It seemed the yellow flowers and bluebirds were everywhere. In the timber and in the draws there were elk and pronghorn antelope and mule deer; and there were still some buffalo. In the horse herd, spotted colts tried their spindly new legs, and one could hear the tinkle of the grazing bells. It was a good sign, the old people said, yet they spoke carefully, for the times in general were hard.
There had been no fighting with the white soldiers for a while, the one bad thing being the slaying of Young Man Catching Up. Much sorrow had fallen on the people, with keening and cutting oneself, for Young Man had been a promising warrior, young, proud, and strong like his brother Quick Thunder and their cousin Wound. Anger and bitterness had run high in the camp of the Brules, and though the bad moment was not spoken of as it had been, it stayed in the hearts of everyone, for Young Man Catching Up had not been killed in battle but through treachery, shot in the back by one of the Gray Men, those the whites called outlaws. Quick Thunder and Wound had sworn revenge on the whites, and only the stature of Little Hawk, himself a warrior who had fought with Crazy Horse, had kept them and the other young warriors from attacking the whites.
Now, just at the end of the Moon of the New Grass, the Brules, only one sleep away from the white soldiers, were at peace. The young men still smoldered for revenge, but Little Hawk and the elders of the council had
insisted that it was foolishness to attack all the whites because of Young Man. Besides, the soldier Kincaid had come to the camp and told them that he and his friend Windy would find the Gray Man and punish him.
Thus the band of Little Hawk had been making no fighting, just going out for meat because there was so little to eat at the agency, and the winter had been cold and long. Still, no one was coming in with white men’s scalps. .
With the moon growing again, the land awakening to the summertime, the people were ready to hunt; the older ones hoped that a big hunt would ease the restlessness of the young warriors.
This day had broken gently over the Brule camp, the sun slipping over the tipis, pausing on the cottonwood and crackwillow in the draws that ran through the surrounding prairie. Much of the rolling prairie was greening. But not for long. Soon the sea of grass would turn to its more familiar tawny brown. But next year, the old ones predicted, there would be less buffalo, less game to fill the parfleches ...
A group of boys from five to seven were playing at war, different bands of them fighting each other with mud balls that they threw with yellow sticks. The bigger boys played a game called Throwing Them Off Their Horses. Usually it was played with real horses, but these days the larger boys were the “horses” carrying smaller boys on their backs, who grappled with the “enemy horsemen,” trying to unseat them. It was a rough game, good wrestling, building strong arms and legs, strong wind, and a quick attentiveness for whatever lay ahead.
In the lodge of Little Hawk, a half-dozen headmen sat with their chief in council. The men had entered the lodge carefully, paying attention to all the details necessary to the occasion and the person of him who was
their chosen leader. They had seated themselves in the required order, and they had smoked, sending the pipe around the circle in the prescribed manner.
“It is good,” Little Hawk said.
“Heya,” said the others.
“What of the news brought by Sees Far Off and Mole?” asked the young warrior Quick Thunder. He was the youngest man in the lodge, and though he often spoke out angrily against the whites, speaking for war to the finish, he often found favor in Little Hawk’s eyes, who remembered himself as a young man with the same anger.
A murmur touched the circle of older warriors now. The two scouts, Sees Far Off and Mole, had brought news of the sheep and the herder men with the repeating rifles, seen not more than a day’s ride away, just in the Absarokas. Sees Far Off and Mole had been visiting relatives in the Oglala camp near the Piney River, and it was on their way back to the Brule camp that they had seen the men who spoke with the strange tongue, and the many woolly animals.
“They are coming into the country fast, it is certain,“ a warrior named Old Face said, moving his eagle-wing fan. “If not right here where we are now, then close, close enough to touch.”
Weasel, an older man, now spoke. “But they will not come on this land. This land has been given us by Wash- tone.”
At his words, Quick Thunder’s eyes flashed. “It is not Washtone’s land to give,” he said harshly. And then he paused, feeling Little Hawk’s eyes on him.
“It is good to remember how to speak in council,” the chief said.
“Forgive me, Grandfather,” Quick Thunder said, and turned to the man known as Weasel. “I spoke in anger against the whites, Grandfather, not against him who
taught me many things, not only in my youth, but still in this moment.”
“It is well,” Weasel said.
“It is the man who is angry that will lose everything,” Little Hawk said.
“But what can be done?” Wound, who had been silent thus far, spoke up. “Can we go on being fed rotten food, being lied to, being treated like prisoners in our own land? It is an angry question, but a sorrowful one too.”
“These men let their cattle and sheep go everywhere,” another warrior said. He was a man with many wrinkles in his face, but his body was straight as he sat impassive, listening. Now he spoke slowly, but with a good strength, the strength of conviction. His name was Running Fast. “Now, with the cattle in the south and the sheep from the west... it means there will be more. And they will surely kill and drive away the game, of which there is little enough now.”
“With the sheep of the white man, the grass is not fit for our horses to eat once they have passed over it. And so now even our ponies will starve,” said another young warrior, named He-in-His-Lodge.
Now Old Face spoke again, saying, “These Wasichus will bring more, more will follow in their steps. And they will kill what little remain of the buffalo.”
“Heya,” the others said. “It is so.”
The lodge was silent and the pipe was passed again, each one smoking, grave with the thoughts that held them all.
It was so. There were so many things. The rations, the having to ask permission for everything, even to hunt; and now the cattle people and those with the sheep.
Now Little Hawk spoke. “It is as it is,” he said. “We can fight the Wasichus and we will be killed. With honor,” he added, looking at the three young warriors—
Quick Thunder, his cousin Wound, and He-in-His- Lodge. “But the Wasichus are many more than the Brules, many more than all the tribes together. It will no longer be as it was at the Greasy Grass against Yellow Hair. The Wasichus are more than the blades of grass. And they do not fight as the Lakota do. They wish to rub out everything. We must survive. What is important is that our people live. If we fight, the Wasichus will kill us all; and there will be none left of our entire nation.”
“It is true the whites never stop killing.” Quick Thunder said. “That is all the soldiers do. Where are their families, their old ones, their children?”
“But what can be done?” Running Fast asked.
A long silence fell.
Finally, Little Hawk spoke. “We must talk to the soldiers,” he said, and he watched the anger leap into the eyes of Quick Thunder, Wound, and He in His Lodge. Yet they said no more.
When they had gone, he cleaned his pipe and filled it. Then, offering it, he prayed.
All that night, Little Hawk sat in his blanket, not moving even when Rising Moon, his youngest wife, brought something for him to eat. These days there was much to trouble the heart; the young men were always pushing to fight the whites, and he knew that except for his own standing as a warrior, and the respect he commanded, there would have been an open break in the camp.
Little Hawk felt sorry for the young men. Once he had been the same. He was surely no paper chief, and they knew this. And the young men listened to him. For the moment. But they were giving in to their impatience. It was a bad sign.
They said it was better to die a man than live in chains in the white man’s iron house, or be held prisoner on the
land he has stolen, the land for which he has no love, but only hatred.
Ah, yes. Only what of the younger ones, the children, those that were even now at their mothers’ breasts? What would happen to them, to the old people, to the Lakota Nation itself, if all fought to the death?
It was much to trouble the heart. Well, he would ride to a high place and build a lodge and purify himself with the heat from the special fire. Maybe then he could cry for a vision; maybe then he could dream. For he must see what was the good road for the people. It was not possible to act truly from himself, for he was weak and could not see. The true road for the people could only be seen from what was Above.
At last he saw the morning star come into the sky, and when the sun rose, Rising Moon brought his horse, and he rode out of camp on the magnificent silver-maned buckskin. He rode alone. He rode with his body as straight as an arrow. He rode in silence.
“It was him.”
“You sure? How can you be sure?”
“Elihu, I am telling you it was him.”
“But can you be sure?”
“I swear it was him. I seen him that close.”
“Jesus...” Cohoes stared across the table at his foreman.
The interior of the Silver Tip in the early morning was deserted save for the two men at the comer table, the baldheaded Roy Skinner reading a month-old newspaper behind the bar, and the old swamper who was carrying out empties. Outside a soft rain was falling, the first rain in several days, and the room smelled damp.
After a moment, Cohoes’s grainy voice broke in. “Thing is, did he recognize you?”
36
“You’re talking about—”
“Who else!” Cohoes cut in irritably. “Hogan, that’s who I’m talkin’ about, not your grandmother! Or whatever he calls himself. I don’t reckon he’s callin’ himself Hogan in the army.” He leaned forward, his eyes piercing the man across the table. “You sure?”
“I am not shittin’ you, Elihu. Hell, you know me better’n that, for Chrissakes.”
Cohoes’s voice was as forbidding as his face as he looked at his foreman plumb center. “That’s the point, Domino, I do know you better than that.” And, holding his foreman with his hard eyes, he raised his glass again and drank, his eyes still on Ching Domino as he put down the tumbler.
Cohoes could see that Domino didn’t like it; but he wanted it that way. Every so often he found it necessary to rein in the big gunslinger. Ching Domino had his uses, but thinking clearly was not one of them. He could handle men, though, rough men, and his gun was swift. The thing was, now and again he’d get uppity.
“Maybe pretty soon we’ll make our play with the army—if we haveTo,” Cohoes said.
“How would that be?” Ching Domino wrinkled his thick forehead. “What kind of play with the army?”
“If I don’t get the cooperation I’m askin’ for, I might need a little extra, like the true identity of one of their men. Because you can bet the last hair on your ass, not only don’t they know who he is, but they’d give plenty to land Larrabee Hogan.” He was staring past Ching Domino as he spoke, his eyes half closed.
“Hogan must know by now what happened to his cattle,” Domino said.
“His cattle?”
“What he took to be his.”
“That’s better.” Cohoes canted his head at his foreman
now for emphasis. “More than likely how come he busted out of the pen.”
Ching Domino grinned. “We’ll be ready for him,” he said.
“You will be ready for him,” Cohoes said, and the emphasis on “you” was not light.
Ching Domino was a tough man. He knew it, and everyone acquainted with him knew it. But he didn’t like the way Elihu Cohoes looked at him right now. At the same time, he had never been able to explain to himself why Cohoes never went armed, and why so many people were careful in his presence, Domino included.
“He must be a good bit younger—the kid, I’m meaning,” he said now, to ease the moment for himself.
“A bullet is a bullet, no matter if a baby pulls the trigger,” Cohoes said, getting to his feet. “You keep a close eye on it. We’ll more’n likely run into that kid brother again.”
Ching Domino pushed back his chair, running the back of his hairy hand across his mouth. “When you figger the herd to move?”
“We’ll see about the escort first. I don’t aim to risk anything with them Injuns all pissed off.” He sniffed. “Now then, till we move ’em, we’ll let ’em feed and pick up the weight they lost on the drive. That grama grass ought to do ’er.”
Ching Domino’s face moved suddenly, and Cohoes realized he was grinning.
“Don’t worry,” the cattleman said. “I don’t expect my foreman to know feed and stock. I got Haines for that.”
“Right,” Domino said. “Your foreman don’t have to, when he knows this.” And his middle finger touched the holstered handgun at his right thigh.
Unwittingly, not realizing he was doing so, Ching Domino had dropped his eyes to his companion’s belt,
where there were no guns. Catching himself, he brought his eyes up to find Elihu Cohoes staring right at him.
“Maybe,” Cohoes said, again canting his head at his foreman. “Maybe someday you might even get good enough with that there peashooter where you don’t have to carry it at all.”
And he turned and walked out of the saloon.
