Scalp in one hand and knife in the other, he leapt back and in morning gloom surveyed the scene. On his left he heard the footfalls of men chasing men. He heard a cry choked off in blood. Looking the other way, he saw a white man taking a scalp, and a bloody Indian rushing at him with raised tomahawk. Sam leapt, felled the man, and saved the life of Hank Cady. Hank had always been a little careless in battle. What Sam was looking for was a live Indian to send as a messenger, and when he saw a redskin leap up from a half dozen prone bodies and make a desperate spurt for freedom Sam was after him like a cougar. He overtook him in about a hundred yards and flung him down. He felt over him for weapons but this brave had none. Sam turned the Indian onto his belly, knelt on his back, and cut leather strings out of the Indian’s elkskin jacket. With these he bound the man’s hands behind him and was securing him to a tree when he heard his name called.
"Here I am!" Sam cried.
It was all over by then. A few wounded Indians had fled with mountain men after them, who one by one returned with their scalps. No one yet knew if any had escaped. No one knew if McNees had been right in his count. Sam and Bill and Mick walked among the dead, trying to count them; and George came up with his habitual smile and said one was dead over yonder, and another over there. Had any of the varmints got away? They didn’t know, Sam said. Dan and McNees were out of sight, probably chasing someone. Had any mountain man got hurt? Well, there was Cy Gregg over there, limping like a man with a broken leg; and Tomahawk Jack, who in his eagerness at scalping had sliced most of the meat off two of his fingers; and Abe Jackson, whose collarbone had been cut in two by a tomahawk. So far as Sam knew, no white man had been killed. As for the dogs, they had all vanished into thin air, and Bill thought that some of the red devils might have taken to wings too. They’d never know until they had counted them. In full daylight Sam and Bill and a few others tried to count the dead bodies scattered over the area but could not agree on the number. Sam then turned to the wounded. Abe had a nasty cut all right, through his collarbone and the two ribs next to it, but like all mountain men he pretended that it was nothing at all. It was because of his doggone awkwardness, he said. Some of the men chewed tobacco and gave him the quids, and Abe pushed them into the wound. Jack had made a small fire and with a hot knife point was trying to cauterize and cicatrize his wounds; and Abe, watching him, said he could use some of that medicine. Even Three-Finger had a wound, a knife-thrust in his shoulder, and into it moistened tobacco was stuffed. Zeke had slashed himself across a palm; another man while chasing an Indian in the dark had struck a tree and knocked five or six of his front teeth out. Mick Boone had torn a thumbnail off. Sam said they would examine the booty to see if there was anything any of them wanted and then they would bend the barrels and burn the stocks off the guns. He told Hank to choose five or six men and ride Indian ponies back to their horses and then go out and find elk for breakfast.
There wasn’t much in the booty that any man wanted. Some of them chose pieces of leather clothing, or a tomahawk or a headdress. The rifles, furnished by the British so that the Blackfeet could wage war on Americans, were piled on a fire, and after their wood was burned off and their barrels were hot the barrels were laid across stones and a huge stone was dropped in the center of each to bend it. It was while bending a barrel that Sam was first startled and then astounded. He was busy a hundred feet from where he had scalped the chief when, glancing that way, he saw what he would never have thought could be. Elk Horns in spite of the awful drubbing he had taken was still alive. He was conscious. In fact, he was slowly and stealthily crawling toward Sam, a knife in his hand. Sam advanced on the Indian and when fifty feet away stopped and looked at him. It was the eyes that held his attention only in the eyes of falcon, wolf, or Wolverine, or of the young man in the river, had he seen such deadly hate. "I’ll be doggone!" he cried, and other men came over to stand with him and look.
George said, "Sam, I thought ya kilt the varmint."
Charley said, "Is thissen the one we send to the Bloods?"
"He’s tied to a tree," George said.
"Hain’t no reason to send two," said Charley. "Which one do we kill?"
Bill had come over. He looked at the bloody Indian, now lying flat and staring at the men. The redman had the exact look of a wounded beast that knew all the advantages lay with the enemy yet was determined to fight for its life. He looked like a thing waiting and planning. The men saw the knife in his hand and expected him at any moment to leap up and charge. Bill said, "Wall now, anyway he knows who done it. I figger Sam intends to send this chief and jist caught the other in case the chief doan feel up to it. Sam, be that it?"
"Might be," Sam said.
George said, "Wooden it be more insultin ta send the chief?"
"Ten times more, it shorely would," Bill said.
"Then who gits the other one?"
"He’s Sam’s," Bill said.
Sam was staring at the chief. He was remembering how this varmint had degraded and humiliated him and how for days he had been close to death in winter desolation; but there was something in this situation that distressed him. Perhaps it was the eyes of all the trapped and helpless or wounded creatures that had looked at him, during his years in the West, and looked at him now, out of this man’s eyes. There was the blue heron. In target practice he had once shot a heron on the bank of a river, only breaking a wing. The bird, tall and stately, had come walking down the bank and right past him, with what he had taken to be contempt for him. He could never forget that experience. The bird, walking with superb dignity, had looked at him steadily with one eye as it approached and passed him and went on down the bank, its blue wing hanging.
And there was Kate Bowden.
Sam might have said, after trying to think his way through it, that in the eyes of all wounded or helpless things there was something that laid a hand on his heart. He was still looking at Elk Horns when Tomahawk Jack went over to the chief, and pressing the muzzle of a revolver against the bloody skull, reached down and took the knife from the hand. It was then that Sam saw with greater poignancy the look in the eyes that he did not want to see and was weary of seeing. Dan had been standing back, listening and watching. He now came over to Sam and said that if the chief was to be the messenger he ought to be skelped roperly—halfway down his foreheadand right across the middle of his ears. Dan was eager to show how it should be done, but Sam said no, the chief had been scalped and that was good enough. If Dan wanted to scalp the other one that way and turn him loose that was all right. A bald head was a better warning than a dead Indian. They could tell them to tell their people that two messengers had been sent for the reason that it was figgered that one would be killed by the Crows on the way. Fine, Bill said; that would heap insult on two bald heads.
After thinking about it Dan said it made sense. Did he get to scalp the other one?
"Shore," said Bill, "an git it over with. We want breakfast."
As Dan approached, the Indian bound to the tree began the death song. Then the song fell silent, and so far as the men watching could tell the redman did not flinch while his scalp was taken. Half of each ear clung to the topknot. The two Indians were placed side by side before Sam, with the points of knives held against their backs. Sam studied their faces. Then Bill said, "Sam, the chief’s shoulder is outta joint, it shorely is." They could all see that it was, when they looked at the position of the arm. From behind, Bill felt over the chief’s torso and said that several ribs seemed to be broken. Sam must have handled him a little rough, Bill said. Both Indians were trembling with hate and outrage; all around them they could see the dead bodies of their comrades, and the pile of useless rifles. The chief was so shaken, so horribly humiliated, and so little in control of himself, that his lips were drooling saliva and blood and he was making water. George might have said that he was enough to draw tears from the eyes of a dead wolf; but Dan, McNees, Jack and a few others were looking at him as if they would have liked to skin him alive. They were thinking of the unspeakable tortures and agonies they would be put to if they were in the power of this savage. Dan would have cut his head off and hung it from a tree.