“Yes.”
Torridon smiled faintly, and the squaw frowned, unable to read his mind, no matter how she tried. She was angry with herself, when she found that she was baffled so early and so often by this youth. His white skin was a barrier that stopped her probing eyes, as it were.
“What should I do with a woman?” said Torridon.
“A wife is better than many horses,” said the squaw sententiously.
Torridon fell amiably into that mode of maintaining the discourse. In a way, he feared to be left to his own thoughts, for since Young Willow had turned the conversation into this channel the picture of Nancy Brett stood like life before him, in all her beauty, her gentleness, her grace. He tried to turn from that hopeless dream into the present. So he answered the squaw: “A bag of fleas is easier to keep watch over than a woman.”
“Ha?” cried the squaw. “I think you are talking about the Arapahoes, or the Dakotas. You do not know our Cheyenne girls. After the sun has gone down, they still have firelight to work by.”
“People who work forever,” quoted Torridon, “are dull companions. You cannot dig up wisdom like a root.”
Young Willow grunted. Her eyes had a touch of red fire in them as she glared across the teepee at her young companion.
“You cannot judge a woman by her tongue,” she replied.
“No,” said Torridon, “but with a small tongue, a woman can kill a tall man.”
“Very well,” grumbled Young Willow, “but you know the saying . . . a woman’s counsel may be no great thing, but he is a fool who does not take it. I am giving you good advice, White Thunder.”
“No doubt you are.” Torridon yawned rather impolitely.
“Aye,” she answered, “but only a pretty woman is always right.”
“No,” he replied, “a pretty woman is either silly or proud.”
“For a proud woman,” she said, “take a heavy hand.”
He raised his slender hand with a sigh. “My hand is not heavy, Young Willow. Even if I had a lovely wife, how could I keep her?”
“With a whip, perhaps.”
“A Cheyenne girl,” he said more seriously, “wants a strong husband. She wants to see scalps drying in the lodge and hear her man counting his coups.”
“You are young,” said Young Willow tactfully, for she had been pleased to the core of her heart by the remark dispraising beauty in a woman. “You are young, and a man is not grown in a summer.”
“I never shall take scalps,” said Torridon, sighing again. “I never shall count coups, or steal horses. How could I be honored among the Cheyennes or by a woman in my own lodge?”
This plain statement of fact took Young Willow a good deal aback. It was, in short, what she had said at greater length to High Wolf. But at last she replied: “Take a wife, and I shall teach her how to behave. She will not be able to draw a breath that I shall not count. Afterward, you will have sons. You will be a great chief.”
She painted the rosy picture with a good deal of warmth. And suddenly Torridon said gravely: “Let us talk no more about it, Young Willow. Are you tired of doing the work in this lodge?”
“I? No, no!” cried the squaw.
“Then stay with me, and I shall not ask for a Cheyenne girl as a wife. There is only one woman in the world who I could marry, Young Willow.”
“And she is not in this camp?”
“She is far away.”
“She is a Blackfoot,” said Young Willow instantly. “They are tall, and a short man wants a tall wife. They have big eyes, and the white men love only big eyes.” Her own small eyes became mere glints of light.
“No,” said Torridon. “Big eyes are good to look at, but not to look. It is not a Blackfoot girl. I never have seen a Blackfoot.”
“Then you have seen a Sioux girl smiling. They always are smiling, and they always are untrue.”
“In short,” said Torridon impatiently, “it is no Indian girl at all.”
“A white woman?” asked Young Willow.
“Yes.”
“She is tall and proud and rich,” said Young Willow.
“No, she is small,” mused Torridon. “Or rather, she is no size at all, but she fits into my mind and heart . . .”
“As the saddle fits the back of a horse,” suggested Young Willow.
Torridon merely sighed.
“When you were carried away in the storm,” said the squaw, “and disappeared over the prairie, then you went to Fort Kendry to find her there?”
But, at this direct question, Torridon recovered from his dream, and shrugged his shoulders. “I am going to sleep,” he said abruptly.
He settled against the backrest and closed his eyes. Young Willow was too well trained in the lodge of her husband to utter a word when one of the lords of creation was resting. Therefore, Torridon heard nothing except the light, faint click of beads in the rapid fingers of the squaw from time to time.
And he passed into another of the weary, sad vigils that he had kept so many times before. At last he actually slept and dreamed of great woe and misery, a dream so vivid that dreary, wailing voices thrummed in his ears loudly. He wakened to find that the sounds were no dream at all, but that from hundreds of throats, apparently, a paean of grief was rising through the village. The noise came slowly toward the teepee. He heard the screaming of women, who seemed maddened with woe.
Young Willow dashed into the lodge, her hair flying in long strings, her breast heaving.
“Why do so many people cry out, Young Willow?” he asked her, bewildered.
“You!” shrieked the squaw, shaking her bony fist at him. “You that make medicine when you wish, but let our men go out to die! It would have been better for us if you had been left in the sky!”
“But what has happened? Has someone died?”
“Has someone died?” exclaimed the squaw. “Eleven men are dead and Rising Hawk has brought home the rest, and all of the eight are wounded.”
“Rising Hawk has brought them home?” exclaimed Torridon. “Then tell me what has become of Standing Bull?”
“He was lost! He was lost! He was captured in the battle and carried away by the Dakotas, and by this time they are eating his heart! He was your friend! He was your friend! Could you make no medicine for him?”
She ran out of the lodge again, raising her voice in a shrill keen as she burst through the entrance.
Torridon, amazed and shocked, followed. It was to Standing Bull that he owed his first captivity in the tribe. It was to Standing Bull, also, that he owed his recapture after the first escape. And yet he had been so much with the Cheyenne giant that he was shocked to hear of his capture. There was little chance that such a warrior as Standing Bull would be spared except for the sake of tormenting him slowly to death when the Dakotas had reached their homes after the war raid.
Torridon wrapped himself hastily in a robe and stepped into the entrance of the teepee in time to see the mass of the crowd of mourners move past. Every relative of a dead or wounded man was called upon by invincible custom to mourn, and with a dozen deaths to account for, it seemed that half the tribe was officially interested.
At that moment Owl Woman went by. She was the young squaw of Standing Bull, the mother of his son, and as handsome a woman as could be found in the tribe. She had disfigured herself for life. Her hair was shaved from her head, and the scalp gashed across and across, so that blood had poured down and blackened over her face and shoulders. She went with bare legs, and along the calves she had ripped up the flesh again. As a crowning token of her affliction, she had actually cut off a finger of her left hand, and what with loss of blood and the shock of her grief and the torment of her exhaustion, she staggered rather than walked, her head rolled on her shoulders, and Torridon could hear her sobbing. It was not the noise of weeping, but the heavy gasp of exhaustion and hysteria.