Ghost Dance (17 page)

"Do you know why Buckhorn, the little boy, kills snakes?"

"For sugar," she said.

"No," said Chance, "because someone whom he likes very much is afraid of them–he is afraid they will make her go away."

Chance turned the horse, kicked it in the flanks, and rode from the white-boarded school, leaving behind him a young, blue-eyed woman who stared after him.

"Good-bye, Mr. Chance," she whispered.

 

 

 

 

Chapter Nine

 

It was a dark, bitter rider who left the white school on the hill, his horse moving easily, the shadows in the silver light moving like spiders beside him.

Through the cactus and the sage in the December night on Standing Rock he rode, not noticing much of anything, keeping the horse always west.

They were long, cruel hours, and Chance would not make them easier.

He cursed himself for running, but knew that it was what he must do.

He was not a killer and he would not go back and kill.

He must leave Grawson to pursue, and he must forget the girl.

She had been brave, that girl, to have risked a hand in the games of men, and simply because he had been kind to a child, because he had stopped long enough to care for an injured boy.

Did she know the danger in which she had placed herself? Could she really understand a man like Grawson, understand that, cheated of his prey and knowing it, he might kill her as easily as the paw of a puma can fall across the neck of a fawn? But Grawson would never know her part in this. It was Indians, simply Indians. Running Horse had seen to that.

My Brother, Running Horse.

The girl had been in her way beautiful, and she had been lonely, so lonely, lonely as Chance was lonely.

They had listened to one another, not just looking and nodding, but hearing and understanding, and caring.

And, Chance told himself, she had held him, no matter what she said. She had cried out and kissed and touched, though she might deny it for a hundred years.

We might have loved one another, thought Chance, in a different time and place.

Chance stood up in the stirrups under the moon.

"I don't want to run!" he cried aloud to the prairie. And all the hatred and frustration that had built its slow fires in his heart over the weeks burst ugly bright in his body and he wheeled the horse to face the backtrail and his boots tensed to hurtle the animal into a gallop back to the school, back to the soddy, to fight to the death those that followed him and would kill him, to kill them or die, and if he lived, to go to the soddy and say to the girl, "My name is Chance. I've come back."

But Chance turned the horse again, west, enraged, weeping. Run, run, run.

The horse snorted.

Startled, Chance looked up. There was a ridge not more than fifty yards from him.

On the top of this ridge, clear and black against the moon, was a rider, an Indian, who carried a lance, winged with feathers; on his left arm was a buffalo-hide shield, from which hung five streamers of leather. With him were five braves.

The man lifted his arms, with shield and lance. He called out, "I am Drum, the son of Kills-His-Horse."

Chance remembered the Indian girl in the camp of Sitting Bull. She had spoken to him. "Sing your death song," she had said.

Chance threw back his head and not knowing why laughed like a madman.

"You bastards," yelled Chance, "I love you, you dirty bastards!"

It was the end of it. No more running. The end of it. It was over.

With a wild shout Chance kicked his horse up the ridge toward the Indians.

They were waiting for him to turn and run.

He didn't.

Chance was in the midst of rearing, snorting horses, sprawling bodies, screams of surprise.

At point-blank range Chance jerked twice on the trigger of the heavy Colt.

One brave fell backward blindly, pawing at his face, not reaching it.

Another, grabbing his gut, rolled over the neck of his pony and fell under the hoofs of the animals.

Chance jerked the trigger of the Colt again but the hammer struck on the rim of a bad cartridge and Drum's lance thrust through his shirt and Chance could feel blood inside but the lance ripped through and came free and another brave was behind and Chance swept the barrel of the Colt back and caught him in the throat and he dropped off the rump of his pony with a noise like gargling.

They were scattered.

Two were dead; another was dragging himself into the sagebrush.

About thirty yards off, the other two braves and Drum were gathering together, to come at him, and Chance yelled again, insanely, jerked his horse around and charged them. This time the knot of Indians broke with startled yelps and each rider separated, and they melted into the prairie, each one taking a different direction.

Chance found himself alone on the top of the ridge.

He had won.

 

* * *

 

Chance walked his horse down the other side of the ridge.

There was no point in being targeted against the sky.

It would be stupid to chase the Indians, and Chance wasn't stupid. But he had been lucky, he knew, damn lucky.

Not being afraid of dying he had done pretty well.

He knew that if he had run he would have been dead by now.

It hadn't even occurred to the Indians that he would attack them. They had wanted the hunt, the chase, making it last, then cutting him down when they pleased.

Drum hadn't even taken his rifle out of the buckskin sheath across his pony's back.

He had wanted to use the lance.

Drum would not make that mistake again.

It occurred to Chance, incredibly, that he was hungry. He pawed through the saddlebags on Grawson's horse, but there was no food there. Chance wondered idly if there had been. Perhaps Grawson had taken it with him, to eat while he watched. Chance recalled Lucia's offer of food. Pinned down in the soddy, tense, waiting, he hadn't eaten. He wished he had. Even a piece of bacon would be all right now. He wouldn't build a fire, too dangerous. He could eat it in the saddle, raw.

The various digestive juices, the names of which Chance recounted dismally to himself, were working on his stomach.

A jack rabbit lit out of the brush almost at his horse's feet and took its long bounding trajectory across the prairie.

Chance urged the horse after it and thought of taking a shot at it, and then thought the better of it. The shot would mark his position if there were any of the braves about. At last the rabbit entered some brush and seemed to stay there. Chance dismounted, picked up a rock and approached the brush. There didn't seem to be a rabbit and, poking around, Chance found the hole. He threw the rock away disgustedly. Then he lay on his belly and reached his arm down the hole. It was a damn sight deeper than the reach of his arm. Chance stood up and disgustedly slapped the prairie dust from his clothes.

His horse was browsing about ten yards off and Chance walked over to get it and the horse moved ahead of him, and Chance moved after it and the horse found something else to eat, always about ten yards further away than Chance happened to be at the time.

Then Chance said a few things to the horse which he would not have said in the presence of Lucia Turner, or for that matter in the presence of the woman in Chicago.

He stumbled after the horse, his feet shuffling in the dust, muttering.

Once he got to within about four or five yards of it and then it shied away and stood looking at him, as though it might never have seen him before.

Chance whistled softly and coaxed and wheedled but the animal had better things to do.

Nibbling here and there out of reach.

Then Chance, not thinking, angrily, hungry, began to run after the animal, and it moved easily away again, effortlessly maintaining that same maddening, delicate interval.

Then he stopped and began to cajole it once more, and wished he had the rope that was on the saddle, and felt like putting a bullet behind its ear.

Then Chance said, "Ah," for he had seen to the left, about a hundred yards away, a small grove of trees, and Chance circled so as to drive the horse into the trees.

"Yah!" he yelled, rushing forward.

The horse turned and cantered into the trees. There, after a minute or two, Chance ran the animal into a mass of brush and as it was backing out snorting he grabbed the bridle.

Instantly the horse became calm and obedient, infuriatingly domesticated.

"Goddam you," said Chance, giving its neck a couple of happy slaps. "Yes," said Chance, "double goddam you." The horse rubbed its nose against his shoulder.

Chance heard a tiny noise.

It sounded like dried peas or pebbles in a wooden bowl, and it was over his head.

He looked up.

In the moonlight above him, hanging from a branch of the cottonwood beneath which he was standing, he saw a gourd rattle swaying softly, gently, in the wind. It was from this that the sound came.

He looked up past the rattle and was startled.

In the branches of the tree, a few feet above the rattle, there was a wooden scaffold, and on the scaffold there was a large bundle, wrapped in leather and tied tightly.

In other trees Chance saw similar scaffolds, each with a similar burden.

From the scaffolds, here and there, hung other rattles, and bone whistles and pieces of colored cloth. From some of the scaffolds there hung, like dark disks in the moonlight, leather shields.

He knew what place this was, and that there would be food here, offerings of corn and dried meat, but he also knew that he would not eat it.

 

* * *

 

The eastern sky was gray now, the moon a pale disk in a robe of fading stars.

The first definite light of the sun, flung from its rim's edge, lay over the prairie now like a cold, golden blade, a saber gleaming at the bottom of the horizon, bleak and glinting in the east.

Chance stooped down and tore up a handful of grass and sucked the moisture from it.

The wind cut through the grove of cottonwoods, stirring the rattles and the streamers of colored cloth, faded now, hanging from the branches. Over his head the buffalo-hide shields turned and swayed, moving with the wind.

Chance shivered.

It had taken him longer to catch the horse than it should have, and he had stayed perhaps a bit too long in this place, looking about.

Had he not been as hungry as he was he might have stayed in the grove until dark, and then moved out at night.

He could eat the offerings on the graves, and he supposed it was the thing to do, in spite of the repulsion. He asked himself why he should not do so. He told himself he was not yet that hungry. Also, he told himself, I am the brother of Running Horse, and he would not want that.

Swinging up into the saddle Chance moved the horse out of the trees.

They had broken cover only a pace or two when Chance flung himself out of the saddle, the rifle shot cracking over his head, two others splattering into the damp ground under his horse's hoofs.

Running he dragged the protesting animal back into the shelter of the trees.

Of course they had followed him, Drum and the others. They had been waiting for him to come out of the trees.

They should have waited longer.

They had been eager, too eager, as young men are eager.

Chance tied the horse well back in the grove, where it could not be seen, trying to shelter it back of a knot of cottonwoods.

He slipped Grawson's carbine from the saddle boot, checked the weapon quickly, scooped a handful of cartridges from the saddlebag into his pocket.

Why hadn't they come into the grove to get him?

Chance ducked back through the trees and getting to the edge of the grove, crawled forward on his stomach, inching with the carbine up a tiny, bush-covered rise that would give him a view of the prairie.

Water from the bush he crawled under slid down his neck, and Chance cussed to himself and lifted his head over the rise, just enough to bring his eyes over the grass.

There were three of them.

They had withdrawn apparently, more than a hundred yards from where their shots had been fired.

Chance estimated the distance and the wind. He decided not to try a shot. There would be little more than a random chance of getting a bullet within yards of them.

He watched them, astride their ponies.

They made no move to approach more closely. They had returned their rifles to the buckskin sheaths carried across their thighs.

For a minute Chance angrily regretted losing his horse and spending the time necessary to recapture it, and for not leaving the grove immediately, but as he lay there on the damp grass, watching the young men in the distance, he realized that he would be dead now if the horse hadn't escaped, if he hadn't taken shelter in the grove.

He had scattered them, but they would have regrouped almost immediately, picked up his trail in the moonlight, followed him and brought him down on the open prairie, apart from cover, where their three carbines to his one would have made the difference.

He might have survived, but it was not likely, especially after they had learned that he was dangerous.

Unaccountably, to Chance's mind, they had not feared him to begin with. He was not an Indian.

But now, judging from the distance, they feared him, but would not give him up.

Chance was puzzled why they did not fire into the trees, trying to draw his fire.

Perhaps their ammunition was severely limited.

Sometimes Indians went into battle with only a handful of bullets, sometimes only three or four.

The Indians could not make their own bullets, as could the white man.

Chance wondered if the white man would have held his land if he had only two or three bullets per man and a handful of stone- or metal-tipped arrows, and his wits and his courage. Probably not, thought Chance, especially after the buffalo were gone. What if the enemy could take the white man's beef and wheat and corn from him, as they had taken the buffalo from the Indian?