Chapter 3

When he had finished and sat down, the head chief arose slowly, and stepping from the folds of his robe, he began slowly to talk, making many gestures. “If the white chief had tracked the stolen ponies to his camp, let him come out to the Indian pony-herds and point them out. He could take his horses.”

The face of the trader grew hard as he faced the snare into which the chief had led him, and the lodge was filled with silence.

The camp-soldier at the entrance was brushed aside, and with a rapid stride a young Indian gained the center of the lodge and stood up very straight in his nakedness. He began slowly, with senatorial force made fierce by resolve.

“The white chief is a liar. He lied to me about the gun; he has come into the council tepee of the Chis-chis-chash and lied to all the chiefs. He did not trail the stolen horses to this camp. He will not find them in our pony-herds.”

He stopped awaiting the interpreter. A murmur of grunts went round.

“I--the boy--I stole all the white chief’s ponies, in the broad daylight, with his whole camp looking at me. I did not come in the dark. He is not worthy of that. He is a liar, and there is a shadow across his eyes. The ponies are not here. They are far away--where the poor blind Yellow-Eyes cannot see them even in dreams. There is no man of the Chis-chis-chash here who knows where the horses are. Before the liar gets his horses again, he will have his mouth set on straight,” and the Bat turned slowly around, sweeping the circle with his eyes to note the effect of his first speech, but there was no sound.

Again the trader ventured on his wrongs--charged the responsibility of the Bat’s actions on the Chis-chis-chash, and pleaded for justice.

The aged head chief again arose to reply, saying he was sorry for what had occurred, but he reminded McIntish that the young warrior had convicted him of forged words. What would the white chief do to recompense the wrong if his horses were returned? He also stated that it was not in his power to find the horses, and that only the young man could do that.

Springing again to his feet, with all the animation of resolution, the Bat’s voice clicked in savage gutturals. “Yes, it is only with myself that the white liar can talk. If the chiefs and warriors of my tribe were to take off my hide with their knives--if they were to give me to the Yellow-Eyes to be burnt with fire--I could not tell where the ponies lie hidden. My medicine will blind your eyes as does the north wind when he comes laden with snow.

“I will tell the white man how he can have his ponies back. He can hand over to me now the bright new gun which lies by his side. It is a pretty gun, better than any Indian has. With it, his powder-horn and his bullet-bag must go.

“If he does this, he can have back all his horses, except those I choose to keep. Is it good? I will not say it again. I have spoken.”

The boy warrior stood with arms dropped at his sides, very straight in the middle of the tent, the light from the smoke hole illuminating the top of his body, while his eye searched the traders.

McIntish gazed through his bushy eyebrows at the victor. His burnt skin turned an ashen-green; his right hand worked nervously along his gun-barrel. Thus he sat for a long time, the boy standing quietly, and no one moved in the lodge.

With many arrested motions, McIntish raised the rifle until it rested on its butt; then he threw it from himself, and it fell with a crash across the dead ashes of the fire, in front of the Bat. Stripping his powder-horn and pouch off his body, violently he flung them after, and the Bat quickly rescued them from among the ashes. Gathering the tokens and girding them about his body, the Bat continued: “If the white liar will march up this river one day and stop on the big meadows by the log house, which has no fire in it; if he will keep his men quietly by the log house, where they can be seen at all times; if he will stay there one day, he will see his ponies coming to him. I am not a boy; I am not a man with two tongues; I am a warrior. Go, now--before the camp-soldiers beat you with sticks.”

IV. The New Lodge

The Yellow-Eyes had departed, and at the end of four days the Bat and Red Arrow drove a band of thirty ponies and mules upon the herd-grounds, where they proceeded to cut them into two bunches--fifteen horses for each young man. This was not a bad beginning in life, where ponies and robes were the things reckoned. The Bat got down from his horse and tossed a little brother onto it, telling him to look after them. The copper-colored midget swelled perceptibly as he loped away after the Bat’s nineteen horses, for the twentieth, which was the war-pony, was taken to be picketed by Big Hair’s Lodge.

As the Bat stalked among the Chis-chis-chash, he was greeted often--all eyes turned to him. No mere boys dared longer to be familiar; they only stood modestly, and paid the tribute to greatness which much staring denotes. The white man’s new rifle lay across his left arm, his painted robe dragged on the ground, his eagle-feather waved perpendicularly above the dried Bat’s skin, the sacred red paint of war bloodied his whole face, and a rope and a whip--symbols of his success with horses--dangled in his right hand, while behind him followed the smart war-pony, covered with vermilion hand-prints as thickly as the spots on a brook-trout. The squaws ran from their fleshing, their chopping or their other work to look at the warrior who made all the camp talk. Wisdom mellowed by age, in the forms of certain old men, sat back and thought disturbedly of the future, as is the wont of those who have little time to live. They feared for the trade with the Yellow-Eyes, for no Chis-chis-chash could forge iron into guns and knives, which were the arbiter between the tribes. This the Bat had brought upon them. But still they thought more than they said; warriors as promising as this young one did not often appear.

There was a feast at the lodge. The Bat told his exploits to the warriors, as he strode about the night-fire in the tepee, waving his arms, giving his war-yell until he split the air and made his listeners’ ears ring. The medicine Bat had made him strong; it had opened the way and he had proved his faith. He sang while a man beat on a dried skin drum:

“Hi-ha-s’ yehe’s’ yeye’!

‘Hi-he-e’ yehe’ e’ yeye’!

‘Hi’ niso’ nihu’-Hi’ yeye’!

‘Hi’ niso’ nihu’-Hi’ yeye’!”

And the yelping chorus came from the fire-lit circle, “Hi ya--hi y a--hi--ye’ye’!--ya’--ya’--ya’--ya!--e’ e’ e’.”

On the morrow, men from the military order of the “red lodges,” the “miayuma,” came to the Bat with charcoal, and he fasted many days before undergoing his initiation. The sacred symbols of the body, their signs and ceremonies, were given him, and he had become a pillar in the Chis-chis-chash social structure.

The nights were growing cold, and occasional bleak winds blew down from the great mountains, warning the tribe to be about its mission. The loads of dry meat made the horses weary, when the camp was broken; the tepee-poles were bright and new, and the hair began to grow on the ponies.

One day, as they moved, they could see far ahead on the plains the colorless walls of Fort Laramie, and the wise-men feared for their reception, but the pillage of the traders’ horses sat lightly on the people. The Yellow-Eyes should have a care how they treated the Chis-chis-chash. It was in their power to put out the white man’s fires. The Bat’s people were an arrogant band, and held their heads high in the presence of aliens. Their hands were laid heavily and at once on anyone who stood in their path. All the plains tribes, the French Indians at the posts and the Yellow-Eyed trapper-bands stood in awe of them. With the exception of the chief, the people had never been inside of the second gate at Laramie. They traded through a hole in the wall, and even then the bourgeois Papin thought he played with fire. Their haughty souls did not brook refusal when the trader denied them the arrangement of the barter.

The tribe encamped, and got rid of what ponies, robes and meats it could dispose of for guns and steel weapons, and “made whisky.” The squaws concealed the arms while the warriors raged, but the Chis-chis-chash in that day were able to withstand the new vices of the white men better than most people of the plains.

On one occasion, the Bat was standing with a few chiefs before the gateway of the fort. M. Papin opened the passage and invited them to enter. Proudly the tall tribesmen walked among the _engages_--seeming to pay no heed, but the eye of an Indian misses nothing. The surroundings were new and strange to the young man. The thick walls seemed to his vagabond mind to be built to shield cowards. The white men were created only to bring goods to the Indians. They were weak, but their medicine was wonderful. It could make the knives and guns, which God had denied to the Bat’s people. They were to be tolerated; they were few in number--he had not seen over a hundred of them in all his life. Scattered here and there about the post were women, who consorted with the _engages_--half-breeds from the Mandaus and Dela-wares, Sioux and many other kinds of squaws; but the Chis-chis-chash had never sold a woman to the traders. That was a pride with them.

The sisterhood of all the world will look at a handsome man and smile pleasantly; so nothing but cheerful looks followed the Bat as he passed the women who sat working by the doorways. They were not ill-favored, these comforters of the French-Creole workmen, and were dressed in bright calicos and red strouding, plentifully adorned with bright beads. The boy was beginning to feel a subtle weakening in their presence. His fierce barbarism softened, and he began to think of taking one. But he put it aside as a weakness--this giving of ponies for these white men’s cast-offs. That thought was unworthy of him--a trade was not his wild way of possessing things.

He stood quietly leaning against a door on Papin’s balcony, observing the men laboring about the enclosure, his lip curling upward with fine contempt. The “dogs” were hewing with axes about some newly made carts, or rushing around on errands as slaves are made to do. Everyone was busy and did not notice him in his brown study.

From within the room near by he heard a woman sing a few notes in an unknown tongue. Without moving a muscle of his face he stepped inside the room, and when his eye became accustomed to the light, saw a young squaw, who sat beading, and wore a dress superior to that of the others. She stared a moment and then smiled. The Bat stood motionless for a long time regarding her, and she dropped her gaze to her needlework.

“I’ nisto’ niwon (You were humming),” spoke the statued brave, but she did not understand.

Again came the clicking gutturals of the harsh Chis-chis-chash tongue: “Whose squaw are you?”--which was followed by the sign-talk familiar to all Indians in those days.

The woman rose, opening her hand toward him and hissing for silence. Going to the door, she looked into the sunlighted court, and, pointing to the factor who was directing workmen, replied,

“Papin.” He understood.

She talked by signs as she drew back, pointing to the Bat, and then ran her hand across her own throat as though she held a knife, and then laughed while her eyes sparkled.

Again he understood, and for the first time that day he smiled. There are no preliminaries when a savage warrior concludes to act. The abruptness of the Bat’s love-making left room for few words, and his attentions were not repulsed except that the fear of her liege lord out by the carts made her flutter to escape that she might reassure herself. She was once again covered by the sweep of the warrior’s robe, and what they whispered there, standing in its folds, no man can tell. The abrupt entrance of Papin drowned all other thoughts, and filled the quiet fort with a whirl of struggles and yells, in which all joined, even to the dogs.

The outcome was that the Bat found himself thrown ignominiously into the dust outside the walls, and the gate slammed after him. He gathered himself together and looked around. No one of his people had seen the melee from which he had emerged so ingloriously, yet humiliation was terrible. Nothing like this had occurred before. Cowardly French half-breeds had laid their hands on the warrior’s body, even on his sacred bat and eagle-plume; and they had been content to throw him away as though he were a bone--merely to be rid of him.

His rage was so great that he was in a torpor; he did not even speak, but walked away hearing the shrieks of the squaw being beaten by Papin.

Going to the camp, he got a pony and rode to the hills, where he dismounted and sat down. The day passed, the night came, and morning found the Bat still sitting there.

He seemed not to have moved. His eyes burned with the steady glare of the great cats until, allowing his robe to fall away, he brought out his firebag and lighted his pipe. Standing up, he blew a mouthful of smoke to each of the four corners of the world; then lowered his head in silence for a long while. He had recovered himself now. The Bat no longer shrieked, but counciled coldly for revenge. His shadow beside him was blood-red as he gazed at it.

Presently he mounted and rode toward camp; his eyes danced the devil’s dance as they wandered over the battlements of Fort Laramie. He wanted a river of blood--he wanted to break the bones of the whites with stone hatchets--he wanted to torture with fire. He would have the girl now at any cost.

After eating at Big Hair’s lodge, he wandered over to the Fort. He said not a word to anyone as he passed. An old chief came out of the gate, turned the corner, saw the Bat, and said: “The white chief says you tried to steal his squaw. His heart is cold toward our people. He will no longer trade with us. What have you done?”

The Bat’s set eyes gazed at the old man, and he made no reply, but stood leaning against the walls while the chief passed on.

No one noticed him, and he did not move for hours. He was under that part of the wall behind which was the room of the woman, and not unexpectedly he heard a voice from above in the strange language which he did not understand. Looking up, he saw that she was on the roof. He motioned her to come down to him, at the same time taking his rifle from under his robe.

The distance was four times her height, but she quickly produced a rawhide lariat, which she began to adjust to a timber that had been exposed in the roof, dirt having been washed away. Many times she looked back anxiously, fearful of pursuit, until, testing the knot and seeming satisfied, she threw her body over the edge and slid down.

The Bat patted her on the back, and instinctively they fled as fast as the woman could run until out of rifle-shot, when her new brave stayed her flight and made her go slowly that they might not attract attention. They got at last to the pony-herds, where the Bat found his little brother with his bunch of ponies. Taking the cherished war-pony and two others, he mounted his new woman on one, while he led the other beside his own. They galloped to the hills. Looking back over the intervening miles of plain, their sharp eyes could see people running about like ants, in great perplexity and excitement. Papin had discovered his woes, and the two lovers laughed loud and long. He had made his slaves lay violent hands on the Bat and he had lashed the girl, Seet-se-be-a (Mid-day Sun), with a pony whip, but he had lost his woman.

Much as the Bat yearned to steep his hands in the gore of Papin, yet the exigencies of the girl’s escape made it impossible now, as he feared pursuit. On the mountain-ridge they stopped, watching for the pursuing party from the Fort, but the Cheyennes swarmed around and evidently Papin was perturbed.

So they watched and talked, and fondled each other, the fierce Cheyenne boy and Minataree girl--for she proved to be of that tribe--and they were married by the ancient rites of the ceremony of the Fastest Horse.

Shortly the tribe moved away to its wintering-grounds, the young couple following after. The Bat lacked the inclination to stop long enough to murder Papin; he deferred that to the gray future, when the “Mid-day Sun” did not warm him so.

As they entered the lodges, they were greeted with answering yells, and the sickening gossip of his misadventure at Laramie was forgotten when they saw his willing captive. The fierce old women swarmed around, yelling at Seet-se-be-a in no complimentary way, but the fury of possible mothers-in-law stopped without the sweep of the Bat’s elk-horn pony whip.

Before many days there was a new tepee among the “Red Lodges,” and every morning Seet-se-be-a set a lance and shield up beside the door, so that people should know by the devices that the Bat lived there.

V. “The Kites and the Crows”

The Bat had passed the boy stage. He was a Chis-chis-chash warrior now, of agile body and eager mind. No man’s medicine looked more sharply after his physical form and shadow-self than did the Bat’s; no young man was quicker in the surround; no war-pony could scrabble to the lariat ahead of his in the races. He had borne more bravely in the sun-dance than all others, and those who had done the ceremony of “smoking his shield” had heard the thick bull’s-hide promise that no arrow or bullet should ever reach the Bat. He lost the contents of his lodge at the game of the plum-stones--all the robes that Seet-se-be-a had fleshed and softened, but more often his squaw had to bring a pack-pony down to the gamble and pile it high with his winnings. He was much looked up to in the warrior class of the Red Lodges, which contained the tried-out braves of the Cheyenne tribe; moreover old men--wise ones--men who stood for all there was in the Chis-chis-chash, talked to him occasionally out of their pipes, throwing measuring glances from under lowering brows in his direction to feel if he had the secret Power of the Eyes.

The year passed until the snow fell no longer and Big Hair said the medicine chiefs had called it “The Falling Stars Winter” and had painted the sign on the sacred robes. The new grass changed from yellow to a green velvet, while the long hair blew off the horses’ hides in bunches and their shrunken flanks filled up with fat. As Nature awoke from the chill and began to circulate the Indians responded to its feel. They stalked among the pony herds, saying to each other: “By the middle of the moon of the new Elk Horns, these big dogs will carry us to war. There the enemy will know that the Chis-chis-chash did not die in the snow. There will be blood in our path this grass.”

Red Arrow and the Bat prayed often together to the Good God for fortune in war, as they sat in the lodge running their eyes along their arrows, picking those which were straightest, and singing:

“This arrow is straight This arrow is straight It will kill us a man It will kill us a man--”

and the Bat boasted to his chum: “When I come to the enemy, I shall go nearer than any other Red Lodge man. I shall have more scalps to dance and no bullet or arrow can stop the Bat when he strikes his pony with the whip.” Red Arrow believed this as much as the boaster did, for men must believe they will do these things before they do them. “Red Arrow, we will not go with a big war-party. We will go with Iron Horn’s band of twenty warriors. Then next winter at the warriors’ feasts when we tell what we did, we will count for something. Red Arrow, we will see for the first time the great war-medicine.”

The boys of the camp herded the ponies where the grass was strongest, and the warriors watched them grow. It was the policy of the tribe to hang together in a mass, against the coming of the enemy, for the better protection of the women and the little ones, but no chiefs or councils were strong enough to stop the yearning of the young Cheyennes for military glory. All self-esteem, all applause, all power and greatness, came only down that fearful road--the war trail. Despite the pleadings of tribal policy Iron Horn, a noted war- and mystery-man, secretly organized his twenty men for glorious death or splendid triumph. Their orders went forth in whispers. “By the full of the moon at the place where the Drowned Buffalo water tumbled over the rocks one day’s pony-travel to the west.”

Not even Seet-se-be-a knew why the Bat was not sitting back against his willow-mat in the gray morning when she got up to make the kettle boil, but she had a woman’s instinct which made her raise the flap to look out. The two war-ponies were gone. Glancing again behind the robes of his bed she saw, too, that the oiled rifle was missing. Quickly she ran to the lodge of Red Arrow’s father, wailing, “My man has gone, my man has gone--his fast ponies are gone--his gun is gone,” and all the dogs barked and ran about in the shadows while Red Arrow’s mother appeared in the hole in the tepee, also wailing, “My boy has gone, my boy has gone,” and the village woke up in a tumult. Everyone understood. The dogs barked, the women wailed, the children cried, the magpies fluttered overhead while the wolves answered back in piercing yells from the plains beyond.

Big Hair sat up and filled his pipe. He placed his medicine-bag on the pole before him and blew smoke to the four sides of the earth and to the top of the lodge saying: “Make my boy strong. Make his heart brave, O Good Gods--take his pony over the dog-holes--make him see the enemy first!” Again he blew the smoke to the deities and continued to pray thus for an hour until the sun-lit camp was quiet and the chiefs sat under a giant cotton-wood, devising new plans to keep the young men at home.

Meanwhile from many points the destined warriors loped over the rolling landscape to the rendezvous. Tirelessly all day long they rose and fell as the ponies ate up the distance to the Drowned Buffalo, stopping only at the creeks to water the horses. By twos and threes they met, galloping together--speaking not. The moon rose big and red over their backs, the wolves stopped howling and scurried to one side--the ceaseless thud of the falling hoofs continued monotonously, broken only by the crack of a lash across a horse’s flank.

At midnight the faithful twenty men were still seated in a row around Iron Horn while the horses, too tired to eat, hung their heads. The old chief dismissed his war-party saying: “To-morrow we will make the mystery--we will find out whether the Good Gods will go with us to war or let us go alone.”

Sunrise found the ponies feeding quietly, having recovered themselves, while the robed aspirants sat in a circle; the grass having been removed from the enclosed space and leveled down.

A young man filled the long medicine-pipe and Iron Horn blew sacrificial puffs about him, passing it in, saying: “Let no man touch the pipe who has eaten meat since the beginning of the last sun. If there are any such he must be gone--the Good Gods do not speak to full men.” But the pipe made its way about the ring without stopping.

Iron Horn then walked behind the circle sticking up medicine-arrows in the earth--arrows made sacred by contact with the Great Medicine of the Chis-chis-chash and there would hold the Bad Gods in check while the Good Gods counseled.