questions.
He wanted to know if Kicking Bird and Touch The Clouds were for peace between Indian and white. Kicking Bird translated this for Touch The Clouds, who laughed and said, 'If we were not this man's body would already be turning black out there in the grass.' Both men laughed as Lawrie Tatum gazed at them blankly.
The Quaker wanted to know if they were chiefs and Kicking Bird explained that Touch The Clouds was a headman but that he was not. A man named Ten Bears, an old, wise man with bad eyes, was the leader of his band.
But the more Kicking Bird and Lawrie Tatum questioned each other the more aware they became of their inadequacies, and what had begun as a conversation quickly devolved into the more practical pursuit of vocabulary building. For another hour the names of everyday items found about the lodge and on their persons were translated back and forth in Comanche, Kiowa, and English.
All three were eager to learn and the lessons might have continued all night were it not for the arrival of several Indian wives, whose insistent voices demanded that their husbands break off the meeting and see to the children, who were asking for them.
Kicking Bird and Touch The Clouds made Lawrie Tatum to understand that he was safe. Then they each took the white man's hand and bid him good night.
The Comanche listened as his wives related the events of the day. He played games, visited with each of his children, and generally tried to discharge his duties as husband and father. But his heart wasn't in it that night. His head was too ripe with thoughts that pulled him, from recurring impressions of the white man Lawrie Tatum to the new English words that begged to be remembered to the crowded world of possibility that had flowered in his consciousness. When he slipped under the covers he was still too excited to sleep, and once the other bodies in the lodge were hard asleep he snuck outside to give free rein to his galloping mind.
The moon had risen full and Kicking Bird sat in the inky shadow of his lodge, wondering at the incalculable mystery hidden in the white man's lodge only a few steps from where he sat.
To his surprise there was a sudden movement of the little lodge's flap, and an instant later Lawrie Tatum was stepping into the bright, blue light of the moon. He wore no coat and the sleeves of his tight-fitting shirt were rolled past his elbows. The glass discs no longer fronted his eyes and there were no shoes on his feet. He looked around warily and, satisfied that he was alone, lifted one of his hands which was holding what looked like a small stick several inches long. In the other hand he held what looked like a canteen. He tilted the canteen over the object in the other hand and a little stream of water dribbled over the strange stick.
Having no idea what the ritual might mean, Kicking Bird's curiosity gave way to astonishment as the white man's mouth suddenly admitted the stick and a violent scouring commenced inside.
The best Kicking Bird could deduce was that, though it lacked any hint of elegance or sanctity, Lawrie Tatum must be performing some kind of purification ceremony. Perhaps there was some evil entity residing in his mouth.
After repeating the action several more times, the stick was withdrawn and shaken. Lawrie Tatum lifted the canteen to his lips, sloshed the water around in his mouth, and, bending forward, spat all of it onto the ground. Then he turned as casually as if he had just urinated and disappeared into the lodge.
Any chance Kicking Bird might have had for sleep was doomed by what he had witnessed. Seeing such inexplicable conduct reinforced and sharpened all that was different between Indian and white, and as he continued to sit in the shadow of the moon, contemplating Lawrie Tatum's bizarre behavior he felt the cloud of euphoria he had been riding all afternoon slowly dissipate.
Exchanges of information and negotiation that might determine how the two peoples could coexist were nothing when compared to the gulf in ways of being that existed between the races, and it was with that mindful realization that Kicking Bird finally went back to his bed.
What little rest he at last achieved was more akin to intermittent catnapping than it was to real sleep: His hopes had sobered but not died, and he floated through a queer twilight of consciousness in which he reminded himself that even if it would be prudent to go slower the prospect of more interplay with Lawrie Tatum the following day was an exciting one.
It never occurred to him that he would not see Lawrie Tatum the following day. Nor did it occur to him that one of the men who had gone hunting with Dances With Wolves would be standing at his lodge door in the predawn chill.
The weary voice calling for him to come out belonged to Lone Young Man, and when the Comanche statesman looked into his face he knew something terrible had happened.
The lodges of the Kicking Bird delegation had been struck, their horses gathered and loaded, and the entire party had already ridden clear of Touch The Clouds' camp when Lawrie Tatum stepped timidly out of his guest quarters half an hour after sunup.
At first he was disoriented, because he was certain that the man called Kicking Bird had been living in a spot that was now bare. As soon as he saw Touch The Clouds, the Quaker agent tried to clear up the confusion, and after a few minutes of fitful signs and words and playacting, the suspicion was confirmed. The Comanche Lawrie Tatum thought of as intelligent and levelheaded had simply picked up and left, presumably for home, without saying good-bye and without any agreement to meet again.
It wasn't as if Lawrie Tatum hadn't been warned. Anyone who had ever dealt with Indians had told him they could not be trusted — that understanding the Indian mind was about as easy as figuring out the meaning of life, that depending on an Indian to do what he said he would do was like a dry farmer depending on rain in a drought.
Lawrie Tatum remembered these admonitions when he glanced again at the vacant ground lately occupied by Kicking Bird's lodge. He still liked the Comanche and it was not in his constitution to give up — whether it be on a patch of skimpy corn back home or the ambitious peace policy the government was hoping he and scores of other Quakers would find a way to implement.
And yet there was bristling in a remote corner of his mind. As he stared at the ring where Kicking Bird's lodge had lately been, Lawrie Tatum couldn't help feeling that in some way he had been played for a fool.
Chapter XIX
It was a typical cavalry unit: heavy with men who had not served long, a few savvy veterans with the tenacity to forge a career in the army and a commander who only needed to shave every third or fourth day.
At the beginning, reports of a Comanche war party had roused the troops with the prospect of relief from the drudgery of work detail and the incessant nitpicking of certain officers who treated the dreary garrison as their personal fiefdom. All but the most chronic goldbricks had jostled for a place in the unit that was formed to take the field, and despite the lack of fanfare that signaled their departure for the wilderness, spirits were high when they rode out.
It was not long, however, before a host of deficiencies began to glare in the bright light of action. Their fuzz- faced commander little more than an earnest boy from a decent family, was operating under a purposely vague directive: to drive the marauders away from the property of citizens without actively engaging them unless fired upon. The lack of potency in his orders immediately created hesitancy and doubt in the young lieutenant, which soon spread virus-like to each member of his command.
To make matters worse, an individual who was far better suited to the role of confidence man than scout had been delegated by the post commander to guide the lieutenant across country, break trail, and advise him on matters pertaining to modes of Comanche warfare.
The scout looked the part. He wore buckskin pants, a flannel shirt, a plumed campaign hat, moccasins, and a band of silver rings on his wrist. But in truth, most of his getup, like the arsenal of weapons he carried, was plunder from his past career as one of numerous ex-Confederate soldiers who had mined opportunities for mischief and crime up and down the Texas frontier in the years following the War Between the States.
None of this came out when he offered his services to the post commander, speaking in a slow, deliberate
