PROPHET KNEW THE girl needed a doctor, but where in hell was he going to find a doctor out here?
The nearest sawbones was no doubt in Bismarck, still a two-day ride away. Even with Prophet’s bandanna shoved in the bullet wound to stem the bleeding, he doubted she’d make it.
The bullet had to be removed quickly. Prophet would attempt removing it himself only as a last resort. First, he’d look around for a farm or ranch in the area. Living as isolated as they did, some ranch women were often better medics than the medics themselves.
He’d decided on the plan while carrying Louisa back to their horses. Now he tied Louisa’s Morgan to the tail of Mean and Ugly, then scooped her up in his arms and gently mounted, setting the comatose blonde before him on the saddle. He heeled the horse into a walk, balancing Louisa between his shoulders, her head lolling against his chest.
He’d had to leave their rifles where Handsome Dave had bushwhacked her. He retrieved them now, dismounting and holding the girl in the saddle with one hand. When he’d slid both rifles into their saddle boots, he remounted and heeled the dun into a lope, heading west, leading the Morgan and scouring the countryside for a settlement.
He’d ridden for twenty minutes when he found himself on a hogback looking into a ravine opening on the north. A creek threaded the ravine, sheathed in box elders and cottonwoods. In the trees, spindly wagons and carts were parked, and seven or eight ponies grazed from a picket line.
Travelers. If there wasn’t a half-decent medic among them, they’d have hot water and blankets, at least.
“Come on, Mean and Ugly.” Prophet reined the dun down the hill. But the horse walked only sluggishly, jerking his head and rattling his bit in his mouth. He turned a white-ringed eye to his master and snorted.
“Come on, Mean,” Prophet carped. “This is no time to get ornery. What the hell’s the matter with you, anyway? Drift, dammit!”
Prophet was about fifty yards from the trees when the recalcitrant mount stopped so suddenly that Prophet and Louisa nearly flew over his head. “Goddamn you, M—!”
Seeing two people step out from the trees, Prophet froze. They were Indians—an old man and a boy. The old man wore a black bandanna with white polka dots, and his coarse gray hair cascaded over his shoulders. He wore a muslin shirt open halfway down his dark brown chest. Buckskin breeches were held over his modest paunch by snakeskin suspenders. In his arms he carried an old Spencer single-shot.
The boy was about ten, with neck-length, jet-black hair. He was clad in only cut-off breeches, and his roan skin was mottled with insect bites. The inside of his right wrist was scraped, as though he’d been squirreling around in briars. His lips were drawn back from square, white teeth, and his big, black eyes were fixed on Prophet warily.
“Whoa,” the bounty hunter said under his breath, reprimanding himself for not heeding his horse’s warning. Mean rarely reacted like that to anything but diamondbacks, Indians, and preachers. “Shoulda known ...”
It was too late to turn back now, so Prophet manufactured a smile and raised a hand in greeting. “How.”
“How-do,” the old man said with a curt nod, his hair breezing around his face.
“You speak English?”
The old man nodded once.
“I have an injured girl here.” Prophet glanced down grimly at the unconscious Louisa Bonaventure lolling against his chest. Her face was pale and her lips moved, but she said nothing. He wasn’t happy about riding into an Indian camp, but Louisa didn’t have much time left. This old man might be her only chance.
Prophet lifted his gaze to him, beseechingly. “If there’s anyone in your camp can help her, I’d be mighty obliged. She’s lost a lot of blood.”
The old man and the boy stood side by side, regarding Prophet with mute skepticism. The boy expectantly shuttled his puzzled gaze between Prophet and the old man.
“What happened?” the old man asked.
“She was shot by an outlaw named Handsome Dave Duvall. He and his gang killed her family. We been trackin’ him.”
The old man stared at Prophet hard, a brown light flickering in the depths of his flinty eyes. Then he turned to the boy and muttered something in guttural Indian. The boy turned and ran back through the trees.
To Prophet, the old man said, “Come,” and then he, too, turned and started into the trees.
In the ten years Prophet had been on the Western frontier, he had steered clear of Indians. He’d tracked a couple breeds in the Staked Plains a few years back, but he’d never tangled with a war party. That was soldiers’ work. Nothing there for a bounty hunter. Besides, he felt Indians in general were getting a raw deal, with the whites moving onto their ancestral lands, killing their buffalo, and crowding the natives themselves onto reservations of the worst land imaginable.
It was the way of the world, he knew. Survival of the fittest. Dog eat dog. Still, he wanted nothing to do with it. And he’d never wanted anything to do with the Indians themselves, whom he understood about as much he understood little blue men on the moon.
As he gigged his reluctant horse ahead, he felt his stomach turn sour and his neck grow stiff with fear. Indians killed white men on sight. Everyone knew that. But he couldn’t very well turn tail and run when there was half a chance that someone here could save Louisa.
Who was it told him that Indians were good healers?
He kept thinking about that as he rode, Mean and Ugly’s reluctant feet snapping twigs beneath him, the sounds loud as gunshots in the quiet woods. Sweat trickled under Prophet’s arms, down his back.
Soon the encampment opened before him: five tepees in a clearing traversed by the creek, and three cook fires over which meat roasted or kettles hung. Children stopped their play to stare warily at the visitor. Dogs barked. Old, prune-faced women sat here and there about the ground, sewing or cooking or hammering raw meat with mallets. They looked up as Prophet approached, halting their chatter to frown and stare dully. No braves appeared anywhere in the vicinity. Maybe they were hunting, Prophet thought with relief. But they’d have to return sooner or later, and then what would happen when they saw the white man and the pretty blonde?
Prophet had to saw back hard on his horse’s reins to get Mean and Ugly stopped. The horse fiddle-footed angrily, not liking the current situation one bit, and Prophet fought him with one tight hand on the reins.
“Settle down, Mean ... goddamn you, horse!”
The old man sidled up to the horse and extended his arms. “Here, I take to Ka-cha-e-nee.”
Prophet looked at the old man warily for a moment. He wanted to carry Louisa into one of the tepees himself; he was reluctant to turn her over to these dark-skinned strangers until he was certain she’d be safe. But with Mean and Ugly acting up, he didn’t think he’d be able to climb out of the saddle with her without falling.
He eased her down to the old man, who must have been stronger than he appeared, for he held Louisa’s weight easily, one arm under her neck, the other under her knees, and moved off toward one of the tepees, where an old woman stood in a dark blue dress adorned with colored beads, waiting. The woman’s nearly black face was scored deep with wrinkles. Her eyes were tiny marbles in the weathered foxholes of their sockets, but her hair bore not a speck of gray as it fell in two thick braids down her shoulders.
As the old man approached her, the crone turned and ducked through the flap in the tepee. The old man followed her in.
Prophet tore his eyes from the tepee and slipped out of the saddle, still holding fast to the skittish Mean’s reins. He turned to the boy, but before he could say anything, the boy yelled, “Wasichu! Wasichu!” and ran off across the meadow. The half-dozen other children, appearing to range from age three to thirteen, followed, repeating the clarion call, “Wasichu! Wasichu!” half in jest, half in fear.
Prophet turned to the three old women working nearby. A young girl had joined them, a smoky beauty in a soft hide dress adorned with porcupine quills and bear claws and beads arranged in the shape of the moon and stars. Her face was high-boned and softly chiseled, and her eyes and hair were of the same obsidian. Her form was as fine as her face, and nearly all of one supple, brown thigh was revealed by the slit in her skirt as she sat.
She returned Prophet’s stare with an only mildly interested one of her own, then haughtily covered her thigh with her dress, whispering something to the old woman beside her. The old woman nodded, glanced at Prophet, and turned away, snickering.
Feeling as though he should introduce himself, Prophet clumsily removed his hat and said, “Name’s Lou Prophet. I come in peace. My friend there—Louisa Bonaventure’s her name—she was wounded by a scoundrel named Handsome Dave Duvall. You probably never heard of him, and lucky for you ye haven’t, but he’s one of the worst badmen currently on the dodge in these parts.”
Prophet stopped. Only one of the old women so much as glanced at him. The others were sewing and tanning and cooking as though he weren’t even there. The girl was watching him, however, looking him up and down with a hard-to-read expression in those pretty black eyes. She mumbled something to the old woman beside her and smiled. She glanced at Prophet again, appraisingly, and returned to the herbs she was grinding in a wood bowl.
“Well... okay, then,” Prophet muttered, feeling stupid and self-conscious. “I’ll just put up my horses....”
He untied the Morgan from Mean’s tail and led both mounts away from the encampment, where the smell of the Indians wouldn’t be as sharp in the wily dun’s keen nose. He tied both horses on long ropes to trees where the bluestem was lush and high, and walked backed to the encampment. He stood around the tepee for a while, trying to listen to what was happening inside, but heard only hushed guttural voices and occasional whimpers from Louisa. As the old women and the girl were not far away, he held his hat in his hands—did Indians recognize such niceties?—as he paced nervously before the tepee, eager to find out whether or not the old woman could help his wounded companion.
Finally, the flap lifted, and the old man appeared. “Ka-cha-e-nee is with her now. If she can be helped, Ka-cha-e-nee will help.”
The old man started away, but Prophet grabbed his elbow. “Who’s Ka-cha ... Ka-cha—?”
“She is medicine woman. The powers of mother earth and father sky work through her for the People. If the girl can be saved, Ka-cha-e-nee will help. If not”—the old man raised his hands and lowered them in a gesture of supplication—”she will pass on.”
He turned and walked away between the tepees.
“Where you going?” Prophet called. The old man was the only one here he appeared able to communicate with, and he wanted him near.
“I hunt. Our cache is growing thin.” The old man turned and said something to the women, then walked away, his Spencer carbine in his arms.
Prophet turned to the women, feeling alone and out of place and worried about Louisa. The girl got up, went away, and returned with a bowl. She filled the bowl at the cook fire over which hung a large iron pot, and brought the bowl to Prophet. Without raising her eyes to his, she offered the bowl and a wooden spoon.
Prophet took them, said, “Obliged, miss,” and watched the pretty Indian princess walk away and gracefully retake her seat with the old woman by the cook fire.
Prophet found a log near the tepee in which Louisa lay and sat down. After examining the food in the bowl— chunks of deer meat and pale, spongy guts in a thin yellow broth specked with green herbs and other things he could not identify—he brought the spoon to his lips and began eating.
Not bad. Bland, but not bad.
Time passed slowly. When he finished the food, the girl brought him a weak tea, again without looking at him. When he finished the tea, feeling heady from whatever herb it had been brewed with, he rolled a cigarette and smoked.
The old woman came out of the tepee, and Prophet stood eagerly, but the old woman did not so much as look at him. She called to the girl, who got up, grabbed a bucket, and walked off toward the creek. Then the old woman disappeared back inside the tepee.
The girl reappeared a few minutes later, with the bucket now filled with water, and went into the lodge. She came out without the bucket, went to another tepee, and returned with a hide sack and a handful of roots of several different shapes, sizes, and colors.
Prophet watched, worried and perplexed and wondering what kind of mumbo jumbo was going on in that tepee ... wondering if he shouldn’t just dig the bullet out himself. For all he knew, Louisa would have as much of a chance with him as with these women and their plants.
The aroma of the smoke wafting through the hole at the top of the lodge smelled musky and fetid and not at all like any medicine Prophet had ever heard of.
When he couldn’t stand the suspense any longer, he marched over to the tepee and swiped the flap aside, peering into the dark depths in which a fire flickered and a pot gurgled. Louisa lay near the fire on a buffalo robe. Her nude, white body shone in the darkness. Her head moved . slowly from side to side, and she was mumbling something unintelligible, but her eyes were closed. The old woman crouched over her, the Indian princess at her side, silently observing.
Prophet was about to step inside when the old crone straightened, lifting her bloody hands. In her left hand, she held a long, thin knife covered with blood. She looked at Prophet and cackled, showing her near-toothless gums.
She held up something between the thumb and index finger of her right hand.
The bullet.
Relief slackened Prophet’s muscles. “Is she going to be all right?”
The crone didn’t say anything. She just dropped the bullet in a bowl and gestured to the girl for a spool of gut thread, cackling deep in her throat. Not knowing how else to take it, Prophet took the crone’s laughter as a promising sign, and went back out.
To pass the time, he took water to the horses, then wandered around the encampment, relieved but puzzled to find no sign of any other men but the old man and the two or three young boys.
Where were the braves? Where was the rest of the band? Surely this small gathering of the very old and the very young wasn’t all there was.