The bundle,” said Skye, holding out his hand. But Childress was not surrendering it. The monkey jumped to the trader’s shoulder and scolded Skye.
“The bundle,” Skye repeated.
Childress did not lift the thong over his head.
“Make your Little Person give the sacred medicine bag back,” Victoria snapped. “It is Skye’s.”
Childress addressed her, inflating himself in his chair.
“Ah! If it were a mere thing of material value, gold, rubies, aphrodisia, rupees, Grecian statuary, anything of that miserable sort, I would remove the dead weight from my neck at once, for I have no patience with mere wealth. But this is purely a mystical gift and it was intended that I should receive it so that I might be empowered by the Spirits. Thus it represents my destiny, my incubus, which my discerning monkey at once recognizes.”
He scratched the simian’s jaw.
“The bundle,” said Skye.
Childress addressed Victoria. “Shine didn’t steal it; he merely bestowed it, and now I am committed to your noble cause, without reservation or cavil. Someday, when this is over, I will return it to your esteemed husband …” He peered
at her. “But let us ask the woman whose will and intention matters most to us.”
He turned to Standing Alone, who stood transfixed, understanding little of this, and spoke to her in her tongue, his fingers lifting the sacred bundle even as he spoke to her.
Standing Alone replied in the simplest manner: she approached the fat Colonel, lifted the bundle from his possession, and gently gave it to Skye. He felt its mysterious power as it lay in his hand, and then he lifted his hat and settled the medicine bundle upon his chest, where it belonged. That made things right. The Cheyenne woman nodded.
But Standing Alone was not through. She was talking in her tongue to Childress, and pointing at the monkey.
“She says, Sah, that I must come with you. The monkey is very wise. I am at your service, Sah.”
Skye saw how it would be. He had gotten in with a daft adventurer, a self-confessed privateer and soldier of fortune, alleged Texan, and only God knew what else. Those gents on the veranda were not traders. Skye had spent years among Indian traders, and none of them resembled this phalanx of cutthroats. Colonel, indeed! Buccaneer, fraud, mountebank, confidence man, these were the correct titles. Skye had made mistakes in his life, but this would not be one of them.
“Colonel, tell our friend Standing Alone that we respect her wisdom, and we are honored that she asked us to look for her children. But we’re going on our way now, without your help.”
“Skye—”
Standing Alone somehow fathomed what Skye was saying. She probably grasped plenty of English after all those seasons at the gate of Bent’s Fort, though she didn’t speak it.
She did not hesitate, but rushed to Skye, a tall, proud woman who each day seemed younger than the previous day, and gently pressed her hands over his.
“All come,” she said, and then spoke in her own tongue to Childress.
The Colonel translated. “She wants me to help you to find the Utes and look for her children in the nation across the river; she means the Mexicans, Sah. The monkey has told her that I must come with you on this great quest for justice and liberty and reunion. I accepted with pleasure.”
Craziness. The woman had never seen a monkey before, so the monkey was a new god.
Skye had rarely felt such misgivings. He felt trapped. Here he was, committed to Standing Alone, being pulled and tugged by a Cheyenne tribal medicine bundle and a thieving monkey named Shine and a fat trader who sounded more like a pirate, and probably was one.
He turned to Victoria.
“Big medicine,” she said. “Little Person gives the fat man the medicine bundle. Skye, we go get them damned Cheyenne Dog Soldier children, and he comes with us,” said Victoria, gesturing toward Childress. “You and me and Standing Alone and the fat man and the Little Person.”
Monkey or not, Victoria wanted Childress along. Skye gawked at her. Suddenly he laughed, the miraculous, booming Skye laugh that shook the mountains and shivered the grasses, and settled his mind and lifted his heart.
“All right, we will.”
All those hard-eyed scoundrels on the porch stared. He wondered whether the warrants for their arrest numbered in the twenties, fifties, or hundreds. They weren’t border men; they were men a thousand miles beyond the borders, and for good reason.
Skye eyed the fat man. “How are you going to travel?” he asked. “Not by horse, that’s certain.”
“I have a cart and a dray.”
“We need more horses.”
“I’ll arrange it. What will you offer?”
“I need the loan of them.”
“I will do it.”
“At dawn, then, Colonel?”
“I sleep late,” he said.
“We’ll be ready whenever you are.”
“Our accommodations leave something to be desired, but you are welcome.” He waved toward the gloomy chamber.
Skye had already peered into the rectangular dirt-floored room stacked with trade goods but redolent of sweat and viler odors. This outfit had yet to erect bunks or build an outhouse, and were simply making their beds among the spiders and snakes.
“Think we’ll camp down by the river, Colonel.”
“As you wish, Sah.”
He led his silent women down to a flat near the water where they could bathe. The sky didn’t threaten, and they could unroll their robes on soft dry silt that would shape to their bodies.
Standing Alone retreated to her own space thirty or forty yards distant, as usual, leaving Skye and Victoria alone under the bright canopy of stars. A chill breeze swept out of the western mountains, and by dawn Skye would be pulling his robes tight around him.
He could hear the water lapping. Far off, a coyote barked. He listened closely. Not all coyote sounds were coyotes.
Victoria huddled close this time, which was not like her.
“Skye, that thing you call monkey. I know what it is,” she whispered.
“It’s just a critter from far south.”
“No! It is a Little Person!”
Skye sat up. “What is that?”
“Only my people know them. A few Absaroka have seen them. But that is one. Aiee! I never thought I would see one.”
Skye waited intently. If Victoria didn’t want to say more, nothing could persuade her to.
“Sometimes they are friends and help us. Sometimes one of our warriors or hunters is in trouble, and a Little Person helps him. He brings a lost horse, or brings wood to splint a broken leg, or finds water. They live in caves and hidden
places. This man the Colonel, he does not know this, but I know.”
“Then we have a helper,” Skye said.
“Ha! Skye, you don’t know nothing. The Little People are tricksters too, like the coyote, making everyone miserable. Maybe this Little Person makes us miserable. They steal, too, and that is how I know. This Little Person, he would steal everything we got and hide it if he could.” She paused. “Don’t you trust no Little Person.”
“The Colonel obviously does.”
Victoria laughed sardonically. “Look at him. Fat man run by a Little Person like a gelded horse hitched to a wagon and he don’t even know it.”
Skye didn’t reply. Sometimes silence was best. He squeezed her hand. It wasn’t the monkey he was worried about; it was the erratic and strange Colonel from Galveston Bay who could put them all into a parcel of trouble. But when he thought of those missing Cheyenne children, and the ever-blooming Standing Alone, who was so filled with hope now, he didn’t have any regrets.