Because it was not Sam’s way to shoot an almost defenseless enemy he loosened the knife at his belt. He then waited, eyes staring, his mind slowly grasping the fact that this was the most spectacular act of courage he had ever seen. As the Indian came on, the black eyes never left Sam’s face. Sam saw more than that. He sensed that this young one had been so outraged in his tribal and personal pride that he was resolved to prove that a Crow warrior could be a braver man than The Terror. If able to touch Sam he would in the next moment plunge the knife, and if he died in the next instant would that matter? He would be remembered by his people as the bravest warrior of them all, living and dead.
Wall now! Sam thought. Having decided what was in the youth’s mind, he moved fast. If this young brave wanted a fight with knives he could have it; and so Sam slid back over the stud’s rump and into the water. At that moment his enemy was no more than ten feet away. In the next moment the Indian’s chest came up, like an otter’s, and in a flash he flung himself on Sam. In that same moment Sam’s powerful hands seized the redman’s right arm and broke the knife from his grasp. The next move caught Sam unprepared. With fantastic speed the Indian came up and almost out of the water, and both desperate hands seized Sam’s throat. The move had been made like a trout’s, in an arc, and with such perfect timing that for a few moments as the hands closed his windpipe Sam could only bug his eyes and wonder what had happened. He was to realize later that the Indian could have seized the knife at Sam’s waist and plunged it through him.
Like a horror in a nightmare of memory Sam saw the grizzly with the badger’s teeth set in its nose. With all the strength he could bring to bear, from the position he was in, treading water, he took the Indian’s wrists and tried to break the grasp. In that moment he was conscious of the redman spitting in his face. In that moment he caught a dreadful picture of eyes so full of hate that they were like black molten steel; and of teeth bared back into the cheeks. Sam sensed next that blackness was about to engulf him, and with the last of his sanity he did the only thing he could do: he grasped the terrible knife at his belt and plunged it deep into the Indian just under the breastbone. When the hands did not instantly relax he drew the knife and plunged it again. As he then fought to remain conscious he saw the change in the black eyes, and that change he would remember to the day of his death. He was to think of it afterward as the kind of change a father would never want to see in the eyes of a son.
Sam thought he must have been unconscious a few moments, for he had water in his lungs. Coughing, he looked round him and saw patches of red. The hands were gone from his throat, and the dead Indian was floating down the current. Putting the knife in his belt and looking at the far bank where his horses stood, Sam began to swim, keeping his head under except when he turned his mouth up for air. Once through veils of water hanging from his brows and lashes he saw his two beasts moving toward a wooded area, a half mile from the river. While he swam the thought came to him that this intrepid youngster was not one of the seven he had seen, but a lone warrior, who had left his people to count coup or die. He was as brave a man, Sam was thinking, as any he had known; and after reaching the bank, exhausted and subdued and feeling a strange shame, admiration compelled him to look down the river, hoping for a last view of this brave youth. But there was no sign of him on the slate-blue waters; he was dead and he was gone. Sam drew the knife. The river had washed it clean except for a tiny spot that had rested between belt and buckskin. With a forefinger Sam wiped off the blood smear and then touched his skin over his heart. It was the only way he could think of to salute the valor of a foe who had been more than worthy of him.
After running into the woods he turned to look back. There was still no sign of the seven. Mounting the stud, he rode at a gallop west by north to the foothills and entered a black forest. He was feeling nausea, and a sadness that was not at all natural to him. Riding by night and hiding by day, he began to wonder about a matter that only now had occurred to him. Here he was, a human male, hunted by a thousand warriors from two nations; and yonder was Kate, a female, whom all befriended and no man wished to kill. If the old Crow chief would now come to him and say that his people were sorry for the murder of his wife and child, and that the braves who killed them would be punished, he would sheathe his l?ife and smoke the
pipe of peace ....
It was true (he told himself) that Kate had killed in a frenzy of hate and passion that no man could excel and few could equal but since then she had given her whole being to her children and their flowers. Sam doubted that she had killed anything, even a bug, since that terrible morning. She watered her plants, talked to her angels, and waited for the Lord to call her home; whereas he, who only now had slain a brave boy, would soon join a war party that would try to exterminate to the last man and dog an entire band.
He suspected that he was not thinking clearly. There surely were aspects of the matter to which he was blind. If the Crows had him in their hands there would be in their hearts no compassion and no mercy; and if the warrior in the river had been able to kill him he would have become a national hero, possibly the greatest hero in all of Crow history. It was an eye for an eye, the holy book said. It was not Kate’s devotion to gentleness that had made her secure; it was the mountain men who had set the skulls on four stakes at the four corners of her tiny world. If the laws of life, of weakness and strength, of timidity and courage, had taken their inexorable course, with no protection of the weak by the strong, she would have been scalped long ago and her bones would now be white somewhere along the Musselshell.
Just how, Sam wondered, lying in his robe, did the Almighty want it, anyway? Throughout the Creator’s world a man rarely, if ever, saw protection of the weak by the strong, except now and then in the human or in the dog family. When Sam was seventeen he had seen three bully boys tormenting a helpless youngster about their age and size, with a dozen men and boys watching the torture without lifting a hand. Sam had gone in and knocked the heads of the three together with such force that he had fractured two skulls, and had made the whole community hostile toward him. When he walked the streets mothers had come shrieking at him who had no interest, none at all, in the boy who had been tortured, but only in their own brutal hellcats. Sam had been glad to get out of the place and away from the hate in the mother-eyes. Of the mountain men he knew, he thought there was none who would take advantage of the weak or defenseless, much less torture for the hellish pleasure of it. In nature under the human level, as Sam had observed it, nothing killed except for food, or for mates, or in defense of itself or its kind. Human beings in what they called the civilized areas of life had brought killing down to such an ugly level that some men actually murdered for a handful of coins or for the simple ghoulish pleasure of it. The red people made of war a philosophy and a way of life, as the bullfighter made of bull-killing. It was not a philosophy and way of life with his country, which had recently jumped on a feeble neighbor and wrested from it half its lands, as stronger bobcats took the rabbit from the weaker. Jim Bridger said that back in Washington they were calling it Manifest Destiny. The Indians, warring against one another, seemed to be pretty well matched, man to man and nation to nation—or at least this was true of the more warlike ones. It seemed to Sam that the tribes that loved and sought war and made a philosophy of it, and killed in the full light and passion of heroism, when emotions were hottest; when a man hardly felt bullet, arrow, or knife; and, when, if mortally wounded, he broke into his death song and died in a clean way with his wings soaring—this, it seemed to him, was all right. Maybe the truth (he thought he saw it now) was that the youngster who flung himself into the river had died a wonderful death: in the last moments he had the enemy by the throat and was choking the eyes right out of his face; and his blood was boiling-hot and his hunger for glory was right at the gates of heaven. How many men in a century passed into death in such triumph? How many won such consummation of all their courage and powers in a last supreme blinding moment? All but a few of them died creaking and itching and complaining, scabbed and scarred over, half blind and half deaf, sick with loneliness and self-pity, and as remote from triumph and glory as an old robin skulking along in forest gloom with its wings dragging.