Even that harsh and incredulous critic, Young Willow, was heard to say: “She was just a young woman before . . . now she is beautiful.”

  “Beautiful?” echoed Torridon, always willing to argue with the squaw.

  “No good woman can be ugly,” said Young Willow.

  Owl Woman, therefore, was seen about the camp anxiously inquiring what could be in the mind of her husband, and then rather naturally she told herself that it was because she had deformed herself so greatly by mourning. She even came to Torridon and brought him a gift of carved bone to ornament a backrest. She wanted to know how she could win back her husband.

  He accepted the gift, gave her a simple salve to hasten the healing of the wounds that covered her body, and then told her to go home and cover her shaven head with a mantle, and to be seen singing around the lodge. As for her husband, he assured her that the heart of Standing Bull was not estranged. He simply was having a struggle with spirits.

  Common sense, of course, would have dictated all these sayings to any man, but she received them with devout thankfulness. She took the mantle that he gave her and went off with a step so light and swift that the cloth—it was a bright Mexican silk gained from the Comanches—streamed out behind her as she went.

  Torridon watched her going until Young Willow broke in on his thoughts with her harsh voice: “Why do you sneer and smile to yourself after you have given advice to people and shown them the truth? He that scorns others must sit on a cloud.”

  On the evening of the seventh day, Standing Bull himself came to Torridon. He looked thin. His eyes were sunken, and his lips were compressed.

  “I am going to try to do a great thing,” he said. “Give me a charm to help me, White Thunder.”

  “There are all sorts of charms,” said the young man. “If I gave you a charm at random, it might be the worst thing in the world for you. Tell me what you want to try.”

  “I cannot tell you that,” grumbled Standing Bull. “Only . . . it is something to make you happy.”

  “Shall I tell you the quickest way to make me happy?” said Torridon. “Send away the young men who watch me day and night. Let me have Ashur and one minute to get away from the camp. Then I shall be happy, Standing Bull, but nothing else matters to me.”

  “Do you ask me to give away my right hand, White Thunder?” asked the chief gloomily. “Then I must go away and carry no luck from you.” He departed slowly in a sort of despair.

  Then he began to make the round of the camp. His reputation was now so big that he was able to call on six of the best warriors in the village and enlist them to follow him wheresoever he chose to lead them. The desperate nature of the work that he had in mind kept him from revealing the secret. Chiefly because, if it were rumored about the camp and came to the ear of Torridon, he was afraid that great magician would blast all their plans.

  At last he had his party together. There were three horses for every man; the braves were painted for the warpath, and Standing Bull rode with them three times around the village. As he came opposite each of the cardinal points of the compass in making this circuit, he blew smoke offerings, but, after the third circle, he bore away to the northwest. They crossed the shallow river, and disappeared over the plains, while Torridon, together with most of the gathered tribe, watched their going.

  “Standing Bull is like a buzzard,” said Young Willow. “He is always hungry and therefore he is always on the wing.”

  But Standing Bull was not thinking of fame; he was facing forward to the dreadful difficulty of his task and wishing that, in all the world, some other duty could have been assigned to him. Sometimes he wished that the entire Cheyenne nation could be behind him for the work. But again, he realized that such numbers could do nothing secretly, and at the first approach of an armed tribe all the people who lived outside the fort would retire within its walls—Samuel Brett with his niece among the rest. He realized, also, that he never had seen the face of the girl. He had seen her only in the dusk, and, if there were more than one girl in the house, he would be shrewdly put to it to select the right one.

  It was no wonder that with these thoughts in his mind he went on the journey with a depressed heart. All the way his words were few, but the warriors followed without a sign of discontent until they came over the lower hills and at last looked down on Fort Kendry.

  Then they assembled together and Red Shirt, chief of the followers of the big leader, spoke for the rest. “Have you come for white scalps, Standing Bull?” he asked with much gravity.

  “You, perhaps, never have taken one?” said Standing Bull pleasantly. For the entire tribe knew about the long-tressed scalp that hung in the lodge of Red Shirt.

  “Because of that scalp I took,” said Red Shirt frankly, “I cannot ride into a trading post without fear. For the white men never forget. Because of that scalp, many Cheyennes have died, and now I know that it is better to fight with the Crows or the Blackfeet or the Dakotas, even, than to fight with the white men.”

  The rest of the men listened in silence that agreed totally with their spokesman, and Standing Bull saw that he would have a good deal of explaining to do.

  He said cheerfully: “I, too, my brothers, know that the white men
are dangerous. I have not brought you here to take scalps, but to do something still more important. I shall tell you simply, now that you have come to the place where the thing must be done.”

  He made a pause and swept his hand toward the fort. The rambling group of unpainted walls, some stone built, all rough and carelessly made, the ramshackle roofs, the twisting fence lines, made a very study in confusion. But at the tops of the walls of the fort itself they could see the little round mouths of the cannons that made such miraculous noise and killed at such a miraculous distance.

  With equal awe and hate the band looked down upon this stronghold of the white skins.

  “We do not love these people,” said Standing Bull, “but one man with a white skin has done much for the Cheyennes. I speak of White Thunder.”

  A unanimous grunt of agreement greeted this remark.

  “Now, my brothers,” said Standing Bull, “we wish to keep White Thunder among us, I am sure. We never have known hunger since he came. He can bring the rain from heaven, and he can turn the bullets of the enemy in battle. He can bring ghosts to protect us and to send our bullets straight into the hearts of our foes. To keep him, we have our young braves guard him. That is hard work. Besides, someday he may find a way to trick our cleverest young men and to escape.”

  “That is true,” said the youngest of the party, a keen stripling of twenty years. “When I guarded him, I trembled with fear. I would as soon try to hold the naked lightning in my hand as to keep White Thunder from doing what he wanted to do.”

  “But,” said Standing Bull, “if once we can make him happy among us, all will be well. And that can be managed, I think. Here in Fort Kendry is the thing that he wants. It is not horses or money or buffalo robes. It is a squaw. There is a girl here who he loves. Because she is not with him, his heart is sick. Now I, my brothers, hope to catch that girl and take her back to him. You see that our business is not so dangerous as the taking of white scalps.”