When Red Hawk was free to rise, before he so much as drew his knife from the body of the dead man, he filled a pipe and smoked it in honor of the spirit, Sweet Medicine. The cold of the wind washed over him like running water, but he forgot comfort while he considered that this—knife against rifle—had been a grand coup; such a thing as gives honor to a brave all his life long, and hushes the young men with wonder and envy when the coup is counted.
Then he stood up, put away his pipe, drew the heavy knife from the body of Murray Quale, and looked critically at the point and the edges. Perhaps his heart was colder than the hearts of other men, or perhaps in some ways he was simply more of a child, for he smiled with pleasure to see that there was nowhere a nicking or even a turning of the sharp-ground edges. So he grasped the greasy black hair of Murray Quale and prepared to take his first scalp.
Something stopped him. It was not the consideration that the soul of a scalped warrior cannot leave the body but must rot away with the flesh; it was simply that he remembered the faces of Richard Lester and Maisry as, on that first night, they had watched him tearing at the roasted meat that they had given to him. White men, unless they had gone Indian-wild on the frontier, do not mutilate the dead. It seemed to Red Hawk that Maisry stood beside him in the cold and windy pass, watching everything he did, with eyes as soft as those of a child, but recording forever.
Thereupon he simply drew the edge of the knife around the central section of the hair, in ceremonial fashion, and in a few words offered that untaken scalp to Sweet Medicine as a sacrifice.
Of the guns and ammunition of the dead man he took nothing, nor anything that was on his person, for the dead thing had grown unspeakably vile in the eyes of Red Hawk. As for the livestock, it was a different matter. He took the mule and the two horses, so that, as he took up the trail of White Horse once more, he now had a string of four animals.
The winter came on early that year. In October it was like December; in November it was like January, and in the middle of November, as he followed the diminishing herd of White Horse south, over the Mountain Desert, Red Hawk had that meeting with Colonel Oliver Dodge about which so many stories have been told.
The colonel was a precise man who made notes of everything that befell, and from his naked narrative the following facts appear: That the caravan, of which he was the elected captain, California bound, had made good progress all the way from Fort Benton. That an unseasonable blizzard of terrible strength overwhelmed them in a desert valley, so that half of the livestock were frozen to death and the whole caravan lodged in the snow. That the blizzard continuing, it was necessary to make a temporary camp here, bringing wood from a distance for fires. That the frightful strength of the hurricane continuing, every ox and mule in the train was frozen, and that almost none of this meat was properly preserved by smoking, but that the cold was depended upon to keep it edible. That the sudden thaw that followed spoiled nearly every pound of the provisions. That the women and children were rapidly weakening. That three men, with Dave Gleason, the scout, as their chief, were sent out to bring help. That game was not to be shot. That leather harness was boiled to make a wretched soup, and that the weaker members of the party began to sicken rapidly. That continual hunting could not turn up game of any sort. And that on a day there rode into the camp the celebrated character who was famous all through the plains and among the mountain tribes as the hunter of White Horse. He rode a mule and led a staggering horse. Both animals were very thin, but they were turned over to the starving camp and rationed out.
Colonel Dodge’s narrative contains an interesting description of Red Hawk’s appearance at this time. He was, says the colonel, something over the average height, and so worn by continual privation that he looked some five or ten years older than his twenty-one years. His eyes were large, and so blue that the color, even from a slight distance, was as apparent as a stain in the brown of the face. His clothes were deerskin rags, with the skin of a mountain sheep, half cured by smoking over a fire, gathered about his shoulders. His body, seen through the rags, looked like that of a starved corpse; it would have made a fine, fleshless specimen for the dissecting table of medical students, observed the colonel with a touch of grim humor.
He stated that the camp gladly furnished this bringer of help with a complete outfit of warm clothes, but that Red Hawk would not wait even to partake of the flesh of the animals that he had furnished to the camp. Saying that White Horse was not two miles in advance, he slung his rifle under his arm, and immediately left the camp.
The colonel himself followed, urging the young man to remain at least a day in the camp to rest, and assuring him that to march on through the white heart of such a storm as was then blowing would be to imperil his life.
To this the strange man replied: “White Horse has no warm campfires to lie by. What he can endure, I can endure.”
Shortly after this, in a blind howling and fury of snow, the colonel lost track of his companion, and barely was able to find his way back to the camp.
Finally, at midnight, thirty-six hours later, the wanderer returned with a report that he had found a dozen mountain buffalo in a box cañon not very far away, and that he had slaughtered them all. He urged the colonel to send out every available man to bring in the frozen meat before the wolves should get at it. When he had delivered this message, Red Hawk guided the men of the camp to the box cañon, and there he left them.
The colonel asked him how he could be rewarded, but he merely begged that one white man’s prayer might be made to the Great Spirit to make clear the trail of White Horse.
In conclusion, the colonel summed up the difference between the mountain buffalo and those of the plains. He found the former a shorter, stockier, more heavily furred species.
To Red Hawk, the adventure of the stalled caravan was hardly more than an extra torment given to him by the inexplicable will of the Great Spirit, Sweet Medicine, placing him on foot and costing him a wastage of three days. It seemed to him a special miracle when, ten days later, blindly marching south over the same route that he had followed the year before, he came again within view of the great horse, once more unattended by a herd. The whole body of tough mustangs that White Horse had stolen from Murray Quale had drifted to one side or the other, worn out by the steadiness of the pursuit. There remained only the great leader himself, and once more White Horse led him south to the Colorado.
How Red Hawk caught a wild horse in a cottonwood tangle and tamed and rode the brute is a story too long to tell. But that tough roan carried his master over fifteen hundred miles, through the warmer south and back again into the freezing north, before, on a March day, it dropped its head and could go no more.
Red Hawk resumed the way on foot. It would be unfair to say that he thought of surrendering. Fever maddened him with thirst and turned his brain astray until on a day he threw the ponderous weight of the rifle away from him. That brought him a little closer to starvation, but already he had starved until his cheeks clove like rough leather to his teeth.
In spite of fever and starvation, however, he kept to the trail of White Horse, for the great stallion was no longer what he had been. If he needed less sleep than the man, he required several hours for grazing—particularly when he had to paw away the snow to get at his food. But those hours were never his, now that he had not the strength to burst away at a reaching gallop and put a few miles of security between him and this patient, dogging enemy. Fear had grown such a part of the great horse that he dared not snatch three mouthfuls without jerking up his head and studying the wind and staring suspiciously all around him. If the man was but a shambling skeleton, White Horse was hardly more.
As they entered the Blue Water Mountains, the veriest runt of a cow pony would have had speed enough to bring Red Hawk up with the stallion, so that he could at last use his rawhide lariat.
That lariat and his knife were the last of his possessions when he came to the last day. He had dug into the heaped snow on the windward side of a thicket and slept there for a few hours of wretched dreams. Then he dragged himself along the trail of the horse, over a ridge and down into a windless valley. The sun came up, strong and clear, and almost in a moment he could hear the lodged snow on the branches begin to fall, sometimes in morsels, sometimes dropping in heavy masses that struck the snow beneath with an unmistakable puffing sound. A few great storms might still be left in the skies, but the back of winter was breaking and the long thaw had begun.
It was a beautiful valley, and those who know the Blue Water Mountains can imagine how the slopes rose, so gigantic that the pine trees that struggled through the snow looked like a dark stubble. They will remember how the round lake, now glassed over with ice, lies in the bottom of the hollow.
Red Hawk, as he went down the hollow with knees unstrung by famine and long labor, stared at the scene with bloodshot eyes. He knew, as though the voice of Sweet Medicine had sounded in his heart, that he had come to the end of his trail. There was no power in him to climb another ridge. He had felt a thousand times before that he was making his last march, but now there was a lump of ice in his vitals, and he was certain that his end was near.
That was why he felt no particular leap of joy through his body when he stole through the frozen bracken and came out on the shore of the lake, with White Horse hardly ten strides away from him, breaking through the snow crust with strokes of his forehoofs, and then tearing up with his teeth the long, brown, lank grasses that all summer long grew beside the water.
Little by little, Red Hawk worked his lariat into the coil, freed the noose, enlarged it, and began to prepare himself for the cast. His prayer was silence, and every breath he drew, to be sure, was a prayer. He felt that his arm was too weak for the throw, that he would be unable to succeed unless the Underground Listeners were good to him.
Then, taking a half step forward, he hurled the noose. It was that half step that warned White Horse. That noise was a mere whisper, but it started the stallion away so that the noose, falling, merely whipped him across the withers and sent him into a frantic gallop right out across the face of the lake.
There was still strength enough in the horse to keep him from slipping and falling. Though he skidded half a dozen times, he regained his control. He was almost across the lake when, with dying eyes, Red Hawk saw the monster disappear from view.