Sun and Sand Page 8

  Rising Bird answered darkly: “I do not love the whites. Once, I was not alone. I had two strong brothers. I was the weakest and the poorest. I lived on the scraps that were left from their glory. I was famous in the tribe and became a chief only because we had the same father. Now they are gone. Their scalps were not taken by a Cheyenne, or by a Ute. They died under the guns of the white men. My heart is sore. I have one white brother. And that is all. I have opened my heart to him and given him good words. Let him be wise and accept them, and ride far away.”

  And they went out into the rain-racked darkness of the night.

  XIV

  In the camp of the Blackfeet, the life of Meany balanced nicely. He was not an inch from death at one time; he was verging toward safety at another, according as one party and then another secured the ascendancy.

  First, dragged up roughly to the camp by the Blackfeet youths, the latter were willingly dispersed by a rush of the Blackfeet women, who seized on Meany and would have made him a victim forthwith. For, by this time, there was not a tribe in the mountains or over the plains which had not certain victims to mourn at the hands of the whites. And, with true Indian instinct, they blamed upon the entire white “tribe” their losses.

  Meany would have been slain by the women with the most dreadful torments if Spotted Calf himself, at this point, had not intervened. He was a young chief. He had a young man’s bitter impulses, but he was enough of a statesman to understand that it was a dangerous affair to involve his tribe with the white men.

  At last, he freed the white man from the circle of the women and saw that he was convoyed to a lodge near his. It was a sort of overflow lodge, or guest house, attached to his own, and it had served before this to accommodate prisoners of importance. Then Spotted Calf called an assemblage of his own chiefs.

  The young leaders and the old came. The medicine men opened the ceremony with due solemnity. After that, they argued about the proper fate for Meany, the trader, and the vote was for death. It was by the treachery of his council that they had lost so many goods that day. It was, however, for more important reasons that he was to die. And one after another the Blackfeet arose and spoke of young warriors found dead in the hills—how often shot through the back, killed as by an Indian with craft, scalped as by an Indian, but the slayer leaving the tracks of moccasins such as an Indian never would have been wearing.

  But before this debate was ended, one of the oldest men gave this bit of toothless wisdom. “If you strike, strike at the heart . . . but if you strike, let it be all together. The Blackfeet are a great people. They are the greatest of the peoples of the world. But still we will need help to beat the whites. Send for the Crows and the Cheyennes. They are great warriors. Show them our hearts and ask them if they will charge at our sides.”

  To this, Spotted Calf willingly assented. He, by instinct, guessed at the wisdom behind that advice.

  But he waited through the day. He was willing that the skirmishing out on the plain around the fort should grow hotter and hotter. If, by any chance, an Indian should be fired upon and killed, then without a doubt the decision of the council would turn in only one way.

  But dusk came—the thunderstorm smote all the camps—and still there was no word of a serious casualty before the fort, where the fire of the rifles was being sternly kept silent by wise Duncan.

  So, with the darkness, Spotted Calf saw no more reason for delaying the council, and now he did two things. First, he dispatched six young braves, as vigilant as hawks, to press up through the darkness and lie near the fort, ready to mark any attempt on the part of the whites to escape through the storm. Then he sent out his invitation to the chief men of both the neighboring encampments, and they quickly gathered in his own capacious lodge.

  Twenty head men of the three nations now sat shoulder to shoulder in a circle, so much so that when the council was opened, and the first man spoke in the person of the oldest—an ancient Crow—this venerable orator burst out: “Here are three great people, all side-by-side, heart touching heart, arm touching arm, peaceful and happy together. Oh, that we should steal across the plains, hunting for the lives of one another. If we were at peace, if we were as one, we could sweep all the world before us. As for the life of this white man, that is a small thing, and no doubt it has been forfeited. Let us pour out his blood. Let us make it a sacrifice to the Sky People, who surely hate the whites. After that sacrifice, we will all be tied together. The Crows, the Blackfeet, and the Cheyennes will make one great nation. We will drive the Sioux into the northern snows and take their hunting grounds. Then we will conquer the Comanches and have all the world at our knees. All this I see in promise, as I see you sitting here, shoulder to shoulder.”

  The wind had fallen, and though the rain fell in crashing torrents and the thunder beat like the striking of huge, half-muffled wings in the distance, still, at intervals, Meany in the little adjoining lodge could hear enough of the discourse to make out its meaning, and his flesh prickled with fear.

  This old fire-eater was followed by a more peaceful spirit, a Crow.

  He began by saying that he did not doubt the good heart and the strong wit of his fellow tribesman, but he knew that at other times alliances had been made to strike the whites. They always failed. He did not know why, but he argued against war, because in the hands of the Indians, it never had been a successful weapon against the whites.

  Then the debate raged freely on both sides.

  At one point, it was suggested that it would be of importance to find out what the prisoner would give, if anything, as a ransom for his life, and he was led into the lodge to give his answer for himself.

  It was a ticklish moment for Meany. His keen, understanding eyes pierced through the swirling smoke and rested upon the hard faces of the chiefs, and he knew that they were against him, one and all. Yet he dared not speak with too much emotion. It would have disgusted the Indians to think that he was pleading for his life too passionately. He must rather speak in measured tones, as a businessman. If he even put too high a value upon himself, he would be considered a braggart and a coward, and probably given at once to the terrible hands of the women—torturers to whom the Spanish Inquisition was as nothing.

  Therefore, he offered them, in the mildest of speeches, a good horse, worthy of a charge in war, or the running of the buffalo, to every chief assembled there. Also, he would give with every horse as many beads as his doubled hands could hold. This, he said, he gave not so much as a price on his head, but because he was eager that the trading should begin and because he wanted to show the Indians that he prized them, and furthermore, that now he could tell which men among the three nations were well worthy of honoring.

  Hardly had the flap of the teepee closed behind him as he was led out when he heard Little Bull, the Cheyenne chief, rising to advise that the offer should be taken.

  Said Little Bull: You speak a great deal of the white men, though what have you seen of them? Would you judge the Comanches by the few warriors who have happened to wander north and who live with us, now and then, in our teepees during a winter? No, you would not judge their power by these men, who often are outcasts and have no real strength or worth. But we know, besides, from men who have ridden far south and seen them, that the Comanches are a great people, the richest in horses of any in the world.

  “How do we see the white men wander forth here? We do not see single men who come forth and rest for the winter in our teepees. But we see men who come forth in small groups, each man loaded down with wealth, and each man eager for more. They do not have to skulk in their teepees. They build their forts so cunningly and so strongly that these forts are able to stand off the attack of the best warriors of an Indian nation. Not with one force would we attack this fort, for instance. We have to take council together, and three great nations pour down on one place.

  “But are these all the white men? They have few women and almost no children with them. Where their masses of tribesmen are will be
where they have left their women and their children.

  “I, Little Bull, know the thing that I speak of. The great river which we call The Father of the Waters, and which we think of as far, far in the east, is to them far west. Beyond this great flood, they live in great cities of lodges built of wood, and of stone, and of baked mud. These people are so many that, if all the Indians of all the prairies were to gather together in one force and attack the whites, they could not win.

  “It is best for us to live as freely as we can, but within a limit. Let us do nothing that will make so much trouble and so much noise that the story of it will go across the great river and come to the ears of all the other whites. Let us do nothing that will reach the ears of their chiefs, where they sit together smoking on the shore of the eastern ocean.

  “If, now and then, the red men destroy a small party of traders, it is no matter. No sound of it as loud as the voice of a bird in the wind that comes to the fathers of the white people, far away. But such a thing as this, and the killing of many white men in a fort, will anger them. They will send out thousands of warriors. They will come up the rivers in fire canoes deep into the heart of our country.

  “And even if they do not find us, some of them will stay. Then others and others will come. Wherever they come, they will hold some land. They will grow in numbers. Even now, they begin to push out fingers into the heart of our land. Let us leave them alone. Let us take each of us a good horse and the double handful of beads. This is what I think it wise to do.”

  When Little Bull sat down, it was plain that his speech had daunted the hearts of half the chiefs, and Meany waited, his heart beating frantically with hope in the next lodge.

  All was quiet for a long moment, and then a vast peal of thunder burst from the heavens above them, and as its echoes went bounding and crackling down, the first of all the speakers shouted suddenly: “The Sky People hear those words, and they are angry. They threaten us with their contempt unless we strike at the white men. Are we cowards to do what the Sky People command us to? Look, look!”

  With this, he rushed to the flaps of the lodge and threw them wide, and the whole assemblage saw above them the rush of a lightning flash, plunging out of the high masses of the clouds.

  XV

  It was exactly at this critical moment that a little boy on the outskirts of the village of the Blackfeet ran out of his father’s lodge in order to look up at the skies and see if a portion of them had not fallen in the last great thunder crash. He looked up and saw that great thunderbolt careering through the sky like a white ship, like a white rider of Blackfeet lore. And, at the same time, he heard the loud chant of criers running through the camp and calling out the warriors. He listened, his heart beating with fear and with joy, when at that moment a strange rider appeared through the night beside him.

  This man was an apparition that seemed to be on fire. And so was the horse he rode on.

  The little boy would have run away with a cry of fear, but hands caught him and lifted him to the pommel of the saddle.

  After all, the man was not actually on fire. But edgings of light appeared around the verge of his robe. And the horse itself was outlined with a strange glow from within and appeared, in fact, to be covered with garments like those that cover a man.

  The boy had not much time to wonder at this apparition, when he was much reassured by hearing a voice speak to him in good Blackfoot, saying: “Little brother, I have come in from a long march, brought by the messengers. Therefore, tell me the teepee of Spotted Calf.”

  “It is there in the center of the lodges,” said the boy. “It is there at the foot of that hill.”

  For there was a mound in the middle of the camp, a high mound of earth, and at the foot of this, the chief had built his teepee.

  “That is good,” said the stranger to the boy. “And where is the dog of a white man who was brought into the camp this same day?”

  “Beside the lodge of Spotted Calf, there is a small teepee. There you will find him. And who are you, stranger and brother?”

  “I,” said the stranger, after the slightest hesitation, “am only a skirmisher, come before the remainder of the Blackfeet who will arrive today, all eager.”

  He dropped the boy, and the latter stood back. It seemed to him that he had noticed an odd, stifling odor, when he was close to this rider from the heart of the night. It seemed to him, also, that faint fumes arose, but of this he could not be sure, because the horseman did not pause any longer, but rode straight on through the thick of the camp.

  Twisting here and there, this man from the dark proceeded through the camp, which was now filling with hurrying men who went back and forth, gathering toward the center of the camp, every man mounted on his best war pony, and every man armed with the choicest of his weapons. For the criers had circulated everywhere through the village of the Blackfeet, and all the warriors, young and old, had answered the call.

  Out from the lodge of Spotted Calf, the chiefs of the three nations had come, and they had paused for a moment to watch the muster of the Piegans.

  The Blackfeet came in throngs, tall, magnificently made men, with long hair flowing freely over their shoulders—hair that was whipped straight out now by the pressure of the wind. And as they gathered in a thick mass at the center of the camp, waiting for the command of their leader, a sudden wild voice ran screaming upon them, carried by fear.

  “The white rider and the horse of fire! Look! Look!”

  And they looked up to the top of the little hill, and there they were able to see a dreadful figure against the black and moving sky of the night. At that very moment as they looked, it happened that a huge lightning bolt burst from the clouds and angled toward the earth. The startled warriors could not be sure whether they had seen the apparition of the flaming horse before or after the lightning bolt, and to most of them, it seemed as though they had seen the thunderbolt drive down from the sky and appear upon the earth in the form of a man of white fire on a horse of white flame. For every detail of that rider on the hilltop was bathed in brilliant light. And yet the light shone on nothing else around him.

  He was naked except for a loincloth. And the loincloth alone was dark—that, and the moccasins upon his feet and the feathers in his hair. But all the rest of this celestial warrior flamed. His hair blew over his shoulders like a garment of fire. And the horse burned, likewise, and even the bridle was a bridle of white fire, held by the burning hand of the rider.

  Most marvelous of all, this rider bore in his hand a great, long spear, and now he turned his horse, and he lowered that spear of heavenly fire, and with it he pointed straight at the lodge of Spotted Calf, in the midst of the Blackfeet.

  When the tribesmen saw this, a universal groan went up from them, and the strongest warriors there were not ashamed to shrink and groan in the agony of their fear, for the old tribal story rang in every ear, as they had heard it in their childhood.

  Then that rider began to move down the hillside, and a wild cry went up from every throat when it was seen that the print of his hoofs upon the earth was outlined in living fire that quivered and trembled and turned green. And all the way from the top of the hill to the bottom, it was observed that the footprints remained as clearly imprinted as though the fire were welling up from the earth.

  At that, with a deep cry of terror, the horde swept backward. And they huddled together, ready to flee in the utmost fright, pressing close to one another in the extremity of their fear.

  Still they remained to look, and the greatness of their astonishment and their curiosity was such that they were almost more delighted with unearthly pleasure in the sight of the vision than they were overwhelmed with awe.

  Many things were noted, about which all agreed the next day.

  There were some who said that a cloud of livid smoke curled upward above the stranger from the sky, and floated toward the heaven from which he had descended to this fortunate earth. But in this, all would not agree. Only the women
were unanimous, as they always were in making each feature of this wonder more miraculous.

  There were some who declared that it was plainly seen that the horse galloped through the sky, bursting from among the clouds, and that it raced down in three long leaps to the earth, just as the fall of the thunderbolt will make three jags.

  But most agreed that at the moment when the horse smote the earth, the ground trembled, and immediately afterward, there was such a great peal of thunder as never had been heard before. The whole tribe were willing to swear to this detail.

  It was further said that the eyes of the stranger shot forth burning sparks, and the direction of his glance was always marked by a ghostly stream of light. But there was much divergence about this, and many said that the mouth and the eyes of the stranger were dark.

  What all could swear to was that the point of the dreadful spear dripped living fire, and that some of that fire fell upon the ground and that there it burned terribly, with a small, immortal light.

  Now this celestial visitor moved down the hillside and rode straight to the lodge that cowered close beside the lodge of the chief, Spotted Calf. There he dismounted and walked forward, and the prints of his moccasins were fire upon the earth.

  He laid his hand upon the flap and cast it back, and the finger mark was a mark of fire that did not burn. He entered that small teepee, and there was a groan of anguish from the Blackfeet. Was it on account of the white man that this messenger had been sent from the Sky People?

  Yes, for behold. Out from the teepee stepped the divine rider, and with him walked Meany, the trader. And the rider went down the slope toward the river, and his burning hand was upon the head of Meany in sign of protection, and yet Meany could stand the fire.

  Then the Blackfeet warriors smote their hands against their foreheads and looked again at this marvel, and every man told himself that he was dreaming.

  But that dream went down to the river and entered the water. And, at that moment, came the greatest miracle of all. For the heavens opened, and there was a great shaft of lightning. And there were some who swore that the lightning descended from the heavens to the earth, near the river, but all who had eyes and sense were able to see that the flash rose from the river to the heavens.