He paused again. I was immensely excited. I said: “Get it over with, Chuck, will you?”
“Oh, well, there’s no one like her!”
“She said she was willing to marry you, I suppose?”
He corrected me like a shot. “She said nothing… and I said nothing about marriage. I simply told her how pretty she is, and how devilishly restless it made me to see her…and such stuff, you know. I forget all of it.” He made one of his irritating pauses again.
“Well?” I shouted at him.
“Did you ever see a prairie fire start, Lew?”
“What the devil has a prairie fire got to do with her?” I thundered.
He leaned back against a lodgepole and began to smoke his pipe, lifting his head to watch every rising puff, as though he saw a face in it. “Did you ever watch May come rippling over the prairie?”
“Damn May,” I said. “I’m waiting to hear something about Zintcallasappa.”
“Did you ever watch a still lake blossom when sunset came along, Lew?”
I could stand it no longer. “You’re talking like a jackass, Chuck. I don’t want to hear any more of your maunderings.”
He waved his hand, still with the same wonderful smile and the same far-looking eyes. “She was like that,” he said. “She seemed a little frightened, just at first. Then she put up her face and looked me over as though I were a new book.” Morris sighed and shook his head, as though he regretted that some of the picture was already fading in his memory. “She said, `Do you wish to take me to your teepee?’
“`I do,’ I said. `But will you come, Zintcallasappa?’
“`I cannot speak until the tenth day,’ she said.
“`But what shall I guess?’ I asked. `I shall lose my mind waiting ten whole days and wondering. Let me guess only one little thing… that you do not hate me.’
“Ah, Lew, I would give ten years of my life to see her always as she was just then when she smiled at me. She went on down the riverbank, still smiling back to me, not caring a damn how many of the young bucks saw her. After that… well, I came staggering home here with my head full of fire.”
That was the story of how Chuck Morris won The Blackbird, put down in his exact words, because I have them all in my mind, exactly as they were when he spoke them. But it was not over a minute before the end of the ten days - not a minute. Most Indian girls would not have given him so much as a glance, no matter how they loved him. But though The Blackbird had let him know instantly that she loved him, she would not give her promise. And when he saw her for the tenth time on the bank of the river, she simply said: “I shall go to your teepee, if you have the consent of my father.”
Her father was Lame Beaver and a notorious lover of firewater, but he was a good-natured brave and had enough courage to fight one hundred men at once. We both went to Standing Bear and told him the good news.
He said: “I knew that Zintcallasappa was not a fool. Now take two or three of your best horses and tie them at the lodge of Lame Beaver. If they are taken into his herd, then his daughter will be brought to you.. .she is yours and has been bought. If the horses are returned to you, Lame Beaver is not satisfied. You must take him more horses. If he sends those back …up to nine or ten horses… then you know that he does not wish to give you his daughter.”
“What can be done then?” asked Morris with anxiety.
“Nothing,” said the chief.
“I’d find something to do, though,” said Morris, and he doubled his big fist.
“There is no need to worry,” said Standing Bear. “Lame Beaver is not drinking firewater. He will do as a man of good sense should do.”
We picked out four horses from among Morris’s five. I gave him two of my own four, and then he went to the lod ge of Lame Beaver and tied the gift at the entrance. Half an hour later they were in Lame Beaver’s herd! Of course, the entire village knew about it instantly. They made a procession past Morris’s lodge all that evening, grinning at him, giving him little presents, and wishing him well. Morris himself was in second heaven.
Finally I said to him: “Chuck, why not marry her? You certainly will never care more for anyone else.”
He snapped his hand at the sky. “No man could ever care for any woman as much as I care for her. But where is there a minister to marry us?”
“We’ll be at a settlement or near one by the fell.”
“By the fell? By the end of ten years, you might as well say. I may be dead and bleaching on top of a rack of poles by that time. Lew, are you made of steel and ice? I’m only a man, and I love The Blackbird. What a delicate and lovely thing she is.”
Every minute there was a weight on my heart. I half trusted in what he said. He swore that as soon as they came near whites, he’d marry her in the white man’s way. But I had a doubt. No one could be sure what Chuck Morris would be thinking when he had turned around the corner of tomorrow.
All of Zintcallasappa’s family came around the next morning and brought The Blackbird herself in their van, while they followed, carrying all sorts of presents for the new family that was starting up. I watched her go in at the entrance and stand there, looking up to golden-haired Morris without a smile, but with a sort of worship. Then she passed on into the shadow of his teepee. That was the clue, after all, to the whole affair, I think, now that I have the long road of the years to look down. She not only loved Morris, but she worshipped him as a sort of god, as though he were in fact the rising sun.
BALD EAGLE
I have talked as though all were peace and quiet during this time. As a matter of fact, it was about a month before the day when Chuck Morris took The Blackbird for his squaw that the shadow of Bald Eagle fell across the Sioux. You must understand that there was never any real peace between the Pawnees and the Sioux. Those horse-stealing Pawnees were never so badly beaten that for the sake of a fine young stallion they wouldn’t risk another war. But, as a rule, they were routed. They simply hadn’t the numbers to combat us. Sometimes they beat a war party of the Dakotas. Sometimes they stepped down and blotted out a village. But in the end they always had the worst of it, so far as I know. The Pawnees were a strong people and hard fighters. But there were three hundred thousand Sioux - as the United States government itself was to learn one day. If the Pawnees grew too daring, the Sioux banded together and sent out a great wave of warriors that washed the Pawnees dizzily west and north and left great villages a drift of white ashes, a few small heaps of black cinders.
Now a new chief appeared among them and began to strike right and left. First he appeared when a tribe of the Sioux called the Brules were towing their household stuffs across a narrow river. That was done by putting a lot of lodgepoles together to make a raft. Then the poles were lashed together, the belongings were heaped on the raft, and thirty or forty braves jumped in and harnessed themselves to the raft to pull it across. That was the way it was always done.
Chuck and I rigged up a pair of light sculls and used to jog across the rivers in no time, but, even in Standing Bear’s own tribe, the old ways were considered the best ways. Standing Bear finally took to the oars himself, but Three Buck Elk never would have anything to do with such dangerously advanced doings. It was while the Brules were making one of these passages over water that a little war party of Pawnees made their appearance. They had no horses with them. They had crawled miles perhaps, through the long prairie grass of the early summer, and now they popped out on the edge of the river. There were nearly one hundred bucks in the water. The braves on shore were butchered straightaway, though even they outnumbered the Pawnees - an Indian taken by surprise is no good for fighting. After the ones on dry land were finished, the rest was perfectly simple. Those Pawnees started picking off the swimmers, and they dropped every one of them. Not a soul among the braves escaped.