But another commander had heard of the big white man’s mission school at The Cottonwoods and had started for it sooner than the commander of the 3rd Colorado. He halted now with his two fellow riders on an elevation of the prairie overlooking Horse Creek. It was a cold dusk. All day the wind had been spitting a sleety rain at them. The horses were tired. They were tired. Now all of them hoped that this was the final rise to be ridden over, the final silence to be peered warily into.
“There,” the leader said, pointing. “That’s it, over where the stream turns toward the sunset. That dark spot of timber. That is The Cottonwoods.” By the darkening light his companions saw him straighten. “Mahesie,” he said to the smaller one, who was only a boy, “you are a Cheyenne. Remember that. There will be times ahead when you will need to remember it.”
The boy nodded, thin shoulders squared bravely. So they had come to it at last. Down there lay The Cottonwoods, the destination of the ride that had begun in high Wyoming many days before. The wonderful time of his wild free life was finished. He would be like a captured mustang down there.
“Uncle Maox,” he said, “I don’t want to stay here. I am a northern boy. My mother was a northern woman. My father, your own brother, was a northern man. We have no people here in the south country. I will die of loneliness at the white man’s school.”
The tall warrior reached out and put his arm about the boy. “Listen,” he said. “Don’t you think that I have studied this a hundred times during our journey? Yet each time I say again to myself that you must do it…you must stay here and learn the white man’s ways. We are too old to learn, Kovohe and I. But for you there is time.”
“Uncle, what I wish to learn, you and Uncle Kovohe could teach me better than any men. I want to be a fighter, too.”
At this, the third rider shook his head. He told the boy that he must not think to be like Maox and himself. He insisted that they had made war all their lives and had little to show for it. They did not have many horses. They were not important chiefs. They had poor robes, no squaws, not even a lodge of their own. They really had nothing whatever.
But the boy said that, on the contrary, they had all that he wanted. They rode where they wished. They hunted or took the war trail and touched the brow in servitude to no man. Every Cheyenne knew their names. He asked only the same life for himself—not to be sent into slavery at the white man’s mission school, not to be abandoned in this alien southland.
The youth’s plea held enough truth to disturb the two gaunt warriors. As Cheyennes they knew well how he felt about freedom. Kovohe sighed deeply. “You make me sad, Mahesie,” he said. “I want to weep for you, for all of us.”
Maox took his own blanket and put it about the boy’s shoulders, for it was very cold. “It is a dark night, Kovohe,” he said. “Go ahead and weep for our people. No one will see you or hear you.”
“Bah!” snorted the other warrior. “You know, Maox, for a fighter with your reputation you are soft as buffalo grease. Who cares about the People? I worry about me! And it is colder up here on this rise than the rump of a wet dog in a snowbank. Come on, let us ride down out of the wind.”
Maox turned his spotted buffalo horse down the slope. The other mounts followed without urging from their riders. Swiftly they went forward through the growing prairie darkness, the unshod hoofs soundless on the dead grass of autumn. The rain came on once more, heavier now, whipping the horses’ flanks, gluing their manes to their wiry necks.
“Maheo’s navel!” swore Kovohe, spitting away the cold drops of freezing water. “We will get lost in this strange country. I cannot see my hand before my face for this rain!”
The boy, Mahesie, put out his small hand.
“Do not be afraid,” he said, touching the fierce warrior. “My uncle is leading us.”
When Bleek heard his dog bark outside, he knew that the visitors were not white men. The dog was an Indian dog; it barked one way for the white man, another for the red. “It’s all right,” he said to the children. “Only some Indians coming.”
They were gathered at the fireplace in the main room. Each night before bed they came there and Preacher told them wondrous stories. He spoke sometimes in Cheyenne, again in hand signs, mainly in simple English. The children seemed to understand him as well one way as another. They laughed or clapped their hands or wept as the circumstances of the tale required. But Bleek seldom told them sad things. “You’ve seen enough of that,” he would say.
Now, however, despite his assurance, the children began to leave the fireplace. They had heard too many Indian dogs barking in the night. But Bleek held up his hand. Out in the clearing before the school, the dog was changing the tone of his bark once more. Now it was quick, excited—a sound of greeting, not challenge.
“Hah!” Preacher said. “Real Indians. That’s a northern dog. He is smelling northern Indians. What bark is that he is giving now, children?” His blue eyes darted among them. “Ohes,” he said. “You tell me.”
The youth, a boy of about six, rubbed his head. It was a notable head, as bare of hair as a bladder. His name translated Young Buzzard, and came from the bald head, a relic of the raging fever with which his mother had brought him to Bleek and never returned for him.
“That is the friendship bark,” the boy finally said with pride. “We know his tail is making little wagon circles.”
“Good.” Bleek nodded. “Now you must all be quiet until I have greeted our visitors. Do you know why? Hehen?”
Hehen, whose name meant Blackbird and whose father had been an escaped slave, was only seven. He was ebony-dark and kinked of hair, looking like some young Bantu or plantation boy, but answering in Cheyenne as alien and guttural as any full-blood’s. “Hehen, Preacher,” he said. “Children should be seen only and not talk.”
“Good, good,” said Bleek, moving for the door. “We speak when spoken to, that’s the rule. Zepeva?”
“Zepeva,” chorused the children, and surrendered to the slash of the rain against the cottonwood logs of the building and to its drum on the prairie sod that made the snug roof. At the door, Bleek hesitated.
A slender tot by the fire nudged her companion.
“I’m glad it’s Indians,” she whispered. “Aren’t you?”
Bleek turned quickly. “Soxoenos,” he reproved the child, “what is it that we don’t do?”
“We don’t whisper,” lisped the little girl, then giggled and held her pudgy hands to her face. Her name was Sunflower and she was Bleek’s secret favorite. An Arapaho waif, she had been found abandoned on the prairie with a broken leg suffered in the flight of her people from soldier pursuit. The leg had not healed right despite Bleek’s every effort to set it and care for it. But Sunflower had a disposition that shone through any handicap, leading the Horse Creek missionary to give her the name she bore.
“That’s right,” Bleek now agreed. “Be still now, all of you.”
The obedience of the children was matched by the falling away of the wind and the rain for a moment. In the heavy silence, Bleek swung open the thick plank door.
The indrawn—“Ah!”—of the children picked the lock of the moment’s stillness. The missionary himself stepped slightly backward.
Painted against the blackness of the storm by the brush of the firelight stood a Cheyenne warrior taller even than Ne-hemiah Bleek. On the warrior’s right was a boy of about ten or twelve, on his left a thick-chested brave with the evil features of a gargoyle. All three stood in dignity, blankets plastered on them by the rain, heads held erect. They made no movement to come in, or to ask permission to come in. Bleek understood this.
“Nomoto, nomoto!” he said. “Welcome, welcome!”
The tall warrior nodded and made a sign with his left hand, accepting. He came into the room, followed by the boy and the second warrior. Just within the door, they halted. Behind them, Bleek closed the door. At the sound, all three wheeled instinctively, then relaxed and waited for the missionary to come around and face them.
The latter did so, informing them that he was Preacher Bleek, a friend of the Cheyenne people, and that they were to think of his home as their own. “These are my children,” he added as he noted the tall warrior eyeing the little ones. “They have forgotten their manners. Children, what do we say when guests enter?”
“Nomoto, nomoto,” murmured the flock obediently, but refused to leave their various retreats.
Now the tall warrior, with his face seeming sculptured of stone, held up his arm toward the children and smiled. It was a beautiful smile, startling for having appeared upon such a brooding and fierce face. “Nihehozetaz,” he said. “I come to you for help. Do not be afraid of me.”
This great dark northern chief coming to them for aid? This vast fearsome figure from out of the stormy night, seeking assistance from them, from little children? Slowly they came forward, bunching behind Bleek like a covey of prairie chicks.
The big Indian—his voice was deep as thunder, yet soft as thunder far off—spoke now to the missionary.
“I am Maox,” he said. “These with me are Kovohe and the boy, Mahesie.”
Bleek made a sign to the second warrior, Kovohe, and said: “You are welcome, Picking Tooth.” Patting the boy on the head, he added: “And all children are welcome here, little Red Dust.” Then he turned back to the leader. “Maox?” he said, frowning. “I don’t remember a Red Nose among the northerns. Is that the right translation?”
“There is another translation.” The tall Cheyenne nodded.
“Yes,” said his companion, Picking Tooth, showing a wolfish grin. “You have the nose part right, Preacher, but the red is wrong. Study that noble feature. Observe its size. Note the hump, especially, of the bridge bone. What do you call a horse with a nose like that?”
Bleek’s frown lingered another instant, then cleared. “Of course, of course!” he said, striking his forehead with the heel of his hand to show his ignorance. “What a poor mind I have. Here, let me have those wet blankets. Come to the fire. Children …Sunflower…run and bring some water for the kettle. Quickly, quickly, everybody to work.”
The Indians came to the fire, yielding their sodden blankets with gratitude. The children scuttled this way and that, raising more dust from the earthen floor than adding of substance to the comfort of the guests. As for Nehemiah Bleek, old as he was at these things, Picking Tooth’s identification of the tall warrior had caused an odd sensation in the stomach. It was as though one were looking at a wild animal not in a cage. As though the view were very close. As though the big room of the mission building had suddenly grown quite small. And as though everything in that room had been touched for the moment by the sweeping freedom of the far places.
The reason was there, warming at the fire. Roman Nose—greatest fighting man of the fighting Cheyennes, a legend and folklore in his own time.