Meanwhile the soldiers of the Seventh, afoot, were rapidly deploying in a hollow square about the camp, taking advantage of the flag of truce,
Chance was not a military man, but even to him it looked a bit stupid, what was going on. The soldiers were extending their lines very thinly and, if fighting started, they would catch each other in their own cross fire. Nonetheless, whatever happened, of course, the Indians would be caught in the middle. Chance supposed that the officer in charge of the troops was not counting on any trouble. Chance found that reassuring, at any rate. He wondered if the officer understood the presence of men in the Indian camp like Drum, who could never forget that they were the sons of men such as Kills-His-Horse and in whose hair had been fixed, as of only days, the feathers of eagles.
Naturally the Indians were well aware that while the parley was taking place the Long Knives had moved into position.
The soldiers had removed their cumbersome greatcoats and stood shivering in their blue campaign uniforms, their rifles at the ready.
Chance looked at the officer again, the man talking to Big Foot and Old Bear. The carriage of his body, the motions of his hands, suggested the mien of a conqueror addressing the servile vanquished.
Chance looked at the surrounding soldiers, seeing here and there faces of hate, of anticipation, of fear, of distrust, but mostly they looked like simple men anywhere look, like the faces of men on any street in any town, clerks, carpenters, farmers, teamsters, coopers, smiths, cartwrights, merchants, barbers, just men.
They all looked cold.
Here and there one of them tucked his rifle under his arm and blew on his hands, stamping his feet and cursing to himself. “Goddam it’s cold,” Chance heard one of them mutter, and Chance agreed with him.
A Sioux child, a small boy with unbraided hair that hung to his waist, walked timidly over to one of the soldiers, his eyes fastened on one of the brass buttons on the man’s jacket.
Slowly the boy put out his finger and touched the button. The trooper gently shooed him away. The little boy turned to go, looked at the trooper again, then smiled and ran back to his mother.
Big Foot and Old Bear now turned to face the Sioux.
As they did so, the officer and his party, the parley ended, withdrew rapidly, the hoofs of their horses sounding on the frozen prairie.
The message which Big Foot and Old Bear communicated to their people was simple.
The leader of the Long Knives had ordered the Sioux to turn in their weapons. They must give up their guns, after which the march to Pine Ridge would resume.
A wave of protest swept through the Indians. They supposed that it had been intended simply that they were to go directly to Pine Ridge. They were supposed to see, as they had understood, the agent at Pine Ridge, who was not a Long Knife, and get rations for their families, and be at peace with the Great White Father. Now the Long Knives, out on the open prairie, where the men of the Great White Father in Washington could not see, were going to take away their guns. After this, what would they do, these Long Knives of the Seventh Cavalry, some of whom had lost friends with Long Hair in the unavenged defeat on the Little Big Horn many snows ago?
The Indians looked at the four guns on the ridge.
Some of the squaws began to keen, as if wailing for their dead.
“Do not give up your guns,” called Drum, his fierce eyes blazing with excitement.
“Be quiet,” said Old Bear.
There shortly appeared in the camp a detail of twelve men, led by a sergeant, a heavy, swaggering man, authoritative, not well shaven, with an open holster, who stumbled a bit as he walked, glaring about himself to the left and the right at the silent Indians.
He stopped and, with the heel of a boot, scratched a large, irregular circle in the dirt.
“Bring out yer weapons and put ’em in a pile,” called the sergeant, pointing to the center of the circle he had drawn on the ground.
Drum turned to the Sioux. “They will kill us when we have no guns,” he said.
Old Bear called out to the Sioux. “Give up your rifles,” he said.
Several of the Minneconjou clustered there looked past Old Bear to Big Foot, who stood nearby leaning on one of his wives. The chief could hardly breathe. His eyes were half shut, marked with fever. Weakly he nodded his assent to the command of Old Bear.
Drum, with two of his young men, went into a nearby lodge, and came out with two rusty rifles, which they contemptuously threw into the dirt circle. The gesture was not hard to understand. The Sioux were forcing no issue, but did not intend to disarm themselves. If the white men were intelligent they would accept this token.
The sergeant in charge of the detail blinked and glowered at the Indians. “You goddam Injuns,” he yelled, “had better turn in your guns goddam quick or you’re going to be all goddam dead!”
Chance’s heart sunk.
He was not close but he guessed the sergeant might be drunk, literally. It was not an easy thing to do, to walk into a camp of frightened, angry Indians, and ask them to give up their only means of defending themselves in the presence of armed, blood foes. The sergeant, Chance guessed, might well be drunk. How else would they have gotten a volunteer to walk into the Sioux camp and make that demand? That was the officer’s job, wasn’t it? No, Chance decided, officers, at least those with sufficient seniority, were for looking through binoculars. Commanding from interior lines, it was called. But, drunk or not, the sergeant was foul and incoherent. The Indians were staring back at him as he shouted at them, and stopped to wipe his mouth on his sleeve, and then shouted some more, making his demand, insulting them.
Several of the Indians, of course, could understand English. And all of them, whether or not they could have been said in any meaningful sense to understand the language or not, were clear that this white man was cursing them, abusing them, and that he was doing this before their wives and children.
Old Bear was listening, apparently impassively, but Chance sensed that the old man was enraged.
The blue square of surrounding soldiers, nearly five hundred strong, shifted uneasily.
Old Bear shut his eyes for a moment and seemed almost to waver with fury, but then he opened his eyes, and lifted his hands to his people. His voice almost broke. “Give up your rifles,” he called out, as loudly, as calmly, as he could.
“You there!” bawled the sergeant, jabbing his short finger at Drum, who was standing conspicuously a bit in front of the other Indians. “You gotta gun under that blanket! Give it to me!”
“Come and take it,” said Drum.
“Do not take the gun,” said Old Bear.
The sergeant hesitated an instant but then, sensible of the eyes of his men behind him, the troops beyond, the Indians gathered about, and the young man challenging him, stalked over to Drum and with both hands he tore open Drum’s blanket, to find the muzzle of Drum’s rifle, at a high angle, suddenly under his chin. Drum’s hand, which was low, was on the trigger.
The sergeant’s face went white and if he had been drunk before it was now a sober man that was looking down the barrel of Drum’s weapon.
“Take the gun,” said Drum.
“Do not take the gun,” said Old Bear.
Desperately the sergeant made a sudden move to knock the rifle aside, and Drum simultaneously pulled the trigger and the sergeant stood there for a second oddly leaning backward in a noise his hat blown off with the top of his skull, and then fell backward, sprawling in the dust, and the four lines of the blue square almost at the same time opened fire.
Warriors threw off their blankets blazing away with hidden rifles. Some of them used bows and arrows. Several charged the soldiers across the open ground with knives and hatchets. The quiet, cold December morning suddenly shattered in the staccato cough of gunfire and the shrieks of human beings who had not expected to die.