Bleek brought out and gave to the Indians some of his best Burley tobacco. With such guests one did not offer the poor quality of harsh trade weed common to the frontier. The northern Cheyennes accepted the gift, and the lending of two pipes to smoke it in, making no undue acknowledgments. To them, it was merely hotoma. Had Preacher come to their lodges and had they such fine tobacco to give him, then he would have been given the fine tobacco.
When the pipes were going well, the blue smoke curling, the bowls glowing, the dark faces knowing content, Roman Nose spoke.
“Preacher,” he said, “we have come a long way to ask a thing of you.”
“Ask it.” Bleek waved, puffing his pipe.
“No, first let us talk a bit.”
Bleek nodded. The children waited, big-eyed, watching the foreign Indians, the strangers from the north.
“These children,” Roman Nose continued, “are yours, you have said. They look more like mine.”
Bleek smiled his rare shy smile and agreed. He explained his relationship to the Indian youngsters, concluding with a shrug: “As they do not know their own fathers, I am their father. Sometimes there are more of them here, sometimes less. These are the ones who stay with me the entire year, the ones who really are my children. Mine and Maheo’s.”
“Good,” said Roman Nose. “I’m glad you mentioned Maheo. The Allfather is the parent of each of us.”
“He is,” agreed Bleek.
“Good,” said Roman Nose again, and after eyeing him: “If a man doesn’t believe in God, I won’t believe in that man. We understand each other, Preacher?”
Bleek was by no means sure that they did. What he was certain of was that he should give no hint of this doubt. “I am your brother,” he said. “Go on.”
Roman Nose then told him that tales of his school on Horse Creek had spread to the north. The southern Cheyennes had said that the big white man who lived at The Cottonwoods was protecting Indian orphans and instructing them in living as white children. It was said by the southerns that the big white man was also the enemy of MashanŌ, who was the enemy of all Indians and most of all the enemy of the Cheyennes. “Is all of this true?” the tall warrior concluded.
Bleek answered that it was not entirely so. He said that he was not the enemy of Mashane, but that Mashane believed all Indians, “little and big,” must be destroyed or there could be no peace. Hence, since Bleek’s life was devoted to his Indian and half-blood outcasts, it was inevitable that he and Mashane should not be friendly. “But I would remind you,” he told Roman Nose, “that most of the settlers and the soldiers agree with Mashane, not with me. I would also remind you that the warring of the Cheyennes this past summer has been a shameful thing. You yourself have been in it. If you say to me that there is no blood on your hands, I will not believe you. You know I speak the truth.”
At this, the huge warrior shook his head. “You do not know the truth,” he said. “The truth is that the red man and the white man are not alike. Maheo made the difference in them…I did not.”
“No,” said Bleek. “You are wrong. Maheo sees us alike, red man and white. We are both only men.”
Roman Nose grew angry. He put down the borrowed pipe and came to his feet. Red Dust and Picking Tooth also arose.
“The southern Cheyennes have lied to me,” growled the war leader. “Those old fools, Black Kettle and White Antelope, have grown soft in their heads. They told me you had hotoma, that you were a Cheyenne in your heart. They lied to me. You are a white man.”
“Yes,” replied Preacher. “And you are a red man.”
“I am going,” said Roman Nose. “Where did you put our rain-damp blankets? We won’t stay in your lodge.”
Bleek did not move to fetch the blankets. He sat puffing his pipe. “Now you are behaving as a white man,” he told the scowling Indian. “You won’t listen to the other side.”
Roman Nose stopped on his way to the door. “What do you mean?” he demanded.
Preacher Bleek shrugged, blew upward a curl of smoke. “I said the red man and the white man are no different beneath their skin,” he said. “They are not.” He turned to Blackbird and called the half-blood boy to come and stand with them. The youth did so, pleased to be singled out. Bleek asked Roman Nose to observe that Blackbird was as dark as a lump of coal. Next, he requested the Indian to explain what difference there was, then, between the half-Negro youth and a white child of similar age.
Roman Nose scowled yet more fiercely. He stared hard at Blackbird, who only grinned happily back at him. And he looked hard at Nehemiah Bleek, who nodded pleasantly and waited. Finally the tall warrior admitted that there would be no important difference—both were but children, no more. “But I do not see,” he concluded, “what this has to do with the discussion, Preacher.”
“Just this,” answered Bleek softly. “They are not just children…they are our children, yours and mine.”
“Hah!” snorted the gaunt brave. “Yours and mine and some buffalo soldier’s!”
“Precisely so,” granted Bleek. “And if our children are no different, red or black or white, then you and I are no different.
Do I lie to you?”
“I don’t know.” Roman Nose shook his head. “Your words confuse my mind. I am not a great talker.”
“No,” said Preacher, “you are a great fighter, and this summer just past you fought on the South Platte River, and in the fight white children were killed. These were little children, with their mothers, each no different, save for the color of their skin, than Blackbird, or Blackbird’s Cheyenne mother, or than Sunflower, here, and her Arapaho mother. Again I say, can you tell me that I lie to you?”
Roman Nose narrowed his eyes. He was thinking very hard. The children fidgeted. Two of them had fallen asleep. In the stillness Sunflower slipped her hand into that of Red Dust. The northern boy did not even notice it. He was too absorbed watching his famous uncle. It seemed to him that the moment was here when they would get their ponies and go away from the big white man’s mission school. When they would ride joyfully back to high Wyoming, and home.
But the uncle of Red Dust was not a simple man to know. He lived much within himself. Now, unexpectedly, he said to Preacher Bleek: “Your tongue is straight, you do not lie.”
“Then you understand,” Bleek asked, “that Mashane feels about the white child as you do about the red?”
At once Roman Nose was scowling again. “No, no!” he denied. “Not Mashane! You, Preacher, yes. But not that devil, Mashane. He is a killer of women and small children!”
“Yes, Roman Nose,” said Bleek quietly. “And what are you?”
The Indian could not answer Preacher’s question. “Why do you defend Mashane?” he challenged Bleek, unable to admit his own guilt.
“I don’t defend him,” said the missionary. “But Mashane is a war leader like you…a fighter. I wanted you to see that, to think about it. How is it all right for Roman Nose to see a little white child scalped or his mother carried off to slavery, while for Mashane to order his men to shoot Indian women and children is a vicious and terrible thing?”
Now the tall brave nodded very slowly. “I see,” he said. “I begin to see….”
Bleek could sense that, insofar as the great warrior was beginning to see, it was not a sight likely to alter his career of killing and raiding and making war. But the thing of the moment was to implant the doubt of Indian righteousness in the fierce mind. The gamble, always, was to get these wild people to stop and start to think—to think how the white man saw things, not just act on their savage impulses as red men. Where the Cheyennes had done this, notably under the two peace chiefs of the southern branch of the tribe, Black Kettle and White Antelope, a good commencement had been made. Those particular Indians, committed as a tribe to live peaceably with the whites regardless of provocation, had the best chance to survive the war of extermination—extermination or life imprisonment on some reservation—that Preacher Bleek knew to be coming to the valley of the Arkansas.
Bleek believed this pacifist course to be the only one that provided the Indian a chance to escape annihilation along the Arkansas. He had talked with the honest Indian Agent Colley at Denver, and with the decent Major Edward Wynkoop of the regular Army before that officer’s transfer out of the area. He had talked, as well, with Major Anthony, the officer sent into the area to replace Major Wynkoop. All had left him convinced that the unchangeable policy of the government was to put the Indian under restraint on reservations in Oklahoma and Kansas, or to kill him in the process—with the choice being generally given to the particular troop commander in the field. Hence, as he now waited for Roman Nose to conclude, Bleek knew a considerable anxiety. The question was not if the huge warrior was beginning to see, but what he was beginning to see. Would he now again demand return of the drying blankets, only to stalk out into the gusting night? Would he “see” that Bleek was still a white man at heart, not a friend of his red people? Or had he actually had a glimpse of the truth—that a little child dead by Indian hands was the same as one destroyed by the guns of Mashane’s soldiers?
The pause was now stretching beyond need. Afraid of whatever dark thoughts might be forming in the warrior mind of Roman Nose, Bleek urged him gently, carefully. “What are you seeing, brother?”
In reply, the huge brave held out his hands, showing them to the bearded missionary. “These hands,” he said, “have never touched a little child in anger. Not a red child, not a white child. I thought they were clean hands, but they are not. What I am beginning to see, Preacher, is the blood you have shown me on these hands. I will think a long time on it.”
“This is a good thing, brother,” said Nehemiah Bleek. “Will you now sit on the robe again? I want to help you, to hear what it is you have come so far to ask of me.”
Before Roman Nose could answer, another less troubled warrior spoke for him. Picking Tooth, that realist by any skin color, grinned and patted his dark stomach.
“All this talk, hai! Listen, Preacher, you and this great fighter talk later. My belly is as empty as a white man’s whiskey bottle washed up on a riverbank. How about some food, eh, Preacher? All you have been feeding us is hot wind and words. We didn’t ride down here ten sleeps from Platte River just to gnaw on argument bones. Come on, now, where are you hiding the buffalo tongue and the hump ribs?”
It was the right thing to say at precisely the right time and put in exactly the correct spirit of human complaint. At once the air seemed to grow lighter in the log-walled room. The mission children commenced to laugh. Sunflower gave Red Dust’s hand a friendly tug, and batted her long black lashes at him. The Cheyenne boy snatched his hand away indignantly, yet in the same moment weakened enough to lick his lips and watch to see what the host was going to do about Picking Tooth’s reminder of food.
As for Preacher Bleek, he shouted out a good loud honest Cheyenne shout and clapped his hands and began to order this child to run that way and bring something, and that child to dash this way and fetch something else. In no time at all the tea was set to steep, the fresh buffalo tongue and the juicy hump ribs were broiling on the rack. Even the precious white sugar was brought out from Preacher’s padlocked iron cabinet—where the whiskey for medicine was also kept—and every person there, young and old, waited in happy anticipation of the feast, and shared meanwhile the heart-warming glow of the fire and the return of the good Cheyenne hotoma.
All except one of them. The boy, Red Dust, knew what it was that Roman Nose had come to ask Preacher Bleek. He could not laugh with the others, or share the hotoma with them. It was the best he could do not to cry.