Chance stood that way for an instant, waiting for the bullet in the back.
The bullet did not come.
Chance smiled.
I have won, he thought, I have won.
He crouched in the middle of the arroyo; with agony he struggled to keep the weapon steady; its weight seemed incredible to him; then the front sight, wavering only minutely, fastened on a patch of blue sky above the arroyo, over the place where the shadow fell.
“Yah!” yelled Chance, the sudden shout ringing in the still arroyo. Almost at the same instant, above the shadow, Drum’s figure reared into view with incredible swiftness, his rifle pointed downward.
Chance squeezed the trigger and Drum caught the bullet in the chest. His eyes looked startled for an instant and then he toppled into the arroyo, falling in the snow at Chance’s feet.
Drum wore no shirt and his body looked dark in the reddening snow. Chance kicked away Drum’s rifle.
Drum’s eyes were half shut; he was fighting for breath.
Chance stood up wearily, dropped his own rifle into the snow. It was too heavy to hold any longer.
Chance saw that the shadow, of course, still fell calmly on the arroyo wall. He turned, looking upward and behind him. There on the rim of the arroyo opposite, casting the shadow, was Drum’s shirt, hooked on a stake of brush. One stick had even been thrust into the brush, looking in the shadow as if it might be a rifle.
Chance, his left arm hanging at his side, knelt beside Drum. He looked at the wound, its placement, considered the angle at which the bullet had entered.
I’m sorry, he thought, kneeling in the snow, I’m sorry.
Drum’s eyes opened. In them there was no anger, no fear.
Chance, to do something, not because there was much point in it, scooped up some snow, trying to press it on the wound in Drum’s chest.
Weakly Drum pushed his hand away. “No,” he said.
Chance was silent.
There was nothing much to say or do. The handful of snow had been a gesture, nothing more. The heart would stop long before the body had lost much blood.
And so Chance knelt in the snow in the bottom of the arroyo, near the young Indian, watching him, listening to him breathe, with his physician’s ear marking the change of breath from minute to minute, the alternation of its rhythm, its frequency, the change in the sound, parameters and gradients familiar to Chance; soon gases would no longer be exchanged; a certain natural process would terminate; a man would be dead.
Drum had turned his head toward him, was looking at him.
“My heart is heavy,” said Chance. “You will ride the death trail.” He looked at Drum. “Tonight,” said Chance, “your pony will trample stars and among the stars a second rider waits for you, that you will hunt with him, and there will be antelope and buffalo, and together through the high sweet grass under the blue sky you will ride with him, and all the Indians will say these are the greatest of our hunters, they, Kills-His-Horse of the Hunkpapa, and Drum, who is his son.”
Drum smiled at Chance weakly. “No,” he said.
Chance said nothing, looking down at the snow.
“I am proud it was you,” said Drum. “No Long Knife could kill Drum.”
Chance looked at him. “No,” he said.
Drum put his right hand over the wound in his chest. Then, weakly, he tried to lift his hand to Chance’s wound. Chance took the hand in his own right hand and put it, bloody, to his shoulder.
“My Brother,” said Drum.
“I am proud,” said Chance, softly.
Drum closed his eyes, and Chance speculated that it was the end. But before he died he opened his eyes once more, and said, “The blood of the badger is true.”
Chance never understood his last words. He was not even sure he had heard them correctly. If he had, he guessed Drum was delirious.
He looked at the red body sprawled in the snow; now the wound had stopped flowing. Mechanically Chance listened for the heartbeat, felt the pulse. He saw the eagle feather in Drum’s hair, lying in the snow, wet. He took it in his hands, wiped it a bit, and laid it over Drum’s left shoulder.
Then Chance got up, went down the arroyo to get his shirt, tied it as well as he could around his shoulder, and then returned to where Drum lay and sat down beside him in the snow, waiting for the Indians to come.
Chapter Twenty-two
Chance, his left arm in a sling, and Lucia, in her squaw dress, dismounted before the remains of what had been her soddy on the reservation. She had ridden Totter’s horse, with the cavalry saddle and the “U.S.” branded on its flank.
“You shouldn’t have come back with me,” she said, touching her lips to his.
“You can reach the agency alone from here,” said Chance. “You’ll be safe.”
Lucia looked at the burned-out shell of the soddy, now gentle with snow.
They had ridden northeast with the Hunkpapa and the Minneconjou from the Bad Lands to the Grand River country. There had been no incident. The ragged, proud file of Indians had made its way openly and with deliberate slowness through the snowy South Dakota prairie. They had passed without being challenged, sometimes riding under the binoculars of distant patrols, sometimes past the gun ports of squat soddy forts, bunkers of a sort, manned by armed homesteaders. It had been clear that the Indians had not been attempting to conceal their movements or position. It had been clear they were returning to Standing Rock. After Wounded Knee no one had made any attempt to interfere.
Lucia and Chance watched the Indians ride by the soddy, heading for the agency buildings on the Missouri, a few miles to the east.
Aside from their night camps and their pauses in the march to cook and eat, the Indians had made only one stop, that at the place of scaffolds. There, wrapped in a blanket and buffalo robe, tied with rope, fastened in the branches of a cottonwood, they had left the body of Drum. It would remain there until the wind and the rain, and the birds, maybe a century from now, had finished with it. To the bundle they had tied a gourd rattle, that would move when the wind blew, making its noise, and seven eagle feathers, that which Drum himself had worn, and one for each of the young men who had originally followed him from Grand River, two of whom survived.
Lucia and Chance lifted their hands, waving good-bye to Old Bear, to Winona and Running Horse, the others.
“You’ve got to go,” said Lucia, standing close to him. “I know you’ve got to go.”
“I’ll write to you,” said Chance. “Really I will.” And he knew that he would. Come hell or high water, for her sake or his, he was not going to give up this woman. He had been through that. Now the morality of loving her and wanting her had triumphed. He had won her in an arroyo in the Bad Lands of South Dakota. They were one blanket. The Hunkpapa does not desert his woman; he does not abandon her.
“Will you come to California?” asked Chance.
“I’ll run all the way,” she said, nuzzling against him.
“When you get tired,” he said, mumbling, pressing his lips to her throat, “take the train.”
Her head was back. Her eyes were closed, her lips slightly open. “I’ll never get tired,” she said. “Never.”
He kissed her on the shoulder, under the buckskin dress.
“It’s too bad you can’t carry me across the threshold,” she whispered. “I always wanted to know what it feels like.”
Chance looked skeptically at his left shoulder, at the sling improvised from a strip of blanket. Then suddenly he scooped her up with his right arm, tossing her over his shoulder like a sack of barley.
“No!” she shrieked, laughing.
He carried her, teasing and laughing, through the door of the soddy. Just as he dropped her to her feet the laugh stopped in his throat. Lucia, who was trying to regain her balance, turned, laughing. Her body stiffened at what she saw.