“You take it too seriously,” said Chuck. “Besides, I’m lonely as the devil in my teepee. You have Sitting Wolf to amuse you. And his mother and stepmothers are glad enough to do your cooking and take care of your teepee. But Standing Bear’s squaws are mighty tired of working for me as well as the chief. I really need a servant, Lew. I really do. Besides, some of these Indian girls are pretty.”
“You mustn’t do it,” I said, getting a little hot.
He looked very gravely at me. Then he dropped his hand on my shoulder. “Why, Lew, if you really don’t approve, of course I’ll let the thing drop right here.”
I knew he meant it. He would have chopped off a leg to please me in those days, and how many times since I have wished to heaven that I had forbade the whole thing on the spot. But I thought, as I looked up at him, that I was a fool to try to control the ways of such a man as Chuck Morris. He was twice as wise as I - older, more experienced. Besides, I hated to buy him off through his affection for me. It rarely pays to bribe a person through affection. It costs you part of their love. They may give up what they want in order to take your advice, but they never forget. All of this came storming through my brain.
At last I said: “I don’t know enough to lay down the law to you, Chuck. If you marry an Indian girl… call it something else if you don’t want to call it marriage… it will be a horrible thing in the end.”
“Tut,” said Chuck. “These matings have happened before, and the Indian girl always gets tired of her white man and runs off with one of her own kind.”
I smiled at the idea of one of the girls running away from Chuck Morris. “Think it over, backward and forward and, when you come to a conclusion, go tell Standing Bear what you’ve decided. I haven’t a right to persuade you.”
He let out a big breath of relief. I could see how much he had been dreading my ban on this affair.
“As far as that goes,” he said, “I’ve already pretty well decided what I want to do. I can talk to Standing Bear now.”
I went with him, pretty sick at heart. We found the old warrior in his teepee with a couple of his squaws whom he sent away on the run with a single grunt. One glance at Rising Sun set a glitter of triumph in his eyes, and he smiled at me a little, as much as to say that he had discovered I was not so strong with my friend as he had thought.
“Very well,” said Chuck, “I’ve thought it over and talked it over with my wise friend, Black Bear, and I’ve decided that you’re right. A squaw would be good for me. But what squaw should I take?”
Standing Bear said: “There is no girl in the tribe too beautiful or too proud to be the squaw of Rising Sun. You must let your eye and your heart choose for you. Standing Bear will not speak.”
“How am I to go about this thing? Do I simply begin to pay court to some girl?”
“In the evening and in the morning,” said the chief, “the girls go down to the stream for water, and the young braves wait for them on the bank. When they see the girl they love coming, they throw a blanket around her, because it is not good that other eyes should see the face of the woman who listens to the man. If she does not wish to hear him, she will send him away at once. If she cares to listen, she will hear him on ten evenings, and on the tenth she will make him an answer. When you hear that answer, come back to me, Rising Sun, and tell me what you have heard. Then I will give you counsel.”
That was all. I could tell by Chuck’s light step as he went out of the tent that he was very happy and very excited about the whole affair. I did not need to ask him what girl he had in mind. There was only one of whom he could think for an instant, and that was Zintcallasappa, The Blackbird. She was by no means the pure Sioux strain. Her mother had been the daughter of a trapper who had gone back to her kind, and the white blood was visible at a glance in the girl. She had black hair and eyes, to be sure, but no Indian ever had eyes so big and so tender, or hair so soft and thick, or such a mourn. And her smile was the smile of a white woman. It had always startled me when I saw it, and it really made my heart jump a little.
I simply said: “It’s The Blackbird?”
He shrugged his shoulders. He was too keen for the business to give me an answer in words.
BLACKBIRD GIVES HER ANSWER
I was sitting in my teepee that evening - as gloomy as any man in the world - and waiting for news, when a shadow fell across the entrance. I saw Sitting Wolf standing there with an unstrung bow in his hand. I jumped up at once and went to him.
He made his voice big and strong so that no womanish tremor might come into it. “The white men,” he said, “beat their dogs when they snarl and snap. Sitting Wolf has been a snapping dog. He has brought a whip to Black Bear.”
He offered me the bow, and I took it. There were half a dozen passing, and they paused to look on. An Indian who offers himself for punishment is a strange sight, and an Indian, no matter how young, who is willing to endure a public shame is simply a miracle. Yet, Sitting Wolf folded his arms across his breast and waited. That was a tough piece of wood, that bow, but there was such a burst of emotion in me that I snapped the bow in two in my hands and threw the pieces away.
“A white man,” I said, “never strikes his brother. It is near the time for the evening meal, Sitting Wolf. Sit here with me.”
We sat down side by side, until he saw where the book lay, crumpled in a corner. He jumped up, ran to it, sat down by the firelight, and tried to read, smoothing the wrinkled pages tenderly. I think that, take them all in all, there were never other Indians like the Sioux, and there was never a Sioux like Sitting Wolf.
Before dark Chuck Morris came in, and I saw what had happened in his face. I sent Sitting Wolf out, and he broke into his story at once.
“Do you know how old she is?” he asked.
“Seventeen.”
“You know a good deal about her, then?”
“Yes.”
“You rascal, Lew, have you had an eye on her, too?”
Now that he had committed himself, I thought, there was no use in holding him back. I merely said: “She’s beautiful, Chuck.”
“You’ve never seen her. You’ve never seen her,” he repeated. “Well, she’s seventeen, and I suppose that it’s been a year since any young brave popped a blanket over her head and asked her to be his squaw.”
I could understand that. “She’s sent them all about their business,” I said. “They are tired of feeling the sting of her tongue. She told Spotted Buck, I believe, that he ought to become a man before he wanted to have a squaw.”
Morris smiled. “I waited by the bank,” he explained. “This springtime has the blood of the braves up. There were a round dozen of them, waiting for the girls… five or six at a time huddled under blankets, muttering. Finally The Blackbird came. What can I call her besides that stupid name… Zintcallasappa? It takes an hour to get it off the tongue. When I saw her coming, I began to feel a bit uneasy. I wanted to put the thing off until tomorrow. Confound it, I remembered that I had never spoken half a dozen words to her since I came into the tribe. There’s always something about her that discourages familiarity. Those young fellows, who would give their eyeteeth for her, don’t know what to do when she looks at them with frost in her eye. And I felt just that way.”
He fell to dreaming, with a strange little smile about the corners of his lips.
I urged him on: “What happened, Chuck?” Because I knew that he had spoken to her.
“Oh,” said Chuck, “when she came nearer and saw me, she stopped a little, and I thought that her head went up just a trifle. And she went on past me, hurrying a little with her eyes fixed straight before her. But I knew that she was seeing me, and I thought there was a bit more color in her face …in a word, I did exactly what the chief suggested. I went up to her with half my blanket trailing over my arm. I didn’t throw it over her head. I simply took her inside it.”