PROPHET SPENT THE rest of the afternoon near the lodge in which the old healer crooned over Louisa, mumbling and sighing and muttering words Prophet couldn’t understand. They sounded half like songs, half like prayers.
Whatever they were, they made the hair on the back of the bounty hunter’s neck stand straight up in the air. He felt a bona fide fever chill when she came out of the tepee and circled the lodge while shaking a rattle and dancing to a song that sounded as though the devil himself had written it and was singing it through the crone.
He checked on Louisa later, though, and she was alive. Feverish, but alive.
He realized early that evening, when the old women began grumbling over their meager food stores, that the old man had not yet returned from hunting. Since there was nothing he could do here for Louisa, Prophet decided to go looking for the man, and do a little hunting of his own.
He rigged up Mean and Ugly, who snorted happily at the prospect of getting out of there. Leading the Morgan, he rode eastward across the creek, through the trees, and up a low ridge swathed in midsummer wildflowers including Indian paintbrush and balsam root. He shot a nice buck on the other side of the ridge, gutted it, and draped it over the Morgan, securing it with rope.
He’d just finished tying the last knot over the buckle when the lineback, having swung around and sidled up behind him, gave Prophet’s back a painful nip.
“Ouch!” Prophet cried, swinging around. “Goddamn you, Mean. Why in the hell did you do that?”
The lineback jerked his head back and twitched his ears, a pleased gleam in his copper eyes.
“Happy to be out of the Indian camp, that it? Well, you got a funny way of showin’ it! You continue that behavior, and I’m gonna offer you up for their stewpot. What do you think of that?”
As if in reply, a distant rifle cracked.
Prophet swung around, facing west, where the sun was tumbling, pushing shadows this way.
The rifle cracked twice more.
Staring westward, Prophet frowned. Who could that be? The old man? Had he finally shot something?
Another report echoed on the freshening breeze. This one belonged to a pistol. Two more just like it followed.
Curious, and hearing a warning bell toll far back in his head, Prophet mounted up and rode westward, trailing the Morgan, the gutted buck flopping against its sides. Twenty minutes later, the bounty hunter climbed out of the saddle and tied Mean to a scrub oak in a purpling canyon.
Shucking the Winchester, he climbed the gravelly canyon wall to the ridge stippled with sparse brush, pines, and cedars. Staying low and removing his hat, he peered down the ridge into the narrow gorge on the other side, where three men dressed in ratty trail garb surrounded another man—the old Indian—tied to the trunk of a dead tree that had been topped by lightning about twenty feet up from its base.
Two of the gunmen held pistols. The third held a rifle. Their laughter rose from the canyon floor, which the sun brushed with salmon and gold.
They’d found an old Indian with only a single-shot Spencer, and they were having a good time out here, where good times were few and far between.
Hearing the sporadic gunfire and the hoots and howls of the old man’s antagonists, Prophet donned his hat and made his way along the ridge, trying to get behind the gunmen while keeping out of sight from below. When he’d walked a ways, he took another peek over the ridge. Satisfied with his position, he traced a circuitous route through shrubs to the canyon and hunkered behind a rock and a chokecherry shrub.
One of the gunmen chuckled. “Now lookee here, JC. Watch this shot. I bet I can hit that knot there just left of his big, black, ole, Injun eye!”
“No way you can, Dick. You’ll take his eye out!”
“Wanna lay some money on it?”
“Two dollar.”
“Jacky, how ‘bout you?” the sharpshooter said.
Jacky said, “I got five says you shoot the ole redskin’s eye out the back of his head. You ain’t no marksman, Dick.”
“Well, to hell with you, Jacky,” Dick said. “Watch this.”
Prophet stood, took one swift step to the left of the rock, and extended his Peacemaker .45. “Watch this, you three brainless wonders.” Their backs to Prophet, the three gunmen stiffened and froze. “I bet I can shoot one eye out of each of ye from the back. Wanna lay money on it?”
The men jerked and twitched as they turned, their raw-boned, pugnacious faces blanched with fear and surprise. “Hey, now ... who’re you?” one of them said.
They held their weapons stiffly, having the good sense not to jerk them in Prophet’s direction.
Prophet’s anger swelled a confluence of veins in his forehead, just beneath his hat brim. “I’m the one wonderin’ just what in the hell you three vermin think you’re doin’ to this old man.”
“What the hell do you care? He’s just an ole Injun. We caught him huntin’ where we hunt fer the railroad.”
“Railroad hunters, eh?” Prophet grunted. “Human vermin is what I call you. I s’pose you were plannin’ on killin’ this man when you were done funnin’ him.” The bounty hunter smiled knowingly and without mirth.
The man in the middle—a short, sandy-haired man missing his two front teeth—said, “What in the hell’s it matter to you? He’s just a thievin’ ole Injun!”
“Yeah,” the man on the far left said. “Didn’t you hear what they done to General Custer?”
Prophet lifted his head to speak to the Indian tied with his arms behind his back to the dead tree. “Old man, did you have anything to do with that idiot Custer’s demise?”
“Nope,” the Indian said without inflection.
“See there,” Prophet said. “He had nothing to do with it. Not only that, but he helped me out earlier today. And for that reason, my trigger finger has gotten awful itchy.” He half-closed one eye as he aimed down the Peacemaker’s barrel. “I might be able to control it, though, if’n you three dumbasses lay those guns down nice and gentle and get the hell out of here.”
The three men glanced at each other tensely. Prophet could see the rocks rolling around in their heads.
“Well, I reckon since ye got us dead to rights, that’s what we’ll have to do, all right,” Toothless said, his bottom lip twitching.
“Yeah, I guess that’s what we have to do, all right,” the man on the left said.
“Damn... I guess there’s no other way,” opined the man on the right.
Prophet smiled and lowered the Peacemaker to his waist.
The three men before him shared one more glance, sighed and carped again and shrugged, and slowly began lowering their weapons. “Well, here goes,” Toothless said.
His gun was down around his knees when he stopped suddenly, lifted his head, and jerked the revolver at Prophet. He was dead before he could fire it. And so were his two companions—blown back off their feet with bullets through their foreheads and chests and rolling in dead heaps at the Indian’s mocassined feet.
Prophet had dropped to a crouch, extending and fanning the Peacemaker till all six chambers were empty. Now he straightened and peered at the dead men through the powder smoke wafting around his head, stinging his eyes.
“I had a feeling they’d pull something stupid,” he groused. He dropped the gun in his holster and moved to the old man. “It’s been my experience that the born dumb die dumb.” He moved around behind the tree and cut the Indian’s tethers with his bowie. “What do you think?”
The old Indian stepped away from the tree. Massaging his wrists, he stared down at the three bleeding, glassy-eyed gunmen, then turned to Prophet without expression. “I think you’re handy with a pistol. That’s what I think.”
The gunmen had shot the Indian’s cayuse out from under him, so the Indian mounted behind Prophet, on Mean and Ugly, who snorted and pranced as he craned his neck around to get a look at the savage on his back.
“Don’t mind my horse,” Prophet told the old man. “I don’t know why he doesn’t like Indians. I don’t think he’s ever had any run-ins, unless it happened before I got him.”
“That’s all right,” the old man said, holding his Spencer in his right hand. “I’m used to it.”
“Sorry.”
“That’s all right”
“Come on, Mean. Settle down and drift, you ornery son of a bitch!”
“That’s a nice buck you shot,” the old man said when Mean had finally settled into a fast walk toward the Indian camp. “I been out here all day hunting, but my eyes— they’re not so good anymore. My aim is even worse. I should have brought one of my children along. Mad Wolf is a good shot, but it’s not good to depend on your children for game. The women lose respect.”
Prophet smiled. “How many of those kids are yours?”
‘They are all mine.”
Prophet turned his head to look at the sober old man. “All?”
The old man nodded proudly. “And all the women are my wives. All but Ka-cha-e-nee. She is the mother of my wife, Cha-lo-why-ka-nee.”
Prophet sawed back on the reins, halting the horse. “Wait a minute,” he said, incredulous, looking back at the old man again. “You mean to tell me that whole group is your family?”
“Yes.”
“Well, I’ll be damned.” Staring at the ground, Prophet thought it over. At least one of the old women must have been younger than she looked, to have had the youngest of those young ’uns. “I guess that explains why there aren’t any warriors.”
Prophet gigged Mean and Ugly into a walk, and the old man, whose name was Three Buffaloes, told Prophet in a desultory way about his life growing up with a band of Sioux along the Missouri River. When he was seventeen, he went to work at a large ranch as a hostler and a drover, and the cook taught him to read and write and to cipher. He became so good at horse gentling that he spent twenty years on the ranch, living among white people, making good wages.
“But I never felt right, living among the whites,” he said. “I always felt homesick. So when I was forty, I went back to my own people and took wives and had children— the children you saw in the camp.”
“That pretty girl, the older one—she your daughter, too?” For all Prophet knew, she might have been a wife.
Prophet sensed a proud smile on Three Buffaloes’ face, heard him inhale deeply. “Yes. She is my firstborn. Her name is Me-the-um-ba. In English it means Sunshine. She was born during the bright summer days of the sun dance.”
“A beauty, that one,” Prophet said, rushing to add, “no disrespect intended, Three Buffaloes.”
The old man put his hand on Prophet’s right shoulder. “None taken, Mr. Prophet.”
“Lou.”
“You may call me Three for short.”
Three went on to tell Prophet that he’d left his band a year ago, when they went on the warpath against the whites. “I do not like what your people are doing to my people, Lou,” he said, “but killing will do nothing but cause more killing.”
“I guess your people and my people have proven that already,” Prophet grimly allowed as they crossed a creek in a shallow canyon, the dark water splashing silver against the rocks.
The sun had set, and the western sky had turned a painter’s colorful palette, layered with high clouds.
“Yes. We have to learn to live together or not live at all.”
“That’s how I see it,” Prophet agreed.
There was a pause as they climbed out of the canyon and cantered across the prairie toward a low ridge at the base of which was a black line of trees. In the trees lay Three’s encampment.
“So you and your family are on your own, following the buffalo?” Prophet asked.
Three Buffaloes sighed. “On our own, yes. But the buffalo are all but gone. Around here the herds have been thinned to nothing by railroad hunters, like those who were using me for target practice. No, we follow the deer now, and the creeks and the rivers, and stay out of the way of the white people, though that gets harder every day.”
They rode into the encampment twenty minutes later, when it was nearly full dark. The children flocked around their father, and the women cooed around the big buck draped over the Morgan. They wasted no time in cutting the ropes, yanking the carcass off the horse, dragging it over to the big, sparking fire they had going, and starting to work with their butcher knives.
When Prophet had unsaddled his horses in the trees, and fed and watered them, he went to see Louisa. He stepped into the tepee in which a low fire glowed, smelling the steam, tanned hides, and woodsmoke. Seeing that the crone wasn’t there, he knelt beside the robe-cloaked figure near the fire and was relieved to hear her breathing.
She was unconscious, and her skin was pasty, but he listened to her heartbeat, and it sounded strong. There was a thick burlap compress on her shoulder that smelled as though it had been soaked in horse piss. It oozed brown liquid.
He touched her tangled blonde hair, caressed her smooth cheek with the backs of his knuckles, then stood and went outside, where the old women chattered happily as they worked. They already had two large shoulders roasting on spits and gleaming juicily in the firelight.
Three Buffaloes was there, too, lying propped against robes beside the fire, two little boys snuggled against his chest, sound asleep. When he saw Prophet, Three lifted a crock jug.
“Lou, join me.”
“What do you have there, Three?”
“Rhubarb wine. Got the recipe from the cook who taught me how to read. It is a staple with me, like meat and fry bread. I seldom have a meal without it.”
The old man grinned broadly, showing brown, crooked teeth. His eyes flashed in the fire’s glow.
“Well, I never was one to turn down a drink,” Prophet allowed, sitting beside the old man and crossing his legs Indian style.
He took the jug, sipped, and smacked his lips appraisingly. The wine was tart but refreshingly bubbly, and its warmth and alcohol bite fought off his fatigue. “That ain’t bad, Three,” he said. “Not bad at all.” He tipped it back.
“I hope you don’t mind one thing,” the Indian said as Prophet handed him the jug.
“What’s that?”
“I told my women I shot the deer.”
Prophet waved it off. “No problem.”
The old man hesitated, looking chagrined. “And one other thing.”
“What’s that, Three?”
“I told them it was I who saved you from the railroad hunters.”
Chuckling, Prophet reached for the jug. “I wouldn’t have it any other way.”
“Tonight, Lou, and until you leave here, you must sleep in that tepee there. I will bed down with my children.”
“I can’t turn you out of your tepee, Three.”
“You must. It is the Indian way. Besides, I have an old man’s pride to thank you for.”
“That’s not neces—” Prophet stopped and raised his eyes as the lovely Indian princess, Sunshine, walked before the fire, the slit in her dress revealing a succulent, golden thigh. She glanced at him with cool disinterest and disappeared in the shadows between the tepees.
Seeing the look on Prophet’s face, Three Buffaloes laughed with delight.
After partaking of a goodly portion of the buck, cooked until the skin had split and the dark meat was lightly charred and rife with flavor, eaten with his hands and washed down with wine, and after several more hours of Three’s delightful conversation under the cold, bright stars, Prophet moved his gear into Three’s tepee, undressed, and rolled up in a bearskin.
He didn’t know how much time had passed before he heard a tap on the closed tepee flap.
“Who’s there?” he said, keeping his voice low, believing it might be Three returning for something he’d forgotten to move into his children’s lodge.
“Shh.” It was a female voice. One of Three’s wives?
Prophet was baffled as he watched the figure-shaped shadow move into the lodge and heard the sibilant sounds of cloth rustling. He smelled bear grease and the subtle, flowery musk of a woman. A young woman.
A girl?
“Who is it?” Prophet said again, louder this time, his hand near the gun and cartridge belt coiled up beside him.
Finally, the figure squatted beside him, lifted the bearskin, and slid down next to Prophet, who felt the unmistakable caress of a young woman’s hair and naked flesh against his own. Slender arms encircled his neck. There was a warm, moist whisper in his ear:
“I came to repay you for saving Papa’s life.”
“Sunshine?”
The girl laughed huskily, running her hand down his chest and hard belly, finding him, and squeezing, and laughing again, but it was more of a delighted squeal this time.
Prophet didn’t know what to do. Shocked and baffled, he slid a few inches away from her, but there was nowhere to go. “Jesus, I didn’t know you spoke English. Jesus, what’re you... what’s happening here? What if your father ... ?”
But then she’d crawled under the bearskin, the long, straw like strands of her hair brushing his belly. She took him in both hands—her soft, exploring hands—and then her mouth was over the end and sliding down, down ... down....
And Prophet shut up and fell back with a deep-throated groan of surrender.