Frontier Feud

by Max Brand

  “They’re a queer lot,” said Tenney. “Anyway, I guess Red Hawk knew that he’d get the White Horse back, one of these days. And he’s got him now.—And may God rot your soul, major!”

  The major had something else to think about, and he endured the insult without so much as a change of color.

  “You’re a poor tool, but I may be able to use you, Tenney,” he said. “There’s only a small brain in Rusty Sabin’s head, and I think that I can addle it now.”

  That was why he went to the head of the column, nearest Red Hawk’s ranged men. He could see Rusty Sabin passing between the ranks, speaking to this man and to that. He could see the set, savage faces of the warriors. They looked like so many crouched panthers on horses.

  The major took out a white handkerchief and waved it over his head.

  Then, three of his aides following him, several yards behind, he rode straight out from the ranks of his own men, still waving the handkerchief. A howl of hatred and derision greeted him from the Cheyennes, and several of the braves jerked up their guns to take advantage of the excellent target. But a shout from Rusty Sabin made them lower the guns unwillingly.

  Red Hawk himself came out on the grandeur of the White Horse to take his part in the parley, followed by Standing Bull and two lesser chiefs.—Or was it surrender that the major had in mind, rather than a parley?

  Marston settled that doubt with his first words.

  “Mr. Sabin,” he said, “you have us in a bad corner. It’s a tight place. If you insist on fighting the thing, a lot of men are going to die. These fellows of mine are outnumbered, but they’ll account for an Indian apiece before they go down. They’re well armed. There’s a Sharp’s rifle for every man, and they know how to use ’em. If you charge, we’ll blow the head off your battle. You may clean us up afterwards, but do you think it will be worth while? Some of your lodges will be singing because they’ve got a fresh scalp inside, but the rest of ’em are going to be howling because they’ve got a dead man. Have you thought that over?”

  It cost the major a good deal to talk in this reasoning vein. His mouth kept pinching in, and his nostrils kept flaring out. He could not help remembering that Rusty Sabin had once been at his command, helpless inside Fort Marston.

  Rusty looked at him with strange eyes such as never had stared at the major before. There was little hate and much disgust.

  “You are not a man,” he answered. “I am sorry for some of the others. But if you had had your way, the Cheyennes would have died one by one. They would have starved until they had to charge on foot, and then they would have died under your rifles. Why do you talk to me about the numbers of Cheyennes who may die? We are all ready to die if we can kill the white men!”

  “Sabin, you’re a white man yourself,” said the major.

  “My skin is white, but to-day my blood has turned all Cheyenne. They are my people—they are all my people. Now, when I look at you, I know that you must die. There is a voice in my throat which tells me that I shall kill you!”

  He spoke so solemnly that the major was silenced for a deadly moment, while fear slid into his soul like the blade of a knife.

  “You throw away Tenney, then?” he asked.

  “Tenney?” exclaimed Red Hawk, angrily. “He is already dead. He fell from his horse and he now lies dead on the plains. Afterwards, I shall see him buried on a platform of high poles, and I shall kill your best horses under the platform, so that his ghost may ride happily through the sky. For it was your men who killed him!”

  “They haven’t yet,” said the major. “But they’ll certainly send the first bullet through his head if you start a charge. If you doubt that he’s here with us, look for him.—There he is, behind the first ranks. You can see him, taller than the rest. That’s Tenney. He was only stunned by the fall, Sabin. He wasn’t killed. He was brought in and treated well, thief that he is!”

  Rusty raised himself high in the stirrups and stared with a glad but startled eye.

  It was true. He saw the big fellow turn his head and distinguished clearly the wolfish outline of the face. Tenney was not a ghost wandering through the air, but a living man. And suddenly Rusty Sabin was smiling with happiness.

  “It is true; he is there!” he exclaimed, joyfully.

  “He’s living now. But he’ll be the first dead man when the fight starts,” said the major. “Think it over, Sabin. He calls you ‘brother.’ What do you call him? ‘Dead man’?”

  The great breath which Rusty drew proved how the blow had shaken him. But after his glance had wavered to this side and to that, he answered:

  “And you? How are you to die?” He held out his hand, pointing steadily at Major Marston’s breast. “There must be battle between us,” said Rusty.

  “I’ll be glad when the time comes,” said Marston, untruthfully. “But my first duty is to get my men safely back to the fort. After that, I’ll meet you. I’ll meet you alone, Sabin, and we’ll have the thing out.”

  “Many times,” said Rusty, slowly, “you have said the thing that is not so. Why should I trust you now?”

  “Because,” said the major, his hatred and rage bursting from his throat loudly, “there’s nothing under the sky that I want so much to see lying dead on the ground as you, Sabin! Will you believe that?”

  “Good!” said Rusty, for he could feel the truth in the emotion of the major. “Now I believe you. But where can we meet—and when?”

  “Three days from this,” answered the major. “Up the Tulmac and the first creek that runs into it from the north. That’s a place where men never go. We could be alone, there.”

  Rusty made a long pause, as he considered.

  Then he looked up, suddenly, and raised a hand to the sky.

  “Sweet Medicine,” he said, “give me wisdom!”

  But all that he could see, in his mind’s eye, was Arthur Marston’s face, convulsed, dying. To Rusty Sabin that vision appeared as the most beautiful of pictures.

  “It must be true that I can trust you to come. Will you go there alone?” he asked.

  “Alone,” agreed the major.

  “At dawn, on the third day from this. On the third morning I am to meet you in the valley of the creek?”

  “At dawn, on the third day,” said the major. And already his subtle brain was scheming.

  “You give me Tenney now?”

  The face of the major writhed suddenly with rage and pain as he answered:

  “Yes. I give you Tenney now.”

  The agony which the speech cost him was purest pleasure to Rusty Sabin.

  “You give me Tenney—and you swear to meet me on the third morning. With your right hand raised—so—with your sword in your hand—facing the sun.—You swear it?”

  The major drew his sword.

  “On the third morning. In the valley of the creek. I swear to meet you.”

  He faced the rising sun as he spoke, and Rusty sighed with relief.

  “You give me Tenney,” he repeated, after the saber had been sheathed again, “and you give what to the Cheyennes?”

  “To the Cheyennes?—What should I give to them? What have I to give?”

  Rusty pointed.

  “You have rifles and ammunition; you have good horses—very good. You have blankets and tents left behind you, but you have many other things—and money. You will put everything on the ground and then march away—?”

  “To be massacred?” shouted the major. “Do you think I’m such a fool, Sabin? Am I going to disgrace myself forever, man? What are you asking me to do?”

  “Ah!” nodded Rusty Sabin. “Now I see that a man can lie and cheat and be ready to murder sleeping people at night, and still he can be proud. That is a very strange thing!—But you won’t be massacred. Not one of the Cheyennes will stir to hurt you. Besides, you will all keep your revolvers.”

  “And get back to the fort how?”

  “You have good, strong legs,” said Rusty. “I, also, have made the journey on foot.” />
  “Damnation!” groaned the major.

  For he saw the clear picture of the future. It would be a disgrace to the service; one that would cancel all of the major’s past services. He would certainly be demoted; he might even be discharged from the army. Then he would have to walk the streets of a city dressed like other men, no longer drawing admiring glances. Men would not come and go at his bidding. In a sense, it would be the end of his life.

  And all of this wretchedness was to flow upon him through the agency of this naïve young white savage of the gentle face and the still more gentle voice. The major felt a sudden horrible conviction that there was an unearthly power operating behind his enemy. There must be.

  “It’s a thing that never can be done,” said Major Marston. “My men—they’d rather die!”

  “No,” answered Rusty, gently. “They are not ready to die. I can see that they would be very happy to live. They will be glad to walk away from this place. Afterwards, perhaps they may have sore feet—but that is a small thing!”

  He smiled a little, contemptuously, as he spoke. And the major, looking earnestly into Rusty Sabin’s face, knew that the thing would have to be as commanded.

  Then the major, with a groan, turned his horse suddenly and rode back to the ranks. He could hardly speak to give the commands. He could only, with bowed head, mutter the necessary directions to Captain Dell, and then turn in haste, so as to blot out from his eyes the white, horror-stricken face of his subordinate.

  “We are all ruined men!” muttered Dell. “And it’s better to be dead than shamed, Major Marston.”

  “Obey your orders—damn you!” shouted the major suddenly, and he swung his horse aside.

  CHAPTER 34

  The news of that compact brought a great groaning from the Cheyennes, but the older men pacified the younger ones quickly enough. It was not hard to see that a hundred trained fighting men would cause a frightful havoc before they were cut down to the last unit. Moreover, if these men were destroyed, other whites might come. That was the old story of the plains. A single Indian victory would for years be followed by a series of raids executed by the white soldiers. Villages would be destroyed, standing crops of corn burned. War against the whites meant bitter summers and starving winters, and before long, a voice of lamenting in nearly every lodge.

  But there would be no such aftermath to this bloodless victory. Lazy Wolf saw to that, for he drew up a paper written out in a clerk’s neat hand, stating that the Cheyennes had been peaceful, that the soldiers had been the aggressors throughout; that chance and Red Hawk had put them at the mercy of the Cheyennes; and that the Cheyennes, instead of taking blood, had merely exacted a proper tribute before sending the whites safely away. This precious document, which would ensure continued peace for the Cheyennes, Lazy Wolf gave to Rusty, dwelling on its importance for the future. Then he made him force the major to sign.

  It was a moment like death, for Marston; for in the signing of that formal document he was calling himself for all time a traitor, a liar, a night-raider and a murderer. His face was haggard and old; it was frozen in miserable hate as, at last, he traced his name at the bottom of the paper.

  He said to Red Hawk, softly, “It’s not the killing of you that I have to worry about; it’s the manner of the killing that I have to consider.—Ah, God! Sabin, if you had the life of a brigade of troops in you, it wouldn’t be as much as I’d like to feed into the fire.”

  “Why do you talk like this?” said Rusty, simply. “What you want to do may be very clear, but you can only accomplish what your Great Spirit wishes.”

  That was how he left the major.

  In the meantime, that wretched retreat began. The hundred soldiers who had come out so hot for blood and plunder and fame stacked their good rifles, took off their ammunition pouches, laid down all their little possessions, and went off on foot, leaving their saddled horses behind them. They kept only their revolvers, with which they threatened the insulting clouds of the small Cheyenne boys who raced about them, raising a dust that covered the ranks, clothes and face.

  But the rest of Standing Bull’s band, forgetting their own blood-hunger, soon were contenting themselves with the plunder. It was no indiscriminate plundering. Standing Bull saw to that, distributing a share to each individual. Above all, the bright spurs, many of them gilded, were treasures beyond the rest of the loot, in the eyes of the Indians.

  Red Hawk himself took no share in the rejoicing, after that victory of his contriving, that famous and bloodless battle of the plains. He went into Lazy Wolf’s tent and sat with a robe over his head; and the noise of the dancers, the singing, the shouting and the laughter covered the sound which was made by Blue Bird in entering. She spoke, close to him, before he looked up. Little of his own face was showing, as he looked at her; but he knew surprise at the misery that he saw in her eyes.

  “If you love the white girl so that your heart is always empty, Red Hawk,” she said, “go find her again. Whatever she may have written on the paper, it was not in her voice when she talked to me about you. When I heard her speak six words, I was sure that one day you and she would be happy together.—Go back to her. Happiness is not a tame dog. It will not come to your feet whenever you whistle.”

  “If I go back, she will laugh at me,” said Red Hawk. “And then I shall have such pain that I shall wish to die.”

  “But you will not die,” said the Blue Bird. “Love is a very great pain, but it won’t kill you.”

  “Ah, do you know about it?” asked Red Hawk.

  “It is a great pain,” said the girl, putting her hand on the spot, “somewhere between the stomach and the heart. Also, it makes the throat dry.—But if she laughs at you, you will not die. You will only come back to the Cheyennes again and become truly one of us. There will be no white left in you, once she has laughed at you.”

  “True,” said Rusty Sabin. “Now go away from me, Blue Bird. Because whenever I see you, I begin to think about her. Sometimes, after she has laughed in my face, I shall want to sit down in front of you for a long time, until the thought of her is rubbed out forever and I can see only you, very clearly.”

  He started for Fort Marston the very next day. No one knew his destination. He went out of the camp as if for a bit of hunting, riding west. Not till he was beyond the sight of the lodges did he turn towards the south, and Major Marston.

  He could not know of things that were happening behind him, or of how big Bill Tenney sat in the lodge of the Blue Bird and Lazy Wolf, his legs crossed, his pipe fuming. He had a habit of blowing out and then drawing in, so that the pipe bowl of red stone grew burning hot, and the bowl gave out more smoke than his mouth, even. He made his speech very well, quietly, evenly. He said:

  “Blue Bird, you want Red Hawk, but you’ll never get him. He doesn’t change his mind, much. He only gets one idea at a time. And that idea lasts him all his life. There’s something about him as hard as the green beetle, the one he wears around his neck. He don’t change.—But look here. I’m a kind of a swine. I want all I could get. But I wouldn’t take nothing from Rusty.—I don’t think I would.”

  He lifted his wolfish head and stared at the smoke that was gathering in the top of the lodge. Lazy Wolf, with his near-sighted glasses pushed high on his forehead, peered without malice at the big man.

  “No,” said Tenney, shaking his head as if in wonder, “I wouldn’t take nothing from Rusty, even if I could. Partly because I’m scared of him; partly because of him—what he is, I mean.”

  He wondered to hear himself speaking like this, admitting fear of any other man. He felt as though there was a new soul in him.

  “Are you listenin’, Blue Bird?” he said, sharply and suddenly.

  “I listen,” said the girl, and she looked up at him, dreamily.

  “What I was drivin’ at,” said Tenney, “was like this. I ain’t much to look at, but I’m kind of fond of you. You give me a chance, and I could be pretty good to you. Look at our kids.
They’d be one-quarter Cheyenne. Think of it that way. And if things change, they could be white.—If things didn’t change, they could be red. I mean, being practical—You see what I mean? Well, I’d like to have you—for a wife or a squaw, or anything you want. White marriage or Indian marriage, or both. Now, you think about it.”

  Blue Bird lifted her head and smiled a strange smile. She had, in that lifting of her head, the wonderful grace of those who bear burdens without being broken by them. She looked at her father. He said:

  “You think it over, Blue Bird.”

  He was grave as he spoke to her. She widened her eyes at him. Tenney saw her surprise, and broke in:

  “Look at here. I ain’t comparing myself with Red Hawk. Nobody is like him. Only, I mean that I might be better inside than I look outside. I might be better than I know. I might be better, because damn my heart if I ain’t wishing to be better! You Indians—you’ve taught me something. About not wanting what the other gent has—except his scalp. I dunno how to say what I want to say.”

  Blue Bird turned to him with a beautiful smile. He wished that the smile had been less beautiful. He wished that it had been more conscious of him, rather than of something inside him. Her bright, big eyes, blue as her name, were looking through him and beyond him.

  “Well,” she said.

  She liked that little word. It was new to her. She felt it was a very good word to use.

  “Well—Bill—I have a love for Red Hawk.” She paused. “If he raised his hand I would go running to him. You wouldn’t want a squaw like that?”

  He considered. Her face burned.

  “No,” he said at last.

  “You want me for a wife,” she said. “Do you want me more for a wife than you want Red Hawk for a friend?”

  He had to consider again, head bent, thoughtful. He thought of a great many things.

  “My God!” he said. “There ain’t nobody else like him! He wanted to butcher them soldiers, and Marston along with ’em. But he gave that up because of me. When I come to him to say I was pleased and grateful, he put a hand on my shoulder and he sort of smiled on me, surprised. He says: ‘What are they, compared to you, brother?’—Brother! He calls me that! Him as clean as clean—and me what I am. My God! He says to me: ‘What are they, compared to you, brother?’—Like that he said it, sort of surprised, and smilin’ on me. And my eyes begun to sting. All at once, I seen that there was nobody like him.—‘Brother!’ says he to me. And now you ask me—no—you don’t mean to me what he means. You ain’t ever died for me, and give me back my life, like he has. No—I’d see you—in hell—before him!”