I was as safe as though I rode a thunderbolt. Sitting Wolf was another matter, but the second horse attended to that. For three miles he whipped the mount he bestrode until it staggered - and still some half dozen in the van of the Pawnees gained on us. Then we halted our horses. I jerked my rifle to my shoulder and dropped the leader of the Pawnees into eternity, the others scattering to the side, yelling. By that time Sitting Wolf was on the back of the led horse and off to a fresh start. The danger ended. The Pawnees had given the best that was in their horses, and now they dropped gradually to the rear, until at last we rode into the darkness of the eastern horizon alone, untroubled by any fear.
There followed one of the merriest fortnights of my life as Sitting Wolf and I roamed over the prairies, hunting for a sign of the Dakotas. He was keen as starvation to find his people once more, but also he was reveling in his freedom and, like myself, in the magic beauty of the white stallion. We found a trail and a broken arrow of a make that assured us we were after a band of Sioux. Sitting Wolf even declared that he recognized the handicraft of one of the old arrow makers of his uncle’s band. Three days later he proved that he was right, for we came into the village of Standing Bear himself. That chief was away hunting buffalo. We went straight to the teepee of Three Buck Elk with the entire camp laughing and shouting for joy around us. It was as though I had come back to my own people. The young children held up their hands to me joyously. The young braves waved and shouted. The women were screaming like so many hawks. But, of course, if they cheered me, they went mad over the return of Sitting Wolf. He had been given up for dead long, long ago, just as I had been given up. Now they were looking on two ghosts, one of whom came back from the dead on the horse that the Great Spirit Himself might have been proud to ride.
There was a cleavage through the mass of people before us. Through this opened lane the mother of Sitting Wolf came running, and in an instant he was off his horse and in her arms. Three Buck Elk left his son, who was the hope of the tribe, to the arms of his mother. He himself looked on with shining eyes. Joyous laughter kept swelling in his throat. He choked it back and subdued it to a groan.
“Brother, brother,” he said to me, “the Great Spirit has sent you back to us as a sign that our troubles are ended. Three Buck Elk has become an old man, ready to die. The sun had no warmth for his cold blood. Now he is young again.”
The braves were beginning to cluster around me and my horse. It was growing embarrassing. I said: “I do not see my brother, Rising Sun. Just where is his teepee?”
There was a little pause at this. Then Three Buck Elk said in a marked voice: “His teepee is yonder.”
I found it at once by the yellow disk that was painted near its top. When I raised the flap and entered, I found Zintcallasappa sitting on a robe with a nursing infant at her breast - a child whose hair was a tender fluff of gold. She was as lovely as ever, but how changed. When she raised her great dark eyes to me, full of fear of a dying hope, I knew without a word from her all that had happened. Chuck Morris had left her and gone back to his kind.
AT THE FORT
I was too choked with pity and with a sort of horror to speak. But The Blackbird? She simply rolled the infant in a blanket and then made herself come to me with a smile and welcomed me with both hands. Then, because White Smoke had put his head through the entrance flap, sniffing and snorting because he wanted to come to me but feared the fire, she went up to him with a handful of corn. I have seen one other woman, as lovely, as gentle of voice and eye, but even she could never come near his head. To my bewilderment, he submitted quietly to her touch and began to nibble the corn from her palm. So, stroking his neck, she turned back to me, smiling still.
“I knew that you would come safely home,” said Zintcallasappa. “And I have heard them shouting. You brought Sitting Wolf also. Ah, what happiness there is in the teepee of Three Buck Elk… for him who has returned.”
There was the slightest tremor in her voice, as she ended, and a shade across her eyes through which I could look into her soul and see, for an instant, the deep agony of her grief. But then, in another moment, she was smiling again.
Afterward, I got the story from Three Buck Elk - a story brutally simple. Morris had simply gone in to a new frontier trading post and fort, and, while he was there, he had seen a white girl. He had not come back. He had sent back a rich present of horses, loaded with a thousand trinkets, together with a message that he was not worthy of her, that she was free, and that she should find happiness with one of her own kind.
I had no doubt that it was a gentle message, for I knew Morris. But when I listened to Three Buck Elk, the first foreshadowing of anger and sadness came over my heart. All the happiness of that return was wiped out of my soul. I cannot tell you what a bitter loneliness came to me at the same time. What a pull there is of like to like - of dog to dog, of hawk to hawk, of white man to his kin. But Zintcallasappa was neither white nor red. She lived on a sad borderland with her heart turned from her people.
I could not endure remaining near her, inactive in her cause. I could not even wait for the great feast that on the next day was to celebrate our return from the land of the dead. In the morning I saddled White Smoke, and I said a brief farewell to Three Buck Elk. I shall never forget how the great chief looked silently at me before he said: “You leave us, my son?”
“I shall come again,” I said, “and bring Rising Sun with me.”
He merely said: “When the bear sees his brother trapped, he should run from the place before he himself is caught.”
I hardly appreciated that. My mind was full of only one thing, and that was how I should bring Morris back to his duty. For it seemed to my blind self then that, when I put the picture of the poor girl and his child before him, he could not help but come with me.
For an ordinary horse, traveling fast, the journey to the fort on the river from the place where I started was a full fifteen-day march. But on the tenth morning I rode into the fort. The fort itself was simply a big, low structure of wood, faced with heaps of dirt and a palisade around it. The town was a scattering street that half surrounded the fortress. It was composed chiefly of canvas and of little wretched shacks. No one would invest in permanent structures when they could not tell at what moment an Indian raid might sweep everything flat as the palm of the hand. In the streets of the village I saw such a population as one might have expected in that country - Indians, halfbreeds, trappers who were more wild than the Indians themselves, hunters, scouts in deerskins, and now and then the shrewd face of a trader, full of anxiety, full of schemes. I looked not half as wild as most of the people I passed. What drew their eyes to me, of course, was White Smoke. He would have made a congress of wise elders leap to their feet and gape as he came in from his ten-day whirl across the prairie as fresh as a lark.
Their voices I paid not the slightest attention to. How long it had been since I had seen any white face other than Morris’s I could hardly guess, but this return to my kind meant nothing to me. I was too full of the sorrows of Zintcallasappa, who waited yonder in the huge bosom of the prairie, hoping, praying, begging the Great Spirit or the white man’s God to put wisdom and eloquence in the words I spoke to Morris. Their voices did not really touch my ears, until I heard the golden voice of a girl cry out: “Look, Dad, look! Oh, what a king of horses!”
I turned like a horse that starts under a spur, and, riding up the street beside her big-shouldered father, I had my first sight of Mary Kearney. To me, fresh from the Dakotas, she looked very like an Indian girl at first, what with her dark olive skin and her glossy black hair. Yet, even before she came near enough for me to see that her eyes were blue, I could have had no doubt of her race. For she rode with an easy, graceful carelessness, and she had a way as bold as a man’s, except that it was all a woman’s - and more than all this, there was something of mind that spoke in her face.