As for Torridon, he did not receive so much honor for his suggestion of the trap at the mouth of the ravine. It was rather because he had predicted the time at which they would take scalps. And even for that the regard he received was of a peculiar nature. To be sure he had done well. He had fought with the foremost. But still there was little honor paid to his person. It was to his magic powers that honors were accorded in the most liberal sense. They looked upon him not so much as a brave or wise man but as a peculiar instrument to which the spirits had confided an overwhelming power. He was hardly thought of as an individual at all.
Trusting in that power, straight south rode the war party. If they met with Spotted Antelope, they were wildly confident that victory again would be theirs. So Torridon spent anxious days until the river was crossed and at last they entered the comparatively friendly prairie where the power of the Cheyennes ruled.
VIII
A treble dignity invested Standing Bull when the war party returned to the village, so that even he could dispute with Rising Hawk the honors and the dignities of the expedition, though all that he had done was to be delivered from the hands of the Dakotas.
But, in the first place, he it was who had brought Torridon to the Cheyennes, and at second-hand, as it were, all the wonders that Torridon had worked since his arrival. Again, Standing Bull had taken prominent part in the first unfortunate expedition against the Sioux and duly counted his two coups before capture. Thirdly, the big man had the credit that comes of entering the jaws of death and escaping.
When the multitudes poured out from the Cheyenne camp, they yelled the name of Standing Bull louder than all the rest, except for a continual roar that lasted from the time the party was first met by fast-riding young men until the whole band had conducted the warriors to the center of the camp, and the burden of that roaring noise was the name of White Thunder. They called upon him, however, as they would have called upon a spirit. But they called upon Standing Bull as upon a man.
When that warrior returned, therefore, he found all in order with his reputation, but all out of order in his lodge. His favorite wife was a wracked and helpless woman, lying stretched on her bed, too weakened by a debauch of grief that had followed the tidings of the loss of her lord to do more than raise her head and smile weakly in greeting. Her shaven head glistened repulsively under the eye of her husband; her body was slashed and torn; her scalp was crossed with many knife slashes, and, beyond this, she had given away practically everything in the lodge and the entire horse herd of her husband in the midst of her grief in order to propitiate the Sky People and to give more lasting rest to the spirit of Standing Bull. In all this, she had acted a most pious part, but it left Standing Bull a beggared man.
For that, he cared not at all. There were many gifts from his friends. White Thunder alone gave ten horses to make a handsome beginning of a horse herd for his old friend, and High Wolf donated a store of provisions. In a day, the lodge was well supplied with all the necessaries. So fluid was prosperity in an Indian tribe. It ebbed and flowed like the sea.
The entire stage was left to be monopolized by Rising Hawk and Standing Bull. White Thunder had withdrawn to his teepee, where he lay on his bed and slept longer than any warrior should, and the whoopings and the yellings only made him turn from time to time and exclaim impatiently.
Young Willow, grown suddenly tender beyond her wont, watched over him. With a new-cut branch she waved the flies away from him, and with ambidextrous skill saw to it that he slept and that food was ready when at last he wakened.
He lolled at ease against the most comfortable of his backrests and ate of the meat that was placed before him—not simply dried flesh of the buffalo, but stewed venison, freshly killed, and roasted venison, turned at the fire on a dozen small spits and handed to him bit by bit by the squaw.
With burning eyes of pleasure she regarded the man of the lodge. “So,” said Young Willow, “you rode out groaning, and you have come back famous!”
“Fame is noise,” said Torridon sententiously—and wearily, also, for he was still tired from the long ride.
“Noise?” cried Young Willow, growing angry at once. “Fame is all that men live for and all that the dead are remembered by!”
“The people shout today, they yawn tomorrow,” sighed Torridon.
“Good fame is better than a handsome face,” said the squaw.
“It is a breath,” said the man.
“It is to men what their breath is to the flowers,” said the squaw.
“The flowers soon wither,” said Torridon, “and so what becomes of them?”
“The sweetness they have left on earth is remembered,” replied Young Willow.
He felt himself fairly beaten, and, acknowledging it by his silence, he smiled almost fondly on that grotesque face, and she smiled back at him, gently.
“From the time we left until the time we returned,” said Torridon, “I fired my rifle only twice.”
“And then?” she asked him hungrily.
“Then,” he admitted, with a lift of the head, “I saw a Sioux jump his height into the air each time.” He added, chuckling: “They must live on springs, because they die in the air.”
Young Willow laughed, like the cawing of a crow. “That is a good thing to remember,” she said. “How many spirits, White Thunder, came down at your call?”
An honest man would have shrugged his shoulders and declared that there was not a spirit in the air on that day of bloodshed. But Torridon had discovered that honesty availed him nothing. If he put all on a common-sense plane, it was simply believed that he was deceiving the people and hiding the truth, and veiling his powers.
He said as gravely as possible: “There was a spirit in front of every man. There were eighty Sioux, and yet all their bullets could not find a single Cheyenne. I shall tell you why . . . I had placed a spirit in front of every warrior. The ghosts turned the bullets away. Some of those bullets went back and killed the men who had fired them.”
At this prodigy, Young Willow opened her eyes and her mouth. She drank, as it were, of the mystery. Doubt was far from her. This was a story that would thrill the very hearts of the men, the women, and the children, and she could be fairly sure that White Thunder would not tell the story himself. It was in her hands. Beads and shells would be showered upon her for the telling of such a miracle. In fact her housekeeping for the white man was turning out a sinecure of great value, in her eyes.
“You saw them, White Thunder?” she breathed.
“I alone,” he said. “There is a veil before the eyes of other men. A spirit like a great bat flew before Rising Hawk. Bullets glanced from its wings and made sparks of bright red light.”
There was a little more of this fantastic conversation. Then, when Torridon went to sleep again, the squaw slipped from the lodge, fairly bursting with her tale. She went back to the teepee of her husband to find that High Wolf was in serious conversation with Standing Bull.
The old chief turned on the squaw with a harsh voice. “What of White Thunder?” he asked.
She concealed the miracle that had just been confided to her. She preferred to retell it herself to small gatherings. “He still sleeps.”
High Wolf made a gesture of impatience. “The Sky People have sent us a pig in the form of a man,” he declared scornfully. “Has he done no boasting?”
“Only that two Dakotas fell under his rifle”
High Wolf and Standing Bull exchanged glances.
“That is nothing to him?”
“He sleeps again.” Young Willow smiled.
“He neither has danced nor sung?”