Three days later the Pawnees vanished from the hills like a thin cloud from beneath the hot face of the sun. Dull Hatchet could find only the general direction of the flight. The reason of it was clear enough. No doubt Wind Walker had kept the band together all this time in the hope that the Cheyennes might walk into some ambuscade. Failing in that chance, the Pawnees had been sent off—the greater part of them, at least—to take the encumbering herd of stolen horses back to the Pawnee camps. They might return, then, and try to bait Dull Hatchet’s band with a greater force.
The Cheyenne chief, learning how the many trails scattered to this side and that, picked out a northern landmark, a tall, bar-headed mountain. Then he scattered his entire troop, with directions to gather again on the southern slope of the mountain. On the way, one of the men might pick up the trail of the scattered Pawnees.
That was how Red Hawk came to be riding alone on his scrawny down-headed mustang, through the narrows of a great defile. The sun was directly overhead, scalding him, when he heard a dull, bumping sound, and the horse dropped flat on the earth beneath him. An instant later the report of the rifle came welling down into the cañon as Red Hawk rolled away from the body of the dead mustang and into the shade of a boulder.
Over the edge of that boulder he looked up and saw the silhouette of White Horse, racing on the verge of the cliff against the sky, with Wind Walker sitting huge in the saddle. The white man-slayer thought, no doubt, that the fall of the horse was what had flung Red Hawk out of the saddle and behind the barrier of the rock. Perhaps he was looking now for a way to ride down the rough sandstone steps of the side of the valley, and so get at his victim.
Then Red Hawk’s whistle, that had called White Horse many times, went up thin as the scream of a hawk. He saw the sound strike the stallion. He saw the shining form whirl and leap from the top ledge to a lower level, and again to another narrow platform of rock. Down came White Horse, with Wind Walker struggling vainly to arrest that descent. It was all the rider could do to keep his place.
Red Hawk, his heart filled with laughter, snatched up his fallen rifle and leveled it. He would not shoot until that target was so close that there was no danger of striking the horse, instead of the man. Then, on the very lowest shelf of the descent, he saw Wind Walker slung sidelong from the horse. Down he came, his body spinning rapidly over and over, until he lay motionlessly on the red shale that covered the bottom of the ravine. And here was White Horse, at last, with a thin cloud of dust sweeping behind him as he galloped to his master, a red froth flying back from his torn mouth and onto his chest and shoulders.
Red Hawk spoke one joyous word to the horse as he ran forward. Then he saw Wind Walker rise up from the ground. From a ragged tear in his scalp, blood ran down over one side of the white man’s face. He staggered on uncertain feet.
Something in that gesture—the hopelessness of even those mighty hands warding away the flying bullet—made the heart of Red Hawk change. He remembered, suddenly, how once he had awakened from a death-like trance and found himself outside Wind Walker’s house. His life had been spared, then.
And so he stood back, his rifle ready, but grasped only in his right hand while with his left he stroked the quivering neck of White Horse.
Wind Walker came suddenly to his full senses. He dragged the back of his hand across his face, and, through the blood that was clotting on his forehead, he peered forth at his enemy.
“I was once in your hands,” said Red Hawk. “Instead of killing me, you threw me out of your house. You let the life grow up in me once more. The Cheyennes have asked the spirits to let them have your scalp, but Sweet Medicine has given me back White Horse, and that is enough to take, even from a Great Spirit, in one day. Farewell.”
He mounted White Horse. He could not believe that he was riding deliberately away from the glory of killing that great foe of the Cheyennes.
When he looked back, he saw Wind Walker in the same place, no longer staggering, but with fallen head, like one whose spirit had been overwhelmed. Yet they would meet again, and the next meeting would certainly be the end of their feud.
He felt no pride in that encounter. Chance and White Horse had brought Wind Walker to lie at his feet, and with a truly Cheyenne terseness he merely said to the others, that night at the camp: “Wind Walker is still alive.”
His red brothers eyed the stallion with wonder, and said nothing.
They had entered now into a deadly game of tiger-hunt-tiger. Through a labyrinth of cañons, broken mesas, sharp-sided hills, the hunt continued.
But the patience of the Indians was soon exhausted, and one after another the Cheyennes melted away to return to the distant camp. At last there remained only a grim trio: men hard as metal and welded together like steel—Dull Hatchet, Standing Bull, and Red Hawk.
The Pawnees, they knew, had scattered, also. There was only a small group of them remaining, but among those Wind Walker was sure to be found.
They were in the jumble of a gigantic badlands. Water flowed in most of these gorges only after heavy rains, when the erosion went on rapidly. During the rest of the year only the wind was at work, with its chisels of flying sand hewing the rocks and wearing away more rapidly the clay slopes.
Standing Bull said: “Here all the red tribes could be hidden so that even a hawk would have a hard time to find a single man. But we must search. Red Hawk, may your medicine be strong.”
Wind Walker hovered like a hawk in all their minds, night and day.
Dull Hatchet established a system that showed why he was war chief of the tribe. His method was slow, but it was sure. It consisted of placing one man on the highest eminence in sight so that he could act as look-out while the others scouted through the ravines below, ever and anon looking up toward their spy, who was ready to warn them, by signals, if he chanced to spot the enemy in the distance while they were working through the gorges.
It was slow, painful, and anxious work, and they spent days at it. The weather was hot and windless. No water ran in the little valley; only now and again did they find water—usually scummed across with green—from which they could fill their leather water bags. They never ventured to build a fire, for the least gleam at night might be enough to bring the enemy upon them, and the slightest trace of vapor during the day would be seen from afar as it stained that clear air.
Hence, for food they crunched parched corn and chewed jerked venison, washed down with the tainted water from the stagnant water holes. Every day their bodies burned dry and their eyes sank back beneath their brows, wrinkled pouches of skin gathering around the lids.
Since the bright sheen of White Horse began to seem like a shining light that would be sure to take the eye of the enemy from afar, his coat was smudged over with yellow and brown clay. Sometimes they even considered the possibility of turning the horses loose, so that they could do their work more efficiently on foot.
Altogether, they were in the badlands seven days. And in the late afternoon of the seventh, Red Hawk made his way stealthily down the bottom of a dry ravine. For some time he had not looked back toward the look-out that Dull Hatchet was keeping from the top of a flat hill behind him. Coming to a stretch of still water that had not the least film of green over it, he tasted it. It was strongly alkaline, therefore he drank only sparingly of it. Nevertheless, it was time that the empty water skins were refilled, so he turned back to signal the discovery to the look-out.
Then it was that he saw on the top of the mesa, through the burning, golden haze of the slanting afternoon light, the brief and shadowy flickering of an arm. It said, almost as swiftly as speech: “Come in, enemy! Come in!”