Three things of importance, never to be forgotten, were seen by Red Hawk on the way to the town of Witherell from the Black Hills. First, as he rode with Standing Bull down the narrow ravine of the first stream that watered the camp, he looked up by chance and saw what seemed to him, at first, a white rock on the verge of the bluff, high above him. But rocks cannot move, and after a moment he realized that it was Blue Bird in the shining newness of her doeskin dress.
He stared at her until he saw her make a gesture with both hands, and then he dropped his head and galloped the gray stallion swiftly down the ravine, far out of sight of the girl. Yet afterward she remained in his mind so clearly that often he wished he had last seen her in shadow rather than in sunshine, so that she would not gleam so in his memory, coming to him out of a distance.
On the third day as they voyaged over the northern plains a herd of wild horses, smaller than grains of dust on the palm of that gigantic hand, moved out of the eastern horizon and poured at a gallop closer and closer until Red Hawk saw a thing that glistened like the sharpened point of a lance. He halted his gray stallion. He threw up his arms and shouted: “Look, Standing Bull! It is White Horse! It is White Horse!”
Standing Bull drew close to him. They leaned from their saddles a little toward one another. The greatness of their excitement surrounded them like fear.
The herd swept nearer, still resembling a dark lance head with a shining point, until at last they had a nearer view of White Horse than ever a Cheyenne had had. They were close enough to see the mark of darkness between the eyes, and how all four legs were stockinged at least fetlock high with black silk. All the rest of him was purest white.
To the startled eye of Red Hawk he seemed burnished silver. Imagination stopped with the beauty of his body and his stride. The herd that followed seemed mere dust that blew at his heels.
He came right on at them, as though he led home a charge, but, angling suddenly, he went off at full gallop, his mane and tail blown like feathers by his speed. They watched him marshal his little host away, rounding to the rear of the herd to drive up the laggards with the ringing bugle call of his neigh.
Afterward the two men looked for a long time on one another with eyes made dull by the pain of a hopeless desire. White Horse was new to fame. He had led herds across the plains and up into the mountain valleys for only two seasons. But already Comanches in the south, Pawnees and Blackfeet to the west, the Dakotas to the north, and the riders of the Cheyennes had all melted away the best of their horseflesh in the vain effort to catch the stallion. That was why the two young Cheyennes sat their saddles quietly and made no effort now to pursue.
Then Standing Bull lifted a hand toward the sky, and Red Hawk knew that he could name with ease the subject of the warrior’s silent prayer.
They were less than a day from the end of their journey when they came to the third great milestone of the expedition. Riding down the bank of Witherell Creek, they came to the ruins of a sod house that many winters had beaten and melted into a sodden heap out of which only a few rotten poles were thrusting. More poles, sticking up through the grass, vaguely indicated what had once been a fenced enclosure. It was by no means an unusual sight, for the prairie was daubed here and there by the dim ruins of the houses of white settlers. This site, however, was more particularly marked by a large white stone, evidently quarried at a distance and brought here at the cost of a great effort, for it was far too ponderous for Red Hawk to budge, no matter how he strained at it.
He had dismounted because out of this obscure place something spoke to him. Standing Bull stood by with folded arms and watched. It was he, however, who called the attention of Red Hawk to what he called the medicine pictures on the face of that stone. Then Red Hawk, who had been taught elementary reading by Lazy Wolf, made out the chiseled letters, pointing them out with his fingers and gradually grouping them into the sound of syllables, until the words were complete.
Kate Sabin lies here,
Killed by the murdering Cheyennes of dull hatchet.
Red Hawk sprang to his feet. “Wind Walker!” he cried.
The name made even Standing Bull leap aside as though to dodge a lance thrust from behind.
“Wind Walker,” repeated Red Hawk. “This is the grave of his squaw. This is where he buried the woman for whose sake he is still hunting the Cheyennes. For this is how they bury a squaw or a brave . . . in the dark and the wet and the cold of the earth, instead of leaving them wrapped on a platform where the sun can shine on them and the wind blow on them, with a good horse killed beneath, so that its ghost can still carry the ghost of the master. But here the woman lies.”
He fell into such a long pause that his friend at last said gently: “What is rising in you? Your throat works. Shall we sing a chant?”
Gradually Red Hawk extended his left arm. “There should be corn land yonder,” he said suddenly.
Standing Bull went instantly to the indicated place. “There is nothing here,” he said, trailing his moccasins over the ground to feel the face of it through the grass. “Ha! Now I find some small bumps . . . now others. And in rows, do you see? Yes, this must have been corn land, long ago.” He came back and looked into the dreamy face of Red Hawk. “This is a strange thing, brother,” he said in an awed voice. “When your eyes look inside of you, what do they see?”
“Nothing,” said Red Hawk. “Only shadows and dimly moving things. But I can hear something.”
“What do you hear?” asked the warrior.
“A voice that says a thing that has no meaning. Besides, it is a woman’s voice. Standing Bull, is it the voice of the buried squaw? It is sounding deeply inside me.”
“What is the sound?”
“There is no meaning to it,” said Red Hawk. “But she calls in me ‘Rusty.’”
“That is a word in the speech of the white men. It is not Cheyenne,” suggested Standing Bull.
“It is a word of the whites,” agreed Red Hawk.
“This is a dangerous thing,” said Standing Bull very gravely. “When ghosts speak out of the ground, old men say that death is near to us.”
“Ride on down the creek. I must stay here for a little time,” answered Red Hawk. “Either this inside me is the voice of a ghost, or the ghost of a memory, and how could I remember a thing that has never been? If it is a ghost, it is a friendly one.”
“Why do you say so?” asked Standing Bull.
Red Hawk answered, “Because I feel now a sorrowful happiness . . . like that which I feel when I think of the lodge of my father, now that I am far away from it. It is happiness to remember, and it is grief to know that it is lost to me. It seems to me that I am eating sorrow, and drinking it . . . till I am full of grief. Ride down the creek, my brother. Leave me alone here, and I shall follow soon.”
But he did not follow quickly, according to his promise. Instead, he remained for long hours, wrapped in his buffalo robe, seated cross-legged beside the white stone of the grave. Sometimes he put out his hand and touched it, hot as it was with the sun, and it seemed to him like the touch of flesh. But all the while, images were rising up in his mind like bubbles in a dark fountain, so that he could never see their faces. Headless ghosts. At last he stood up and climbed again into the saddle.
Standing Bull asked no questions, for he saw in the face of his friend a thing that was beyond speech.
It was because of this delay that they did not pass through the hills into view of Witherell until the sunset had dwindled to a smudge.
As they paused in the dark throat of the little valley and looked down on the lights of the town that lay in the hollow, it seemed to Red Hawk that he was looking through dim water, at strange spots of sunlight on the bottom of a stream. There was no moon. They stood in silence so long that he could mark the updrift of the stars above the eastern hills.
Standing Bull said: “I go back to the tribe now . . . and you go forward to your people. I shall come again.”