novice, wandered downstream, stepping lightly on his bare feet.
A quarter mile later he found an outcropping that made for a nice bench. He worked up a good lather and, as a novice will do, rubbed the soap rather tentatively into one of the blankets.
By and by he got the hang of it. With each article the routine of soaping, beating, and rinsing became more assured, and toward the end Dunbar was flying through his work with the single-mindedness, if not the precision, of a seasoned laundress.
In only two weeks out here he had cultivated a new appreciation for detail and, knowing the first pieces had been botched, he redid them.
A scrubby oak was growing partway up the slope and he hung his laundry there. It was a good spot, full of sun and not too breezy. Still, it would take a while for everything to dry, and he’d forgotten his tobacco fixings.
The naked lieutenant decided not to wait.
He started back for the fort.
Kicking Bird had heard disconcerting stories about their numbers. On more than one occasion he had heard people say they were as plentiful as birds, and this gave the shaman an uneasy feeling in the back of his mind.
And yet, on the basis of what he had actually seen, the hair mouths inspired only pity.
They seemed to be a sad race.
Those poor soldiers at the fort, so rich in goods, so poor in everything else. They shot their guns poorly, they rode their big, slow horses poorly. They were supposed to be the white man’s warriors, but they weren’t alert. And they frightened so easily. Taking their horses had been laughable, like plucking berries from a bush.
They were a great mystery to Kicking Bird, these white people. He could not think of them without getting his mind baffled.
The soldiers at the fort, for instance. They lived without families. And they lived without their greatest chiefs. With the Great Spirit in evidence everywhere, for all to see, they worshipped things written down on paper. And they were so dirty. They didn’t even keep themselves clean.
Kicking Bird could not imagine how these hair mouths could sustain themselves for even a year. And yet they were said to flourish. He did not understand it.
He had begun this line of thinking when he thought of the fort, when he thought of going near it. He expected them to be gone, but he thought he would see anyway. And now, as he sat on his pony, looking across the prairie, he could see at first glance that the place had been improved. The white man’s fort was clean. A great hide was rolling in the wind. A little horse, a good-looking one, was standing in the corral. There was no movement. Not even a sound. The place should have been dead. But someone had kept it alive.
Kicking Bird urged his pony to a walk.
He had to have a closer look.
Lieutenant Dunbar dallied as he made his way back along the stream. There was so much to see.
In a strangely ironic way he felt much less conspicuous without his clothes. Perhaps that was so. Every tiny plant, every buzzing insect, seemed to attract his attention. Everything was remarkably alive.
A red-tailed hawk with a ground squirrel dangling from its talons flew right in front of him, not a dozen feet overhead.
Halfway back he paused in the shade of a cottonwood to watch a badger dig out his burrow a few feet above the waterline. Every now and then the badger would glance back at the naked lieutenant, but he kept right on digging.
Close to the fort Dunbar stopped to watch the entanglement of two lovers. A pair of black water snakes were twisting ecstatically in the shallows of the stream, and like all lovers, they were oblivious, even when the lieutenant’s shadow fell across the water.
He trudged up the slope enraptured, feeling as strong as anything out here, feeling like a true citizen of the prairie.
As his head cleared the rise, he saw the chestnut pony.
In the same instant he saw the silhouette, creeping in the shade under the awning. A split second later the figure stepped into the sun and Dunbar ducked down, settling into a cleft just below the bluff’s lip.
He squatted on jellied legs, his ears as big as dishes, listening with a concentration that made hearing seem the only sense he possessed.
His mind raced. Fantastic images danced across the lieutenant’s closed eyes. Fringed pants. Beaded moccasins. A hatchet with hair hanging from it. A breastplate of gleaming bone. The heavy, shining hair spilling halfway down his back. The black, deep-set eyes. The great nose. Skin the color of clay. The feather bobbing in the breeze at the back of his head.
He knew it was an Indian, but he had never expected anything so wild, and the shock of it had stunned him as surely as a blow to the head.
Dunbar stayed crouched below the bluff, his buttocks grazing the ground, beads of cold sweat coating his forehead. He could not grasp what he had seen. He was afraid to look again.
He heard a horse nicker and, sucking up his courage, peeked slowly over the bluff.
The Indian was in the corral. He was walking up to Cisco, a looped length of rope in his hand.
When Lieutenant Dunbar saw this, his paralysis evaporated. He stopped thinking altogether, leaped to his feet, and scrambled over the top of the bluff. He shouted out, his bellow cracking the stillness like a shot.
“You there!”
Kicking Bird jumped straight into the air.
When he whirled to meet the voice that had startled him out of his skin, the Comanche medicine man came face-to-face with the strangest sight he had ever seen.
A naked man. A naked man marching straight across the yard with his fists balled, with his jaw set, and with skin so white that it hurt the eyes.
Kicking Bird stumbled backward in horror, righted himself, and instead of jumping the corral fence, he tore right through it. He raced across the yard, vaulted onto his pony, and galloped off as if the devil were on his tail.
Not once did he look back.
CHAPTER IX
