Magee rolled his tongue over his upper teeth. "Damn mad about it, too, I guess."
"You don't have to go in with me."
"Oh, sure. I came this far to be a yellow dog, huh? That isn't the kind of soldier somebody trained me to be." Staring at Charles's haggard eyes, at the long pointed beard nearly down to his stomach, Magee suddenly winced. "I'm sorry I sound sore. I just think all this is hopeless. Your boy's gone, Charles."
"No he isn't," Charles said. "Gray Owl? Go in or stay?"
"Go." The tracker eyed the village, but not in a comfortable way. "First, load all the guns."
It was a splendid balmy day. The wrong sort of day for the tragedy of a lost son or a starving belly. The wind floated fluffy clouds overhead and the clouds cast majestic slow-sailing shadows. In and out of the shadows, in single file, the three rode in the Z pattern Jackson had taught Charles.
One of the pelt-clad dancers was first to spy them. He pointed and raised a cry. The drumming stopped. Men and women and children surged toward the side of the camp nearest the strangers. The men were middle-aged or elderly; the warriors were undoubtedly off somewhere searching for food. Well before Charles was within hailing distance, he saw the sun flashing from the metal heads of lances and the blades of knives. He also saw that no dogs frolicked anywhere. The tipis were weathered and torn. There was an air of despair about the village beside the Sweet Water.
The wind still blew in their faces. Charles smelled offal, smoke, and sour bodies. He didn't like all the gaunt angry faces lining up behind the dancers, or the truculent expression of the stout old warrior who strode out to meet them with his eight-foot red lance and his round red buffalo-hide shield. The horns of his headdress were red but faded; he had distinguished himself in war many winters past.
Charles held his hand palm outward and spoke in their language.
"We are peaceful."
"You are hunters?"
"No. We are searching for a small boy, my son." That touched off whispers among some of the grandmothers. Magee caught it too, raising an eyebrow. Those starved old women with their watering eyes acted as if they knew who Charles was talking about. "May we come into the village a while?"
Chief Red Bear thrust his shield out. "No. I know that man beside you. He turned his face from the People to go and help the white devils of the forts. I know you, Gray Owl," he exclaimed, shaking his shield and lance. One of the dancers with a scrap of pelt on his head sank to a half-crouch, his knife moving in a small provocative circle.
"You are soldiers," the chief said.
"We are not, Red Bear —" Gray Owl began.
The chief pointed his lance at the trackers and shouted: "Soldiers. Call Whistling Snake from the Massaum lodge."
Magee brought up his Spencer from the saddle where he'd been resting it. "Don't," Charles said in English. "One shot and they'll tear us up."
" 'Pears they'll do it anyway." There was a slight quaver in Magee's voice; Charles feared that what he said was so. More than a hundred people confronted them. In terms of physical strength each of the Cheyennes was no match. Hunger had shrunk them and age enfeebled them. Numerically, however, they had the fight won before it started.
"Do you know this Whistling Snake?" Charles asked Gray Owl.
"Priest," Gray Owl replied, almost inaudibly. "Ugly face. As a young man he scarred his own flesh with fire to show his magical powers. Even chiefs like Red Bear fear him. This is very bad."
Small boys darted forward to pat the horses. The animals sidestepped nervously, hard to control. Indian mothers chuckled and nudged one another, eyeing the trackers as if they were so much contract beef. Charles didn't know what to do. He had bet on having an ace facedown and turned over a trey.
One last try. "Chief Red Bear, I repeat, we only wish to ask if anyone in your village has seen a white man traveling with a small —"
The crowd parted like a cloven sea. There was a great communal sigh of awe and dread. The old camp chief's gaze was curiously taunting. Along the dirt lane fouled with human waste came the priest, Whistling Snake.
MADELINE'S JOURNAL
April 1869. The school has a new globe, a world map for the wall, eight student desks to replace the homemade ones. A party of distinguished Connecticut educators plans to visit next month. Prudence insists we must clean and refurbish the place.
The rasp of the mill saws and the rattle of the mining' carts I hear amidst the sweet noise of house construction remind me that we can afford windows to replace the school-house shutters. Andy will glaze them. Prudence and I and one or two of the youngsters can do the other tasks at night. It is suitable work for lonely women: demanding tiring. Prudence, strong as a teamster, grows a little stouter every month. Though she still quotes her favorite passage from Romans, I now detect a sadness in her eyes. I think she knows she will remain a spinster. As I will remain a widow. To work until the body aches is the best medicine for the loneliness that seems to be one of God's great blights on existence.
I share sadness of another kind with Jane. She told me that despite long effort she cannot conceive a child. Prudence, the Shermans, Orry's dying as he did, senselessly — they are all linked somehow. Is it because they all testify that we are never guaranteed a happy life, only life itself? ...
Encountered a man, young and poorly clothed, riding a white horse on the river road. He gave no greeting, though he stared as if he knew me. Despite his youth there was a cruel aspect to his face. He is no good-hearted Northerner come to inspect our school, I think. ...
... Andy saw him this morning.
And again I met him. I hailed him. He charged his white horse at me as if to trample me down, forcing me to throw myself aside and take a bad tumble in the weeds. For one moment his face flashed by above me, a perfect study of hatred. ...
... No sign of him for two days. I suspect and hope he has gone elsewhere, to terrorize others. ...
The small Negro cemetery overlooked the Ashley in the scrubs outside Charleston. The ground around the grave mounds was a musty carpet of brown decaying leaves. Bunches of wilted sunflowers and even a few brown dandelions lay on the graves; the place was poor, and poorly kept.
Des LaMotte knelt and prayed before a wooden marker from which he'd chiseled a shallow circular depression. Into this he had wedged a common-looking plate, chipped at many places on the edge and showing a long crack. On the marker, above the slave's plate, he had carved an inscription.
Where the trees opened on the water, a silver-colored sky shone with a strangely threatening luminescence. The wind, a rising nor'easter, streamed in from the Atlantic. It was too cold for spring. Or maybe Des was feeling the effects of time, and poverty, and his strange inability to come to grips with his enemy. After the travail of war and the passage of years, he no longer wanted vengeance so ferociously. Honor was less important than bread, or keeping possession of his tiny room in town, or preserving clothes he couldn't afford to replace. "LaMotte honor" now had the queer sound of a foreign phrase impossible to translate.