About a mile from the new camp they rendezvoused with three scouts who had made a little camp of their own a hundred yards from the mouth of a wide draw.
Leaving their horses below, sixty Comanche warriors and one white man started quietly up the long western slope leading out of the draw. As they neared the crest, everyone dropped close to the ground and crawled the final yards.
The lieutenant looked expectantly at Kicking Bird and was met with a shallow smile. The medicine man pointed ahead and put a finger to his lips. Dunbar knew they had arrived.
A few feet in front of him the earth fell away to nothing but sky, and he realized they had surmounted the back side of a cliff. The stiff prairie breeze bit into his face as he lifted his head and peered into a great depression a hundred feet below.
It was a magnificent dish of a valley, four or five miles wide and at least ten miles across. Grass of the most luxuriant variety was rippling everywhere.
But the lieutenant barely noticed the grass or the valley or its dimensions. Even the sky, now building with clouds, and the sinking sun, with its miraculous display of cathedral rays, could not compare with the great, living blanket of buffalo that covered the valley floor.
That this many creatures existed, let alone occupied the same immediate space, set the lieutenant’s mind spinning with incalculable figures. Fifty, seventy, a hundred thousand? Could there be more? His brain backed away from the enormity of it.
He didn’t shout or jump or whisper to himself in awe. Witnessing this put everything but that which he was seeing in suspension. He didn’t feel the little, odd-sized rocks pinching against his body. When a blue wasp landed on the point of his slackened jaw he didn’t brush at it. All he could do was blink at the coating of wonder that glazed his eyes.
He was watching a miracle.
When Kicking Bird tapped him on the shoulder, he realized his mouth had been open the whole time. It was parched dry by the prairie wind.
He swung his head dully and looked back along the slope.
The Indians had started down.
They had been riding in darkness for half an hour when the fires appeared, like faraway dots. The strangeness of it was like a dream. Home, he thought. That’s home.
How could it be? A temporary camp of fires on a distant plain, peopled by two hundred aborigines whose skin was different than his, whose language was a tangle of grunts and shouts, whose beliefs were yet a mystery and probably always would be.
But tonight he was very tired. Tonight it promised the comfort of a birthplace. It was home and he was glad to see it. The others, the scores of half-naked men with whom he’d been riding the last few miles, were glad to see it, too. They had begun talking again. The horses could smell it. They were walking high on their toes now, trying to break into a trot.
He wished he could see Kicking Bird among the vague shapes around him. The medicine man said a lot with his eyes, and out here in the darkness, bunched so intimately with these wild men as they approached their wild camp, he felt helpless without Kicking Bird’s telling eyes.
A half mile out he could hear voices and the beat of drums. A buzzing swept the ranks of his fellow riders and suddenly the horses surged into a run. They were packed so tightly and moving at such a good clip that, for a moment, Lieutenant Dunbar felt part of an unstoppable energy, a breaking wave of men and horses that no one would dare to oppose.
The men were yipping, high and shrill, like coyotes, and Dunbar, caught up as he was in the excitement, let out a few barks of his own.
He could see the flames of the fires and the silhouettes of people milling about the camp. They were aware of the returning riders now and some were running onto the prairie to meet them.
He had a funny feeling about the camp, a feeling that told him it was unusually agitated, that something out of the ordinary had happened during their absence. His eyes widened as he rode closer, trying to pick up some clue that would tell him what was different.
Then he saw the wagon, parked at the fringes of the largest fire, as out of place as a fine carriage floating on the surface of the sea.
There were white people in camp.
He pulled Cisco up hard, letting the other riders blow past while he hung back to collect his thoughts.
The wagon looked crude to him, a thing of ugliness. As Cisco danced nervously under him, the lieutenant was startled by his own thoughts. He imagined the voices that had come with it, he didn’t want to hear them. He didn’t want to see the white faces that would be so eager to see his. He didn’t want to answer their questions. He didn’t want to hear the news he’d missed.
But he knew he had no choice. There was no place else to go. He fed Cisco a little rein and they walked forward slowly.
He paused when he was within fifty yards. The Indians were dancing about exuberantly as the men who had scouted the herd jumped off their horses. He waited for the ponies to clear out, then he scanned all the faces in his line of sight.
There were no white ones.
They came closer and once again Dunbar paused, his gaze searching the camp carefully.
No white people.
He spotted the fierce one and the men of his little party that had left them in the afternoon. They seemed to be the center of attention. This was definitely more than a greeting. It was a celebration of some sort. They were passing long sticks back and forth. They were yelling. The villagers who had gathered to watch them were yelling, too.
He and Cisco edged still closer and the lieutenant saw right away that he was wrong. They weren’t passing sticks around. They were passing lances. One of them came back to Wind In His Hair, and Dunbar saw him lift it high into the air. He wasn’t smiling, but he was surely happy. As he let out a long, vibrating howl, Dunbar caught a glimpse of the hair tied near the lance’s point.
At the same moment, he realized it was a scalp. A fresh scalp. The hair was black and curly.
His eyes darted to the other lances. Two more of them held scalps; one was light brown and the other was sandy, almost blond. He looked quickly at the wagon and saw what he had not seen before. A load of stacked buffalo hides was peeking over the rails.
Suddenly it was clear as a cloudless day.
The skins belonged to the murdered buffalo and the scalps belonged to the men who had killed them, men who had been alive that very afternoon. White men. The lieutenant was numb with confusion. He couldn’t participate in this, not even as a watcher. He had to leave.
As he was turning away he happened to catch sight of Kicking Bird. The medicine man had been smiling widely, but when he saw Lieutenant Dunbar in the shadows just beyond the firelight, his smile vanished. Then, as though he wanted to relieve the lieutenant of some embarrassment, he turned his back.
Dunbar wanted to believe that Kicking Bird’s heart was with him, that in some vague way it knew his confusion. But he couldn’t think now. He had to go off by himself.
Skirting the camp, he located his gear on the far side and went out onto the prairie with Cisco. He went until he could no longer see the fires. Then he spread his bedroll on the ground and lay looking at the stars, trying to believe that the men who had been killed were bad people and deserved to die. But it was no good. He could not know that for certain, and even if he did . . . well, it was not for him to say. He tried to believe that Wind In His Hair and Kicking Bird and all the other people who shared in the killing were not so happy for having done it. But they were.
More than anything he wanted to believe that he was not in this position. He wanted to believe he was floating toward the stars. But he wasn’t.
He heard Cisco lie down in the grass with a heavy sigh. It was quiet then and Dunbar’s thoughts turned
