"You are a modest man," she said. "But Mister Morris told me how you saved the life of Sitting Wolf. Was that the beautiful young savage who tried to sink a knife in my father ...when Dad grew angry with you?"
"You see," I explained to her, "the Indians very often do their thinking with their hands, and an Indian's hand is apt to have a knife in it. But, when one grows accustomed...."
"To being stabbed while one talks?" she finished for me. "But, of course, they were afraid of.. Black Bear."
She brought out my Indian name with a soft little laugh, as much as to say: The others may fear you, but I not a whit. To this moment I close my eyes and remember how that flutter of music went sadly and sweetly through me.
"You may not answer a single question I wish to know," she said gravely after that. "And if you won't, tell me so. But I've come to ask you to tell me about the mother of the son of William Morris."
I thought then, by the manner in which she uttered his mere name, that he was further from her than if he had been the man in the moon. I turned her question slowly through my mind. To answer it might seem a betrayal of Morris. And yet, now that they knew the first facts, they had only to ask among some of the Sioux, and they would learn all of the story and learn it in a naked brutality that would be far worse than the truth as I could tell it.
I said at last: "I am Chuck's friend, and he has been more to me than any man in the world. We were together a good many years. We've bunked together when we didn't know whether or not our scalps would belong to a Cheyenne before the morning came, I've owed him my life, you see."
"And he has owed his to you," she exclaimed. "He has confessed that. That evens the score, I imagine."
I shook my head. "There's no way to repay some things."
At this she stared a little in a high-headed way that reminded me of her father's haughtiness, but she changed almost at once and was smiling at me as she had done before. I could almost have prayed her not to smile in that way. There was something as hard and as strong as ice in me - I suppose I may call it my manhood. When she smiled, I felt that strength melting away under her shining eyes, and a great yearning, that was half fierce and half sad, came over me. Ah, but she was a lovely thing on that day, like a bright bit of spring flowers come among those naked brown trees.
"What an honest man you are," she said. "I felt it before, and I know it now. He is your friend. I can't ask you to talk against him."
"The truth has to come out. And, if I am his friend, I should like to be...your friend also."
It was quite possible to say such a thing in the most genuine manner, just casually enough to make it seem no more than a rather intimate tribute. But as I have said before, I had no conversational training and no tact. I wanted to talk to her not in English, but in the Sioux tongue with all its strength and all its wildness. Because its strangeness would have made it possible for me to say things that I could not put into bald English, with the matter-of-fact sun of common sense shining on it. And now I brought out this speech to her as if it were a thunderbolt, escaping my lips. It left me trembling. It left me hot and crimson, too, as I realized that I was making an ass of myself. God bless her for the manner in which she took it. If she stiffened a little at the first, and if she lifted her head in her father's overbearing way, she abandoned that attitude at once. She merely looked down to the ground, and I felt that she was casting about for some withering phrase to blast my forwardness.
"I wish I had not said that," I broke out.
Up flashed her eyes at that, and, to my bewilderment, there was no more danger in them than a light of laughter.
"Oh, Black Bear," she said, "you may be a great warrior, but you are a great boy also. I'm glad you said it.. .because I want you to be my friend. And you will be, if you tell me all that lies behind that poor little bright-haired boy in your teepee. After all, haven't I a right to know?"
I could not help saying: "Yes." Then I told her the story. "You see," I began, "Chuck was always so big and so strong, so quick with his hands and so quick with his brains, that other boys had no chance with him. When he grew up, other men had no chance with him. He got into the habit of doing what he wanted to do, because he was free, and no one could stop him. He still was like that when he joined the Sioux with me. After we had been with them a while, Standing Bear wanted us to take squaws."
"How horrible," she said.
"It isn't like marriage exactly," I tried to explain. "An Indian divorce comes very easily. A chief may have half a dozen wives, you know. A squaw... is just property, perhaps-like a horse."
"Ah?" she said with a cold little lift to her voice.
"We had been years with them. We thought we might spend more years with them, because I was still hunting for my father."
"Yes, William has told me about that," she said, and, oh, her voice slid into my very soul, as gently as the sound of the running river beside us. "And did you never find a trace of him?"
I remembered, and the memory brought the old agony fresh on me.
"Forgive me. I have no right to ask!"
"I want you to know," I insisted. "Because I want you to know me...and my father is a part of me, and what he is, I am also... partly. He had gone among the Indians because ...there was a crime behind him."
"What crime?" she asked me.
The word stuck in my throat, and, when it came, it was a hoarse whisper. "Murder," I said and watched the shock of it make her shudder.
She said: "They may have called it murder, but it must have been a fair fight."
"God bless you for thinking that!" I cried. "Yes, it was one man against six. All I knew was that he had gone west. Well, while I was with the Sioux, we met and defeated Bald Eagle, their great chief."
"It was you who did it. I've heard that story."
"I saw him leave the fight when it was hopelessly lost, and I rode after him...."
"And killed his three men, one by one, and then killed Bald Eagle himself!" she cried. "That was a glorious day for you."
"I found Bald Eagle at last. My bullet went through the head of his horse.. .his bullet grazed my scalp and knocked me senseless."
I took off my hat and touched the white scar. She was mightily excited now, letting her horse come on until it was touching noses with White Smoke, for her hands were off the reins and clasped together.
"He tied me with ropes. I woke up and found him sitting beside me. He was waiting for me so that I could see my death come when he was ready. I told him, at last, that if he killed me, he himself would not have long to live, for Will Dorset, my father, would find him and crush him to bits. When I said that, he stood over me and looked down in my face, and I thought he would strike then. But, instead, he built a fire. Then he stood beside me and told me to go back to my own kind, because I should never see my father. He, Bald Eagle, had killed him, and I should never see his face again.
"Then he left me. As he went away, through the dusk, the truth came over me and choked me. At last I called out: `Father.'"
"Dear God," cried Mary Kearney, "it was he?"
"He turned and threw out his arms to me, but he would not come. He went stumbling off through the evening. I burned my ropes away and rode after him. I hunted for weeks. But I found no trace. He may have drowned himself in the next river. I know that I shall never see his face again."
I could not speak again for a moment, but I looked down, fighting hard as the grief took me by the throat and turned my blood to water. When I could look up again, the tears were running down her face.
"Poor boy," she said. "But you will find him."
I shook my head. "I've slipped away from Chuck Morris," I said. "I was saying that he and I expected to be more years among them, and, when the chief urged us to take squaws, it seemed only natural and right to Chuck. He didn't look on it as a sin. It was just something new to do. There was a pretty girl in that tribe with a dash of white blood in her. She was called Blackbird, which is Zintcallasappa in Sioux. Chuck took
her. Afterward this child was bom. And, after that, Chuck came to the fort and saw you and knew that he could never go back among the Indians."
"And she?" said Mary Kearney.
"It broke her heart. I came back from trailing my father and found that she was dead. I brought the boy in to see what Chuck wanted me to do with him. Perhaps I've made a bad story of it. I want to explain how Chuck was simply headstrong... it didn't seem a crime to him. It was only an adventure, you see? And, after he left her, he took care of her well. She lacked nothing. An Indian would have thought he was a fool to be so good to a squaw he no longer wanted."
"But he was not an Indian."
It was a sharp blow. I saw that I had done poor Chuck more harm than I dreamed. "If I could make you see...," I began desperately.
"They wanted you both to take squaws. Did you take one?"
"I was younger than Chuck. I couldn't bring myself to it."
What a warmth and what a brightness came up in her face. "I knew that you had not," she said. "Ah, Mister Dorset, I'm glad I've met you, if only to know what a difference there can be between two men who have lived the same lives."
"If I have hurt him," I told her, "I shall never forgive myself. But I wanted to tell you the truth, rather than let you hear some story....
"Hurt him?" she said coldly. "I tell you, he was dead in my mind the moment I heard the Indian say the name of the father of that poor little boy. And what will become of the child?"
"Of him? Oh, I'll take care of him, of course. For the sake of Zintcallasappa, poor girl."
She said hotly: "If all the rest of his life were given to good work, when he came to the gate of heaven, the face of that Indian girl would stop him and send him back."
She was so close, now, that she could reach out her hand and rest it on my arm.
"But I thank you for everything you've told me. Mostly for what you've told me about yourself. For we shall be friends. Will you promise me that?"
What could I do but take her hand and wonder at the tears of very kindness in her eyes and call myself the happiest man who saw the setting of the sun that night?
CHUCK AND LEW - ENEMIES
When she went back, I could not go with her. I wanted to be alone and turn over in my mind again all the strange wonders that had come to me in my talk with Mary Kearney. I felt as though I had drawn a star down out of heaven, and now it was so close that I could almost hope, some day, to hold it in my hand. I let White Smoke wander over the snow until it was red with the sunset. Then I turned back to the town. It was still twilight when I came to the edge of it. There was a great, bald-faced, golden moon, hanging in the east, but the day was still bright enough to shut the moonlight away. Out of the shadows of some trees near the road a horseman came out and hailed me.
"Lew Dorset?"
"I'm Dorset."
He came up to me and held out an envelope.
"Miss Kearney sent me out with this," he said. "She told me that I'd find you on this side of town. I've hunted, but you seemed to have disappeared."
I ripped the contents out hungrily, and this is what I read:
Mr. Dorset:
This is to warn you that you are in great danger, and danger from the man you call your friend, William Morris. I met him on my way to the forty and, when he talked to me, I told him what 1 knew. He guessed at once that I had been talking with you, and, when I confessed that I had, he went into a terrible passion and swore that I should never see your face again.
Mr. Dorset, he means murder, if ever a man meant it. When I told him that, if I had ever meant to marry him, the story you told me would have changed my mind, he went literally mad.
If I have broken a friendship which you prize, may God and you forgive me, but on my honor he is not worthy to call himself your friend!
Come to my father's house. There are armed men here. They will protect you, and my father is eager to have you. I am eager, too. If any harm comes to you from this, I shall never have a happy moment from this to the hour of my death.
In most dreadful anxiety, your friend,
Mary Kearney
It is before me now, this letter time has yellowed and worn the creases until the light shines through them. The ink is pale and brown, but it brings back to me now freshly the wretched sorrow that came over me when I first held it, unfolded, in my hand. For I knew, then, that he would find me, and, when he found me, one of us must die.
Oh, time that has put this wrinkled mask over my face, you have no power to change or mask the soul of a man. Mine turns cold and hot, as it turned cold and hot while I rode on into Fort Kempton, watching the shadows on either side of the way, waiting for the glint of the increasing moonshine on the steel barrel of a gun.
He was not lurking there. I reached my teepee on the farther edge of the town and dismounted from White Smoke. As my foot touched the ground, it slipped on a round pebble and made me stoop suddenly forward. That stooping saved my life, for the gun that barked behind me sent a bullet whistling a scant inch above my head.
It was not Chuck Morris who tired that shot, for the man with whom I roved the prairies, in whose hands my life had lain a thousand times, could never have met any enemy and taken him from behind. It was not Chuck Morris. It was the devil into which he had turned on that day and which has not left him even to this present moment, as I sit here writing. How I dread and hate him for all the evil he has done me and all the evil he has hoped to do.
I had wit enough to keep on, lunging down as I heard the gun. I fell flat upon the ground, but with Hudson's old Colt in my hand, as I fell. Then I whirled over and fired at the shadow that was rushing upon me. I fired and heard him snarl like a wounded tiger. At the same moment a bullet went through my thigh from his flashing revolver. He could have finished me with another shot, but in his madness it was not a killing with his gun that he wanted. He wanted to use his hands. He wanted to feel me die beneath them.
"Traitor and devil!" Morris cried and drove upon me with all his weight.
I could not have risen to meet him, but, as he fell upon me, reaching for my throat, I met him with my hands. The instant they were on him, I knew that I was his master. Yonder lies the iron bar that I bent in my youth. My feeble hands now lift it and wonder over it, for God had given me a strange and marvelous power in those dead days.
I caught him by the wrist, and with the turning of my hand the muscles were bruised against the bone, and the gun dropped to the ground. With that he seemed to know that he was overpowered, for he flung back from me with a shout of fear. His free hand caught up the fallen gun - not by the butt, or that would have been my last second of life, but by the barrel, and he struck the heavy handle against my head. It glanced, cutting the scalp like a knife and loosing a hot flood of blood that poured constantly down during the rest of our battle.
Out of the distance I could hear the squaw in my teepee, screaming for help. But that meant nothing. What can barehanded men do for one assailed by a tiger?
Before he could strike again, I flung myself close to him and got him in the grip of both arms. I scooped up my own gun and beat it into his face and with three strokes turned all that beauty of his into the hideous mask that men knew afterward and that I, alas, was to see many times more. And he, responding to those crushing blows, screamed with rage like a great panther that feels an arrow in his flank.
I had weakened fast under the double drain of blood. He managed to tear his hands loose and get them at my throat. Both of them I could not budge, but one I did, and, while my head swam and darkness poured through my brain, I took his bulky left arm in one hand and across a crooked elbow and broke it like a rotten stick. Like a bulldog his other hand kept its pressure. I fumbled for it in utter blackness. But my hands were too weak to budge it. I reached for his own throat, found it, and fixed my grip on it as I sank into unconsciousness.
Afterward, as they told me, they had to tear us apart. Each was more than half dead. Each, lying in a half trance, was surely
killing the other. What Morris awakened to, I cannot tell. What I wakened to was the soft arms of Mary Kearney about me. The pressure of a bandage was around my head and the loud voice of John Kearney was exclaiming: "If he does not live. Doctor, this country west of the Mississippi is too small for you."
Not live, when I had this to live for? By the crooking of one finger she could have called me back from within the very gates of hell. Not live when she was weeping over me, praying over me?
Oh, my dear, pray for me still in that other life that you have inherited. Pray for me still and lean closer out of heaven to read what I write now: That I loved you no more then as you drew me back to life than I love you now.
Here, then, is a proper place to write: The End. Though why books should end with love and marriage, I cannot say, when love and marriage may be only the gate through which man passes to a new and greater life. As death, in turn, shall bear me with the mercy of God to a newer and to a stranger life where my happiness has gone before me. How will that death come upon me? Not in my bed, I think, after the life I have lived. Perhaps some unknown enemy will come upon me. Perhaps the endless malice of Chuck Morris will yet contrive a trap for me. Yes, that is most likely of all.
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.
Brand, Max - 1925 Page 22
