He had closed his eyes as he sucked in air, and when he opened them again, he found himself staring down at a large rectangle of green bordered by a high fence. In the center of the green strip was a body of water.
Ten Bears walked back across the room and pulled on a soft rope hanging next to a wall. How it could summon white men he did not know, but in minutes there was a knock at the door, and when Ten Bears opened it he found a white boy in tight-fitting clothes decorated with golden buttons standing in the hall.
"Yes, sir?" he asked cheerfully.
Ten Bears motioned him into the room, took the puzzled boy by the elbow, and guided him to the open window.
"Ten Bears," he said in Comanche, pointing an index finger at his chest, before thrusting it at the green below the window.
"What?" the boy inquired, not understanding.
"Ten Bears. ." he began again, repeating the gesture. "Go,” the old man blurted, remembering the English word for moving. Once more he pointed out the window.
Light washed over the boy's face. "Oh!" he exclaimed. "You want to go down to the garden."
Ten Bears sat at the side of the pool for a long time. The water was green and tasted rotten and had plump, golden fish living in it. Noises from the city crept steadily over the fence and sometimes curious white people stared or tried to ask him questions but, all in all, the setting was superior to the suffocating boxes the white men seemed so excited about inhabiting.
He still had some of the incredible little sticks whose red tips made fire when they were scratched in the proper way so he filled his pipe and smoked through the twilight as he revisited the dream of that afternoon.
Ten Bears believed in the purpose of dreams and concluded that this one was instructing him to behave as an eagle in the days to come. He would fly above the many forthcoming talks and social activities they were scheduled to have with the white men. If he could watch these things from the heights a truer picture of white people might emerge. Being an eagle, Ten Bears decided, would be the best way to proceed.
When the garden was saturated with shadow he heard familiar voices and turned to see his fellow warriors coming down the stairs at the rear of the hotel. They, too, preferred the garden and related various anecdotes of their walk around washington as they lounged beside the pool with Ten Bears. At last light, Lawrie Tatum and some other white men came out and told them the clock said it was time to take food.
But no one was hungry and Kicking Bird asked instead if they could have fuel for a fire. Lawrie Tatum looked perplexed but told him to wait and returned a few minutes later to say that a fire would be all right, but only on the condition — and he emphasized this several times — that it be small.
Several of the warriors retrieved the last of the food they carried with them, and the delegation sat around their tiny conflagration, staring fixedly into the flames as they passed the pipe and devoured the last of their jerked meat.
Naturally, all thought drifted toward home, and the men wondered aloud about friends and relatives who had come into the reservation and how they might be faring on the white man's holy road.
Since each man was a warrior, the talk eventually gravitated toward those who had stayed out to fight. These were their friends and relatives, and they speculated at length on the chances so many good fighters might have in battle with white soldiers. The more they talked about it the more convinced they became that the distinguished body of hostile warriors could not help but have success, and by the time some members of the delegation began to yawn, the idea that the buffalo might return was being discussed enthusiastically.
Chapter XLVIII
Six days after the deadline for the ultimatum passed, Captain Bradley's command was hit by a large, combined force of well-armed warriors.
The attack came a few minutes before dawn, and though it had been repulsed, four troopers were dead and six were wounded. Seven of the enemy had been killed. The captain was certain that more Indians had died but he listed only the bodies that had been recovered.
Enemy wounded weren't counted. A lesser officer would have been tempted to embellish his report, but Captain Bradley was a rare bird. He laid out only the plain facts of the engagement in the official report he scribbled to General Mackenzie barely an hour after the fighting had ceased.
The night before, his command had bivouacked in a small valley nestled in rolling, mesquite-covered country. The site, which was spotted with growths of cottonwoods at its deepest point, had been chosen because a large spring of pure, clear water had been discovered there.
He didn't mention it in his report, but Bradley had begun to feel restless as soon as they made camp. In the days before, they had encountered more and more Indian sign, much of it fresh. None of the hostiles had been sighted, but having led his column so deep into enemy territory the captain was on high alert.
The wide ravine was, from a military point of view; neither the worst nor the best place he might have chosen to spend the night. His ambivalence about the spot left him vaguely queasy, and after dark he ordered the herders to move the horses and mules closer to camp. once this was accomplished he ordered that a half dozen more men be detailed to guard the livestock. Auxiliary fires were lit and tended through the night. Sentries were doubled, and instead of reporting once an hour, they were required to signify their presence to the sergeant of the guard every fifteen minutes.
Despite these measures, Captain Bradley found himself unable to rest and spent the balance of the night in sporadic checks of the camp. He had just returned from an inspection of the guard when, according to best estimates, nearly half a hundred screaming savages charged out of the blackness and attacked the horse herd.
Captain Bradley remained coolheaded through the ensuing ripple of chaos, giving strict and specific orders for the mounting of no more than twenty-five soldiers, who sped to aid the defenders of the precious herd. As firing echoed up the ravine, Bradley ordered the deployment of skirmish lines on either side of the bivouac and instructed the Gatling gun crew to set up their weapon in a position facing east.
The young commander had not guessed that an attack would come that morning, nor did he have any inkling of the Indian plan of battle. But his few engagements with the aboriginals had been enough to give him a feel for the enemy. Bradley understood, as did few of his peers, that to fight Indians effectively required leadership of an instinctive sort. In a land bare of all but the most natural elements it behooved any commander to make himself as much a part of the landscape as possible. He had realized after his initial debacle that the only individual he should rely upon was himself and to do that he had better “listen” to the enemy and to the country as much as possible. The captain had listened attentively in succeeding months, and though it could not be said he understood the language of nature, he was open to it and responding instinctively.
Captain Bradley had organized his defenses with little analytical thought and it was well that he did for in deviating from normal practice he successfully parried the surprisingly clever strategy of his native adversaries. The attack on the horse herd was no more than a ploy to divert attention from the real attack, which came a few moments after the sky had lightened, when a legion of warriors, estimated at more than two hundred, thundered out of the east' seeking to overrun the bivouac and kill everyone in it.