Scar screeched like a boy who'd won a game. He jumped on Charles with both knees, then rolled him from his side to his back. He seized Charles's knife hand and pushed it over his head into the mud. The axe swung high, a black wedge against a familiar milky veil of stars.
The axe came down. Charles wrenched his head the other way; felt the blade scrape his hair before it buried in the mud. He twisted his knife hand and pricked Scar's knuckles. Scar yelled, more surprised than hurt.
Charles tried to jerk his knife hand free. Scar held fast. Charles smelled the rancid grease Scar had used to dress his body before he applied his paint. Scar swung the muddy axe down again, and again Charles twisted away. The wrenching movement freed his knife hand. He spiked the Bowie through the upper part of Scar's left arm.
The Dog Society man dropped the axe. The blunt top of the blade bounced off Charles's temple. Scar was breathing harshly, in pain. Charles clamped the Cheyenne's chin in his left hand, his right hand with the knife well inside Scar's bleeding left arm. He felt the chin clamped in his left hand turn to flaccid weight. The wound was draining Scar quickly. Charles had only to reach up and cut his throat.
"Stab him,'' Gray Owl said from the dark.
Charles's knife hand began to shake. Scar hung over him like a meal sack someone was filling; it became heavier and heavier.
Reach up.
He couldn't do it. He pushed with his left hand and rolled from underneath as Scar tumbled away. He'd whipped him. That was enough.
He felt a hand snatch at his right thigh before he comprehended what it was. Gray Owl ran forward as Scar sat up, cocking the Army Colt he'd plucked from Charles's holster. Despite the mud coating the piece, the mechanism worked. Gray Owl stepped in front of Charles to shield him, and the two Cheyennes exchanged shots. The tracker took the one meant for Charles.
Scar's head flung backward in the mud with a sloppy splash. He was hit, though Charles couldn't tell where. Up on the rise, the ponies of the four riders neighed and tossed their heads. Gray Owl sank to his knees and discharged three more rounds at them. In Cheyenne, he shouted that Scar was killed. The Indians hastily formed a file and trotted out of sight.
Gray Owl exhaled, a weary sound. Charles scraped mud out of his eyes and crawled toward the tracker as he relaxed and slipped down onto his back. In the village someone raised an alarm.
Charles lifted Gray Owl in his arms. The tracker's shirt was slippery with mud and blood. The starlight whitened his face, which showed a remarkable repose.
"I found the way for us, my good friend. Now I go on."
"Gray Owl, Gray Owl," Charles said in a broken voice.
"I go on as my vision foretold. I go —"
"Gray Owl."
"There." With a tremor in his hand, Gray Owl reached for the veil of stars. The Hanging Road. His hand fell back to the bosom of his shirt and Charles heard the rattle and felt the shudder as he died.
He held Gray Owl's body while he studied that of Scar, motionless with the Army Colt in his hand. He knew there was something he should do but exhaustion and confusion kept it from him a few moments. Then he remembered. He envisioned a platform high in a tree, nearer to heaven. It was his duty to build that for Gray Owl, a good man. He had believed his gods wanted him to lead others, even if that led him to exile, and the white man's path, and death. To the end he was faithful to the vision. Charles wished he had something as strong to believe in.
But he did. He remembered Gus. He remembered Willa.
Gently he laid the body on the muddy grass. He slipped twice gaining his feet. He heard clamorous voices behind him. Red Bear and his people. They would help him build Gray Owl's resting place. He turned around to wait for them.
Dying but not dead, Scar raised himself a few inches and shot Charles in the back.
GEO HAZARD
CARE OF HAZARDS
LEHIGH STATION PENNSYLVANIA
THE CRIMINAL BENT APPREHENDED AND EXECUTED IN THE INDIAN TERRITORY ON THE 27TH INST. I HAVE THE EARRING.
CHARLES MAIN
FT LEAVENWORTH KANS
BY TELEGRAPH
MADELINE'S JOURNAL
May, 1869. The press has a new hare to chase. Charleston papers are full of revelations from Washington about the Dixie Stores. Cannot believe the name associated with the scandal.
"Unfortunate," said the Boss. "Very unfortunate, Stanley. I thought you'd make an excellent congressman from your district when Muldoon retires at the end of the next term. You're well known, you can afford to campaign, your positions are highly principled."
Stanley knew what that last meant. He was obedient to orders from the state machine, which was under his guest's absolute control.
The two of them were seated near the bust of Socrates at the Concourse, Stanley's favorite club. Stanley's face had a pale and saggy look these days. He was standing fast in the face of daily exposes, principally in the Star. Although Stanley was forty-seven and his guest, Simon Cameron, seventy, Stanley felt that the Boss was the more vigorous. He'd stayed slim. His hair showed no sign of thinning and his gray eyes revealed none of the dullness of imminent senility that Stanley noted in some men Cameron's age. The Boss had returned to the Senate in '67, and had never been so powerful. Political intrigue agreed with him.
Reflective, Cameron sipped his Kentucky whiskey. A warm spring twilight gilded the windows near them. "As to circumstances now," he resumed, "I must be candid with you. Usury may not be illegal but it is certainly unpopular. And Northerners have grown tired of flogging the South. The Dixie affair has actually generated a surge of sympathy for the victims of carpetbag profiteers." He raised a hand to placate his host. "That's a newspaper term, my boy, not mine. But it is regrettable that the moment Dills was confronted with that Klansman's confession, be caved in."
Stanley snapped his fingers to summon one of the servile waiters. He called for another round so blithely, Cameron was puzzled. Stanley was under enormous pressure because of the stories linking him to ownership of Mercantile Enterprises, which owned the forty-three Dixie Stores throughout South Carolina. Almost daily Stanley made a public denial of his guilt; he explained nothing, merely professed his innocence with the determination of old Stonewall resisting the enemy at First Bull Run. Given Stanley's past behavior, Cameron expected him to be not only visibly tired, which he was, but also completely unnerved, which he was not. Remarkable.
Stanley said, "I presume Dills cooperated in hopes of keeping what's left of his practice. In the past year or so his circumstances have been greatly reduced. No one's sure about the reason. He had to resign from this club, for example. He couldn't afford it any longer."
"Like our friend Dills, I presume you'd like to keep something, too? Such as your good name?" The lean old Scotsman's face showed a familiar severity. "You have no political future without it."
"I have nothing to do with the Dixie Stores, Simon. Nothing." There; another sign of Stanley's surprising new assertiveness. Until recently he'd been timid about using the Boss's first name. "I have stated and restated that to the press, and I'll continue to say it, because it's true."
Cameron puffed his lips out and moved his tongue behind them as if trying to dislodge an irritating seed. "Well, yes, but to be candid, my boy, in the Republican hierarchy, they don't believe you."