amicable way.
But after two days of discussing the question in uncommon detail, the two warriors were losing some of their own resolve. Kicking Bird had received his peace medal as a ceremonial present and had never had what might be considered a true conversation with a white man. Touch The Clouds had met many whites in council but the talks never led beyond vague promises of friendship and, in the ten winters he had attended these parlays, he had never met with the same white man twice. Despite his long experience, Touch The Clouds didn't really know any white men.
By the third morning of Kicking Bird's visit the two friends had come full circle. They sat in Touch The Clouds' lodge making a show of keeping their discussions vital while in truth their talk had become moribund. They had met with every leading warrior and had explored every avenue that might lead to a decision as to what action to take. The most viable approach had come from the vacillating White Bear who had suggested they ride in force to the vicinity of the great Medicine Bluff, show themselves, and wait for a reaction.
The two friends discussed this idea once more and, in doing so, realized that it had little promise. The chance was too great that the white soldiers would open fire at the sight of armed warriors, thus defeating the goal of talks that might hold out some hope for conciliation.
On the heels of this frustrating review, Touch The Clouds fired his pipe and the men lapsed into an awkward silence as they passed it back and forth. Neither man knew what to say.
At last Kicking Bird put into words what both of them were thinking.
“I have been thinking. . This question of what to do cannot be answered by ourselves.”
'I have been thinking the same,” Touch The Clouds confessed.
'Perhaps it is a question only the Mystery can answer.”
'Yes,' Kicking Bird agreed. His eyes roved helplessly around the spacious lodge. 'But nothing has been revealed. I wonder sometimes if the Mystery no longer looks on us as his children.”
'I wonder the same.”
Again the men lapsed into forlorn silence, but a moment later the stillness in the lodge was pierced by a cry from outside. Many other shouts followed in rapid succession, and by the time the friends had gotten to their feet, it sounded as if a general alarm was being raised.
They ducked through the lodge entrance to an explosion of action outside. Men were leaping onto their ponies. Women were hurrying children into their lodges. A great whooping filled the air.
Swinging onto their ponies, Kicking Bird and Touch The Clouds were able to make out through the dust and shouting words that told them what the pandemonium was about.
'White man on the prairie! White man coming in!'
Following thick clouds of dust, Kicking Bird and Touch The Clouds tore out of the village and had barely cleared the camp before they pulled up in disbelief at what lay before them.
A solitary man dressed in black, his hands thrust into the air, was sitting on a wagon pulled by a mule as dozens of warriors, yapping at the limit of their lungs, swarmed around him.
As they rode closer they saw White Bear's pony jostle the intruder's mule. The warrior bawled out words they couldn't hear, then struck the man hard with his bow and the cause of all the excitement toppled off the wagon and crashed to earth.
The impact of his fall sent the man's dark, broad-brimmed hat flying, and Kicking Bird and Touch The Clouds saw what everyone else saw. The sun reflected almost as in a mirror off his smooth, shiny head. Hair the length of a rabbit's ran in a band above his ears and low down along the back of his skull. Everyone drew back in disbelief. He had no scalp.
'I will kill this ghost!' White Bear shouted, pulling an arrow from his quiver.
Before he could string it, Touch The Clouds' hand was on his arm.
White Bear's expression said he resented the intrusion but Touch The Clouds' words flew in his face before he could protest.
'Great warriors do not waste arrows on mice. . shivering in the grass.'
The squabble between White Bear and Touch The Clouds barely registered as Kicking Bird sat, trancelike, on his pony, watching with profound fascination as the white man scrambled after his hat and replaced it on his head. He was quite small for any man and was wearing something on his bearded face that Kicking Bird had never seen before: two tiny discs of what looked like glass suspended before each eye by a delicate framework of wire.
The man walked back to his mule, clasped a hand on one of its reins, and waited, almost childlike, for what might happen next. Who he was or what might be his mission in Kiowa country the Comanche could not guess. He was not a soldier nor did he have what Kicking Bird imagined to be the stature of an important emissary. That he might be lost was possible, but some indefinable sense told Kicking Bird this was not the case. His eyes seemed to have a special energy that was linked somehow with plaintive hope, and in the few seconds that Kicking Bird watched the apparition, he deduced that this being bore no one ill will.
Inspiration suddenly flashed in Kicking Bird's mind and the excitement it wrought tickled him from head to toe as he realized that he possessed a weapon of great power and that this was the opportunity he had been waiting for to use it.
He had pestered Dances With Wolves and Stands With A Fist to teach him the weapon from the day of their marriage. He had practiced it, in private, for years, checking and rechecking the accuracy of what he knew with the reluctant couple in the set-apart lodge. How much of it he remembered and how well he might pronounce it he could nor be sure, but an instant later he found himself dropping off his pony and walking through the grass toward the little man.
The Kiowa and Comanche warriors surrounding the scene were silenced at Kicking Bird's approach, and in an odd way they, too, suddenly realized that this white man represented no real threat. The Comanche they all knew as mild-mannered was of average height but to see him now, standing opposite the white man, he seemed a giant. The little man in black was a thing so puny that the wildest imagination could not have perceived him as an adversary.
Kicking Bird's confidence was reinforced by a close-up view of the stranger's face. He guessed that the diminutive figure must have had at least fifty winters, though his countenance was full of youthful innocence, and as he uttered the first words he had ever spoken to a white, Kicking Bird could not help thinking he was addressing a boy.
'I,' he said, lightly tapping his chest, 'Kicking Bird.'
The white man's face opened as if a cloud had moved away from the sun. His lips pulled apart in a smile so wide that it seemed as if his eyes were smiling too.
'I,' he began in a light, high voice, pushing a finger up against his chest in the way Kicking Bird had done, 'I. . Lawrie Tatum. Friend, friend.'
'Friend,' Kicking Bird nodded for that was a word he knew. 'Hmmm. . where?. . from?'
'I'm from Iowa,' Lawrie Tatum answered, speaking the words in a clipped, precise fashion that seemed to suit the latent energy pent up in his little body. 'But I have come from Washington.'
Kicking Bird knew the word
Lawrie Tatum bobbed his head up and down happily. 'That's right. . well, that's the
'Hmmm. . Washington.'
'I. . Lawrie Tatum, want to be your friend. Lawrie Tatum and Kicking Bird. . friends.'
At that he thrust a small hand forward, leveling it at Kicking Bird's waist.
At a conference he had once attended Kicking Bird had seen white men make the same gesture. He glanced into Lawrie Tatum's eyes once more, as if to reassure himself that no treachery lurked there, before lifting one of his bronze-colored hands in the stranger's direction.
The two hands closed on one another. Lawrie Tatum grinned and Kicking Bird, not quite believing what was happening, stared at the pudgy digits enveloped in his own long and elegant fingers.
A few other warriors, including Touch The Clouds, had slipped down from their ponies and drifted closer during the exchange. When Kicking Bird performed the intimate act of taking the white man's hand in his own, shock and curiosity drove them even closer.
There they remained for most of an hour standing on the open prairie, ringed by warriors on horseback,
