Sam went out and looked south. Something had happened here that he did not understand. After walking twice around the cabin he knelt to examine footprints of man and horse. He went east from the cabin fifty yards. He swung north and doubled back to the south, and at the top of a hill found the incredible evidence that he had thought he might find. He knew now that a party of Indians had been here and that they were Crows. This seemed to him so utterly outside the plausible and the possible that he examined all the signs, over and over; stared again at the cairn, half expecting that it would not be there; and looked up and down the river and all around him. He knew it was true but he could not believe it, not all at once: a party of Crows had come here and found Kate in her bedding, dead, with a part of the roof fallen on her; and they had gathered stones and built a house to protect her; and they had taken none of her tools, bedding, food, not even her rifle! How could a man believe that?
To be completely sure he searched over the area where they had hitched their horses; examined footprints of man and beast; studied from top to bottom of the cairn the way the stones were laid; found their campsite and inspected the ashes of their fire; and then for two miles followed the path they had taken eastward over the hills. The implications so overwhelmed him that after two hours of searching and study he could only sit and look and wonder. It was this way: they had come in from the southeast, perhaps looking for Blackfeet; and on the first hill from which they had a view of the shack they had sat on their horses, looking and listening. They had tied three of either seven or eight horses to a cedar and in single file had approached the cabin. When a hundred yards from it they had been able to see that most of the roof had fallen in, and that there were no flowers, no woman, no life. They had then moved nearer, and two of them had approached the door by going around the north wall. They had found her in the bed. Old woman's man her children their ghosts, there, in the blackest nights they are, in the sagebrush they are crying ....
Sitting by the bedding, his left palm resting on it, Sam smoked three pipes. He was trying to believe that far yonder in the pale haze in a small tent filled with death smell a wife was bowed before her man, her hair hiding his shame; and that here another wife had lived for years, alone, by the graves of her children. Greater love hath no man, but greater love hath the mother. Where was her Bible? He would know someday that they had put it in the cairn with her. Where was her axe? He would never know. Why had the Crows done this thing? It was an act of such gracious mercy and pity—or, if not that, of atonement—that he sat humbled before it.
So this was why all the way up from the post he had seen no Crow!
After the third pipe Sam patted the bedding as though it were Kate, and closed his eyes on loneliness and grief. Then he went to the cairns. On a ledge of stones shoulder high he rested his face in his arms and tried to say a prayer for Kate, or a farewell, or something. Prayers had never been a part of him, and he did not know how to say farewell. The opening of light in the last movement of the Fifth, that was prayer maybe, his kind. No matter: the Crows long ago had said the only prayer for her that need ever be said:
Old woman’s man her children their ghosts, there, in the blackest nights they are,
in the sagebrush they are crying ....
But not crying now. Not any more.
From time to time, he told himself, head bowed and tears falling, he would pass this way, to bring flowers and touch a stone. His wife and child would be here, and Kate and her children. There would be no olive-green sage plants any more, no marigolds and bluebells and gilias; no little gray woman in rags carrying pails of water up a hill all day long. There would now be only memory of her and the story of her; and after a generation or two there would not even be that. But as long as any of the mountain men lived there would be the footfalls of friends passing this way, and eyes looking over to the spot where the crazy woman lived ....
Meanwhile he had a job to do. Leaving everything here as he had found it, for time and God to do with in their infinite patience, he mounted his horse, drew tight on the lead rein, and set his course into the southeast, straight for the Belle Fourche and the old chief of the Crows.
35
AFTER HE HAD crossed the Yellowstone he proceeded through Crow country without his usual vigilance. He shot game, and at night he made a fire and roasted steaks. He sat outlined by flame and smoked his pipe. Though he crossed fresh trails he saw no redmen.
He decided to take the chief by surprise, and so slipped past the sentinels and sleeping dogs just before daybreak. He knew the chief’s tent by the size and position of it. At the entrance he drew the skin flap aside and put an ear to the aperture. He had heard that the old chief snored as loud as a shipload of sailors, and after listening a few moments he guessed he had the right tent. Glancing round him, he slipped inside and stood in the dark. He then threw the tent flap far back, exposing to early morning a part of the interior. Because the chief was an old man he made in his sleep the sounds of anxiety and unhappiness that the old sometimes make; and so for a few moments Sam stood above him and looked at the face and listened. Then, filling his lungs, he gave the mountain-man battle cry. Instantly the chief came bolt upright, and though drugged by sleep and shattered by alarm, he reached blindly for his weapons. Sam had placed himself so that the old fellow would see his face and recognize him; he stood with a finger inside the trigger guard of his revolver and the other hand on his rifle. The chief's first recognition was that he was covered; his second, that the person before him was the dreadful killer of his people; and his third, that the killer was offering his hand and speaking.
"Thought I dotta call on you," Sam was saying. "It’s morning. How about some breakfast?"
The old man rose slowly to his feet and stood, facing Sam, his eyes searching his face. He looked down at last to the extended hand. "Time we shook hands," Sam said, and seized the old hand and held it. "I figger mebbe there’s too much killing in the world." Outside, the village was in uproar, with dogs howling, mothers shrieking at children, and braves racing away to their horses. Sam stood his rifle against his belly, released the hand, and drawing his knife, offered it handle first to the chief. When the old man refused to take it Sam laid his rifle on the earth, unbuckled his revolver and dropped it, and expertly threw the knife so that half the blade was buried in earth between his feet and the chief’s. He offered his hand again, saying, "It’s time to be friends."
The old warrior, one of the greatest his nation had ever had, stepped forward, and standing above the knife, looked into Sam’s eyes. Black eye looked into gray-blue, gray-blue into black, for perhaps half a minute. Then the red hand came up to meet the white hand. Going to the tent opening, the chief called and a woman came running; he sent her for pipe and tobacco. In words and signs he asked Sam where his horses were, and sent a warrior to bring them in. Most of the braves had rushed away into morning dusk to find their horses, and now returned to stand in groups and look at the chief's tent. Word had passed that The Terror was here, to smoke the pipe of peace. As among all impassioned and impetuous people, there were young hotbloods who wanted to keep the vendetta alive, and would go on dreaming of hanging a scalp on the medicine pole, high above all other scalps there. When full daylight was on them Sam and the chief, sitting in the places of honor in the village center, smoked a pipe, as Sam looked round him at hostile faces. Never in Crow country would he dare to forget the past, for to the end of his days one of the avengers might trail him.