I said at last: “I am Chuck’s friend, and he has been more to me than any man in the world. We were together a good many years. We’ve bunked together when we didn’t know whether or not our scalps would belong to a Cheyenne before the morning came, I’ve owed him my life, you see.”
“And he has owed his to you,” she exclaimed. “He has confessed that. That evens the score, I imagine.”
I shook my head. “There’s no way to repay some things.”
At this she stared a little in a high-headed way that reminded me of her father’s haughtiness, but she changed almost at once and was smiling at me as she had done before. I could almost have prayed her not to smile in that way. There was something as hard and as strong as ice in me - I suppose I may call it my manhood. When she smiled, I felt that strength melting away under her shining eyes, and a great yearning, that was half fierce and half sad, came over me. Ah, but she was a lovely thing on that day, like a bright bit of spring flowers come among those naked brown trees.
“What an honest man you are,” she said. “I felt it before, and I know it now. He is your friend. I can’t ask you to talk against him.”
“The truth has to come out. And, if I am his friend, I should like to be…your friend also.”
It was quite possible to say such a thing in the most genuine manner, just casually enough to make it seem no more than a rather intimate tribute. But as I have said before, I had no conversational training and no tact. I wanted to talk to her not in English, but in the Sioux tongue with all its strength and all its wildness. Because its strangeness would have made it possible for me to say things that I could not put into bald English, with the matter-of-fact sun of common sense shining on it. And now I brought out this speech to her as if it were a thunderbolt, escaping my lips. It left me trembling. It left me hot and crimson, too, as I realized that I was making an ass of myself. God bless her for the manner in which she took it. If she stiffened a little at the first, and if she lifted her head in her father’s overbearing way, she abandoned that attitude at once. She merely looked down to the ground, and I felt that she was casting about for some withering phrase to blast my forwardness.
“I wish I had not said that,” I broke out.
Up flashed her eyes at that, and, to my bewilderment, there was no more danger in them than a light of laughter.
“Oh, Black Bear,” she said, “you may be a great warrior, but you are a great boy also. I’m glad you said it.. .because I want you to be my friend. And you will be, if you tell me all that lies behind that poor little bright-haired boy in your teepee. After all, haven’t I a right to know?”
I could not help saying: “Yes.” Then I told her the story. “You see,” I began, “Chuck was always so big and so strong, so quick with his hands and so quick with his brains, that other boys had no chance with him. When he grew up, other men had no chance with him. He got into the habit of doing what he wanted to do, because he was free, and no one could stop him. He still was like that when he joined the Sioux with me. After we had been with them a while, Standing Bear wanted us to take squaws.”
“How horrible,” she said.
“It isn’t like marriage exactly,” I tried to explain. “An Indian divorce comes very easily. A chief may have half a dozen wives, you know. A squaw… is just property, perhaps-like a horse.”
“Ah?” she said with a cold little lift to her voice.
“We had been years with them. We thought we might spend more years with them, because I was still hunting for my father.”
“Yes, William has told me about that,” she said, and, oh, her voice slid into my very soul, as gently as the sound of the running river beside us. “And did you never find a trace of him?”
I remembered, and the memory brought the old agony fresh on me.
“Forgive me. I have no right to ask!”
“I want you to know,” I insisted. “Because I want you to know me…and my father is a part of me, and what he is, I am also… partly. He had gone among the Indians because …there was a crime behind him.”
“What crime?” she asked me.
The word stuck in my throat, and, when it came, it was a hoarse whisper. “Murder,” I said and watched the shock of it make her shudder.
She said: “They may have called it murder, but it must have been a fair fight.”
“God bless you for thinking that!” I cried. “Yes, it was one man against six. All I knew was that he had gone west. Well, while I was with the Sioux, we met and defeated Bald Eagle, their great chief.”
“It was you who did it. I’ve heard that story.”
“I saw him leave the fight when it was hopelessly lost, and I rode after him….”
“And killed his three men, one by one, and then killed Bald Eagle himself!” she cried. “That was a glorious day for you.”
“I found Bald Eagle at last. My bullet went through the head of his horse.. .his bullet grazed my scalp and knocked me senseless.”
I took off my hat and touched the white scar. She was mightily excited now, letting her horse come on until it was touching noses with White Smoke, for her hands were off the reins and clasped together.
“He tied me with ropes. I woke up and found him sitting beside me. He was waiting for me so that I could see my death come when he was ready. I told him, at last, that if he killed me, he himself would not have long to live, for Will Dorset, my father, would find him and crush him to bits. When I said that, he stood over me and looked down in my face, and I thought he would strike then. But, instead, he built a fire. Then he stood beside me and told me to go back to my own kind, because I should never see my father. He, Bald Eagle, had killed him, and I should never see his face again.
“Then he left me. As he went away, through the dusk, the truth came over me and choked me. At last I called out: `Father.’”
“Dear God,” cried Mary Kearney, “it was he?”
“He turned and threw out his arms to me, but he would not come. He went stumbling off through the evening. I burned my ropes away and rode after him. I hunted for weeks. But I found no trace. He may have drowned himself in the next river. I know that I shall never see his face again.”
I could not speak again for a moment, but I looked down, fighting hard as the grief took me by the throat and turned my blood to water. When I could look up again, the tears were running down her face.
“Poor boy,” she said. “But you will find him.”
I shook my head. “I’ve slipped away from Chuck Morris,” I said. “I was saying that he and I expected to be more years among them, and, when the chief urged us to take squaws, it seemed only natural and right to Chuck. He didn’t look on it as a sin. It was just something new to do. There was a pretty girl in that tribe with a dash of white blood in her. She was called Blackbird, which is Zintcallasappa in Sioux. Chuck took her. Afterward this child was bom. And, after that, Chuck came to the fort and saw you and knew that he could never go back among the Indians.”
“And she?” said Mary Kearney.
“It broke her heart. I came back from trailing my father and found that she was dead. I brought the boy in to see what Chuck wanted me to do with him. Perhaps I’ve made a bad story of it. I want to explain how Chuck was simply headstrong… it didn’t seem a crime to him. It was only an adventure, you see? And, after he left her, he took care of her well. She lacked nothing. An Indian would have thought he was a fool to be so good to a squaw he no longer wanted.”
“But he was not an Indian.”
It was a sharp blow. I saw that I had done poor Chuck more harm than I dreamed. “If I could make you see…,” I began desperately.
“They wanted you both to take squaws. Did you take one?”
“I was younger than Chuck. I couldn’t bring myself to it.”