After the last of the tasty buffalo ribs had been gnawed bare, dry blankets were brought and spread on the warm hearth, where the visitors from the north preferred to sleep for the night. The mission children then bade their guests good night and retired to the adjoining dormitory.
Here, in the “sleeping room”, as they called it, were bunks of planking built against the log walls. Each bunk was equipped with a buffalo robe and a mattress of old canvas stuffed with prairie hay. The robes were the product of Preacher’s hunting and tanning skills, the grass-filled pallets the work of the mission orphans. In one way or another, the room was furnished by those who used it, and loved by them as the only real home they had ever known.
Now, young health being what it was, excitement soon blended into sleep. In minutes, only the visiting northern Indians and Preacher Bleek were awake. It was time to come to the serious business of the evening.
Roman Nose was brief with it. It seemed to him, he said, that where one white soldier was killed, ten sprang up to take his place. At the same time, if an Indian warrior were slain, no other warrior leaped to do battle in his cause. Soon the Indians would be gone. No one would be left to fight for the free, wild life that the Cheyennes treasured. This was why Roman Nose had come to see Preacher.
After the past summer of killing along Platte River, it was certain that there must be a terrible revenge of the pony soldiers upon the Cheyennes. For himself, Roman Nose did not fear. But the boy, Red Dust, had been given into his keeping by the lad’s dying father, and the boy must live. He was only eleven summers. He was a bright boy, very quick to learn, very slow to forget. He was not war-like in his ways, but believed in gentleness. Such Indians were the first to be slain by the white man.
Roman Nose himself spent ten moons of each year on the war trail. He had no home in which to keep the boy. His fire was wherever darkness caught him on the prairie. He had no woman to mother the boy. His vows of chastity to his warrior society forbade a mate. One day, perhaps, when the wars were over, he would take a squaw and have a lodge. But what of the boy, meanwhile?
It was at this time of worry that he met White Antelope, who had journeyed to Wyoming to plead with the northern Cheyennes to end their war and make peace with the pony soldiers.
“Your madmen will get us all killed!” the old chief had cried. But the young fighters had hooted and jeered him and told him to go home to the Arkansas. They called him peace-talker, and coward, and old woman.
But Roman Nose spoke with him about Red Dust, whereupon White Antelope had told him of Preacher Bleek’s school for Indian orphans. He promised that if Roman Nose would bring the boy to Preacher’s school, White Antelope would be camped nearby, probably at Little Dried River, which the white man called Sand Creek. Thus, if there were any trouble with the boy at the school, White Antelope could give him an Indian home until such time as a party was riding north and could return him to his Uncle Maox.
“Now, Preacher,” concluded Roman Nose, “we come to the question which brought me here…will you take the boy and teach him your ways…the white man’s ways…until I return for him when the grass is new again?”
Bleek hesitated, seriously concerned. Red Dust was older than he liked. He preferred to get his children when they were much younger and could be taught more easily. Moreover, this particular boy was quite wild and shy. He had been nervous from the moment he came into the building. He had not laughed once, or smiled, or uttered a solitary word. Finally he was a fighting Indian by birth—born free among a people who valued liberty above life. There was the look of eagles in his dark eyes, the crouch of a wolf cub in his wary walk. No, this one could not be tamed. It was too late.
Carefully he explained his fears to Roman Nose. To his surprise, the warrior agreed with him. “Yes,” he said. “You are correct, Preacher. The boy is as you say. Now you know why his uncle has ridden ten sleeps to bring him to your school.”
Bleek puffed furiously at his pipe. He wanted time to think of the best way of refusing the boy. “You take a pony,” he said to Roman Nose. “What is the proper age for first training? Please answer that.”
“Very young is the best time,” the Cheyenne replied at once. “The first spring after the foaling, if possible.”
“Shall we say a yearling, then?”
“Yes.”
“Very well. In a boy, now, how many years equal one pony year?”
“My people say seven years.”
“That is right.” Bleek nodded. “So you see what I mean about the boy. He is too old for the best training.”
Preacher thought that he had trapped Roman Nose with this logic, but he had much to learn of the great fighter.
“All right,” said the latter. “But what makes the best-grown horse, the most trustworthy in all trouble? The one to be depended on beyond any started as a mere yearling?”
“Why,” said Bleek, “the one you start as a two-year-old, of course.”
“Aha!” cried the stern warrior. “You have lost, Preacher. In terms of pony years, Red Dust is just exactly two years old. Namea, white friend! I give the boy to you.”
Bleek raised his pipe. He intended to wave it about in protest, while he thought of a way to escape. But he had no more than stabbed the air with it than the dog in the outer yard commenced to bark snarlingly.
“Zehavseva!” said Picking Tooth, reaching for his rifle. “Those are white men coming!”
Preacher Bleek was at the plank door in the next instant. Swiftly he dropped its heavy locking timber into place. Behind him, Roman Nose and Picking Tooth crouched with rifles ready. Red Dust had no gun, but in the winking of one coal in the fireplace he drew his knife and joined the two warriors. Almost in the same breath of time, a heavy cavalry boot thudded against the door panels from the outside, followed by a hoarse-voiced order: “Open up!”
The missionary called out that he would obey, asking his callers to be patient for a moment. Crossing the room, he signaled the Indians to stay where they were, making no move, no sound. Then he disappeared into the dormitory, reappearing shortly dressed in a flowing old-fashioned nightgown and carrying a lighted candle in a tin tray. He had a sleeping cap with tasseled tip on his head, and was yawning mightily.
“All right, all right,” he told the soldiers. “Quit smashing at my door with your blasted boots. Can’t you give a man ten seconds to get out of bed?” Pausing by the fireplace, he told Roman Nose and Picking Tooth that they and the boy had one chance: to get down into their blankets on the hearth and pretend that they had been aroused by the knocking from a sound sleep.
Roman Nose at once ordered his companions to do as Preacher said. Bleek waited until the three were in their places, noting that the warriors took their rifles with them, and the boy his knife. Then he was at the door and had unbarred and flung it open.
Into the fire-lit room, with a bluster of windy rain, stomped three cavalrymen. Two were ordinary troop sergeants. The third was what the Cheyennes called an “eagle chief”, a full colonel. All three were wearing the uniform of the dreaded 3rd Colorado regiment.
Nehemiah Bleek, himself a very large man, could only stare at the officer. Six feet, seven inches tall, clad in a winter great coat of wolf skin, he loomed as a veritable Gargantua against the blackness of the outer night. The fearsome impact was not lessened by the craggy features, the huge head, the jut of the heavy brow, the burning intensity of the eyes, and the wide, merciless set of the thin-lipped mouth.
The boy, Red Dust, had never seen him before but had heard of him in the tales of terror told by Cheyenne mothers. He knew him at once. “Mashane,” he gasped, and shrank back.
Preacher Bleek stepped forward. He bowed to the gigantic officer, welcoming him with a diffident sweep of the candle.
“Good evening, Colonel Chivington, sir,” he said. “Please to come in, gentlemen, and permit me to close this door against the rain.”
Chivington said nothing to Bleek. His unblinking eyes ran over the room. He stood motionless, like some hungry prowling cat come into a warm barn full of fat mice.
“Skemp,” he ordered one of the sergeants, “arrest those Indians by the fire. Durant,” he told the other sergeant, “get our horses into the Preacher’s barn, then bring the men inside. Shoot those Indian ponies where they stand.”
The second sergeant saluted and went out.
Skemp moved to the fire. Ignoring the two grown Cheyennes, he put the muzzle of his carbine to the head of Red Dust. Chivington nodded watchfully.
“If either of the devils moves,” he said, “kill the boy.”
His command was three times punctuated by pistol shots from the outer yard. The Cheyennes by the fire moved only their eyes and the muscles of their faces, but it was as though the shots were going into them rather than into their beloved shaggy ponies.
In the muttered thunder of his voice Roman Nose said something slowly and with great distinctness, but in his own tongue. Instantly Chivington wheeled on Bleek.
“What did he say?” he demanded, lashing the question.
Bleek shrugged. “A prayer for the ponies,” he answered. “I reckon we wouldn’t understand it, Colonel.”
Chivington stared at him. “We may understand it better than you think, Bleek,” he said. “That was no prayer. Skemp.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Did you catch any of that?”
“No, sir. I ain’t no good with Cheyenne. Just a little ’Rapaho and Comanche, sir.”
“Did that sound like a prayer to you, Skemp?”
“Not hardly, Colonel.”
There was a pause. During it Chivington seemed to be studying the situation. And Nehemiah Bleek was studying it. The missionary could smell the danger.
“All right,” said Chivington, breaking the stillness, “we’ll see if we can’t get a little better Indian translation. Skemp, bring me that boy. He can be our interpreter.”
Nehemiah Bleek saw the look of wildness that came into the face of Roman Nose at the officer’s reference to Red Dust. In the same glance he noted the way in which Chivington was watching Roman Nose and Picking Tooth, and he understood what it was that the commander of the 3rd Colorado was doing. He was trying to make the warriors move. His hand was at the butt of his revolver. He wanted the Indians to do something, regardless of how trivial, when Skemp seized the boy. In his cold-eyed cunning, he knew that of all things calculated to snap the thin string of civilization restraining such horseback hostiles, the most certain act was to touch one of them in roughness—and especially a child.
But if Colonel John Chivington knew Indians, he did not know Nehemiah Bleek. Few men did. The Horse Creek missionary was standing behind Chivington, near the front door. The first hint the officer had of anything amiss was when he heard the thud of the door bar dropping home. He wheeled about, hand closing on the revolver butt. But the hand did not continue with the movement to draw or to fire.
From beneath his long white nightgown, Preacher Bleek had produced an ancient flintlock pistol of awesome bore. The distinctive scraping clink of the big spur side hammer being put on cock was not lost on Colonel John Chivington.
At the fire, hands outreached to grasp Red Dust, Sergeant Skemp hesitated. He had set down his carbine to take up the boy. Now he did not know whether to leap to retrieve the weapon, to seize up the youth and use him as a shield, or to stay poised as he was. Bleek relieved him of the decision.
“Now, Colonel,” he said quietly to Chivington, “happen you touch your pistol, or your sergeant touches that there boy, I will touch off this here blunderbuss, and God Himself will judge the consequences.”
Chivington’s glare was that of a cornered thing. His face was dead white.
“Bleek,” he said, thick-voiced, “you’re crazy. You can hang for this!”
The bearded missionary shook his head. “Hang, Colonel?” he said. “For saving your life?”
He waved the horse pistol, uttered a Cheyenne phrase to Red Dust. Reaching down, the boy took the corner of Roman Nose’s blanket in one hand, the corner of Picking Tooth’s blanket in the other.
“Go ahead,” said Bleek gently. “Pull them away.”
The boy drew the blankets off, not quickly, but slowly and with his dark eyes never leaving the giant cavalry officer and Preacher Bleek.
Chivington saw the rifles of Roman Nose and Picking Tooth come into view. He saw the bores of both weapons aimed at him. He saw the red fingers on the triggers, the red thumbs hooking the hammers back. And he saw the look in the eyes of the two Cheyennes. In the hush of that seeing, he felt the barrel of Bleek’s flintlock ease into the small of his back.
“Unfasten your revolver belt and let it drop,” said the Horse Creek missionary.
Chivington was in a dark rage. It was a fact that Bleek had just saved him from the certain death hidden beneath the Cheyennes’ blankets. But now Preacher had gone beyond this fact and had put a gun on an officer of the United States and was unlawfully disarming him in the presence of the enemy.
“Bleek,” he said coldly, “do you know the penalty for insurrection?”
“Colonel,” answered the missionary, “I ain’t even certain that I know what insurrection means. Drop the belt.”
“It means, ” said Chivington through his teeth, “armed upris ing against established authority. It means,” he added icily, “pulling a gun on an officer of the Third Colorado Cavalry. It means the rope.”
Preacher Bleek shifted the horse pistol, but only to press its muzzle more deeply into the officer’s back.
“You won’t hang me, Colonel. Not tonight, anyways.”
“Bleek, for the last time…I warn you!”
“Drop the belt, Colonel,” repeated Preacher. “And that’s my last warning to you.”