In the Brule Indian camp there was no laughter; no young boys threw mud balls with the yellow sticks; there was no war game of Throwing Them Off Their Horses. In Little Hawk’s lodge the chief sat with three young warriors. He had filled the traditional pipe and they had smoked silently and watched each other with eyes that were absolutely without any emotion.
Finally, Little Hawk emptied the pipe and cleaned it and put it into its special deerskin pouch.
“Why have you come, Quick Thunder?” he asked, looking at the young man seated opposite him.
“It is to ask your help, Grandfather. You have taught us many things, ever since we were Small children. Now we come asking for you to help us.” Quick Thunder looked at Wound and at He-in-His-Lodge, sitting to his right and left. “We have fought with the whites, the men of the sheep, and we will fight them again. But there are also the men of the cows, and the soldiers and the soldier fort.”
“That I know.” Little Hawk spoke softly but decisively, and still with no expression on his lined face. “I have heard of the fighting with the sheep people.”
“We ask you to come fight with us, you and the older ones; we ask your help to drive out the whites.” It was Wound speaking now, a tall, thin warrior with a scar running from his left eye down to the point of his jaw.
“We have already spoken against this,” Little Hawk said. “Yet you went. We spoke of there being too many
whites—more of them than there are blades of grass on the prairie. We spoke of the uselessness of fighting them. You did not listen. It has always been a trouble with you. But now you are men. You must think of the people.”
“But, Grandfather, they will kill us all anyway, whether we fight or not,” Quick Thunder said.
The chief was silent for a long time. He could not argue. What the young men said was true. In his heart he was not in disagreement with them.
At last he spoke. “It is important to survive, that our people may live. We are prisoners on the white man’s island. Yes. It is so. But that is for now. If we fight the Wasichus, we will all be killed. That does not matter. But if we are all killed, who then will remember our dead? Who will live our way of life? No. We must live. We must survive the white man. We must find our hearts again.”
He sat immobile, letting the silence fall all around him.
“But we cannot live like this!” Quick Thunder’s eyes were flashing. And immediately he was sorry for having spoken, and bowed his head.
After another long silence, Little Hawk spoke. “Will you not wait to talk with the soldier men again?”
“The soldiers always talk—and lie,” said He-in-His- Lodge.
“It is so.”
“They will take the land, kill ail the animals, bring more of the singing wires and the Iron Horse, and they will dig into the earth for the yellow metal.” Now it was Wound who spoke angrily.
“Let us smoke once again,” Little Hawk said. “There must not be anger between us. You have taken the young warriors with you, leaving only the old ones and the
children. But you do not have enough.”
“That is why we ask your help. Grandfather.”
Little Hawk was silent. They smoked while the sun slipped toward the horizon, its final brilliant light touching the chief’s lodge where it met the ground.
Now the light seemed to grow stronger as the day moved toward twilight, and for a moment it was brilliant along the western edge of the lodge.
At length. Little Hawk stood up. “It is as it is.” And he stood before the three warriors, tall, erect, regal in every inch of his bearing, a man who had lived many winters.
His eyes fell on Quick Thunder. “I have known you since you were carried by your mother. And you, and you,” he said, looking in turn at Wound and He-in-His- Lodge. But mostly you,” he said, turning back to Quick Thunder.
He was still standing tall, outside his lodge, when the three young warriors mounted their ponies and rode awav.
Later that night the three Brule warriors sat around another fire. They sat on blankets on the edge of a buffalo wallow, not very far from the sheepmen, not very far from the cattlemen, and within a day’s ride of Outpost Number Nine.
“We must waste no more time,” He-in-His-Lodge said, referring to their talk with Little Hawk. “Every moment we delay, the whites grow stronger.”
“It was necessary,” Quick Thunder said.
“But we already knew that Little Hawk would not tie up his horse’s tail and come with us. Nor the other old ones who stayed behind.”
“They are all old,” Wound said. “They are no longer warriors. They are not like us.”
“They are our people,” Quick Thunder said. “And it needed to be spoken, what we said in the lodge. Yes,
I knew how he would answer. But it needed to be spoken. It was the time for that.”
The other two did not argue. All three still felt an uneasiness about Little Hawk’s refusal, yet they were resolved in their purpose.
“It is right that the people must live,” Quick Thunder said. “But they will not live in the good way. They will simply die one by one, for when the heart is gone, there is nothing.”
They sat in silence for a while now, looking at the fire, while around them their warriors waited.
Now Quick Thunder spoke in a new voice, a voice that was sure. “It is true that we are not enough to wipe out the whites. In this. Little Hawk is right.”
“What are you saying?” Wound stared hard at his cousin.
“I am saying that I have a plan.” Quick Thunder was looking steadily into the fire. “Think of it; we are only one band of the Brules. But think of it now; we are Sioux. And there are other Sioux. There are the Hunk- papas. There are the Oglallas.”
“They will help us!” He-in-His-Lodge said.
“With their help we can rub out the whites, and then we will have our land again. Our people will live, and the game will be good.” Quick Thunder had spoken the words as though he were seeing them written in the fire.