“Go,” I said in his own language. “The teepee of the Stink Bear is too small for the son of a great chief like Three Buck Elk.”
He shuddered under every word as though it had been the stroke of a blacksnake and, for a soul like Sitting Wolf’s, that speech of mine was worse than any beating. But he turned on his heel and walked out of the tent with the dignity of a grown Indian brave.
I had hardly time to fling ROBINSON CRUSOE the width of the tent and damn all books and what they did to men, when Three Buck Elk’s youngest squaw came running to me. She caught me by the arm and pulled me after her.
“What have you done to Sitting Wolf?” she asked. “He is dying.”
I hurried after her full of horror until she had brought me behind the teepee, and there she showed me Sitting Wolf, lying on his face, hidden in some shrubs. Not a sound came from him, but he twisted his whole body as if in agony. His face was buried in his arms; his fingers were clutched in his hair. That was his remorse, his shame because he had insulted me. It cut me to the heart. Yet, I have heard fools say that Indians have no emotion. However, I dared not interfere. I couldn’t do it without losing my dignity and showing the tears in my eyes, and then even Sitting Wolf himself would have despised me a little as long as he lived. So I said to the girclass="underline" “Keep your eyes off him. Sitting Wolf is a little sick now. I shall make him well before the next sunrise.”
Then I went back to my teepee with a very dark heart. I had hardly gone inside when Standing Bear came to the entrance, wrapped in his robe, with a splendid set of feathers in his hair - true eagle quills, stained blue and crimson and yellow. His eyes fell on the spot where the book lay, and by that single glance I knew that he had been nearby and had heard the entire scene between me and the boy. I expected that he would deliver a lecture to me on the subject. He was greatly worried, and so was Three Buck Elk, I knew, because of those English lessons. But he said: “I have not seen Rising Sun.”
“Have you looked for him in his teepee?”
“I have looked there. So I come to his brother.”
“He is probably gadding about with some of the young braves, practicing with his bow and arrows,” I suggested.
“The bow has a small voice,” he said, “but it has many tongues.” This was his way of saying that the rifle has a single shot, and that a bow in a strong hand can turn loose a steady stream of arrows. He went on: “I have found a thought in my heart that I will give to Rising Sun.”
I went out and whistled through my fingers - you can make a shriek like a siren in that way, if you know how. Almost at once Chuck came in view, racing his pony toward me. He leaped off while the little brute was still in full gallop.
“What’s up?” he asked, for that whistle was our signal to call one another for important matters.
“Old Standing Bear has something on his mind,” I told him. “He looks more like a storm than ever. I think he wants to send us out on a war party.”
“I hope so,” said Chuck. “This time I’m going after scalps.”
He strode into the teepee. I went to the entrance, and Standing Bear waved me in.
“What a man thinks, his brother must think also,” explained Standing Bear.
He said not another word, but remained gravely seated on a buffalo robe. I saw what he wanted and so took out and loaded a pipe, which I lighted and puffed, then passed to Chuck, who took a whiff and handed it to Standing Bear. The old fellow kept it, nodding his satisfaction.
“Rising Sun,” he said at last, “how many horses have you?”
“Five,” said Chuck.
“They are all chosen horses,” said Standing Bear. “You have a teepee also.”
“Yes.”
“It is filled with robes, with food, with guns, with arrows and bows, with moccasins.”
“Yes.”
“And yet,” said Standing Bear, “your teepee is empty.”
“I am contented,” Chuck replied.
“If the sun sets, when will the sun rise again?”
Chuck looked at me. I had seen the drift of Standing Bear at once.
“If you die, Chuck,” I translated, “there will be no sun left …not even a moon. You have no children.”
“The devil,” said Chuck and then grinned in the foolish way that most men do when a certain subject is mentioned.
“If an unlucky bullet or an arrow found the heart of Rising Sun,” said the chief, between his puffs, “my tribe would be left in darkness.”
Chuck shook his head.
“It is good that a man have a squaw,” said Standing Bear. “You are now one of my nation. You must have children. Their hands will be strong for you when your hands are weak, friend.” He stretched out his own huge paws. “I, Standing Bear,” he continued, “have empty hands. I have many horses and many squaws, and my teepee is filled, and still it is empty, and the heart of Standing Bear is empty also. I have no children.”
He dropped his head for a moment. For the first time in my life I pitied that fellow.
“There was only my brother’s son,” went on the chief, “but what we thought was a hawk now wears the feathers of an eagle and begins to fly with his kind.”
Here he looked at me - a left-handed compliment, along with a black look that gave me a chill.
“He has left the nest of his father,” said Standing Bear. “He strikes with Black Bear’s claws” - here he touched my rifle - “and he speaks with Black Bear’s tongue. But that is good. An eagle is greater than a hawk.”
Another compliment, but it did not mask the soreness of his heart.
“But you, friend,” said Standing Bear to Chuck, “have taken no hawk from our tribe and made it your own. It is good that you should have a squaw.”
Chuck Morris stared at me, and I stared back at him. Then he shrugged his shoulders. “Well, Standing Bear,” he said, “if you really wish it, I suppose….”
I broke in: “We must talk this over, Morris.”
Chuck scowled at me, as a man scowls when he hears the voice of his own conscience. “I suppose that I must,” he calmly stated.
“It is good,” said Standing Bear, favoring me with another black look. “I shall wait in my teepee to learn what Black Bear has said to Rising Sun.”
He got up and walked out with that measured stride that belongs to nothing on earth but an Indian chief. The moment he was out of hearing, I said to Morris: “Good heavens, Chuck, you don’t mean that you’ll make yourself a squaw man?”
It was the most brutal way of putting it, and I had chosen that way on purpose.
“We’ve been here a couple of years,” said Chuck uneasily. “We may be here a couple of years more.”
“But at the end of that time, or some time, you’ll go back to your own kind. Then what will you do with your wife?”
“Squaw,” said Chuck sharply. “Not wife… squaw.”
“It’s the same thing.”
“Not at all. There’ll be no marriage ceremony.”
“Not our kind of ceremony, but what serves just as well for these people.”
“There’s a difference. You know as well as I do that they shuffle their wives about pretty freely. A man can divorce his wife at any sun feast, and she can do the same by him with a stroke on the drum. Is that a real marriage… when it can be broken up at any time either the man or the squaw feels like breaking it up?”
I was afraid to argue with him, because argument merely fixes a man’s mind on what he has already decided. I said: “There’s another angle. What about the children?”
Chuck flinched again. “They’d be happy with the tribe,” he said.
“Maybe they would, but would you be happy without them? They’d be a part of you. They’d belong to you. Confound it, Chuck, half of their blood would be white.”