Dan now turned his cold eyes on George and went on sucking his pipe. Well, one thing you could say about Dan, Sam Minard might have said if he had been here, was that he had avenged himself on his enemies ten or twenty times. Dan had a shack far up the Madison near the headwaters, and the only time Sam had looked into it it had seemed to him that half the walls were covered with Indian scalps. Dan combed the black hair and glossed it up the way he did with beaver pelts, and as George put it, kept everything nice and purty. Once in a while, when his whole skull itched under mosquito bites, Dan would go forth to get another scalp. He always cut it across the ears and forehead and low on the neck. He was a lone and deadly killer. If Sam had been asked which of all the men he knew might give him buck ager if he had to face him in a fight he might have thought first of Dan.
The next morning there rode into camp the man whom all mountain men would have chosen by private ballot as the ablest of them all. It was not because Sam Minard was the biggest man in the West and physically the most powerful. It was not because he was the deadliest shot—there were many deadlier ones; or the most courageous—there were others more foolhardy; or that he was the coolest when faced with appalling challenge—perhaps no man on earth had nerves of colder steel when confronted by charging grizzly or redman with raised tomahawk than Hank Cady or Kit Carson, Lost-Skelp Dan or Three-Finger McNees. It was not because he was the most successful Indian Eghter; in this, Kit or Dan or Jim Bridger or a dozen others were more than his match any day. It was because he had in ample measure all the traits and skills that made the superlative mountain men. There was none of Jeb Berger in him. Though Windy Bill was a brave man and a superb fighter in a pinch, there was a little of Jeb in him. Though Mick Boone would have faced any man on earth, he always felt gooseilesh when his life depended solely on his nerve.
The men who gathered here—there were twenty-three of them before they rode forth—were probably as daring and able a group of warriors, for their number, as had ever been brought together. Any one of them could be put down for two Indians, most of them for three, and a few of them for four or five. In varying degrees they were all eager for the fight. They all felt competitive, and some of them were afraid they would not get their share of the scalps. A few, like Dan and McNees and Jack, were ambitious to be recognized as the outstanding killer, when it was all over. Others—George, for one, Hobe Isham, a quiet man, for another—felt that they hadn’t the killer talent to be first, and so would be content to do the best they could. A few, like Sam, David Black, and Zeke Campbell, were strategists at heart and killers only secondarily.
McNees said Scarface and his pack were encamped on a small stream against a sheer bluff with a heavy stand of timber on its crest. That was the west side. The prevailing wind when he was there was from that side but the winds in that area were like a woman’s mind and changed for no reason. On the north side and back about fifty yards was dense aspen and spruce. A stream flowed past on the south side. With the men gathered round him, Three-Finger drew on bare earth a map of the area. When he scouted their position they had two sentinels out—one here, one over there, on the northeast and southeast points; and he supposed they had a lookout on the bluff above, though he had seen no sign of one. They had only seven tepees standing; he had assumed that the largest, which stood in the center and
back toward the bluff, was the chief’s.
It was possible that they had moved and would have to be scouted again. Looking up at a lowering sky, he said one hell of a storm was getting its belly full of water; if they could move in under thunder that would be fine.
George at last had been able to divide fifty-eight by twenty-three and now said that some of them would be cheated. There wouldn’t be three apiece, all the way around. There would be three apiece for thirteen of them, two apiece for nine of them, and only one for him. Someone said that Sam dotta have an extree, since it was his huggin party; but someone else said Sam was to have the chief. A third suggested that most of the varmints should be divided equally and the remainder should be extrees, on a free range, for the men who got there first. S am now spoke up and said one of them should be allowed to escape, to carry the glad tidings to the Blackfeet nation; and Dan said that would be fine, if he was scalped first. They would let Dan scalp him, and then give the bugger a fast horse with a cactus under its tail. "Wal1 now," said George. "Lotta mathmaticians here."
Some of the men talked about the imminent killing of fifty-seven Indians as if they were about to go on a buffalo hunt. Some, like Hank Cady, said nothing. For nearly all of them a redman was no more human than a blackman. "They looks a little more like a man," George had said, "but they issent when ya come right down to the marrow. When the Almighty made the Injun he had plum run out of stuff cept ferrosities. They ain’t no devil as hisses down in hell half as froshus as a red varmint." Some of the men had come from points as far away as Bear Lake and the North Platte and felt that two pesky redskins were lean pickings for a long journey. One of them said it was like riding a hundred miles to eat two doves. If he’d knowed, Mark Hillers said, there’d be a hull army here he would of stayed home. His pa would be ashamed if he saw his son riding a thousand miles for two scalps.
"Mebbe we’d best give him three," George said. "Me, I kin stay and tend camp." Windy Bill thought that a good suggestion. Mark, he said, was plum down there torst the other side of the world, almost to Bent’s Fort, and he had crossed fifty rivers and a thousand mountains to get here. Pretty soon, said George, there wouldn’t be any extrees left. They’d jist hafta let the men have them who first got their knives in them.
That was about it, Zeke said; he didn’t kallate any man would get his sights on anything. There would be no moon and probably no fires. The night would be so black it would be like crawling back into your ma’s womb. That was right, Bill said, scanning the dark sky; they would have to tell by the feel of the skin if it was red or white. By the smell, Mick Boone said. But how was Sam to tell elk horns from wolf paws or beaver tail? It was David Black speaking, and when he spoke, according to Bill, his brain swole up like a pregnant belly.
"He will smell like a chief," George said.
Sam, Bill said, would go to Elk Horns like a calf to its mother. But what if he didn’t? Dan asked. Would the man who got there first hold him by the halter and wait for Sam?
The chief, Bill said, had spit his stomach in Sam’s face. He had smacked his jawbone with a tommyhawk. He had tied him to a tree and near froze his gizzard out and he had boasted and threatened almighty awful. They would have to let Sam have him. He guessed Sam would have the chief by his topknot in less time that it took a wolf to turn around.