All was still black when he awakened. Standing up, he saw the pale hand of day behind the hills, blackening them, and so he saddled the gray and rode up the side of a hill. It was still too dark for him to distinguish features in the valley beneath him, therefore he was guided to water by the sound of its running. In the cool wind of dawn he stripped, washed with icy water, and pulled on his clothes again.
By this time the first color was beginning and the trees along the tops of the hills were awash with flame. At last he could see the camp in the hollow clearly.
As it first grew on his eye out of the darkness, he refused to credit his senses, for one beyond the other he saw big huddling shapes, each larger than a medicine lodge. He discovered that there were lodges by twenties and twenties and twenties, many of them far larger than that of Richard Lester. Were they all chiefs, then? Were they all great? Incredulity overwhelmed his mind, for these were not lodges of buffalo skins, but all of wood, a mighty labor of thronging hands.
Riding down to the lodge of his white friend, he saw a strange matter. The girl was in a fenced enclosure behind the house, milking a cow that closed its eyes in dull content and chewed its cud with a wagging jaw. This was very proper. But at a pile of wood that had already been cut into lengths, the great chief, Richard Lester, the peacemaker and chief, was wielding an axe and splitting the logs.
Red Hawk regarded this marvel with a dropping jaw. It was true that the squaw seemed small for such labor, but, then, why did not the chief take a second wife into his lodge—a young strong woman, able to hew and carry?
He put his horse into a closed pasture and came thoughtfully toward the house. Smoke was spouting from the top of it. An odor of food crept out to him.
A large, gray-striped cat jumped down from a fence and came straight toward him. No creature is so wild as these hunters of birds and prairie dogs. Yet this one advanced straight toward him, and actually rubbed itself against his leg. The thing was tame! More medicine, and powerful medicine, indeed, if the savage hunters from the wilderness could be so enchanted.
Then Richard Lester hailed him, cheerfully. The girl came in with a bucket half filled with milk, frothing and slopping in the pail. The back door of the lodge opened, and the sharp voice of Mrs. Lester called out that breakfast was ready.
It was a meal made memorable by Red Hawk’s initiation to flapjacks and syrup, and by the fact that he sat for the first time in a chair. He was confused by the explanations that his few questions brought upon him. The making of porcelain—the weaving of cloth—mills that sawed and planed wood—and, above all, the mystery of the oil lamp was made clear to him.
In the meantime, he imitated the actions of the others at the table very successfully until it came to the flow of the thick, amber-colored syrup. This, being an utter novelty, he first smelled. He mopped up some from his plate with the flat of his thumb, and tasted it. It was pleasanter far to the taste than to the smell, so straightaway the syrup pitcher was inverted above his mouth. Mrs. Lester, with an exclamation, fled from the table, but, when Red Hawk lowered the pitcher, he saw the last of a smile passing between the father and the daughter.
I have done something wrong, Red Hawk thought to himself, and was buried in gloom during the rest of the meal. The cold of homesickness suddenly breathed through him like a winter wind.
After breakfast, Richard Lester gave him a blue woolen shirt and strongly urged that he should have his hair cut off. “Everything that makes you strange to the people of the town,” said Lester, “will help to keep you at a distance. I have some old clothes. Perhaps even my shoes will fit you. If you are to live among us, you ought to take up all our ways.”
Red Hawk looked from his skin-fitted leggings to the clumsiness of the trousers, from his supple moccasins to the unwieldy leather shoes. He shook his head. “If I change so much,” he answered, “it would be as though I wore a new face. My Cheyenne brothers would never know me. But the shirt is very good. It makes me half a white man, at once.”
So he put it on, letting the tails of it fall down outside his leggings, of course. Over the shirt he threw his robe, and in that garb he left the house of Richard Lester, accompanied by his host.
Mrs. Lester peered at them from a window, but the girl went on to the gate of the garden and shook hands with Red Hawk. “This is his first day of school,” she said to her father. “Be good to him.”
“It is a woman of understanding who makes happiness in the teepee,” remarked Red Hawk as they went down the street. “But why does she speak of school?”
“Because there’s a great deal for you to learn,” said the lawyer. “Most of it will be hard, simply because it is new. And here come the boys to plague you. Boys have no manners, and they’ll laugh at anything new.”
It seemed as though all the youngsters in the town had been lurking in wait to fall on the stranger, for now they poured out into the street and made a whirling pool around Red Hawk. They shouted, they leaped, they pointed deriding fingers at him, they raised an acrid dust that blew into his face, but he stepped on with unseeing eyes.
So they came to the small square that made the center of the town of Witherell, and there Red Hawk saw a figure from the plains that made his heart jump. He was of the type of those wild white men who took scalps as readily as the Indians, but without any Indian ceremonies. He was dressed in deerskin so grease-stained and time-polished that they looked like varnished leather, and on his head he wore a flopping hat of black felt, with his hair pouring from under it in tangled strings as far as his shoulders.
The plainsman used a saddle with vast Mexican stirrups, and on his heels were a pair of enormous spurs. In a shoulder belt was a bullet mold, a worm for cleaning his rifle, a powder horn, and an awl. He sat on a mustang with a braided mane, and across the pommel of the saddle balanced one of those long-barreled, old-fashioned rifles that, in certain hands, seemed unable to miss.
When the trapper saw the Indian figure of Red Hawk, he shifted his rifle suddenly to the ready and remained with it so, on guard. He was not the only one to mark the howling mob of boys and the strange figure in the center of the cluster, for there were many other men opening for the day the stores and small shops and saloons that surrounded the square. All of them paused to stare at Red Hawk. It was true that Indians were often seen in Witherell, but white Indians very seldom.
Now Lester cut straight across the square toward a low shed in front of which half a dozen horses were hitched at a long rack. From the wide-open doors of the place there rolled an atmosphere of blue smoke, while the clangor of iron on iron rang from it.
“This is Sam Calkins’s blacksmith shop,” said Lester. “He’s a big, rough fellow, full of fight . . . but I believe he’s honest enough and he loves his work. I’m going to ask him if he can give you a place. Just wait a moment at the door while I talk to him.”
Red Hawk, at the side of the double door, looked in upon new marvels. Compared with them, even Lester’s house was nothing, for along the walls hung tools of iron or of bright steel, in shapes so many and strange that the imagination of a medicine man would have been strained to conceive them. In a corner, with a metal hood stretched over it to collect most of the smoke, there was a large box filled with the center of it. Beside the box, Red Hawk saw, was a contrivance of leather, with a long wooden handle that was worked up and down by the blacksmith. At every downstroke it made a strong wheezing sound, and the yellow flame of the fire turned into a shooting blue with a double tongue that stabbed the air. With a long-handled tool of iron, the smith now lifted out of the fire a mass that glowed almost white, and sent off a constant shower of sparks. It was metal, therefore.
Sam Calkins was a six-foot giant, not that six feet made a man look tall on the plains, but because Nature had piled on him a load of muscle and fat that had bowed his legs and made him walk with a waddle. About him there was no weak part. Everywhere was an immensity of bone and flesh, and the very legs that appeared hardly able to bear up the bulk of his body were twice the normal size. He wore a pair of corduroy trousers, and slippers of soft leather—his feet were his point of tenderness. His clothing stopped at the waist, above which the mass of his muscles and paunch protruded behind a leather apron. He was half bald. A long wisp of moustache hung on either side of his mouth, with a large naked space between. Like his body, his face was swollen, and constantly polished with a greasy sweat; his eyes were as pale and bright as knobs of dim blue glass.
He had not yet given any answer to Lester’s words, nor any sign that he had so much as heard him speak. Now he stepped with the knot of iron to the ponderous square of black metal that was nailed in place on the round section of a log. With his tongs in the left hand, he managed the iron, and with his right hand he wielded a twelve-pound hammer, beating the lump of iron into shape.
Presently he took it back to the fire, and again began to lean his weight rhythmically on that apparatus that forced the wind whistling up through the flames. It was apparent to Red Hawk that here was a medicine man to whom fire was like a child or a tame dog in the teepee.
As he worked, he spoke, and presently Lester waved Red Hawk into the shop.
He approached close to the fire-handler. A hot, sulphurous damp oppressed his lungs.
“Young feller,” said Sam Calkins’s thick voice, “it don’t mean much to me to have an apprentice hangin’ around . . . white or Injun. Mostly they’re only in the way, and the minute that they learn enough to make a weld they go off somewhere and set up for themselves. It ain’t funny. It’s a sad thing, when you think about the tons of iron that fools spoil every year in the world. If a new man comes to work for me, he’s gotta stay till he’s a smith, or I don’t want him.”
“How long would that be?” asked Lester.
Sam Calkins’s bulging eyes retracted behind their lids for an instant. Then he said: “This here long.” In the grasp of one fist he swayed his hammer in a wide arc, so that it swept up through the air and dropped down as though to batter against his own upraised chin. But at the last moment, with an exertion of power that made his arm and all his vast shoulder tremble, Sam Calkins checked the impetus so that the bright steel face of the hammer head touched his jaw lightly. He twisted it back through an arc and laid it back in place against the wall. “When he can do that, he’s blacksmith enough to suit me,” said Calkins, and his glance traveled over the slender body of Red Hawk.
“He’s not a Hercules,” said Lester, smiling. “Do you think you’d want to stay here until you could do that trick, Red Hawk?”
Red Hawk lifted the hammer in one hand. “To do such a thing is medicine, not the strength of a horse or of a fool,” Red Hawk said slowly. He put down the hammer and waved his hand toward the blacksmith. “I shall stay with him till I learn,” he concluded.
Sam Calkins said nothing; he merely grinned until his thick lips were pulled out thin, like rubber. “Ten dollars a month . . . and a man’s pay after he learns,” said Calkins. Then he added with a fierce scowl: “But if he tries to walk out before his time’s up, I’m gonna go after him . . . Injun or white . . . and have him back to his work. I gotta spend brains to make a blacksmith out of a damn’ young fool, and I ain’t gonna spend brains for nothing.”
“This may be hard work,” said Lester to Red Hawk. “It may even be harder than you’ll want to do. But if you go through with it, you’ll be ready for a life among us. Do you want to try it? You hear what Sam Calkins says. If you start, you’ll have to finish to his satisfaction.”
It seemed to Red Hawk that he stood again in the medicine lodge, that Running Elk, with a blood-dripping hand, had grasped him by the right breast and again asked him if he wished to endure the test that would prove him a man. That was why he cried out with a sudden eagerness that he would attempt this thing.
“All right,” said Sam Calkins. “If there’s enough wear in you, you’ll be the man for me. If there ain’t enough wear, I’ll throw you out quick enough. You can stay in the shack with me and the old woman. We’ll feed you and board you, and you’ll get ten dollars a month for pay.”
Red Hawk walked back to the door with Lester. “My brother, you have been very kind to me,” he said. “He who honors a stranger honors himself . . . and now you have given me to a great medicine man who will make me wise. What shall I give you? The gray stallion that carried me from the country of the Cheyennes . . . he is yours. I am to be a man who lives on the ground for a long time, and the horse is yours.” Red Hawk said no more, and he was astonished at Lester’s reaction.
Lester protested, until he saw a darkness of incredulity and anger come into the eyes of Red Hawk. Then he realized that to refuse the present would be an unforgivable insult, so at last he went up the street. Once, however, he paused, turned, and looked back toward Red Hawk with an anxious and doubtful eye.