SUPPER was over. Dusk, settling over plains and post, deepened into night. Carson led his saddled horse through the gate of the post corral fronting the river bottoms, on the south side. He sprang into the saddle, as the sentry closed and barred the gate again, and flung the man a word.
“Be back ’fore morning.”
He cantered along toward the main gates, at the east or down-river end of the post. Passing these, he descried horse and man vaguely, in the obscurity ahead, and caught a low word of greeting.
“Bon! You are come.”
“You made your brag; I'm here,” answered Carson. “What now?”
“To the council. Maybe you not liked there; but I am Shunan. See Plenty Eagle first.”
It was dark, save for lodge fires that shone ghostlike through whitened, thin-scraped hide walls, or from opened flaps.
Shunan led on, confidently. Carson became uneasily conscious of snapping dogs and statuesque, robe-wrapped figures that stared as he passed among the lodges. Here was the Cheyenne camp. He was well known to these people, as he was to the Arapahoe; but no “How?” of salutation was offered; nor did he offer any.
It was the same in the Arapahoe camp, when they reached it. Carson had noted a steady movement of individuals setting in this direction: and he and Shunan joined this general movement. It converged upon a large lodge whose entrance was ruddy from the reflection of a central fire.
“I have spoken for you, but there must be more talk.” Shunan said, drawing rein. “Plenty Eagle must say. Wait till I come out.”
He vaulted from his horse and went on into the council lodge.
Carson waited, his features impassive, but with senses keened and ears alert. His hide was prickled by the hostility of figures and eyes all around.
Shunan came out again. And with him was a stalwart tall figure, magnificent in painted buffalo robe and tailing feathered head-dress of ceremony. Plenty Eagle! Carson’s fingers tightened upon his rifle. The knife at his belted waist seemed to stir and quiver in its sheath.
For a long moment Plenty Eagle, standing at his very knee, surveyed him as he reined in his horse. Hatred hung heavy in the air between the two men.
“I see your knife red with Blackfoot blood,” Plenty Eagle said suddenly.
Carson retorted in the universal sign-talk: “I see your hair in my belt.”
Plenty Eagle grunted. “A dog barks. No harm.” Then he turned, waited, and made the sign. “Come.”
“A boy will watch the horses,” said Shunan.
Carson slid off. The chief erectly paced back into the lodge. Shunan at his heels, Carson following, thrilling to the marvel of it.
The interior of the big lodge was warmly mellow from the blaze. The flames, flickering in the draught from the entrance, sent shadows dancing eerily, and played with somber highlights upon faces and squatted forms of the council chiefs, densely ranged in a solid circle.
One tense instant of silence and fixed eyes greeted Carson’s entry—then a storm of furious, savage voices. Plenty Eagle dropped the robe to his waist and stood with chest bared, painted stripes and bear-claw necklace glimmering. His voice lifted in imperious authority and beat down the tumult.
“It is said. The white man shall stay; it is Sun Buffalo’s wish. Who cares what he hears? The Americans are few: we are many. Soon we will burn them up like dry grass in fire. Let him sit with Plenty Eagle.”
A gesture of finality. He gathered up his robe, swept back to his vacant niche in the circle, and seated himself. Shunan sat at his knee. Carson beside the flaming breed.
This lodge made a white man feel very small. He could easily read the tribal signs; Cheyennes, Arapaho, Utes, a couple of Sioux, the Blackfeet, Comanches—yonder was the chief who had been with the dancing woman in Santa Fe—Go Everywhere Woman! No Apaches, Crows or Kiowas; but that meant little. There would be plenty to tell Bill Bent, thought Carson, if he ever got out of here on his two feet.
Chief after chief stood up and made harangue, with lips and nimble gesture: Indian harangue of metaphor and simile, passionate and moving, striking fire from savage emotions, yet with meanings to be sensed rather than out-rightly grasped. Here the meanings were clear enough: alliance against the Americans, the war trail everywhere! Only the Utes sat silent. The Utes, friends of the Americans.
Carson could guess that this council was but a preliminary, that nothing would be settled here tonight; that later, weeks or months, perhaps a year, the embers of menace would blow up into a flame of red war. A medicine sign—over and over, the words were repeated. Something had been promised. The tribes were to wait until the medicine sign appeared.
“Sun Buffalo! Hear Sun Buffalo!”
Shunan rose, huge and florid. He spoke with words and fingers; his tongue lapped at English. French, Snake. Spanish, Arapahoe. He adapted himself to all ears, and did it deftly. For the Hudson’s Bay Company, of course: a shrewd speech, pointing to the controlled beaver take of the company, the wasted and desolated streams left by the Americans, whose ruthless hands spared nothing, but stripped clean.
The Blackfeet bore out his words. They held truth, as everyone knew. Carson knew it also, and was angered by the knowledge. Fame and fortune and heart’s desire, so Shunan painted it; all these things awaited the friends of the company. Presently he sat down and turned to Carson.
“Maybe Leetle Chief have something to say? He speaks for the Utes, non?”
“I speak with this, when the time comes!” Carson tapped his rifle. “Utes can speak for themselves. They’ll never join with your Blackfeet and ’Rapahos. You can tell these bad hearts that while there’s one American on plains or in mountains, he’ll fight to keep free country and open trails.”
Shunan laughed, and clapped him on the knee.
“Such talk is only smoke through the nose. Now wait; you see why I brought you here. Ha! By gar, you see something!”
The council circle was leaning forward, eyes expectant, faces tensed. His entrance flap rustled; a figure swiftly entered. On the instant, an old squaw tossed a strip of buffalo fat upon the. fire. The flames sizzled and leaped high, until all the lodge interior was lurid.
The figure was ghostly, robed in a white blanket, a pure white blanket of the Navajos such as Carson had never before seen. The blanket dropped from head and shoulders, from waist and limbs.
It was the woman of Santa Fe!
“Go Everywhere Woman!” The murmured words reached Carson, but with intonation of awe and wonder.
Slimly rounded form, skin warmly tawny like smoke-tanned buckskin, she stood bold and lovely. She was ruddy in the hissing rush of light, ruddily beautiful, so that the whole circle sat in silence, eyeballs glinting.
Then a medicine-drum struck hollow, measured notes.
THE girl, braids tossing, slipped forward in a dance. Her moccasins beat perfect time to the quickening taps of the drum while she circled the central fire. This was no love dance, but a medicine dance to the Great Spirit, such as the young warriors of the Blackfeet put on. when setting out against the enemy. Everyone recognized it.
Moving faster and faster, words became gradually audible on her lips. A reiterant refrain in the Snake tongue: words that seemed to come from her with involuntary pantings. They stirred the circle. They were translated, picked up and passed on:
“When the white beaver crosses the mountains!”
Carson caught the words, wondered briefly, returned to the glowing sight before his eyes of pulsing youth. The circle of chiefs sat with hiss of breath through lips and nostrils, eyes following each step and gesture. Then, suddenly, she ceased the dance. She caught up her white blanket. The last vestige of the flaring buffalo fat hissed and died; and she was gone.
Entranced, Carson sat motionless as the chiefs broke into movement, until the hand of Shunan clamped on his arm.
“That was something to see, hein? Come, my frien'; all is done.”
Mad excitement and confusion—Carson sticking close to Shunan. The chill of the dark night freshened eyes and lungs. Carson drew deep breath and steadied his pulses. He was groping for the reason why Shunan had brought him; would he be permitted to go freely, with what he had heard and seen? He peered for the obscured forms of the waiting horses. Then Shunan gave bluff assurance.
“The horses have been taken to my lodge. We go too, for leetle talk.”
“So you’re camped Injun, huh?”
“Mais oui. Not so good for you to run around alone, maybe, till camp quiets. Then I, Shunan, put you on your trail.”
Shunan’s lodge was set in the Arapahoe camp. The two horses were standing before it. He followed Shunan in-side—then stopped short.
She was here. Sitting composedly-still panting a little, and wearing now the doeskin garments of Santa Fe—on a soft cow-buffalo robe beside the wakened fire. At Carson’s startled look, she flashed a smile, a tinkling laugh at his wonderment. Shunan, turning, laughed broadly.
“You are surprise', hein? Maybe glad you come. You see her before in Santa Fe, yes? You not know she’s my daughter.”
There was shock in the words, but Carson smothered it.
“I never heard you had a daughter.”
“You never see her in the mountains? She have been at school, when she’s young; sometimes with the Blackfeet, her mother’s people. You will be frien’s, Let us sit down. My lodge is yours.”
Carson took one of the two low couches of furs, and Shunan sat opposite upon the other. The girl was between them.
Her presence filled the place with strange witchery. Carson’s eyes caught at details—the long twin braids, the vermilioned part in the sleek black crown, tawny rich skin, allure of rounded limbs and body, lissome, flawless. She sat and smiled, with eyes constant, inviting, deliberative.
“A comfortable lodge,” said Shunan, “Marie, she’s a good keeper. Good to look at too, maybe. Hein?”
“You said you have a talk to make,” Carson rejoined.
“For Leetle Chief, yes. He has been in the council, he was safe; now he is safe here. Will he smoke?”
“Not yet. What’s the talk?”
Shunan’s face drew into grave lines.
“We’ll talk with straight tongue,” he said, and evidently meant it. “You have heard, you have seen, in the council. Maybe you not like; but you heard.”
“I heard a lot of nonsense about a war to wipe out the Americans and turn over the country to another nation,” Carson said coolly, slowly. “By your own words there, that’d be the Hudson’s Bay outfit, from Canada and the Oregon country. Shunan, you’ll never get these tribes together on that. They've too many wars of their own afoot. You’ll notice the Utes didn't rise and speak.”
Shunan smiled. “No? But when the white beaver is passed, they will. Quick.”
The white beaver again! Carson felt his pulses flicker. He was learning, now. Whatever this incredible thing was, it was coming.
“White beaver?” he repeated. “What’s that?”
“Go Everywhere Woman, they call her; but now they give her another name, White Beaver Woman.” And Shunan nodded toward his daughter. The firelight reddened his mass of shaggy locks and flaming beard. “You have heard Marie sing as she danced. She sing of white beaver medicine. But that, my frien', is not the answer. The white beaver is the sign. You have seen white beaver, maybe?”
“No. Never heard of one come to trap,” Carson said. “Did you?”
Shunan nodded thoughtfully. “Once in the Oregon country, I heard of one. It had been seen in a dream by a Blackfoot medicine man, and it say to him: ‘I am White Beaver Woman. Whatever people have me to take across the mountains will be strong forever.’ That is medicine, that dream. Big medicine.”
“What?” Carson, puzzled, glanced at the girl. “You mean her?”
“No, no, no!” And Shunan laughed, then shrugged. “But yes, the man who has Marie, he be strong too. She is not the dream medicine, although she be ver’ good medicine, for sure! The medicine man say that the dream mean the white beaver skin. Marie, she only sing about it, carry the word everywhere. When the pelt of the white beaver is found for the Injuns, that is sign from the Great Spirit. I tell you, plains and mountains get red with blood that day!”