The many days of hunting collapsed to a moment, only, on the instant that Red Hawk’s eye deciphered that signal. He turned and ran back, his body bent horizontally and in his ears the imagined clang of a distant rifle, the thin whine of a bullet.
When he came to the foot of the mesa, Standing Bull and Dull Hatchet were already there, Dull Hatchet on one knee, loading his rifle. He had thrown off his deerskin shirt and flung away his leggings, so that he was in a breechclout only. To Red Hawk he looked the mightiest figure of a man he had ever seen. What was even Wind Walker compared with this copper-skinned giant?
Standing Bull, stripped to the waist, was hardly less imposing. What he lacked in height and weight, he made up in an appearance of greater agility.
Dull Hatchet stood up and pointed. “Over there toward the hill with the two tops,” he said, “there is a mesa with a flat top. On it I saw the shine of the sun on a medicine glass. It is a hunter, and the game he hunts is not deer or antelope or buffalo. He is hunting men.”
Red Hawk had quite forgotten the possibility that Wind Walker might have with him a field glass.
“We must go ahead quickly and carefully,” Dull Hatchet continued. “The white man may have seen me wave from the top of the rock. He may be waiting with others, and they may be loading their rifles with news bullets and smiling at one another. Ahead of us, a little distance, there is another high hill that looks out on two cañons. Let us climb it. Tether the ponies to White Horse, because he knows how to stand still.”
“Suppose Wind Walker goes by us, following another ravine, and so comes out behind us and catches the horses,” said Standing Bull.
“At a time like this,” answered Dull Hatchet, “one stupid mind is better than three clever ones. I have thought of one way to try to fight them . . . but we have no time to talk about it. While we sit in a council, the white man is perhaps stealing toward us.”
They did as he said, because the point of his last remark was perfectly patent. Standing Bull tethered the other ponies to White Horse, while Red Hawk stood in front of the stallion and talked to him quietly, moving his hand back and forth across the eyes of the horse. When they had left, White Horse stood fast, looking after them with his head canted a trifle to one side as though he strove to read the minds of these humans.
Now the swift feet of the Cheyennes found the way down the cañon until they came to the foot of that hill that the chief had discovered before. All its lower slopes were deeply gullied red clay; above, there was a flat cap of rock, turreted like a castle, so that the place made a perfect citadel.
They climbed until they had reached an upper brow of the rock. There were other hilltops not far away from which they could be seen, and so they crawled to the forward edge of the big stone platform. Lying flat over the edge of the rock, Dull Hatchet could see right down into the right-hand ravine where, coming toward them, were three men. He had a glimpse of one, then another, and another.
“Back! Back!” said Dull Hatchet.
They wormed back from the edge of the platform. Dull Hatchet was saying in a murmur: “Keep well in. From time to time I shall look over the edge of the rock. Did you see?”
“I saw the roached heads of the Pawnee wolves,” said Standing Bull.
“Good,” said Red Hawk. But to him Wind Walker was the great prize. When he thought of the fixed and savage light in the eye of the famous man-slayer, his breath left his body.
Dull Hatchet went on: “There is a place where the ravine has no rough places . . . no brush, no rocks, and no hollows. If they cross that close together, they will all be in sight at once, and we shall try to shoot. Keep close here to the edge of the rock. Have your rifles ready. When I give the word, be ready to push the guns over and fire. I shall take Wind Walker. You, Standing Bull, take whichever of the Pawnees is on the right. Red Hawk, take the man on his left.”
Red Hawk had to remember that, unless they took this advantage, now that they had won it, the enemy would be perfectly ready to slaughter them. The whole fame and name of Wind Walker rested on the fact that he fought Indians by the use of Indian methods. Only the direct interposition of Sweet Medicine had induced him to spare Red Hawk’s life on that other day.
Another thing, however, suddenly began to beat in Red Hawk’s temples. That was the memory of how Spotted Antelope had died, upon his lips a warning to his foster son never to harm Wind Walker. Some dread secret had been in the Cheyenne’s throat, but death had choked it.
“Quick,” whispered the war chief.
Red Hawk raised himself on both elbows and settled the butt of his rifle against his right shoulder. Leaning his head to the right, he closed his left eye. Thus he looked down the sights over the rim of the rock, and saw beneath him the three men.
They had come to that bit of unsheltered ground. Off to their left was a deep draw, along its edge a scattering of brush. This would have given them cover, but their caution would have been more than human had they wormed their way through that jagged cut instead of taking the upper ground.
Even so, it was plain that the two Pawnees did not like this business of crossing open ground. Wind Walker’s lofty, stately form strode along as though he had no fear of bullets, but the two Indians skulked forward, constantly edging toward the right, to get to cover again more quickly. They were both to the right of Wind Walker, for which reason Dull Hatchet corrected his directions rapidly, saying: “Take the one nearest the side of the ravine, Red Hawk.”
Red Hawk had the figure in his sights, an easy, pointblank shot. He could not miss, although for his rifle he had to allow of a bit of driftage to the left. He made that correction, but he felt that he wanted more time. He felt, somehow, that he had been hurried into this.
Then the man he covered looked up suddenly, froze in place, and the sun flashed on his arm as he pointed.
Red Hawk squeezed the trigger at the same instant. The rifles on either side of him roared in a double report even before his own weapon spoke. His Pawnee bounded into the air, turning around and around like a dancer. He landed in a heap, his arms sprawling out to either side, and lay still. Off to his left, the other Pawnee had fallen.
But Wind Walker had bounded to one side as the bullet struck him—or so it seemed—and had been caught in the brush at the verge of the draw. His broad hat could be seen there, at least.
Standing Bull’s yell sounded far away in the ears of Red Hawk. “Sweet Medicine steadied our rifles!” he was shouting joyfully.
“I go to climb the higher rock behind us,” Dull Hatchet said. “From that place I can look farther and see if any other men are coming.” He went back swiftly, calling over his shoulder the suggestion that the other two put at least one more bullet into each of the fallen men. Standing Bull hardly needed that cautioning. He had already loaded, well before Red Hawk.
“This for Wind Walker,” he said as he fired, and Red Hawk distinctly saw the hat in the brush move. “Take your own man again!” exclaimed Standing Bull.
“He is dead,” said Red Hawk. Then he saw the second Pawnee, the one that Standing Bull had struck down in the first place, push himself up into a sitting posture and try to crawl away. But it seemed as though his legs were glued to the ground.
“I have him!” shouted Standing Bull, reloading again with flying hands.
“Let him be,” said Red Hawk. “Look. He is dying again. He is singing the death song, brother.”
For up from the ravine came the small, wavering sound of the chant. By the pauses in it, it seemed to Red Hawk that he could count the pulses of agony, the dragging steps by which life departed from the wounded man.
“Let him die before his song is finished,” said Standing Bull, and leveled his rifle once more.
Red Hawk grasped his arm. “Let him die in peace,” he urged. “If the Listeners Above wish to hear him, let him finish his song.”
Standing Bull turned a convulsed face. “Are you a woman, still?” he exclaimed. But turning suddenly aside, he took a fresh aim, and fired again at the broad hat that was stuck in the brush at the side of the draw beneath them.
To Red Hawk’s amazement, that hat turned to the side, revealing the fact that there was no head beneath it, and then it dropped quite out of view.
Standing Bull grunted with alarm. “Suppose he was not killed, brother,” he said. “Suppose he leaped into the draw when the rifles sounded, and that Dull Hatchet missed him. Suppose nothing happened to him, except that his hat was stuck there in the brush?”
Red Hawk stared back at his friend. “Then,” he said, “Wind Walker might still be alive and running up that draw or down it, unseen by us and ready to fire?”
Standing Bull nodded, and the two looked gloomily at one another.
“We must go back and tell Dull Hatchet,” said Standing Bull, and, rising, they hurried back to the rear of that shoulder of rock. Above them rose the turrets another fifty feet or more.
“Do you hear? Dull Hatchet!” called Standing Bull.
“I hear. I hear,” said Dull Hatchet. “There are no others in sight. We may climb down to the valley now. Why have you left that Pawnee singing?”
“Because the heart of Red Hawk turned weak,” said Standing Bull contemptuously.
It seemed, suddenly, that he had ceased to be the old friend Red Hawk had always known. Anger thickened his voice.
Still the chant of the dying man slowly mounted upward from the floor of the ravine.
“Wind Walker’s hat has been knocked out of the brush by two bullets,” said Standing Bull. “Perhaps he was not hurt at all, but only left his hat behind. Or perhaps he is lying dead in the bottom of the draw.”
There was an exclamation from Dull Hatchet. “There is a bullet through his heart,” he vowed, “unless the spirits turned it aside from his flesh. Come, come. We must go down. . . .”
His voice changed and rang out suddenly on a note of astonishment and fear. He had been looking down at them through an embrasure in the upper rocks. Now, as he whirled about, Red Hawk had the briefest glimpse of another figure with long gray hair blown over the shoulders, rushing in upon the Cheyenne chief.
In an instant they were out of sight.
“Wind Walker,” groaned Standing Bull, and began to bound up the rock like a mountain goat.