“Yes.”
“But, when I saw what a wild young tiger you were, my heart went out to you. I’ll never forget how you came staggering in at me, when your face was just a blur of blood, not knowing where you hit, but still fighting. I swore, even while I was fighting you, I’d beat you that day and make you my friend afterward. While I lay on my back, getting over that fight, I turned the same idea in my mind a hundred times. A good friend is worth millions. I decided to make you my friend. After that, we lived together for years. We were never apart. I taught you what I knew of the prairies. I gave you a horse. I gave you eveiything that I had to give… freely. I would have laid down my life for you.”
“I know it,” I said.
“At this moment, ask whatever you can dream of, and I would do it for you. I would put my last dollar in your pocket. Do you doubt that?”
“No.”
“If ten men came through that door to take your life, I’d stand before you. Do you doubt that?”
“Heaven knows it’s true.”
“But, if you turn against me in this thing, Lew, the love I have for you will turn to the blackest hate that any man ever felt. Mark that. I’m a hard man, Lew. I’m determined to get out of my life what I can. But I’ve made one exception. I’ve kept you apart. I’ve never had a thought about you that wouldn’t have been worthy of your brother. I’ve never envied you, never scorned you, never used you. But, if you strike at me now, God help me to grind the life out of your heart. Now, when I need a friend and you turn on me, I call you a hypocrite, a sneaking traitor, worse than a dog. Do you hear me? Do you know that I mean it?”
I started to speak, but he stopped me.
“Don’t answer me now,” he commanded. “Go by yourself and think of what I’ve said. Oh, you may think that you love her. But what do you love? Her pretty face? That will change. She’ll be wrinkled in another ten years or so. The blossom will leave her. Will she be worth giving up what you’ll give up in me? Go away and think it over.”
And he turned his back on me and went to the window where he leaned out, breathing heavily.
BLACK BEAR TALKS
I knew that thinking and time for thought would not change me, but I wanted to be alone to weigh in my mind all the dangers in the thing that was before me. I knew that he was not shamming. All that he had said had been spoken very seriously. He would do what he threatened, and, if I turned against him, he would put a bullet in me with as little compunction as any Dakota ever showed when he held a Pawnee at his mercy.
It was not the physical fear that moved me most. It was the fear of losing that friendship which now, it seemed to me, was all that I owned of any value in the world. I had closed the Indian chapter of my life. I had left my father dead or living, somewhere lost upon the prairies. And now, as I came to meet the conditions of a new life, I needed more help from big Chuck Morris than I had needed even when I first went onto the prairies.
I went to the river’s edge and sent White Smoke slowly through the woods. Most of the trees were naked. There was no touch of color, but here and there were a few patches of brown leaves, trembling miserably in the wind. All the ground was thick with crusted snow. I rode until the voices from the fort died away, only some occasional shouting coming, small and thin, out of the distance. Never in my life have more melancholy thoughts passed through my mind.
I had gone some distance, following the winding of the river’s bank, watching vaguely the flash of the water in the sun and the shining, metal black of the standing pools nearer to the bank. Then I heard the rapid thudding of hoofs to the rear. I had a tingling premonition, after all, that it might be Chuck Morris come after me to retract some of the stern things he had spoken. For he always rode like that - at a headlong pace. I turned about, and then I saw break into the clearing, where I was, none other than Mary Kearney herself.
When she saw that I had stopped for her, she drew rein so suddenly that her horse slid up on stiffened legs and cast a shining cloud of snow dust into the air. It would have dismounted an ordinary girl, but she rode like a wild Indian - a part and parcel of her horse. She sat the saddle very flushed, with her eyes sparkling at me.
“I was afraid that I’d never overtake you!” she exclaimed. “I thought that White Smoke would be whisking you away like the wind upriver.”
Most men, I suppose, have on the tip of their tongue a thousand pleasant little things to say on such occasions. They make a girl perfectly at home and put small bridges from one bit of conversation to the next. But I have never had that talent, and, besides, I was too astonished to use my wits very effectively. She went on at once, as though she had hardly expected an answer from me.
“Of course, I want to talk with you, Mister Dorset. Dad was too excited and too angry. He’s still excited when he remembers how near that knife came to his heart. But he’s forgotten a good deal of his anger. How have you managed to live happily among such wild wolves as those Dakotas?”
So dexterously had she brought the conversation around to my viewpoint that she started me talking about myself. And I suppose, after all, that those famous conversationalists who held forth in the great French salons were not talkers at all, but simply cunning creatures able to make any man talk freely - about himself and his ideas. Why is it, then, that we are so hungry to speak of ourselves? Why is it that I have written all this tale of my past with such a warmth of happiness, unless we feel, when what is in us is exposed to the eye of the world, that the world will wonder and applaud? It is very foolish. But I was as happy to have Mary Kearney ask me that question, as though she had put a treasure in my hand.
“They are kind people very often,” I said.
“To everyone?” she asked me.
“No, of course not. But the son of a chief took a fancy to me. After that they adopted us into the tribe.”
“But why did he take a fancy?” she insisted.
“Well,” I said, “Indians are like us and form likings as quickly, and for reasons just as obscure.”
At this, all at once, she began shaking her head and smiling at me in a quiet way as though she saw straight through me and found within me nothing at least to hate. There was never such kind mockery.
“You are a modest man,” she said. “But Mister Morris told me how you saved the life of Sitting Wolf. Was that the beautiful young savage who tried to sink a knife in my father …when Dad grew angry with you?”
“You see,” I explained to her, “the Indians very often do their thinking with their hands, and an Indian’s hand is apt to have a knife in it. But, when one grows accustomed….”
“To being stabbed while one talks?” she finished for me. “But, of course, they were afraid of.. Black Bear.”
She brought out my Indian name with a soft little laugh, as much as to say: The others may fear you, but I not a whit. To this moment I close my eyes and remember how that flutter of music went sadly and sweetly through me.
“You may not answer a single question I wish to know,” she said gravely after that. “And if you won’t, tell me so. But I’ve come to ask you to tell me about the mother of the son of William Morris.”
I thought then, by the manner in which she uttered his mere name, that he was further from her than if he had been the man in the moon. I turned her question slowly through my mind. To answer it might seem a betrayal of Morris. And yet, now that they knew the first facts, they had only to ask among some of the Sioux, and they would learn all of the story and learn it in a naked brutality that would be far worse than the truth as I could tell it.