There was a rapid chattering of surprise. Those rascals really expected me to do magic with that rifle. I went out and looked at the bullet mark. I had simply snapped the spinal cord - that was all there was to it - and the brute was dead. I returned to my place and tried again, and again the horse dropped. Once more they surrounded the fallen body. They felt the heart, then they began to shout all at once, and I knew that this time the trick had been turned. Yes, a moment later the old horse got staggering to his feet and went about at the length of his tether, shaking his head. I tried the third brute. I felt a certain surety, now, in my work. Again I nipped the neck of the horse, and once more it fell stunned, not dead.
They brought me back in triumph to the village. Dark Water, in much excitement, hurried into the teepee of Bald Eagle and returned, after a time, to tell me that a hunting party would start at once and take me with them. In the meantime Bald Eagle asked to see my rifle. I sent it in to him, and Dark Water returned in a short time, bringing back my own weapon and a brand new rifle, as tight as a drum, a good pound lighter than my old gun, and in every way better. I tried it only once and knew that it was meant for me. It was not only lighter, but it had more power also. I took it with thanks and then sent for Two Feather.
“My friend,” I said, “the Great Spirit has breathed upon my rifle. Take it with my good wishes. Bald Eagle has given me one of his talons in its place.”
Two Feather took my rifle in both hands and was like a happy boy. From that moment I knew that I could count on at least one real friend among the Pawnees. Meanwhile a dozen braves, including Two Feather himself, had gathered. They were the cream of the tribe. Each had three horses, and those horses were the best the Pawnees could find. Then Dark Water made us a farewell speech. He told us that we were about to start on a long trail, and that before the end of it we might find whether the great horse for which Bald Eagle had yearned was a horse, indeed, or a form of the Great Spirit. “But,” he said finally, “if the bullet stuns him not but strikes him dead, and if you come not back with White Smoke, never come again in the sight of Bald Eagle, for your faces will be hateful to him.”
WHITE SMOKE
I should have guessed from the very beginning that the goal of the quest was White Smoke - that strange horse haunted the minds of the Indians like a fairy tale, just as it haunted the white traders and trappers. The very thought of leveling at that matchless stallion a rifle bullet that might drop it dead made my heart jump. However, I would be shooting for the sake of Sitting Wolf as well as my own.
We traveled steadily westward. I was kept under a constant watch every moment. I was never allowed to carry a weapon, but each day I was allowed to take my rifle - under the eye of the entire detachment - and practice with it as much as I pleased. I kept my hand in a good hour every day. I no longer tried to center things. It was always the outer and upper edge that I made my target - a mere nip off the edge of a rock or the top of a trunk. A slight graze of the bullet was what I always tried for. Invariably my horse was tethered to the saddle of someone among the Indians, which was only to be expected. They handled me as if I were a fire that might go out, and like a fire that might burn them to a crisp.
We marched for ten days. A dozen times we crossed the old trails of herds of wild horses, and on each occasion one of the band took a coil of rope and went over the tracks. Wherever it was found that a horse had galloped, they measured the tracks. And finally I learned why. No two horses take the same span in striding, and a horse at full speed never varies the length of his reach. It is as certain a method as fingerprinting.
I think it was the ninth or the tenth day when one of the younger braves, searching fresh-made tracks, discovered what he wanted. He let out a yell like a war cry. The whole lot of them swarmed around the spot and saw that the rope exactly fitted the stretch between hoofmarks. Then we held a consultation. That is to say, they consulted and I listened, for I would never have dared to lift my voice among such expert trackers. Finally they adopted a scheme that I should never have dreamed of. The wind was blowing steadily from the north, and we cut to the south in a shallow detour, riding hard for the rest of that day and continuing, once more, with the dawn. About midday we came to a pass through some high hills - for we had been striking steadily toward the Rockies and out of the prairies. Two of the men took fresh horses and headed north and south across the pass, while the rest of us hid the horses among a grove of poplars and then went back to lie in wait in a thicket. The Indian maneuver had been made in the simple hope that White Smoke was leading his band toward this cleft, and that we might have headed him.
In a quarter of an hour the two scouts swept back to assure us that there were no tracks in sight. So we waited, broiling in the heat that seeped through the scant and speckled shade under the brush. We waited until the deadening heat of the mid-afternoon had scalded us and diminished. We waited until the golden time of the late day arrived, and it was at this moment that Two Feather, who had eyes like a hawk, as I could bear testimony from our first encounter, suddenly whispered and pointed. We hardly dared lift our heads, but presently we made out a thin cloud of dust, rolling in from the east, growing thicker and larger, until at last it took shape as a mist, sweeping above the gleaming backs of horses.
I felt faint with excitement. They dipped out of sight in a hollow. Then they swept over a knoll just beneath us, and there I had my first view of White Smoke. He was running well in front of the rest, and how he ran! I have seen Thoroughbreds of the finest, but I have never seen an animal that moved so grandly. The desert blood of Arabia was in him; he was a throwback to some of those fine stallions the Spaniards had brought over at the time of the Mexican conquest. It needed no horse lover or expert to tell his points. He filled the eye. He fitted neatly into that place in the brain which holds the picture of a perfect horse.
I write the word soberly, judiciously - perfect! There is no other word for him. Behind him came half a hundred chosen mares and their foals. There was not an animal in the lot unworthy to seat a duke. There could not be, for a horse capable of following White Smoke in his arrowy flights across country had to have limbs of steel and a heart of brass. Yes, they were fifty queens of their kind - take them one by one, and it would have been hard to pick flaws in them. And yet, when the king was with them, they were not visible. He was gloriously alone. The wind was rippling in his mane and his arched tail. He carried his head high, with his ears ever pricked alertly. He lived like a tiger, ever on the watch.
I looked aside, dizzy and amazed, and I saw the Indians around me, quaking like sick children, their mouths gaping, their eyes burning with a fever like the fever of thirst. Straight down the pass he galloped, flicking the earth with winged feet, and yet for all his lightness he was big. I could understand how a large man like Bald Eagle might pine for such a charger, for I put him down as sixteen hands at least. As a matter of fact, he proved to be even taller than that. Then he reached the tracks of one of our scouts and stopped the rest of the band. The wind whipped the dust cloud away from them. Like fifty statues they stood, except for the life in their manes and in their eyes. And in White Smoke one could see the fear, hate, suspicion working.