The boy was brought and an old squaw with him who was to be his nurse and declared that she would gladly go with Black Bear and be a mother to the orphan. I hardly had a word for her; my eyes were so entirely filled with the face of the boy. I have said that he had blue eyes and golden hair. There was white blood in his mother, and in the boy all the Indian traces disappeared except, perhaps, that his skin was a trifle dark for such brilliant hair and eyes. In a word, he was the bright image of what Chuck Morris himself must have been at that age. He was a gay little mite, already toddling around, falling down every step or two, and then pulling himself up again. I took him on my knee and made a silent vow that if Morris disowned him - and how could he help doing that if he wished to marry Mary Kearney? - I myself should be a father to him.
THE HEIR OF RISING SUN
The next morning the preparations were made quickly. A hundred willing hands packed my belongings which doubled or trebled in amount before the packing was ended, for I think that every woman, child, and man in the tribe made some sort of a donation when it was known that I was fixed in my intention to leave them. Then a number of young braves volunteered to help me drive the herd of horses toward the fort. An old, abandoned trader’s wagon was repaired for the use of the squaw and the boy. Then we started out.
The whole tribe came out and accompanied us for a few miles. Then they said farewell. Sitting Wolf was very much broken up. At the last moment he wanted to accompany me, but I told him that we were parting for the moment only, and that he and I would see much of one another from time to time. If it had not been for this promise, the whole lot of them would have insisted on all sorts of formal ceremonies before they let me go. By noon the last of them had disappeared across the horizon, and my caravan hurried on toward the fort. We were twenty-five days in reaching it, the last five days through a very steady fall of snow, so that we were glad enough when, one evening, we made out the dim lights of the fort in front of us. We camped in the snow that night. The next morning I pitched my camp on the edge of the scattered town. The Indians who had accompanied me started home, each with a man-size present under his belt. Before I went to find Chuck Morris, first of all I visited the store and bought a good suit of clothes, from boots to hat, a complete equipment. I pur chased a new saddle for White Smoke. I visited a barber and had my long, shaggy hair cut properly short for the first time in many years. When I looked at my new self in the mirror, the wild man of the prairies had disappeared. In his place was a sober-looking young man with a touch of gray at his temples. In this fashion I went to Chuck.
It was as easy to find him at Fort Kempton as it was to find a full moon in a clear sky. Everyone knew him. He was more important there than the commandant of the fort himself. In the few months since I last saw him, his little storeroom had grown into a big emporium. He conducted a double business. On the one hand, he supplied the traders who sent long caravans over the prairies. On the other hand, he traded directly with the Indians who chose to come into the fort itself. I was told that he was busy when I asked to see him. He was talking important business; he could not be disturbed. I wrote down my name and told the clerk to take it in.
“He’ll cut my head off,” said the boy.
“I’ll put it back on again, then,” I said and grinned at him so confidently that he carried the bit of paper into the office.
Morris came lunging out at once, a brand new Morris. His trousers were so fashionably tight that one could see the big double bulge of the thigh muscles in front of his leg. His boots shone like polished ebony. His coat was like a glove upon his back, and his throat was wrapped in a snowy stock. Altogether, he might have stood for the portrait of a duke. But, though I was quite overawed, he was as hearty as ever. He took me into his office, got rid of two weather-bitten traders in a word or two, and sat me down for a talk. I could hardly hear him at first, I was too busy staring at the thick, rich carpeting on the floor, the shining desk, and the numerous pictures on the wall.
“Good Lord, Chuck,” I broke out. “This cost a fortune!”
“It did,” he admitted, “but I like it. Besides, it’s a good investment. I found that I could put my prices up after I had a room like this. It looks like success… it is success… and the traders are impressed. That’s what counts. Not what a man is, but what he seems to be. That’s business. We’ll talk about that afterward. Thank the Lord you’ve come back to me. And I see by your clothes that you’ve come to stay.”
“I’m no longer a Sioux,” I admitted.
“We’ll talk about your business future in a moment. First I want to know the truth of all these stories that have been rolling into the fort. The colonel was about to take out an expedition against those thieving Pawnees when he heard a great war chief had sprung up among the Sioux and smashed the cream of the Pawnees to smithereens and killed the great Bald Eagle himself. The name of that chief, as we have heard it, is Black Bear. Lew, the game went through, then? You did beat them?”
I told him the whole story in ten seconds. I simply said: “Bald Eagle turned out to be my father. I tried to get him to come back to civilization with me or let me go on with him. He did neither. He simply disappeared. And that’s part of the reason I’m here.”
He was always quick to respond to another man’s sorrow. I saw the tears spring up in his eyes. He even had to get up and walk about the room for a moment. Then he put a hand on my shoulder and said: “Old fellow, all I can do is to try to help you forget. Now the next thing is to know the other reason that brought you here.”
No matter how cruel he had been to her, it was hard to face him with the truth. I managed to say: “Chuck, I brought your boy in with me.”
He turned the gray of ashes. “Zintcallasappa is dead?” he blurted out at me.
“She is dead.”
“May heaven forgive me,” he said.
“Amen,” I said with such solemnity that he started.
“After all,” said Chuck, “what else could I do? I couldn’t be an Indian the rest of my life. I… I took care of her after I left.”
I made no effort to answer him. It was his business, not mine, and I have never had any sympathy with people who fight the battles that ought to be left to the conscience of other men. Morris began to frown.
“And I’ll handle the boy, too,” he said.
Here I broke in with: “If you want the boy, take him. If you don’t want him around… TO be glad to have him.”
The frown left him. He looked at me with the happiest smile in the world.
“Would you do that, Lew?”
“Gladly.”
“If I had him…even in the background… there would have to be explanations. And….”
“Your wife might not care to know about it?” I asked, looking fixedly at him.
He shook his head. “I haven’t married her yet,” he said. “And, between you and me, if the truth about this leaked out, I’d be ruined with them. They’re an old New England family. Proud as Satan. Well, you’ve seen Kearney, and you ought to know. He hasn’t stopped talking about his last meeting with you. He says you took hold of him as a man might take hold of a child. He’s a rare good old fellow, under that high-handed manner of his, and he swears by you. I told him a few things that were not against you, of course. But this Pawnee war of yours has been the finishing touch. He says you’re a man in a million.