It was at these times that, should they choose to do so, people took independent action.
two
Wind In His Hair had lobbied hard for a second plan, Ride down and take the horse without harming the white man. But instead of boys, send men this time. The council rejected his second idea, but Wind In His Hair was not angry with anyone.
He had listened openly to all opinions and offered his solution. The solution had not been adopted, but the arguments against it had not convinced Wind In His Hair that his plan was poor.
He was a respected warrior, and like any respected warrior, he retained a supreme right.
He could do as he pleased.
If the council had been adamant, or if he put his plan into action and it went badly, there was a possibility he would be thrown out of the band.
Wind In His Hair had already considered this. The council had not been adamant; it had been befuddled. And as to himself . . . well . . . Wind In His Hair had never done badly.
So once the council had ended, he strode down one of the camp’s more populous avenues, looking in on several friends as he went, saying the same thing at each lodge.
“I’m going down to steal that horse. Want to come?”
Each friend answered his question with one of their own.
“When?”
And Wind In His Hair had the same answer for everyone.
“Now.”
three
It was a little party. Five men.
They rode out of the village and onto the prairie at a studied pace. They took it easy. But that didn’t mean they were jovial.
They rode grimly, like blank-faced men going to the funeral of a distant relative.
Wind In His Hair had told them what to do when they went for the ponies.
“We’ll take the horse. Watch him on the way back. Ride all around him. If there is a white man, don’t shoot him, not unless he shoots at you. If he tries to talk, don’t talk back. We’ll take the horse and see what happens.”
Wind In His Hair wouldn’t have admitted it to anyone, but he felt a wave of relief when they were in sight of the fort.
There was a horse in the corral, a good-looking one.
But there was no white man.
four
The white man had turned in well before noon. He slept for several hours. Around midafternoon he woke, pleased that his new idea was working.
Lieutenant Dunbar had decided to sleep during the day and stay up with a fire all night. The ones who stole Cisco had come at dawn, and stories he’d heard always singled out dawn as the preferred hour of attack. This way he would be awake when they came.
He felt a little groggy after his long nap. And he’d perspired a lot. His body felt sticky. This was as good a time as any to get in a bath.
That’s why he was hunkered down in the stream with a head full of suds and water up to his shoulders when he heard the five horsemen thundering along the bluff.
He thrashed out of the stream and went instinctively for his pants. He fumbled with the trousers before throwing them aside in favor of the big Navy revolver. Then he scurried up the slope on all fours.
five
They all got a look at him as they rode out with Cisco.
He was standing on the edge of the bluff. Water was dripping down his body. His head was covered with something white. There was a gun in hand. All this was seen in glances thrown over shoulders. But no more than that. They were all remembering Wind In His Hair’s instructions. With one warrior holding Cisco and the rest bunched around, they tore out of the fort in tight formation.
Wind In His Hair hung back.
The white man hadn’t moved. He was standing still and straight on the edge of the bluff, his gun hand hanging by his side.
Wind In His Hair could have cared less about the white man. But he cared greatly about what the white man represented. It was every warrior’s most constant enemy. The white man represented fear. It was one thing to withdraw from the field of battle after a hard fight, but to let fear fly in his face and do nothing . . . Wind In His Hair knew he could not let this happen.
He took his frantic pony in hand, swung him around, and galloped down on the lieutenant.
six
In his wild scramble up the bluff Lieutenant Dunbar was everything a soldier should be. He was rushing to meet the enemy. There were no other thoughts in his head.
But all that left him the moment he surmounted the bluff.
He had geared himself for criminals, a gang of lawbreakers, burglars who needed punishing.
What he found instead was a pageant, a pageant of action so breathtaking that, like a kid at his first big parade, the lieutenant was powerless to do anything but stand there and watch it go by.
The furious rush of the ponies as they pounded past. Their shining coats, the feathers flying from their bridles and manes and tails, the decorations on their rumps. And the men on their backs, riding with the abandon of children on make-believe toys. Their rich, dark skins, the lines of sinewy muscle standing out clearly. The gleaming, braided hair, the bows and lances and rifles, the paint running in bold lines down their faces and arms.
And everything in such magnificent harmony. Together, the men and horses looked like the great blade of a plow. rushing across the landscape, its furrow barely scratching the surface. It was of a color and speed and wonder he had never imagined. It was the celebrated glory of war captured in a single living mural, and Dunbar stood transfixed, not so much a man as he was a pair of eyes.
He was in a deep fog, and it had just begun to dissipate when Dunbar realized one of them was coming back.
Like a sleeper in a dream, he struggled to come awake. His brain was trying to send commands, but the communication kept breaking down. He could not move a muscle.
The rider was coming fast. stampeding toward him on a collision course. Lieutenant Dunbar did not think of being run over. He did not think of dying. He had lost all capacity for thought. He stood unmoving, focused trancelike on the pony’s dilated nostrils.
seven
When Wind In His Hair was within thirty feet of the lieutenant, he pulled up so sharply that, for a moment, his horse literally sat on the ground. With a great spring upward, the excited pony gained his feet and began at once to dance and pitch and whirl. Wind In His Hair held him close all the while, barely aware of the gyrations going on underneath him.
He was glaring at the naked, motionless white man. The figure was absolutely still. Wind In His Hair could not see him blinking. He could see the bright white chest heaving slowly up and down, however. The man was alive.
He seemed not to be afraid. Wind In His Hair appreciated the white man’s lack of fear, but at the same time, it made him nervous. The man should be afraid. How could he not be? Wind In His Hair felt his own fear creeping back. It was making his skin tingle.
He raised his rifle over his head and roared out three emphatic
“I am Wind In His Hair!”
“Do you see that I am not afraid of you?”
“Do you see?”
The white man did not answer, and Wind In His Hair suddenly felt satisfied. He had come straight to the face of this would-be enemy. He had challenged the naked white man, and the white man had done nothing. It was enough.
He spun his pony around, gave him his head, and dashed off to rejoin his friends.
eight
Lieutenant Dunbar watched dazedly as the warrior rode away. The words were still echoing in his head. The sound of the words, anyway, like the barking of a dog. Though he had no idea what they meant, the sounds had seemed a pronouncement, as if the warrior was telling him something.
Gradually he began to come out of it. The first thing he felt was the revolver in his hand. It was extraordinarily heavy. He let it drop.
Then he sank slowly to his knees and rolled back on his buttocks. He sat for a long time, drained as he had never been before, weak as a new-born puppy.
For a time he
thought he might never move again, but at last he got to his feet and wobbled to the hut. It was only with a supreme effort that he managed to roll a cigarette. But he was too weak to smoke it, and the lieutenant fell asleep after two or three puffs.
nine
The second escape had a different wrinkle or two, but in general, things went the way they had before.
About two miles out the five Comanches settled their horses into an easy lope. There were riders to the rear and on either side, so Cisco took the only route left to him.
He went forward.
The men had just begun to exchange a few words when the buckskin leaped as if he’d been stung on the rump, and shot ahead. The man holding the lead line was pulled straight over the head of his pony. For a few fleeting seconds Wind In His Hair had a chance for the lead line bouncing along the ground behind Cisco, but he was an instant too late. It slipped through his fingers.
After that all that remained was the chase. It was not so merry for the Comanches. The man who had been pulled off had no chance at all, and the remaining four pursuers had no luck.
One man lost his horse when it stepped into a prairie dog hole and snapped a foreleg. Cisco was quick as a cat that afternoon, and two more riders were thrown trying to make their ponies imitate his lightning zigs and zags.
That left only Wind In His Hair. He kept pace for several hundred yards, but when his own horse finally began to play out, they still had closed no ground, and he decided it wasn’t worth running his favorite pony to death for something he couldn’t catch.
While the pony caught his breath, Wind In His Hair watched the buckskin long enough to see that he was heading in the general direction of the fort, and his frustration was tempered with the notion that perhaps Kicking Bird was right. It might be a magic horse, something belonging to a magic person.
He met the others on his way back. It was obvious that Wind In His Hair had failed, and no one inquired as to the details.
No one said a word.
They made the long ride home in silence.
CHAPTER XII
one
Wind In His Hair and the men returned to find their village in mourning.
The party that had been out so long against the Utes had come home at last.
And the news was not good.
They’d stolen only six horses, not enough to cover their own losses. They were empty-handed after all that time on the trail.
With them were four badly injured men, of which only one would survive. But the real tragedy was counted in the six men who had been killed, six very fine warriors. And worse yet, there were only four blanket-shrouded corpses on the travois.
They had not been able to recover two of the dead, and sadly, the names of these men would never be spoken again.
One of them was Stands With A Fist’s husband.
two
Because she was in the once-a-month lodge, word had to be passed from outside by two of her husband’s friends.
She seemed to take the news impassively at first, sitting still as a statue on the floor of the lodge, her hands entwined on her lap, her head bowed slightly. She sat like that most of the afternoon, letting grief eat its way slowly through her heart while the other women went about their business.
They watched her, however, partly because they all knew how close Stands With A Fist and her husband had been. But she was a white woman, and that more than anything else, was cause for watching. None of them knew how a white mind would work in this kind of crisis. So they watched with a mixture of caring and curiosity.
It was well they did.
Stands With A Fist was so deeply devastated that she didn’t make a peep all afternoon. She didn’t shed a single tear. She just sat. All the while her mind was running dangerously fast. She thought of her loss, of her husband, and finally of herself.
She played back the events of her life with him, all of it appearing in fractured but vivid detail. Over and over, one particular time came back to her . . . the one and only time she had cried.
It was on a night not long after the death of their second child. She had held out, trying everything she knew to keep from caving in to the misery. She was still holding out when the tears came. She tried to stop them by burying her face in the sleeping robe. They had already had the talk about another wife, and he had already said the words, “You are plenty.” But it was not enough to stem the grief of the second baby’s passing, grief she knew he shared, and she had buried her wet face in the robe. But she could not stop, and the tears led to sobbing.
When it was over she lifted her head and found him sitting quietly at the edge of the fire, poking at it aimlessly, his unfocused eyes looking through the flames.
When their eyes met she said, “I am nothing.”
He made no reply at first. But he looked straight into her soul with an expression so peaceful that she could not resist its calming effect. Then she had seen the faintest of smiles steal across his mouth as he said the words again.
“You are plenty.”
She remembered it so well: his deliberate rise from the fire, his little motion that said, “Move over,” his easy slide under the robe, his arms gathering her in so softly.
And she remembered the unconsciousness of the love they made, so free of movement and words and energy. It was like being borne aloft to float endlessly in some unseen, heavenly stream. It was their longest night. When they would reach the edge of sleep they would somehow begin again. And again. And again. Two people of one flesh.
Even the coming of the sun did not stop them. For the first and only times in their lives, neither left the lodge that morning.
When sleep finally did find them, it was simultaneous, and Stands With A Fist remembered drifting off with the feeling that the burden of being two people was suddenly so light that it ceased to matter. She remembered feeling no longer Indian or white. She felt herself as a single being, one person, undivided.
Stands With A Fist blinked herself back to the present of the once-a-month lodge.
She was no longer a wife, a Comanche, or even a woman. She was nothing now. What was she waiting for?
A hide scraper was lying on the hard-packed floor only a few feet away. She saw her hand around it. She saw it plunge deep into her breast, all the way to the hilt.
Stands With A Fist waited for the moment when everyone’s attention was elsewhere. She rocked back and forth a few times, then lurched forward, covering the few feet across the floor on all fours.
Her hand went to it cleanly, and in a flash, the blade was in front of her face. She lifted it higher, screamed, and drove down with both hands, as if clasping some dear object to her heart.
In the middle of the split second it took the scraper to complete its flight, the first woman arrived. Though she missed the hands that held the knife there was enough of a collision to deflect its downward flight. The blade traveled sideways leaving a tiny track on the bodice of Stands With A Fist’s dress as it passed over the left breast, ripped through the doeskin sleeve, and plowed into the fleshy part of her arm just above the elbow.
She fought like a demon, and the women had a tough time prying the scraper out of her hand. Once it was free, all the fight went out of the little white woman. She collapsed into the sisterly arms of her friends, and like the flood that comes when a stubborn valve is tripped, she began to sob convulsively.
They half carried, half dragged the tiny ball of shaking and tears to bed. While one friend cradled her like a baby, two others stopped the bleeding and patched up her arm.
She cried for so long that the women had to take turns holding her. At last her breathing started to grow less intense and the sobs faded to a steady whimpering. Then, without opening her tear-swollen eyes, she spoke, repeating the same words over and over, chanting them softly to no one but herself.
“I am nothing. I am nothing. I am nothing.”
In the early evening they filled a hollowed-out horn with a thin broth and fed i
t to her. She began with hesitant sips, but the more she drank, the more she needed. She drained the last of it with a long gulp and lay back on the bedding, her eyes wide as they stared past her friends to the ceiling.
“I am nothing,” she said again. But now the tone of her pronouncement was measured with serenity, and the other women knew she had passed through the most dangerous stage of her grief.
With kind words of encouragement, murmured sweetly, they stroked her tangled hair and tucked the edges of a blanket around her small shoulders.
three
At about the same time exhaustion carried Stands With A Fist into a deep, dreamless sleep, Lieutenant Dunbar woke to the sound of hooves, stamping in the doorway of his sod hut.
Not knowing the sound, and hazy from his long sleep, the lieutenant lay quiet, blinking himself back awake while his hand fumbled along the floor for the Navy revolver. Before he could find it, he recognized the sound. It was Cisco, come back again.
Still on guard, Dunbar slipped noiselessly off the bunk, and creeping past his horse in a crouch, he went outside.
It was dark but early yet. The evening star was alone in the sky. The lieutenant listened and watched. No one was about.
Cisco had followed him into the yard, and when Lieutenant Dunbar absently laid a hand on his neck, he found the hair stiff with dried sweat. He grinned then and said out loud:
“I guess you gave them a hard time, didn’t you? Let’s get you a drink.”
Leading Cisco down to the stream, he was amazed at how strong he felt. His paralysis at the sight of the afternoon raid, though he recalled it vividly, seemed something far away. Not dim, but far away, like history. It was a baptism, he concluded, a baptism that had catapulted him from imagination to reality. The warrior who had ridden up and barked at him had been real. The men who took Cisco had been real. He knew them now.
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