Chance sat up in the blanket, wiping his eyes.
The ashes of the huge fire formed a sloping mound, now covered with a light dust of snow that had fallen in the night. Near the fire, naked, still staked out, lay the corpse of Jake Totter, mutilated and eyeless, the snow on it not melting any more than on the rocks and brush.
Chance was waiting for the discovery to be made, that Grawson had made his escape.
He had not tried to free Lucia.
On the snowy prairie, had they been able to clear the Bad Lands, they might have been trailed easily, and the vengeance of Drum would have been terrible, falling on Lucia perhaps as well as himself; Chance did not wish to face the almost certain dilemma at the end of such a flight, whether to allow the girl to fall into the hands of Drum or to put his last bullet through her brain; if he stayed to fight he might win, and if he did, he was free to go, taking the girl with him; if he lost he did not know what would happen, other than the fact that he would be dead and the girl would be Drum’s; perhaps she would live for a time as his squaw and sometime, perhaps, if he tired of her, he might sell her to another, and perhaps this other, or the next, might take ransom or trade her, perhaps for a pair of horses, or a rifle, or a handful of cattle, perhaps to homesteaders, perhaps to a patrol of soldiers; it was possible she might be carried as far as Canada, or after weeks, across the Rio Grande to Mexico, changing hands several times; if this sort of thing happened, eventually, somewhere, somehow, she would find her freedom; a greater danger was that soldiers might attack the Indians who owned her, and that she might fall in the fighting; or be slain by the Indians, whom she might otherwise impede in their retreat; perhaps she would be shot that she might not fall alive into the hands of the soldiers, not be rescued; Chance could imagine Drum killing her under such circumstances; all things considered Chance decided it was best for Lucia that he meet Drum; it was hard to judge the matter.
And something within him was not altogether dissatisfied with this decision.
Old Bear, Running Horse, the others, expected him to meet Drum; he had said he would do so; he was expected to fight, as a warrior fights, not run.
Chance smiled to himself thinking of honor, and of a distant field many years ago.
How foolish that had been.
But, Chance realized, the foolishness of that act in which he had found himself involved, expected to assume a homicidal cultural role, had not been the consequence of the foolishness of honor, but rather of its perversion and distortion; that act, in its special circumstances, had been a misunderstanding of the obligations and significance of honor; a misrepresentation of its imperatives; it had been vanity, not honor.
Chance wondered on the thing honor, understanding it not much at all, wondering if it could much be understood.
It was a strange thing.
If he had run, he knew, astoundingly, that when Lucia was safe, he would then have turned his horse once more toward the Bad Lands, would have returned to meet angry Drum and his people.
Was that honor?
Or foolishness?
Or only the blood of Running Horse in his veins?
Hunkpapa pride?
How can we understand honor, Chance asked himself, or pride, or courage or loyalty; how can we understand what we are, man, ourselves?
What are these remarkable genetic dispositions to nobility, so easily betrayed, that will insist on stubbornly, doggedly filing their claims, whether they be acknowledged or not?
Yet Chance, partly from himself, partly from the bravery of a fine, beautiful girl, partly from the Hunkpapa, understood himself somehow, not quite knowing how, to have learned in the past few weeks something of the mysteries of honor and such matters, more than he had learned in all the preceding empty years of his past life, before he had known friendship, and love; perhaps he had learned most from the Indians, from savages, where honor’s primitive rudiments were least concealed by the complex customs and hypocrisies of a civilization of bricks and dollars, that could preach love and brotherhood and on the banks of a creek in South Dakota bayonet women and children. Running Horse, his brother, had taught him something of honor; and so too had Old Bear, Sitting Bull, and Drum; and the Sun Dance had taught him, and smoking, and Wounded Knee; he had learned lessons of truth to oneself, of the keeping of pledges and the being of a brother, and of the incomparable horror of the dishonorable deed, performed because it may be accomplished with impunity.
And so it was that the physician, Edward Chance, in an Indian camp in the Bad Lands of South Dakota discovered himself incontrovertibly sensitive to certain kinds of claims, those of honor among them, sensitive to the coercions of codes of nobility; in this he was a man, not the sly animal that denigrates honor and courage as stupidity and foolishness, the petty envious animal incapable of either, scurrying about in its smugness, the intellectual rodent seeking its hole when the wind blows or the cat prowls, content to be protected by the works and valor of others, men, whom he fears and despises, to whom he owes his wretched existence.
Chance had gone to the brush shelter of Grawson.
He wondered if it had been honor that had sent him there, cutting the big man free. He doubted it. He thought rather it might have been, incredibly enough, pity, perhaps the memory of the screams of Totter.
Pity?
Grawson would have hated that.
He had given Grawson his Colt, unloaded, and a handful of bullets.
“You’re a fool,” the big man had said, taking the weapon, the bullets.
Perhaps, thought Chance, perhaps I am a fool, but perhaps there is some difference.
I saw, as you did not, what was done to Totter.
Edward Chance, though he rode with the Hunkpapa, though he was used to the weight of a weapon at his thigh, the precision steel of a device for killing, had seen enough, had seen too much; never again, if he could help it, would a man die as Totter had, no matter who the man might be, Grawson or any other, stranger or mortal enemy.
And yet if this simply, this alone, was his motivation, he found it hard to understand what he had said to Grawson. He had said simply, knowing he would meet this man again, “I do not let the Hunkpapa do my killing.”
The big man had disappeared from the brush shelter.
Chance remained behind, to meet Drum, to fight for a woman-whom he could not keep even should he win her.
There was the scream, announcing the discovery.
The thin woman, she with the scabs of mourning wounds crusted on her face, had crept to Grawson’s brush shelter, to be the first to taunt the prisoner.
Her shriek awakened the camp.
She scrambled among the blanket shelters and the snowy figures of sleeping warriors curled like dogs in the snow, pulling at them with long fingers, jabbing them, shaking them, screaming. Then she stood in the center of the camp, almost over Totter’s corpse, holding Grawson’s severed bonds in her fists, shaking them like snakes, looking at the gray sky, howling in disappointment.
Warriors sprang up bewildered, some angry, some looking about as if to see soldiers on the cliffs or the horses gone. The startled shrill voices of the squaws pierced the bedlam, ringing from the stone walls of the canyon.