George couldn’t have a child without help, Bill said. "He muss be as old as I am." Bill was thirty-seven and George was forty-two.
Jist the same, George said, a winter like the last one put cricks in a man’s jints. Why, up in them mountains the wind like to blowed theirselves offen the earth.
"Reckon the woman on the Mussel is all right?" Bill asked.
"Hope so," Sam said. He aimed to git up there soon.
Sam bought generously for Kate. There was a lot more to buy than there had been when he came west: besides raisins there now were dried apples and peaches, as well as peanuts and hard candy, plenty of salt bacon, dried fish, rice, navy beans, prunes, honey. He bought a few pounds of each, and thread and needles and cloth, moccasins, blankets, flower seeds, a short shovel, and then looked round him to see what else he could take to her.
On leaving the post he did not for the first time in his years out west head north through Crow country. He was not running from trouble but he was not looking for it. He did not want to kill any more young damn fools bent on taking his scalp. After a hundred and fifty miles he had no doubt that he had been seen by Crows but none had taken his trail. Had they been cowed by the destruction of Elk Horns and his band, or had the dreadful winter subdued them? Whatever the reason, not a single warrior tried to ambush him or creep up on him during the long ride through the western part of their lands. Near the junction of the Bighorn with the Little Bighorn, not far from the spot where a general named Custer would make his last stand, he saw the fires of a war party that had passed; but when he stood on the bank of the Yellowstone, only fifty miles from the Musselshell, he could say that he had not seen a redman in five hundred miles.
He knew that there was a meaning in this and he felt that it boded no good. Had the Crows made a pact with the Blackfeet that would allow them to capture him again? This thought so enraged him that, sitting on a hilltop, he filled his pipe and looked south and east at Crowland, and north and northwest to the Blackfeet. He guessed that Elk Horns, his skull healed over and as bald and white as Dan’s, would be looking for him. As a gesture of contempt, both for himself and for the chief, Sam decided to headlong north across the Musselshell and right into Blackfeet land. He would then approach Kate from the west, over the death trail where, early dead and deaf and blind, he had staggered on and on. It was in the foothills that he saw something that stopped him: a skin tepee in an aspen grove. Retreating, he hid his horses and then warily approached, rifle cocked. On reaching the tent he saw that its door flap had been sewed together with buckskin thread and that the hems of the skin had been staked to the earth all the way around. After a few moments of trying to look inside he came to himself with a violent start, and quickly looking round him, said aloud, "Sam Minard, this is jist the way ye were when Elk Horns took you!" Leaving the grove, he scouted the area in all directions but found no human prints, new or old.
Though he felt that he was desecrating a holiness he pulled three stakes and on his belly crawled under the loosened skin, rifle in hand, Unable to see anything inside, he propped the edge of the tent up, to let daylight in, and then stood and stared for a full minute. On a bed of lodgepoles two feet above the earth lay a dead warrior in full regalia, his shield of buffalo hide across his loins, his tobacco pipe, adorned with eagle feathers, across his right arm, and his medicine bag on his chest over his heart. At the head of the bed, kneeling, was a woman in what looked like an attitude of prayer. Sam knew that she was the man’s wife. After carefully studying her position he guessed that she had knelt there and frozen to death. He sensed that the man was Elk Horns and he guessed that he had killed himself because his people had cast him out. Sam was deeply moved by the scene. He did not want to touch anything here, but because he had to know whether this man was the chief he gently moved her heavy hair back until he could see a part of the skull. What beautiful devotion in a wife! What a poem, what a symphony this picture before him was! The chief had been his deadly enemy but he must have had remarkable virtues to have won from a woman such love as this. Softly he-put the hair back over the skull and the face. The odor of human decay had turned him sick; dropping to hands and knees and grasping his rifle, he crawled under the tent and looked around him before rising to his feet.
He guessed he had better be going. As he rode east it occurred to him that he and the mountain men had avenged not only his own humiliation but also the massacre of Kate’s family, if it could be said, in earth or heaven, that a wrong so monstrous could be avenged. If Lotus had lived would she have loved him with such holiness that she would have covered his shame with her hair, and have knelt by him and died in the bitter cold? All the mountain men had been impressed by the loyalty of red women to their husbands. They were wildcats in their jealous furies, and they often killed, when they could, the adulterous husband; but they would accept floggings and brutalities that would drive white wives from the door. Covering the unspeakable shame of a scalped head with their own hair, they would freeze to death by the man they loved.
After crossing the Musselshell, Sam observed that winter had been in no hurry to depart. It was June, but on the north flank of every hill was a snowbank, molded to the hill’s contours and dappled with wind dust. No river flowers were yet in bloom; he wondered if Kate’s would be. He had with him twenty different kinds of wild-flower seed—enough, he expected, to sow an acre of prairie. Kate might not use them but she would be happy to have them: when building a nest, a woman, like a bird, was happiest when she had more materials than she could use. Except for the willows and shrubs the plant life hadn’t put on its spring dress yet; and the river grasses were barely looking out of the earth. Everywhere were signs that the Canadian winds had been here. Cottonwood trees riven by frost now stood with their bellies open; and aspens had been snapped off by the winds or torn from the earth.
When he came to the hill where he had always paused to look at the shack and the garden he cried aloud, "My God!" and some part of him died. He saw it instantly and knew it all. He saw the second cairn of stones, standing close by the one he had built, and he knew that Kate was dead. The grief that choked and blinded him would have been no more intense if he had looked at the grave of his mother. The sky had darkened, the earth had taken on a deeper quiet. It was all desolation now: there were no flowers—there was only an old shack with a part of its roof fallen in, and two mounds of stones. Dismounting, he dropped the reins, and rifle in hand, approached on foot.
The sage plants still lived and for a few moments he looked at them. Then he looked at the second cairn, observing how the stones had been laid, for his first thought was that a mountain man had passed this way. He had found Kate frozen to death. But he knew it was not that. Something had caught his gaze and he now circled the two cairns and looked down at the sage, most of which had been trampled and broken, and went to the shack to peer in. The pile of filthy bedding was still by the door. By the north wall with earth from the roof spilled on it was the heap of utensils and food. Stepping across the bedding, he went over and knelt to examine it. He found an old knife but no axe. Under the bedding was the rifle.