When Wind In His Hair was within thirty feet of the lieutenant, he pulled up so sharply that, for a moment, his horse literally sat on the ground. With a great spring upward, the excited pony gained his feet and began at once to dance and pitch and whirl. Wind In His Hair held him close all the while, barely aware of the gyrations going on underneath him.
He was glaring at the naked, motionless white man. The figure was absolutely still. Wind In His Hair could not see him blinking. He could see the bright white chest heaving slowly up and down, however. The man was alive.
He seemed not to be afraid. Wind In His Hair appreciated the white man’s lack of fear, but at the same time, it made him nervous. The man should be afraid. How could he not be? Wind In His Hair felt his own fear creeping back. It was making his skin tingle.
He raised his rifle over his head and roared out three emphatic
“I am Wind In His Hair!”
“Do you see that I am not afraid of you?”
“Do you see?”
The white man did not answer, and Wind In His Hair suddenly felt satisfied. He had come straight to the face of this would-be enemy. He had challenged the naked white man, and the white man had done nothing. It was enough.
He spun his pony around, gave him his head, and dashed off to rejoin his friends.
Lieutenant Dunbar watched dazedly as the warrior rode away. The words were still echoing in his head. The sound of the words, anyway, like the barking of a dog. Though he had no idea what they meant, the sounds had seemed a pronouncement, as if the warrior was telling him something.
Gradually he began to come out of it. The first thing he felt was the revolver in his hand. It was extraordinarily heavy. He let it drop.
Then he sank slowly to his knees and rolled back on his buttocks. He sat for a long time, drained as he had never been before, weak as a new-born puppy.
For a time he thought he might never move again, but at last he got to his feet and wobbled to the hut. It was only with a supreme effort that he managed to roll a cigarette. But he was too weak to smoke it, and the lieutenant fell asleep after two or three puffs.
The second escape had a different wrinkle or two, but in general, things went the way they had before.
About two miles out the five Comanches settled their horses into an easy lope. There were riders to the rear and on either side, so Cisco took the only route left to him.
He went forward.
The men had just begun to exchange a few words when the buckskin leaped as if he’d been stung on the rump, and shot ahead. The man holding the lead line was pulled straight over the head of his pony. For a few fleeting seconds Wind In His Hair had a chance for the lead line bouncing along the ground behind Cisco, but he was an instant too late. It slipped through his fingers.
After that all that remained was the chase. It was not so merry for the Comanches. The man who had been pulled off had no chance at all, and the remaining four pursuers had no luck.
One man lost his horse when it stepped into a prairie dog hole and snapped a foreleg. Cisco was quick as a cat that afternoon, and two more riders were thrown trying to make their ponies imitate his lightning zigs and zags.
That left only Wind In His Hair. He kept pace for several hundred yards, but when his own horse finally began to play out, they still had closed no ground, and he decided it wasn’t worth running his favorite pony to death for something he couldn’t catch.
While the pony caught his breath, Wind In His Hair watched the buckskin long enough to see that he was heading in the general direction of the fort, and his frustration was tempered with the notion that perhaps Kicking Bird was right. It might be a magic horse, something belonging to a magic person.
He met the others on his way back. It was obvious that Wind In His Hair had failed, and no one inquired as to the details.
No one said a word.
They made the long ride home in silence.
CHAPTER XII
Wind In His Hair and the men returned to find their village in mourning.
The party that had been out so long against the Utes had come home at last.
And the news was not good.
They’d stolen only six horses, not enough to cover their own losses. They were empty-handed after all that time on the trail.
With them were four badly injured men, of which only one would survive. But the real tragedy was counted in the six men who had been killed, six very fine warriors. And worse yet, there were only four blanket-shrouded corpses on the travois.
They had not been able to recover two of the dead, and sadly, the names of these men would never be spoken again.
One of them was Stands With A Fist’s husband.
Because she was in the once-a-month lodge, word had to be passed from outside by two of her husband’s friends.
She seemed to take the news impassively at first, sitting still as a statue on the floor of the lodge, her hands entwined on her lap, her head bowed slightly. She sat like that most of the afternoon, letting grief eat its way slowly through her heart while the other women went about their business.
They watched her, however, partly because they all knew how close Stands With A Fist and her husband had been. But she was a white woman, and that more than anything else, was cause for watching. None of them knew how a white mind would work in this kind of crisis. So they watched with a mixture of caring and curiosity.
It was well they did.
Stands With A Fist was so deeply devastated that she didn’t make a peep all afternoon. She didn’t shed a single tear. She just sat. All the while her mind was running dangerously fast. She thought of her loss, of her husband, and finally of herself.
She played back the events of her life with him, all of it appearing in fractured but vivid detail. Over and over, one particular time came back to her . . . the one and only time she had cried.
It was on a night not long after the death of their second child. She had held out, trying everything she knew to keep from caving in to the misery. She was still holding out when the tears came. She tried to stop them by burying her face in the sleeping robe. They had already had the talk about another wife, and he had already said the words, “You are plenty.” But it was not enough to stem the grief of the second baby’s passing, grief she knew he shared, and she had buried her wet face in the robe. But she could not stop, and the tears led to sobbing.
When it was over she lifted her head and found him sitting quietly at the edge of the fire, poking at it aimlessly, his unfocused eyes looking through the flames.
When their eyes met she said, “I am nothing.”
He made no reply at first. But he looked straight into her soul with an expression so peaceful that she could not resist its calming effect. Then she had seen the faintest of smiles steal across his mouth as he said the words again.
“You are plenty.”
She remembered it so welclass="underline" his deliberate rise from the fire, his little motion that said, “Move over,” his easy slide under the robe, his arms gathering her in so softly.
And she remembered the unconsciousness of the love they made, so free of movement and words and energy. It was like being borne aloft to float endlessly in some unseen, heavenly stream. It was their longest night. When they would reach the edge of sleep they would somehow begin again. And again. And again. Two people of one flesh.
Even the coming of the sun did not stop them. For the first and only times in their lives, neither left the lodge that morning.