by Max Brand
They weren’t giving chances, however. Four of the fellows who bore the coup sticks rode about him and gave him smart whacks as they went on. The rest pulled out their horses in a swirl of dust. One of them threw a noose of rawhide rope over the neck of Tenney, pulled the loop taut, and seemed ready to drag the white man to death. Yet, with his horse turned, he waited for a moment.
The oldest looking brave of the party, the one with the longest hair flowing down his back, came up and made his face more hideous with speech. He tried a harsh, rapid, guttural tongue, at first. But when Tenney shook his head the fellow growled:
“White Horse—where get him?”
“Rusty Sabin give,” said Tenney. “Red Hawk give.”
“Give?” exclaimed the warrior.
He took a stride nearer and grasped Tenney’s throat.
“Red Hawk no give!” he declared, vehemently.
Tenney shrugged his shoulders as he repeated, “Red Hawk give.”
The elderly brave glared at him for a moment. His nostrils kept flaring and contracting with each breath.
“Lie! Lie!” he muttered. “White men all lie!”
“Red Hawk is white,” said Tenney.
The brave fetched out a long knife with the look of one ready to use it. However, he shoved it reluctantly back into its sheath. After that, he mounted, took the rawhide lariat from the hand of the fellow who had lassoed Tenney, gave the captive a jerk that half strangled him, and told him to start moving.
Tenney started. Walking would not do. These devils trotted their horses, or even loped them gently, and Tenney had to run up hill and down dale.
He ran till the soft green waves of the prairie washed up into the blue sky, and the sky rippled like blue water along the ground at his feet. He ran till his lungs were filled with flame. Finally he stumbled. The rope rubbed his throat, dragged him a dozen feet before he managed to scramble erect, and then he had a few bad minutes after he had loosened the rawhide around his neck. Those minutes were spent in trying to catch his spent breath again.
He kept on catching it, but it would not really come back; and all the while, the cruel old devil at the head of the party would not so much as turn in the saddle, and all the rest kept their backs likewise turned upon Bill Tenney.
He was gone, staggering in his stride, almost done in every way, before the warriors dropped the pace of their horses to a walk. And Tenney, at that, could still go on, held toward a straight direction by the tugging of the lariat every time he reeled to this side or to that.
But he uttered no complaint. He felt that it would be as silly to waste breath complaining to these men as to utter laments to hungry wolves.
After a time, his knees had strength once more. And also he was able to see that over the horizon the peaked tops of a group of Indian lodges were appearing. That was what made him think of the White Horse. These fellows were likely to take him into their village and torture him to death. But if the White Horse had been under him, a pale thunderbolt of speed, he could have galloped away from the best of them. He could have laughed at the best mounted of the warriors. As it was, he had to trudge on foot, into whatever trouble waited for him.
As the troop came nearer, a cloud of naked young boys rushed out of the camp on racing ponies and swirled around the returning war-party, screeching. Nearly every one of these young devils carried a weapon of some sort. Knives, clubs, axes were brandished over the head of big Bill Tenney; and some of the rascals had arrows with blunted heads. With the latter they thumped his body soundly. When the blows fell on the raw of his still naked back, they gave intense pain. However, this was not yet death, such as he expected. He wondered, when the flames of the fire began to consume him, if he would be able to endure that agony, too, without screaming. And an immense pride and resolution filled his heart and swelled in his throat as he swore that he would die like a man.
In that moment he looked back along his life as a traveler sometimes looks back along a great road, and it seemed to him that he had never stopped at an inn of importance. It seemed to him that he could spend future days better; that he could find men of greater significance; that so far his work had consisted of idle gestures. He had been a thief, but a thief cannot really take anything. He can only steal money or worldly valuables—baubles. What is worth while is something else. He wondered what that something might be!
They went still closer to the Indian village. Then a cloud of the smallest children, intermixed with howling dogs, poured out around him, and the dogs leaped high and snapped their teeth close to his throat. They seemed to be howling, even when they were closing their teeth. He could feel the teeth in his flesh, as it were. But to be torn with teeth would be nothing compared with the soul-searing bite of the fire.
Then he was on the verge of the camp, and he saw that all the lodges were ranged in circles. Some of them were new and glistening white. Some of them were tanning with time, with rain and with sun.
Here and there, he saw braves standing at the entrances to their lodges, cloaked in buffalo robes, sometimes with their faces almost completely hidden, and often with their stark features seen only through deep shadow. He saw the squaws, the old ones who were time-bent and work-worn. There were the young squaws, also, still with the unmistakable signs of life upon them. And last of all, there were the girls. The supple flow of young bodies was apparent under the thin deerskins. Tenney, near to death, noticed those women. And he held himself a little taller and stepped with a lighter and a longer stride.
He was ashamed of the red gorings on his back which told that he had been flogged. He was ashamed of the lariat which clasped his neck and led him along like a dog. Despite these things, he told himself that he could die like a man, if there were such women as these to watch while he was being tormented. He felt that he would be able to laugh in the midst of the flames as, windblown, they rotted away his body a little at a time.
Then, before one of the lodges, the party halted. He was dragged through the entrance flap. A strong jerk on the lariat laid him flat on the ground, and he was wise enough not to struggle to sit up.
CHAPTER 16
He lay for a long time. He was aware that there were two young braves in the tepee. They never spoke to one another. They kept watching his big body. Sometimes, as dust worked into the whip wounds in his back, the anguish it caused him blotted out everything in his mind, and sometimes the cold force of thought made him forget his torment.
Hanging about the neck of one of the braves was what seemed to be a dried up mouseskin. The other wore a shapeless pouch which could not be identified. One carried a short truncheon with a spearhead on it. The other was unarmed except for a knife at his belt. But Bill Tenney knew that he could not escape. Among white men he was almost a giant. But among these Indians, he was hardly more than a peer. He had seen scarcely a single mature man in the camp whom he would not have considered at least his equal.
After a time, the tent flap was raised, and another man entered. At sight of him, Tenney started to a sitting posture, though one guard instantly balanced his javelin for the cast, and the other jerked out a thin-bladed knife. But they held their hands. Perhaps they understood the excitement of their captive, who saw before him another white man.
Not that the white man was capable of much active interference. He was old. His beard flowed softly and loosely; the beard of a man who is too lazy to shave. And his body had almost the same loose contour.
He was dressed like an Indian, below, and above the hips like a white man. Yet he was not a half-breed. The blue of his eye was too clear, and his skin, where it showed on the hands and about the eyes, was too apparently merely darkened by a tan. He held in his hand a short, curved pipe. No weapon was on his person.
Behind him, there was a scuffle at the entrance. Then an Indian girl broke in. No, she was not all Indian. She had blue eyes, like the man, and her skin, instead of the dull copper, was a paler tint with a deeper glow shining through it. She was breathing ha
rd; hands reached after her through the tent flap, and a savage face showed for an instant until the white man spoke.
He took the girl by the arm. She chattered at him, half savagely and half appealingly, until he released her. After that, her step was like a spring as she moved to the place where big Bill Tenney sat upright. The guards, he noticed, had lowered their weapons, strange smiles appearing on their harsh faces. And she, leaning over Tenney, burst out at him:
“Is it true? Did you have the White Horse? Did you get it from the Red Hawk?—Did you get it from him?—Did you lie, and say that Red Hawk gave you the horse?”
He had to think for an instant. Then he remembered that the Indian name for Rusty Sabin was Red Hawk.
It was hard to think. The dusky beauty of the girl closed up his throat. She was trembling, and like hers, Tenney’s flesh and spirit vibrated. He looked like a half-wit as he sat there. But he managed to nod his head and say:
“Yes, he gave it to me.”
“You lie!” cried the girl. “You murdered him! You killed him and took the horse! You sneaked up like a coward and killed him in his sleep. You could not have faced him. He would have laughed and the breath of Sweet Medicine would have blown you away like a dead leaf. You could not face him—you must have killed him in his sleep!”
Tenney shook his head. Words were still hard to come at. He merely said:
“We were chased. My horse pegged out, and he gave me the White Horse!”
“Gave you?” cried the girl, incredulously.
“Wait a minute,” said the white man. “You know, Blue Bird, that Rusty is always the one for giving and giving.”
“You look like a wolf. You look like a white wolf. Why would he give the horse to you?” exclaimed the girl.
“I dunno,” said Tenney. “He’s queer. And I’d hauled him out of the river one time—out of the Tulmac. That’s all I know about it. But he gave me the White Horse, all right.”
“And what happened to him?” she demanded.
With this she clasped her hands and crooked a knee, and seemed to be sinking down toward the earth, in the ecstasy of her entreaty.
“I dunno,” repeated Tenney. “The soldiers were after us. Major Marston and his lot. I guess they grabbed Rusty Sabin. There wasn’t no fighting. They just sort of come up and took him. I seen it while I was riding away.”
“You rode away and left your friend?” said the girl. “You rode off and—”
She looked ready to go at his eyes with her hands made into eagle talons, but the white man caught her and pushed her rudely toward the exit. He called out, because her struggles were almost too much for him, and big dark-colored hands reached through the flap of the lodge and mastered her, bearing her away.
Still her outcries, and then her sobbings, reached Tenney’s ears from a distance. And something in his thought magnified the sounds and multiplied them. He was full of ears. He could close his eyes; and to the end of time, he knew, he would remember clearly the sheen of her blue ones. He had been touched—and far deeper than the skin.
He heard the white man saying: “Well, it kind of looks mean for you, stranger. What might your name be?”
The fat white man with the beard was sitting cross-legged on the ground near him, stuffing his pipe full of tobacco.
“Bill Tenney is my name. What’s yours?” he answered.
“I’ve got another name,” said the white man. He finished filling his pipe, sprinkled some light-colored dust over the tobacco, and then picked a coal out of the fire that burned in the center of the tent and laid it on the bowl of the pipe. Tenney noticed that, like a real Indian, the man blew four ceremonial puffs of smoke to the quarters of the compass before he settled down to the enjoyment of the pipe.
“I’ve got another name, somewheres,” went on the fellow, “but among the Cheyennes I’m called Lazy Wolf. It’s not a name I’m proud of, but I reckon it has to stick. Lazy Wolf is what you might as well call me.”
“All right,” nodded Tenney. “But what’s all the excitement about Rusty Sabin, up here? What’s it all about? Or is it because I had the White Horse? Or is it because I let the White Horse get away from me?”
Lazy Wolf puffed smoke out of his fat lips. He pulled down from his forehead a pair of spectacles that had been riding high, and as they settled over the bridge of his nose, he took on an owlish aspect. Gravely he considered Tenney.
“I’ll tell you plenty of things about Rusty Sabin and this tribe,” he remarked. “But first I better get your straight story. How did you come by the welting, and who gave it to you? How did you come by the White Horse? Tell me the whole yarn.” He added, “I want to do you some good, stranger, and it’s going to be a mighty hard thing to wangle. These redskins want your hair, and they’ll likely take it. But if you got any chance, it’s because I’m willing to talk for you. Talk to me like I was wearing your own pair of ears.”
Tenney blinked. He liked the truth little more than he liked justice and its courses. He was a good, thorough-going liar, as a rule, and the temptation was to start lying now. Yet an instinct worked in him, to make him understand that this was the time for the naked truth, no matter how much shame there might be in it. So he simply said:
“I stole twenty pounds of gold out of a trading post down on the Tulmac. I got up to Fort Marston. I seen a steamer coming in, and a white horse was lost off of it, a man diving in after the horse. I managed to fetch them both out with a canoe I grabbed. The man was Rusty Sabin. He shook hands with me and said he was my friend. Afterward, I was caught with the gold on me. They took me into the fort and tied me to a post and flogged me.”
His lips pulled back far enough to show his teeth, as he said this.
“Then Rusty and a brace of Cheyennes showed up and got me away from the major,” he went on, “and we rode away across the plains. The soldiers follered on, with dogs to light the way for ’em, and my mustang pegged out. Then Rusty climbed down off the White Horse and gave it to me. And I took it and rode away till this gang of Injuns stopped me.”
He paused. His face was hot and his breathing fast. A queer agony of shame, an entirely unfamiliar sensation, was burning through his blood.
“Back there at the fort,” he muttered rapidly, “they’d knocked the hell out of me. Anyway—I dunno—anyway, I took the White Horse and I rode off—and I left Rusty behind me, there—”
Here he jerked up his head and glared at Lazy Wolf in defiance; but the calm consideration in the eyes of the older man overwhelmed him, and by degrees he found his head sinking until his chin was on his breast.
“Well,” said Lazy Wolf, “I’m gonna do my best for you. I believe what you’re saying, by the shame that seems to be in you. But will these Indians believe you? I don’t know. Let me tell you, these are Cheyennes. Rusty is the biggest medicine man that ever walked the ground, as far as this tribe is concerned. And that leads me on to tell you the other half of the story that you ought to know. The Cheyennes felt pretty mean when Rusty left them and found his father and went back to the white people; and not long after he went away, a sickness hit a lot of the people. The medicine men danced themselves black in the face and wore their craziest masks and whooped and hollered and ordered up steam baths every day, with plunges in cold water afterward, but the sick men got sicker and sicker.
“But pretty soon word came across the prairie—you know, news spreads far and fast over the plains—that Red Hawk was away down south on the Tulmac River; and with that it was decided that a part of the tribe would start south as fast as it could leg and take along with it all of the sick people. And that’s what happened. I came with the rest. I didn’t want to come, but my daughter made me. You understand, she’s pretty fond of Red Hawk, Tenney. So fond that I had to leave the tribe for a time. But when Rusty turned white, I went back to the Cheyennes; and now my girl, the Blue Bird, has dragged me south. She’s heard of a strange man who was riding the White Horse; and that means, to her, that she’s heard of the man who
has murdered Rusty.
“The whole tribe feels the same way. It wants blood in exchange. It wants your blood—and it’s pretty likely to get it.”
He made a short, eloquent gesture. There could be no mistaking his grim meaning.
“These people are scared of Rusty,” he went on. “They look up higher than the sky to see him. Besides all that, they love him. He’s a gentle sort of a cuss, Tenney. Giving his horse to you—well, that’s what he would do to a friend. All the ways he walked in the Cheyennes camps were kind ways. Men in trouble went to him. He talked to them like a woman. He has a soft voice. He has the softest voice that an Indian ever heard. The women of the camp turned into stone when he went by. When they saw Rusty, nothing about them lived except their eyes. But he wouldn’t notice that. All he thinks about himself is that he’s lucky. Well, Tenney, that’s the man the Cheyennes think you’ve murdered. You can guess what they want to do to you, but they’ve sent me in to give you a last chance.”
This last part of the recital was what killed the hope in Tenney.
“Even if you told ’em the truth,” Bill Tenney mused, “even if you told ’em how he really gave me the White Horse and stood there waiting for the soldiers—even if they believed it, they’d want to kill me just the same.”
The silence of Lazy Wolf was a death sentence to Tenney.
At last the squaw-man said, “The sick people who are dying in these lodges—the ones who’ve been kept alive by the hope of seeing Rusty and having him work a miracle over them—well, they’re the ones who’ll be extra set against you, Tenney. They say that Red Hawk’s dead, and that means that they’re all dead, too.”
“What could Rusty do?” demanded Tenney, agape. “He ain’t a wizard—and he sure ain’t a doctor. How could he cure ’em?”
“I don’t know,” answered Lazy Wolf. “I’m telling you what a lot of Cheyenne Indians believe, not what I think.”
Then he stood up and said good-bye.
“I’m going to talk to the council, now,” he told Tenney. “I wish I could say that I’m going to put everything right for you. But I’m afraid I’ve only got half a chance.”
