We were talking about that when I first saw the signal ahead of us, a white, thick column rising beyond the sun mist. I showed it to Chuck Morris, and his face turned pale in an instant.
“A prairie fire?” I asked him, because I had heard a good deal about them.
RECKONING
I stared at Chuck with a growing dread in my heart, but he did not speak. He turned and cut the antelope away from his saddle - all that precious fresh meat of which we had been so happy and so proud. I did not ask questions about that. I simply followed his example and then sent my brown after his gray. It was hard to keep pace with that flying mare. Up to that time I had thought secretly that this talk about the blood of White Smoke was a silly prejudice on the part of Chuck Morris rather than a real superiority. For it seemed to me that there was nothing the gray mare could do that my brown gelding could not manage.
I saw the difference on that wild ride across the prairie. Chuck, in spite of the greater weight which he made in the saddle, could have ridden away from me at any time, if he had chosen to do so. The gray mare was still sliding over the ground at an easy gallop when the brown gelding was utterly spent, his head bobbing, his hoofs pounding. If I had learned to love horseflesh before this, I learned at that moment to value blood and bone and the heart that knows no weakness.
We did not speak on the whole return trip, but there was no need of talk. We thought of only one terrible possibility, and, when we reached the source of the smoke, we saw that our fears had been prophetic, indeed. There lay the caravan, a crumbled, blackened ruin. The story was told even by the smoldering remnants of the wagons. There had not been time to curl the train into a perfect circle. The danger struck too quickly after the first warning. While the rear wagons were hurrying up, and while the front wagons were slowly turning back to make the circle, the charge struck home. Through the gap the screaming riders must have poured. After that there was no chance to make an organized defense. Ten men in good positions may keep off a thousand Indians - for a time, at the least. But when it comes to scattering fight, man to man, it takes a rare good white man to beat an Indian when the latter is attacking with his first rush. At any rate, not a soul remained alive, and most of them had been burned beyond recognition. First the Indians had looted the wagons of all that was useful to them. Then they had thrown the bodies of the whites into the wagons and set them all on fire, trusting to the fire itself to wipe out the traces of their crime. But we, wandering slowly through that dreadful place, were able to identify a few of the bodies, and from every one the scalp had been ripped away. There were fifty-three dead men. Not a soul had escaped except the two of us.
I was so sick that Chuck Morris had to help me away. We climbed into the saddles, rode over the next rise, and stopped in the hollow. There I threw myself from the saddle and fell flat on my back. I stared up at the evening sky. The red of the sunset was not the only red that seemed swimming and streaming across it. Then I sat bolt erect.
“Chuck,” I said, “you hear me swear that so long as I live I’ll…”
He clapped his hand over my mouth. “Leave the rest of that oath be,” he said. “I know what you’re gonna say. You’ll never treat an Indian the rest of your life to nothin’ but bullets. Well, don’t say it, Lew. You ought to have better sense, and you’ll get better sense after a while. I’ve known Indians all my life. They come good, and they come bad. Just the way white men do. But if they’re some bad, the whiskey that they get out of the traders makes them worse. You can’t give a man poison and then blame him for what he does.”
“Would you let a thing like this go, Chuck?” I asked him, full of horror. “When I think of poor Chris Hudson….”
“Chris was a fine fellow,” said Morris. “But the average is what you got to think of. The average good that the traders have done for the Indians is to give them whiskey to turn them crazy and give them guns to do more murders with when they’re crazy. Whiske’ll kill more Indians than rifles ever will, Lew, and you’ll agree with me before long.”
“Why?”
“When our horses are rested a mite, you and me are going to have a look at that gang and pay them back a little for the pretty piece of work that they’ve done.”
He had such a set look about the face that I was afraid he meant what, in fact, he really did mean. I asked him what he intended to try.
He said: “We each have a Colt and a rifle. That gives us seven shots without reloading.”
He didn’t offer any more explanation, and I didn’t ask for any because of pride. But I was feeling rather wobbly inside, I can tell you, when we climbed onto our horses again. It was easy to follow the trail of those Indians, of course, for they had ridden off in a solid troop.
“What mighty near kills me,” said Chuck, “is the number of the Indians. Why, son, there wasn’t more’n sixty or seventy of the rascals, take them altogether.”
It seemed to me that was quite a number, particularly for two youngsters like ourselves to play with, but I had to follow where Chuck led me. Pure shame whipped me along. I wouldn’t be first, but I wouldn’t be useless.
It was dark, then twilight, then black night, with all the stars scattered over the sky. Against those stars we presently came on a scaffolding on top of which was a bundled form, and under the scaffold was a dead horse. There were other scaffolds near, built from the timber taken from the wagons, and on each scaffold was the bundled form, and beneath each frame was a dead horse.
“Five Indians,” said Chuck Morris, “gone to death…one for every ten white men that they’ve murdered. Oh, this wouldn’t be believed! It makes my blood boil. Ten for one.”
Really, the actual murders in themselves seemed to make very little difference to Morris. It was the fact that they had not at least slaughtered twice as many Indians as the whites numbered - that was what punished him.
“But the horses?” I asked him.
“They kill a horse for each dead man. The braves have to have something to ride when they get to the happy hunting grounds, don’t they?”
He said it rather testily, as though I should have guessed that oddity at a glance. Then we rode on, but I couldn’t help looking back at those dead forms, turned toward the sky under which they had lived and fought and murdered.
After a time, Chuck pointed straight ahead. “There it is,” he said.
“What?”
“The fire, of course.”
I had no idea what he meant, but, after we had gone a little farther ahead, I made out a very faint glow beyond the next swale. Immediately after that we heard their voices.
“All drunk,” said Morris. “All dead drunk. If they’ve taken too much of that poison that Gregory called whiskey, they’ll wake up as dead as Gregory himself is.”
We dismounted and ran up the swale. Underneath us was the fire, built of still more wood from the wagons that they had taken along with them and heaped higher with brush that they had cut down on the prairie. All around that fire we could see them. Most of them lay flat on the ground, the light glistening on the copper of their half-naked bodies. But a dozen or so were still staggering around the fire, falling down every step or two and then picking themselves up again to go on with the dance. I shall never forget the sound of their drunken maunderings as they tried to shout and sing their chants.