While the two men smoked and breakfast was prepared in the fires the chief looked at Sam with eyes almost ninety snows old and said, "Dua-wici?" Sam thought of Charley and Cy and tried to remember what these words meant. The chief now asked him in signs if he had a wife. Sam shook his head no. The chief gave a signal. A little old woman, crippled by arthritis and age, hobbled over to him and bent down to listen with half-dead ears; and then hastened away, to return half dragging by the hands a frightened girl. She looked to Sam like a child but she was slender and lovely and reminded him a little of Lotus. This, the chief explained, was his youngest daughter and she was not for sale. He would give her to Sam as a guarantee of that friendship and peace that must henceforth rest between Long Talons and the Sparrowhawks. Sam was touched by the offer. He knew it was a goodwill offering of extraordinary size—to give to the killer of his people the only unmarried daughter of the head chief! It was almost as if George Washington had offered his daughter to Cornwallis at Yorktown.
It took Sam a few moments to sense the magnanimity of it. He then got to his feet and beckoned to the girl to come to him. She came slinking, shy and hostile, and stood before him, looking down. Stooping, Sam put his left arm under her rump and straightened; and there she sat in the cradle of his arm, her black eyes staring at him. One who read the human female more unerringly than Sam might have thought her stare a fascinated blend of hate and admiration; hate, because this was the monster; admiration, because her father had said that as a fighter Long Talons had no match in all the lands of the earth. "Wife for me?" he asked her, but she only stared. She was a little heavier than Lotus, he thought, and a little taller. He liked the womanly female of her on his arm and her pressure against his shoulder. He liked the intelligence in her eyes. He set her down but did not release her at once; with his left arm across her back and her black hair coming to the top of his shoulder, he looked round him at the braves; at the women and children in a large group beyond the braves; and at the smoke of breakfast fires. He did not want the girl but he did not want to offend his host. He now had to match the chief’s generosity, and this, it seemed to him, he could hardly do, unless he gave everything he had and walked away. But then he thought of the panniers bulging with stuff for Kate. That was it! The chief would think he had bought all these things for him and his people., So with words and signs he told him that he had brought gifts to the great chief of the Sparrowhawks; and clasping the girl’s hand, Sam walked over to his packhorses. There he released her and began to strip the panniers. A ten-yard bolt of cloth in brilliant colors he gave, with a slight bow, to the girl. He did not observe that she was rigid with amazement and joy. All the other things he gave to the chief, who almost melted with happiness, for he felt that at some trading post Long Talons had bought these things for him. During the hours spent with the chief not a word was said about Kate Bowden. But the chief knew that Sam knew what had been done, and Sam knew that he knew it. The Indian male was in fact a sentimental soul, but from early childhood there waited for him a pattern of life in which he would be brave, daring, ruthless, and conquering. The chief wanted to know if the pale people from the rising sun were going to keep coming until they overflowed the land and drove the red people out. Sam said he would fight for his red brothers before he would see them robbed of their ancient lands. That pleased the chief, and so they smoked another pipe. Sam had given him four pounds of tobacco, and to the young warriors around him he promised tobacco and rum. The chief said they were all friends now. His people had enough trouble fighting the Blackfeet and the Cheyenne; he wanted only peace with the mountain men.
While Sam took breakfast with the chief the daughter stood back, her black eyes studying the whiteman. Perhaps she was trying to imagine what life would be for her as his wife. The Crow women were menials but they seemed fairly contented with their lot, and they boasted louder of their lords and masters than any other women Sam had known. This girl, he supposed, was thinking that she would gather the wood, set the fires, cook the food, tan skins, sew and mend garments, find forage for horses and berries and roots for her man, while in fringed and beaded buckskin he rode arrogantly away to kill an enemy or a bull. So far as Sam knew, no Indian girl had ever preferred a whiteman to a red. He didn’t know whether he would ever come back to claim her or ever want another wife. If he could be at peace with all the tribes around him he would have the life he wanted—the free wide world of valleys and rivers and mountains, of natural odors and natural music, where the black currants and red chokecherries and red plums bent their boughs toward him, and his drink was pure water and his bed was the earth. If he were not slain by man or beast, someday he would be old, and like the old bull he would go off somewhere and be alone to wait for death.
But he had before him, he hoped, twenty or thirty years of full living and millions of square miles to live them in; hot steaks and bird throats singing to him and mornings as fresh as the first alpine lily, and evenings as deep with peace as the earth under them. Turning on a hilltop, he looked back at the thousand Sparrowhawks watching him, and made a sign which said that he would come again someday; and then he galloped off into the southwest and a brilliant Rubens sunset. Maybe he would go down to see Jim Bridger, who was having trouble with Brigham Young and his Mormons.
When a few days later he came close to the Oregon Trail he paused, as in former times, and looked at the scene before him. There they were, hundreds or thousands of them, as far back as he could see in clouds of dust, and as far ahead—a long gray line of bawling beasts and squealing axles and creaking wagon beds that hadn’t a drop of moisture left in them. There they were, pushing on and on like the armies of red ants; and behind them were other thousands, on their way or getting ready; and in the future their children’s children would swarm over this magnificent land, chasing to their death the last elk and deer, shooting the last songbirds, trampling the last berry bush; there and everywhere with their houses and hotels and saloons and gutters, their towns looking like gigantic magpie and crow nests; there and everywhere, proliferating, crowding, and making untidiness and stench of everything, a people bumping and stumbling to get out of one another’s way. Every Indian tribe was becoming more restless as the hordes poured in, and before long there would shorely be bloody war between the red and the white. During the hour that he watched the slow dust-saturated serpentine crawl of a wagon trail four miles long there filled him the realization that his way of life would someday be no more. For a little while there would be patches of it left up in Canada but here it would all be what Jim Bridger said it would be, swarming human masses, with the effluvium of their body smells and city smells and machine smells rising to the heavens and wash away the blue. Sam didn’t know if the Creator had planned it this way or if it was only the blind way of the blind. He remembered what a musician had written after hearing the Dan Giovanni overture: that he had been seized by terror as there unrolled the ascending and descending scales, as answerless as fate and as inexorable as death. Sam guessed he wouldn’t go on to Jim’s post now but would turn back to the bird wings and giddy roadrunners and bluebirds, spilling lyrics out of the clean blue loveliness of their souls. He would go back to the Breughel mornings and Rubens evenings, and see what Bill was doing and what Hank was doing; and he would find a bushel of wild flowers and lay them gently over the bones of two mothers and one child. And so after a last long look at the immigrants he turned and headed straight north, back into the valleys and the mountains.