When Red Hawk saw the Bailey brothers coming up the street a moment later and sent White Horse vaulting over the fences to meet them, he halted them and the string of pack mules that had been prepared so quickly for the two traders. Then he rode down to the square and halted at each corner of it.
“Friends of Wind Walker, tell him that between the full of the moon and the half, Dull Hatchet and Standing Bull and Red Hawk shall hunt for him among the Witherell Hills, between the peak with two summits and the white hill. Let him come, and bring two friends with strong hands, because three Cheyennes will be waiting for him.”
Four times he called that speech, from the four corners of the square. Then he turned and smiled as he found the eyes of the many clinging to him, following him—and most of all huge Sam Calkins, who stood in front of his shop, all soot and shimmering sweat. For how could all of these people know that in fact there was little or no danger to the Cheyennes in the battle to come, since Sweet Medicine had given to the tribe freshly favoring good fortune?
Once they were started, the mules reached across the plains in long marches, for mules take short steps, but they are never tired. There were six of those mules, besides the riding horses of the Bailey brothers, and every one of the mules, they said, would be loaded with the yellow god before they turned back to the towns of men. They talked as though they could pack heaven on the backs of the six mules.
“We’ll pack half a million,” said Jeremy to Joe.
Red Hawk, listening indifferently, said to them: “I am your guide and not your guard. You know that the Sacred Valley has been entered by only one man. I am that man. Are you not foolish, then, to enter the valley? Are you not foolish to go past the leaning pillar?”
They laughed at him. “How will Sweet Medicine hit us, Red Hawk?” they asked him. “With thunder and lightning?”
They kept on laughing while he watched them with calm, incurious disgust, as though they were walking deaths.
Yet he went first, when they came to the leaning pillar at the entrance to the Sacred Valley, and they followed, with their rifles prepared, looking cautiously from side to side. Blind fools who thought that they could see a god, as it seemed to Red Hawk. He was amazed when, looking back, he saw that they had safely passed the pillar. He had been sure that they would die on the threshold of this holy place. However, who can determine the mind or predict the ways of the spirits?
These two men now hurried on with stony faces, as though fate already had entered them. They passed the thunder of the waterfall, speaking magic with deep tones, and in a short time they were entering the narrow upper ravine where the gold had been found.
The Sacred Valley seemed to have shrunk in size since Red Hawk had first come there. But what may not a god do in his own dwelling?
They were halfway up the stream when Joe Bailey screamed out an unintelligible word. With pain, but not with surprise, Red Hawk looked back, expecting to see that Sweet Medicine had already struck and that the man would be lying dead on the ground. Instead, he was on his knees, scooping sand and gravel up from the shallow bottom of the creek, and letting it drip out of his fingers. Showing his yellow-gilded palms to his brother, they laughed and shrieked. Then Joe hurled the first gold he had washed far away into the grass. He was mad, Red Hawk concluded. Sweet Medicine was touching the minds of the white men before he touched their bodies.
Jeremy was in the water, too, now. Then the pair of them was out and at one of the mule packs, tearing it apart and feverishly bringing out the shovels and wooden cradles for washing the gravel. They laid down buckskin sacks. Without pausing to remove more than that one pack, they worked on wildly all the rest of that day.
Truly it was wonderful to see how the stream turned yellow and black, and, when they trenched into the sod beside the stream, they washed out portions of the deeply underlying stratum of sand, and this was as rich as the creek bed itself.
For some time Red Hawk watched them. They were already soaked to the skin, and their voices were already hoarse from shouting. They had become grimly patient now, but their eyes were like the eyes of hungry beasts. He felt that he could endure the sight of them no more.
He looked up to the blue peace of the sky, and saw a single white cloud floating and melting in it. Perhaps that was Sweet Medicine, watching and smiling at these fools who thought that they could invade his house without punishment. Let not the blow that involved the pair strike on the faithful heart of a white Cheyenne!
Finally he set about unpacking. When the mules had been hobbled to graze, he built an open fireplace of rocks, cementing them together with mixed mud and long grass. Then he put up the shelter tent made of thick sail cloth, strong and light, cutting a good center pole and pegging down the flaps. He felled a quantity of branches out of which he built three soft, deep beds, for he would remain with them that one night, if indeed Sweet Medicine held his hand so long.
Then he took a rifle and went out to hunt. He passed a group of black-tailed deer almost at once, but he could not murder creatures that looked at him without fear. Luck, in the late afternoon, gave him sight of a mountain sheep that stood on the verge of a cliff, facing the brightness in the west. He tumbled it to the valley floor with a bullet through the head, and took off as much of the best meat as he could carry.
That burden he brought back to the camp that he had pitched beneath the spread of a mighty tree, and found that the Bailey brothers had glutted their first hunger for gold and now lay with their backs against the trunk of a tree, smoking.
The sun was out of sight behind the western heights, but it was not yet down. All the upper sky was brilliant with the pure light as Red Hawk put down the fresh meat and called to the brothers: “Here is something to put in hungry bellies. Make your coffee as you choose to make it, while I roast some of this on spits.”
They said nothing in reply. They looked at one another in silence, as though each was too tired to fall to any sort of work, even for the sake of hunger. In the meantime, Red Hawk busied himself in the kindling of the fire, the cutting up of the meat in small gobbets that would fit on some long splinters of wood that he had prepared. He was intent on this work, blessing his appetite with the promise that meat would soon be between his teeth.
All at once he heard one of the brothers come up behind him, dragging a rope that made a whispering sound in the grass. He did not even look aside as he said: “That noise is like a snake coming, friend.”
Something cut the air over his head with a whispering sound. The noose of the rope fell over his body and jerked tight. He was flung on his back, with his arms pinned against his sides and bound fast below the elbows. Above him appeared the scarred face of Jeremy Bailey.
“Easy, Joe, eh?” he said.
“It don’t take a man to handle a blind fool like him,” said Joe Bailey.
Red Hawk lay still and looked at the sky. His mind was clear. He felt the damp cool of the turf seeping through his deerskin shirt at the hips and the shoulders.
Joe Bailey stood by and kicked him heavily in the ribs. “What does Sweet Medicine say about this, you half-wit?” he asked.
“Get that other rope and we’ll tie him hard,” said Jeremy.
“Why not bash him over the head now and have done with it?” asked Joe.
“Because I want to talk to him for a minute. I want to tell him a few things about his Sweet Medicine. Yeah, sweet medicine it’s going to be for you, Red Hawk.”
Red Hawk made no effort to struggle. They had revolvers at their hips, and knives in their belts, and they could cut him to pieces before he moved twice. More than that, this was the very floor of the house of the god—his voice spoke yonder and seemed to fill the sky. Therefore it was plain that all things were in his hands and that nothing could happen here except of his will.
He was tied hand and foot. Jeremy Bailey took him by the hair of the head, with one hand, and dragged him until his shoulders were propped against the trunk of the tree. Then the two brothers filled pipes and sat down cross-legged before him. They blew the smoke toward his face.
He merely said: “Why do you want to kill me? People kill men they hate or men they’re afraid of. Why do you hate me, or why do you fear me?”
“Tell him, Jeremy,” said Joe. “I hate to talk to the damned Cheyenne. I’d rather take and smash in his head for him and have it finished. You tell him why, will you?”
“Did you think, you poor idiot,” said Jeremy, smiling into the eyes of Red Hawk, “that we’d let you get away from here to sell the news about this placer strike to somebody else? Look yonder.” He pointed. “You see those two little snaky-looking buckskin sacks?” he demanded.
“I see them,” said Red Hawk.
“There’s about twenty-five pounds of dust in each of ’em,” explained Jeremy. “We’ve washed around twelve thousand dollars’ worth of gold . . . in a part of one day. Hell, we’ve taken out of the ground in one day more than we’ve worked for all the other years of our lives. And you think that we’d let you walk free out of here to tell other people?”
“I understand,” said Red Hawk.
“Good,” said Jeremy. “Then you understand one reason why you’ve got to be shut up for good and all. There’s other reasons of my own. I’ll tell you the best of ’em. I didn’t like the way Maisry looked at you the other day. She sort of rested her eyes on you as if you were a nice spot to see. She looked at you, and seemed to forget that I was on the face of the earth. Understand? It made me a little sick to see a white girl look like that at a damned Cheyenne. It made me a little sick at the stomach. Well, that’s another good reason why you’re going to die. It’s your face that’s harming you, brother. It’s that handsome mug you wear that’s giving you trouble. It’s those big blue eyes and the nice cut of your map that’s hurting you under the fifth rib.” He laughed again, sprawling at his ease and smoking his pipe.
Joe got up and stretched himself. “We’d better get it over with,” he said, and pulled out a revolver.
“Wait a minute,” said Jeremy. “I want to talk to the fool for another minute. I want to ask him how much faith he has in his damned red god, just now. What’s Sweet Medicine going to do for you, Red Hawk? Eh? You’re the brave boy who got the sacred arrow out of the sacred cave, in the sacred mountain of the sacred valley. Eh? And what’s the god going to do for the scared Red Hawk who managed all of these sacred things? You tell me, will you?”
“Yeah,” sneered Joe. “How scared are you?”
Red Hawk looked up at the sky through the wide design that the branches spread against the color. The sun was down. Red and gold mounted in deepening waves out of the west and flooded the zenith, spreading out and giving more light and less warmth of the staining dyes. It was not exactly fear that he felt, rather a holy awe. He said: “I am not afraid. I am only excited. I am excited as people are when they have a bet on a horse race and the horses are standing ready at the start.”
“And a damned long race you’re gonna run, in a couple of seconds,” commented Jeremy. “So you ain’t scared? You’re only excited, eh?”
“You have guns,” said Red Hawk. “And with a touch of your fingers you may send me death. But Sweet Medicine is swifter and stranger by far. That is why I am excited, because I wait to see how he will touch you before my eyes.”
“Now tell me something,” said Jeremy, taking out a revolver and resting the barrel of it across his knee. “Before I sink a slug in you and then go to roast the meat that you hunted for us . . . when the bullet goes home and you get the bellyache, are you going to admit that Sweet Medicine is no god at all? Are you going to admit he’s just a plain damned owl that you happened to run into?”
Red Hawk frowned with profound consideration. “I do not think so,” he said. “Am I to understand the mind of a spirit? Perhaps he will let me die because I have allowed two white men to come into the Sacred Valley. That I cannot tell. Afterward, he will strike you.”
“Will he?” said Jeremy. “It kind of makes me mad, Joe, to hear the way the fool sticks to his story. It kind of makes me mad to think that’s the way he’ll be thinking when he passes out and turns cold. He won’t have any horrors. He’ll still feel that he’s in the hand of his god. It sort of takes the satisfaction out of lifting his hair, doesn’t it?”
“Yes . . . it does,” admitted Joe in a strained voice. “It does . . . sort of.”
He had been standing rigid behind his brother, his head straining back, his lower jaw thrust out, his eyes staring down under their lids. With the last words he spoke, the revolver in his hand lifted. Leaning, he fired straight down into Jeremy’s back.
Jeremy fell on his face and gripped the grass with both hands. Joe fired into him again. It seemed almost as though the impact of the bullet had caused Jeremy to rebound from the soil, for, as his body flopped clumsily over, Red Hawk saw the gleam of a gun in his hand, too.
Joe stood back, half crouched, his left hand spread stiffly against the air, his mouth pressed up. “Damn you!!” he yelled as he saw the gun, and fired again.
Red Hawk could see the impact of that shot, the shudder that it sent through Jeremy’s body, but there seemed to be no killing him. His own bullet he sent home with a much better aim, for he planted it fairly between Joe’s eyes so that the dead man fell across the dying.
“The dirty damned skunk! The dirty skunk!” gasped Jeremy.
He writhed his legs together, stretched them out, and lay still. . . . ‘