We stayed at Plum Creek a couple days, and the Pawnee patrolled the country roundabout, finding it altogether clear of hostiles. North and his officers had just about decided to return to the end-of-track when a force of Cheyenne appeared on the south bank, coming back, I reckon, as an Indian will, to the place of their prior victory: remember they had hit Julesburg twice.
The Pawnee howled their war cries and headed for the bridge near the old stage station, which was too small to accommodate their whole force, so a good many went into the water and forded the stream, but coming up the other shore their horses stuck in the mud, so the scouts dismounted and footed it up the bank. This movement confused the Cheyenne, who had not expected resistance where before they had it so easy, and when the Pawnee delivered a murderous fire from their Spencer repeating carbines, making a half-dozen kills, the Human Beings turned and run for it despite their advantage of number.
I rode with North across the bridge. As I have suggested he had a low opinion of me, but when the action started he didn’t have time to take a mind of what I was doing and once we reached the other bank I galloped free on the borrowed Pawnee pony. It was a liberating feeling once again to have such a mount. I hadn’t rode pad saddle for many a year, but once you have been trained to the Indian style of riding you don’t forget it no more than you disremember to swim if dumped into the water after years away.
There we went, pounding along, us few whites and forty Pawnee, with maybe a hundred and fifty Cheyenne in full flight across a mile of prairie, with the roar of hoofs and Pawnee yells and the frequent crack of them Spencers, the Human Beings loosing a few futile arrows but mainly running in disorder.
The ground slowly ascended towards a line of hills. Now and again a Cheyenne dropped from his pony and a Pawnee sprang off to deal him the death-stroke if he still breathed, and lift his scalp. I hadn’t fired yet and never intended to except in self-defense, but that Pawnee, Mad Bear, kept lateral and eyed me, his roach blown flat from the rush of wind, so at length I squeezed one off from my Ballard, purposefully aiming midway between the two nearest Cheyenne. But I had little practice at firing from a running horse up to then, on account of not having had a gun in my pony days, and by a quirk of chance cut off a flying braid from the farther man. It was entwined with blue ribbon, for I saw it on the ground as I thundered over, and indeed it looked queer there.
Now we was reaching the slopes, and higher on could see the Cheyenne women and children with their camp baggage on the pony drags. They was fleeing too, but hardly so fast as the overtake, so their warriors flowed around them and turned and rode back against us, but the Pawnee broke the charge with their rapid-firing carbines. Then the Cheyenne dismounted, give their ponies to the women and children, who abandoned the baggage and run for it behind the barrier of their menfolk walking backwards.
They managed the retreat as well as Indians could with no discipline and no strategy, and was no longer in rout though steadily losing men. Seventeen Cheyenne was killed that afternoon and countless wounded, and it seemed for an hour or so that the whole band might be rubbed out by nightfall, for as usual they owned few rifles, and the Pawnee continued between charges to pour a fire from beyond arrow range and drop them one by one.
Then we outflanked them, being they was afoot and with their fleeing village spread across the hills and into the valleys between, and despite what North could do to prevent it, his men killed a few noncombatants, for the Pawnee medicine was great that day and fed by fresh blood, and to an Indian an enemy is fair game of whatever sex or size. I saw a Cheyenne woman get shot off her horse. She was fat and for some reason looked familiar to me, and I rode alongside while the Pawnee put his knife above her ear and carved. For a second I thought it Was my foster-mother Buffalo Wallow Woman-but no it wasn’t, and I galloped on.
However, it did give me a start, for this fight was another thing from the trouble in which Olga and Gus was carried off. I got no satisfaction in running with the Pawnee: having been raised to hate them. I felt right uneasy about the whole business and sure didn’t like shooting at Cheyenne who was defending their families. And suppose this very band was holding Olga and Gus: soon I’d find their bodies with the skulls busted in. I had been a fool to board that train at Julesburg.
Thinking in this negative fashion I continued to ride and before I knowed it had got separated from the Pawnee now charging the right of the Cheyenne line, which was ever falling back though stubbornly. I was on the left and descending the valley behind the first range of hills. Ahead of me and widely dispersed, the Cheyenne women and children was quirting their ponies, here and there pursued by Pawnee riders.
It was right dry, and clouds of dust climbed to meet those of gunsmoke, and then the wind spread the mixture as a thin fog across the country, filtering the sunlight, and the colors looked intense as they do at a certain hour of evening. I was about half a mile now from the concentrated fire, so that it popped rather than blasted or snapped to my ear.
To make these observations and to rest my frothing pony, I had pulled him up at the lip of a deep ravine. Bad place to halt during a fight, and being an Indian mount he knowed it, and strained to move on, tired as he was. And then he give a deep sigh and sunk beneath me, like I was sitting on a big bag of grain that had a small puncture out of which the grains leaked steadily. But I leaped free before he was all the way down, being horseman enough to realize he had took an arrow in his belly. Though I hadn’t heard its flight nor felt its entry.
There was a Cheyenne in the ravine. I lay just back of the margin thereof, waiting for him to appear, my horse gasping out its life nearby, and not another sound. I put my hat onto the muzzle of the Ballard and stuck it just over the rim, and thungg! come an arrow into the brim, passing through feathers and all, and in descending almost hit me though its power was spent. Then before I could withdraw my weapon, he had seized the barrel end with a grip so mighty that had I retained hold I should have been drug into the gulch atop him. I am a small man. I let go and lost my rifle, though managed to discharge it before my hand was tore from out the trigger guard, the ball puffing up the sand on the far bank, not hurting him except for the shock of passage, from which his brown fingers jumped as though burnt. Then the stock upended and slid out of view.
Well, it was single-shot and wouldn’t do him no good unless he carried a supply of .56 rimfires. So I pulled my pistol and hurled myself to the brink and had he been still up on the bank where he seized my rifle I’d of killed him straightway, but he had already slid to the bottom with the Ballard at his knees all fouled with sand and empty, and he knowed it and was out of arrows, and drawed his knife, and, standing up, began to sing of death.
I recognized this man. It was Shadow That Comes in Sight. I wish he done as much for me, for as I started down the bank, he come to meet me with unfriendly intent and that edged weapon.
CHAPTER 16 My Indian Wife
“HOLD ON, BROTHER,” I cried in Cheyenne. “Let us talk.” And then, with my attention so strenuously fixed upon him, I tripped on that steep slope I was negotiating and plunged directly towards him, my pistol firing inadvertently as my hands clenched.
He held up his knife, with his left fingers gripping the right-hand wrist, so as to give added support for the impact. Which is to say, I was about to be impaled just below the arch of my rib-cage. My accidental shot had gone into the air.
Well, I was only falling six feet, but the time consumed by any type of action is relative, and I recall hanging motionless there in space like the subject in a photograph or artist’s rendering. Shadow wore two eagle feathers, aslant one from the other. There was beads of sweat upon his brown shoulders. He wore a choker of horizontal porcupine quills divided by vertical lines of blue beads; and between his left bicep and elbow cavity, a copper armlet; between his legs a dirty breechclout of red flannel. The black points of his narrow-lidded eyes was fixed on the target of my upper belly, and his legs was braced for the collision. Vermilion was the predominant color of his face paint, with an overlay of yellow bolts of lightning.