In the same instant he saw the silhouette, creeping in the shade under the awning. A split second later the figure stepped into the sun and Dunbar ducked down, settling into a cleft just below the bluff’s lip.
He squatted on jellied legs, his ears as big as dishes, listening with a concentration that made hearing seem the only sense he possessed.
His mind raced. Fantastic images danced across the lieutenant’s closed eyes. Fringed pants. Beaded moccasins. A hatchet with hair hanging from it. A breastplate of gleaming bone. The heavy, shining hair spilling halfway down his back. The black, deep-set eyes. The great nose. Skin the color of clay. The feather bobbing in the breeze at the back of his head.
He knew it was an Indian, but he had never expected anything so wild, and the shock of it had stunned him as surely as a blow to the head.
Dunbar stayed crouched below the bluff, his buttocks grazing the ground, beads of cold sweat coating his forehead. He could not grasp what he had seen. He was afraid to look again.
He heard a horse nicker and, sucking up his courage, peeked slowly over the bluff.
The Indian was in the corral. He was walking up to Cisco, a looped length of rope in his hand.
When Lieutenant Dunbar saw this, his paralysis evaporated. He stopped thinking altogether, leaped to his feet, and scrambled over the top of the bluff. He shouted out, his bellow cracking the stillness like a shot.
“You there!”
Kicking Bird jumped straight into the air.
When he whirled to meet the voice that had startled him out of his skin, the Comanche medicine man came face-to-face with the strangest sight he had ever seen.
A naked man. A naked man marching straight across the yard with his fists balled, with his jaw set, and with skin so white that it hurt the eyes.
Kicking Bird stumbled backward in horror, righted himself, and instead of jumping the corral fence, he tore right through it. He raced across the yard, vaulted onto his pony, and galloped off as if the devil were on his tail.
Not once did he look back.
CHAPTER IX
April 27, 1863
Have made first contact with a wild Indian.
One came to the fort and tried to steal my horse. When I appeared he became frightened and ran off. Do not know how many more might be in the vicinity but am assuming that where there is one there are sure to be more.
Am taking steps to prepare for another visitation. I cannot make an adequate defense but will try to make a big impression when they come again.
I’m still alone, however, and unless troops arrive soon, all may be lost.
The man I encountered was a magnificent-looking fellow.
Lt. John J. Dunbar U.S.A.
Dunbar spent the next two days taking steps, many of them geared toward creating an impression of strength and stability. It might have seemed lunatic, one man trying to prepare for the onslaught of countless enemies, but the lieutenant possessed a certain strength of character that allowed for working hard when he had very little. It was a good trait and it helped make him a good soldier.
He went about his preparations as if he were just another man at the post. His first order of business was to cache the provisions. He sorted through the entire inventory separating only the most essential items. The rest he buried with great care in holes around the fort.
He stashed the tools, lamp oil, several kegs of nails. and other miscellaneous building materials in one of the old sleeping holes. Then he covered it with a piece of canvas tarp, spread several yards of dirt over the site, and after hours of meticulous landscaping, the cache looked like a natural part of the slope.
He carried two boxes of rifles and a half-dozen small barrels of gunpowder and shot onto the grassland. There he spaded up more than twenty pieces of prairie, each about a foot square, each with the sod and grass clinging to one another. At the same spot he dug a deep hole, roughly six by six, and buried the ordnance. By the end of the afternoon he had replaced the sections of sod and grass, tamping them down so carefully that not even the most practiced eye could have detected a disturbance. He marked the place with a bleached buffalo rib, which he drove into the ground at an angle a few yards in front of the secret spot.
In the supply house he found a pair of U.S. flags, and using two of the corral posts as poles, he flew them, one from the roof of the supply house, the other from the roof of his quarters.
The afternoon rides were pared down to short, circular patrols that he made around the fort, always keeping his post within sight.
Two Socks appeared as usual on the bluff, but Dunbar was too busy to pay him much attention.
He took to wearing a full uniform at all times, keeping his high-topped riding boots shining, his hat free of dust, and his face shaved. He went nowhere, not even to the stream, without a rifle, a pistol, and a beltful of ammunition.
After two days of fevered activity he felt he was as ready as he could get.
April 29, 1863
My presence here must have been reported by now.
Have made all the preparations I can think of.
Waiting.
Lt. John J. Dunbat U.S.A.
But Lieutenant Dunbar’s presence at Fort Sedgewick had not been reported.
Kicking Bird had kept The Man Who Shines Like Snow locked away in his thoughts. For two days the medicine man stayed to himself, deeply disturbed by what he had seen, struggling mightily for the meaning of what he first believed to be a nightmarish hallucination.
After much reflection, however, he admitted to himself that what he had seen was real.
In some ways this conclusion created more problems. The man was real. He had life. He was over there. Kicking Bird further concluded that The Man Who Shines Like Snow must be linked in some way to the fate of the band. Otherwise the Great Spirit would not have bothered to present the vision of him.
He had taken it upon himself to divine the meaning of this, but try as he might, he could not. The whole situation troubled him like nothing he had ever experienced.
His wives knew there was some kind of trouble as soon as he returned from the fateful ride to Fort Sedgewick. They could see a distinct change in the expression of his eyes. But outside of taking extra care with their husband, the women said nothing as they went about their work.
There was a handful of men who, like Kicking Bird, carried great influence in the band. None was more influential than Ten Bears. He was the most venerated, and at sixty years, his toughness, his wisdom, and the remarkably steady hand with which he guided the band were exceeded only by his uncanny ability to know which way the winds of fortune, no matter how small or large, were going to shift next.
Ten Bears could see at first glance that something had happened to Kicking Bird, whom he looked on as an important staff member. But he, too, said nothing. It was his custom, and it served him well, to wait and watch.
But by the end of the second day it seemed apparent to Ten Bears that something serious might have happened, and late in the afternoon he paid a casual visit to Kicking Bird’s home.
For twenty minutes they smoked the medicine man’s tobacco in silence before slipping into bits and pieces of chitchat concerning unimportant matters.