Young Willow shrugged her shoulders. “He has had a few Dakotas killed, and taken a few scalps to make the Cheyennes proud. But what is that to him? If he wished, he would wash the Dakotas into the rivers so thickly that the Father of Waters would be choked on his way to the sea. The Cheyennes come home and sing like children over a few beads. White Thunder sleeps so that he may dream of happier things.”
The two warriors listened to this speech with the deepest attention.
“He is not happy, then?” asked High Wolf.
“He is as always. I spoke to him about fame. He turned my words into the thinnest air.”
High Wolf gestured toward the door, and the squaw departed. After she had gone, High Wolf said: “From the time you first brought him to us, I knew that he was a gift from the heavens. But I never knew until now what his powers could be.”
“Use him now, while he is with us,” said Standing Bull. “Use him like a magic rifle that will soon be gone. For he is unhappy among us. I cannot tell why, but he is unhappy.”
“I, however, know the reason,” returned the chief. “It is because of a woman.”
“Ha?” cried Standing Bull. “If it is a Crow, a Blackfoot, if it is even a Sioux, there are enough horses in the tribe to buy ten girls for him.”
“Tell me,” said the old man, “how often do the whites sell their women?”
Standing Bull made a face of disgust. “A woman to a white man,” he admitted, “is like a child to a mother.” He added: “Is it a white girl?”
High Wolf nodded. “It is a white girl,” he said.
At that, the big man threw out his arms. “It is she who lives at Fort Kendry, I saw her. She is no bigger than a child. In twenty days she could not flesh a robe. She has no more force in her hands than there is in the claw of a sparrow. Why should a man want her?”
“This is not a man. It is a spirit,” said High Wolf.
The warrior made no answer.
“Heammawihio,” went on the chief gravely, “has given power to you in this matter. It was you who brought us White Thunder. It was you, also, who followed him to Fort Kendry and brought him to us a second time. Therefore, it is plain that the Great Spirit wishes to work through you in all of these things. Perhaps it was to free you that we were given this last great victory over the Sioux. At any rate, it is clear that you must do what is necessary to keep White Thunder happy . . . that is, to keep him with us. You must bring to him the white girl that he wants.”
Standing Bull groaned. “Twice in the trap makes a captured wolf,” he said.
“Look over the tribe,” said High Wolf. “Take the finest horses and the strongest braves, but fix this in your mind . . . that you must ride to Fort Kendry and bring the girl here.”
IX
For a whole week, Standing Bull purified himself every day. It became known throughout the village that he was about to attempt some great and secret thing. For every day he went to the sweat house and there he had water poured over red-hot, crumbling stones until the lodge was filled with choking, blinding fumes. In these he remained for a long time, and then came out, staggering and reeling like a drunkard. He would run down the hillside naked, the steam flying up from his body, and plunge into the cold river. In this manner he was driving out evil and preparing himself for a great deed.
He fasted, also, eating sparingly only once every second day, and he never smoked, except ceremonially. With his hands he touched no weapons. He was much alone, and used to sit on a hill overlooking the camp and the river for hours and hours at a time. Sometimes he was seen there in the midday. Again, the growing dawn light discovered Standing Bull on the hill. Perhaps he was wrapped in a buffalo robe. Perhaps he was half naked, as though unaware of heat or of cold.
His poor wife, Owl Woman, cured by the return of her husband, was up and about the camp, frightfully worried by the procedures of her spouse. She had harried herself until she was a mere caricature of a woman, but she was honored throughout the village because of the extremity of her devotion. Even that harsh and incredulous critic, Young Willow, was heard to say: “She was just a young woman before . . . now she is beautiful.”
“Beautiful?” echoed Torridon, always willing to argue with the squaw.
“No good woman can be ugly,” said Young Willow.
Owl Woman, therefore, was seen about the camp anxiously inquiring what could be in the mind of her husband, and then rather naturally she told herself that it was because she had deformed herself so greatly by mourning. She even came to Torridon and brought him a gift of carved bone to ornament a backrest. She wanted to know how she could win back her husband.
He accepted the gift, gave her a simple salve to hasten the healing of the wounds that covered her body, and then told her to go home and cover her shaven head with a mantle, and to be seen singing around the lodge. As for her husband, he assured her that the heart of Standing Bull was not estranged. He simply was having a struggle with spirits.
Common sense, of course, would have dictated all these sayings to any man, but she received them with devout thankfulness. She took the mantle that he gave her and went off with a step so light and swift that the cloth—it was a bright Mexican silk gained from the Comanches—streamed out behind her as she went.
Torridon watched her going until Young Willow broke in on his thoughts with her harsh voice: “Why do you sneer and smile to yourself after you have given advice to people and shown them the truth? He that scorns others must sit on a cloud.”
On the evening of the seventh day, Standing Bull himself came to Torridon. He looked thin. His eyes were sunken, and his lips were compressed.
“I am going to try to do a great thing,” he said. “Give me a charm to help me, White Thunder.”
“There are all sorts of charms,” said the young man. “If I gave you a charm at random, it might be the worst thing in the world for you. Tell me what you want to try.”
“I cannot tell you that,” grumbled Standing Bull. “Only . . . it is something to make you happy.”
“Shall I tell you the quickest way to make me happy?” said Torridon. “Send away the young men who watch me day and night. Let me have Ashur and one minute to get away from the camp. Then I shall be happy, Standing Bull, but nothing else matters to me.”
“Do you ask me to give away my right hand, White Thunder?” asked the chief gloomily. “Then I must go away and carry no luck from you.” He departed slowly in a sort of despair.
Then he began to make the round of the camp. His reputation was now so big that he was able to call on six of the best warriors in the village and enlist them to follow him wheresoever he chose to lead them. The desperate nature of the work that he had in mind kept him from revealing the secret. Chiefly because, if it were rumored about the camp and came to the ear of Torridon, he was afraid that great magician would blast all their plans.
At last he had his party together. There were three horses for every man; the braves were painted for the warpath, and Standing Bull rode with them three times around the village. As he came opposite each of the cardinal points of the compass in making this circuit, he blew smoke offerings, but, after the third circle, he bore away to the northwest. They crossed the shallow river, and disappeared over the plains, while Torridon, together with most of the gathered tribe, watched their going.
“Standing Bull is like a buzzard,” said Young Willow. “He is always hungry and therefore he is always on the wing.”
But Standing Bull was not thinking of fame; he was facing forward to the dreadful difficulty of his task and wishing that, in all the world, some other duty could have been assigned to him. Sometimes he wished that the entire Cheyenne nation could be behind him for the work. But again, he realized that such numbers could do nothing secretly, and at the first approach of an armed tribe all the people who lived outside the fort would retire within its walls—Samuel Brett with his niece among the rest. He realized, also, that he never had seen the face of the girl. He had seen her only in the dusk, and, if there were more than one girl in the house, he would be shrewdly put to it to select the right one.