Chief Fierce Bear then took his turn at insults. He said that Danvers and his men had killed so much of the game, cropped so much of the forage, and burned so much of the wood on Sioux land that the children were so hungry and feeble they could not stand; the women shook with moans and laments all day; and not five horses in the whole nation could rise to their feet. He and his warriors had loved peace; they had never killed a man; but if he and his braves were to be treated as if they were sick coyotes, and if they were to be robbed, it would be by brave fighters and not by coughing and sneezing palefaces. He and the men with him were the bravest on earth; they had only scorn for long rifles and knives in the hands of womanish creatures who had turned pale the first time they faced a foe and had never got their color back. He would say again, and for the last time, that the blood in his men was hot and their honor was crying for vengeance. The horses, weapons, tobacco, all these were to be delivered at once.
According to the tale told by trappers, Danvers and the chief swapped insults for an hour or more, and then, backing off, each returned to his men. The battle commenced at once. Danvers was shot through the lungs and suffered so from hemmorhage that he could only stagger around, unable to use his weapons or to speak, able only to stand helpless while he exploded torrents of blood from his mouth and nostrils. Only one whiteman escaped to tell the story.
Sam’s mind again wandered to Windy Bill and Bridger and Charley and their tales; and suddenly out of campfire and tobacco smoke and evening odors there came as sharp and clear as his mother’s farewell these words:
Old woman’s man her children their ghosts there in the blackest night they are in the sagebrush they are crying.
Those words, known to every free trapper in the mountains, had surely been sent down by the Almighty, for the woman on the Musselshell. Sam looked north across Crow land. How was she now? After he had taken a few scalps he would go up to see.
12
BY THE TIME he reached the middle fork of Powder River Sam had become as wary as an Indian. Just ahead were the southern foothills of the Bighorns. He was undecided whether to swing west and go down the Bighorn Valley or straight north between the Bighorns and Powder River, and on to Tongue River, which had its source in the Bighorn Mountains. After hiding his beasts in a thicket and making a tireless camp he considered the matter. What he wanted to know was where most of the Crows were at this time of year. Too lazy, or maybe too restless, to cultivate the soil, they were a wandering people, always on the move. While eating stale jerked meat and thinking, Sam heard the warbling aria of a purple finch. Lord, hearing bird song put hot grief all through his blood and bones; how many times on the long journey south had they stood together, his arms to her shoulders, while listening to this singer, or the robin, the vireo, the vesper sparrow, the lark?
Taking his mind off song and putting it on vengeance, he wished his first triumph might be the death of a chief. That would be a coup to raise the hair of the nation. He had heard that one of their boldest younger chiefs was River of Winds, whose medicine bundle was the weasel, the ferocious killer of the gentle prairie dogs. He had an image of the Crow people, the whole tive or six thousand of them, shaking in a national convulsion as they filled the sky with their blood-chilling mourning-howl. It was the women who shrilled the loudest; their infernal noise was so wild and savage that they turned a whiteman’s blood to water. When with their hideous incantations they tried to terrify the evil spirits they silenced even the wolf. Sam had once seen a large village in which was a mortally wounded warrior: instead of allowing the poor devil in his agony to lie on the fur side of a robe and die in such peace as he could find the women had dragged him all over the place, while blood flowed from a dozen wounds and dogs lapped it up; while with beating of drums and pounding of kettles and blowing on reeds, and flinging piercing yells and shrieks at the sky, they made his last hour on earth a perfect nightmare. They were frightening the evil spirits away. Sam had no doubt that they had;. if the squaws were to enter hell all the creatures there would flee before them.
This evening as on every evening since leaving the Laramie post he examined his weapons. On stone and soft leather he had honed his knives until they could mow the hair on his arms. His revolvers and rifle were oiled, loaded, and in perfect order. His wiping stick, used to force the ball down the rifle barrel, was of tough hickory and the best he had ever seen. He didn’t intend to use his rifle in close lighting, or his handguns either. In a close light you couldn’t shoot fast enough or straight enough. Jim Bowie had taught them all that with a knife you could lay open three assassins before you could shoot one. A man’s heels, knees, lists, and elbows were faster and more deadly than a gun in close quarters. With a blow of his heel driven by powerful leg muscles Sam could break a man’s spine. With his two large hands on a throat he could in an instant so completely shatter the neck that the head would fall over toward the backbone. He felt able to take care of himself in a close fight with as many as four or five redmen, if he had the advantage of surprise; but he thought it might be smart to call on Powder River Charley. He didn’t like Charley the way he liked most of the mountain men; he felt that this tall, sly, awkward-moving trapper had been born with larceny and murder in his heart. Charley seemed always to be boiling for a fight, as though his honor had just been impeached or his mother insulted. Three or four of the trappers had pale-blue eyes that looked half popped out but none had such bulging ferocious eyes as Charley. The moment you met his gaze there was a change in his eyes; they seemed to swell and to move a little out of their caves and to fill to overflowing with the lightnings of challenge. But Charley might know which Crow warriors had gone south to the Little Snake.
He had his own private hideaway back in the Bighorns, with a sheltered foothills meadow that gave forage to his beasts; there were excellent trapping streams all around him. He was in Crow country—he was right in the middle of it—but he was their friend; he had had two or three Crow wives, though still a youngish man. Charley had known such white Crow chiefs as Rose and Beckwourth, and he was a friend of John Smith, one of the most eccentric of the mountain men. It was said that Charley and John used to forgather on a Sunday to sing pious songs and make reverent gestures toward the Father, though Windy Bill said they were the most sanctimonious pair of hypocrites and the meanest varmints and the most inexplicable mixture of caution and foolhardiness, of good will and venomous hostility, to be found in the mountains. It was said that Smith had lived for a while with the Blackfeet, then with the Sioux, then with the Cheyennes, taking wives in all three tribes. It was also said that he could turn the air to a sulphur blue cursing in English, Spanish, and four Indian languages. Sam had never seen the man.
While thinking about Charley there came to Sam the one tale of the many told about him that he liked best. Riding into camp one evening leading a packmule, Charley had wanted to unpack the beast close to the fire; but when he pulled on the leather rope to bring the mule forward, the mule, most stubborn of all critters, laid his ears back and sank toward the earth at his rear end. Charley had then wrapped his end of the rope twice around his waist, and like a horse in harness he had tried to surge forward and take the mule with him; but the mule, if he moved at all, moved backwards, with his rump drawing closer to the earth. Charley by this time was getting up the insane fury for which he was famous. Dashing back to the sulking mule, whose eyes by this time had turned yellow with hate and whose ears had been laid out flat, Charley seized an ear and sank his teethin it; and then with wild howls of rage in both English and Crow he grabbed the nostrils with thumb and fingers and tried to tear the nose off. With a moccasined foot he delivered a blow at the beast’s ribs, and so wrenched his big toe that he screamed with pain and fury; and then smote the mule’s ribs with both fists. By this time the beast had sunk to his hind end and was sitting like a creature determined to sit forever. Charley ran back ten paces, swung, rushed at the mule, and with all his might heaved himself against it, trying to knock it over. By this time several men were shouting encouragement to Charley, who, with a badly sprained toe, bruised hands, a slobbering mouth, and bulging eyes wild with bloodshot, was looking desperately but blindly round him, as though for a crane or derrick. He next worked at right angles to the beast, both right and left; surging forward with the rope, he would yank the mule’s head around and try to topple him over; and then run in the other direction and try to spill him that way. But the mule by this time had his rump flat on the ground and his front feetspread. If Charley had left him alone he probably would have sat there for hours.