tribes knew a few words of each other's tongues, and both counted Spanish-speakers among their ranks, but neither was adept enough to make meaningful talk so they naturally resorted to a language whose fluency was shared by all: the language conducted as music by fingers, hands, and arms, the artful language of signs.
There was only one soul lurking outside the meeting place that night, and he had not come out of curiosity. Loitering close by, he had happened to see the Cheyenne delegation arrive at the lodge and drifted closer with the idea that spying on the gathering might provide a respite from his misery. He had already attended several feasts but had been unable to appear at the one hosted by the father of Hunting For Something. He would have walked through fire to see her face and it would have been simple to stop by and pay his respects to the Horned Antelope family. But courage had failed him. If he had showed his face, no mask, however thick could have hidden the hopeless ardor in his bleeding heart.
As Smiles A Lot moped about, hoping to pick up any sound from inside that might distract his despair, he noticed a sliver of light. There was a tiny rent in one of the lodge's seams, and as he placed one eye against it, the lovesick young man found that it afforded a complete view of the principal men seated around the fire.
He was in time to see Ten Bears offer his visitors still more food.
'If there is room in your bellies,' the old man signed, 'you are welcome to more.'
'No,' Wolf Robe countered amiably, 'your generosity has made every Cheyenne belly hearty. Some of our people can barely walk.'
Smiles flashed through the lodge and the two headmen chatted easily for a few moments about the prospects for a successful round of trading with the Mexicans. The assembled warriors listened passively to the preliminaries, knowing full well that the meat of the discussion was yet to come, and when Ten Bears made a casual inquiry about the quality of hunting in Cheyenne country it opened the gates to a flood of alarming news.
Wolf Robe had remained cross-legged throughout the small talk but now he rose to give everyone a full view of all he had to say.
'Our brother the buffalo has given us all we need. The grass is good and the buffalo are plenty but they are acting strangely. They gather less and less in great herds. They are acting like ants scattered from their nest. They act lost.'
'Why is this?' Ten Bears asked.
Wolf Robe paused as if pained. Then he signed curtly.
'The whites are overrunning our country.'
Silence pervaded the lodge and Wolf Robe listened to it for a few moments before continuing.
'They are popping out of the ground like grass after rain. There is nothing but trouble everywhere we look. That's why we are here now. We are hoping some of these troubles will have passed by the time we get back.'
The Comanche looked at one another for enlightenment but each face showed only puzzlement.
'Tell us about these troubles,' Ten Bears asked.
'White hunters are camping everywhere. They come in small groups but they have far-shooting guns that can kill as many buffalo in an hour as we can take in a week.'
'Are you killing these men?' Ten Bears asked.
'We kill as many as we can. It is not easy to ride against the far-shooting guns. A party from my wife's brother's band killed six in one raid but it turned out bad. The white men were infected with the spotted sickness and the warriors carried it back to the village. It killed many. My brother-in-law is dead from it. Our band has killed a few of these hair-mouthed hunters but every time we do they send soldiers out to chase us. . in our own country! There are two soldier forts, in the east, on the edge of our country. We learned before we left that they are making another one.'
Ten Bears' brows pinched together. 'Why are they doing this?'
'They want our land,' Wolf Robe replied. 'They're on it now, all along the Vermillion River off to the east. They make square houses of mud to live in.'
'I have heard of these square houses,' Ten Bears interjected. 'It is said that these houses cannot be moved and that inside there is no air.”
'I have only seen them from afar. I have never touched one. These white people put blades in the ground and skin the earth. They drill holes and plant seeds and eat the green things that grow out of the holes. . '
One of the Cheyenne warriors said something to Wolf Robe.
'Trees are being felled everywhere they can be found,' he went on. 'They cut the trees into pieces and push the pieces into the ground and stretch wire between them. .'
'Singing wire? ' Ten Bears asked.
'The wire doesn't sing. It sits there.'
Another Cheyenne mumbled something to Wolf Robe and the headman made more pictures in the air.
'If we kill the earth skinners. . soldiers chase us around for that, too.'
Still another warrior spoke up. Wolf Robe listened, nodding at what the warrior was saying. Then he turned to his Comanche listeners.
'Some of our people are trading robes for colored water that white men make. Everyone has a name for it. I call it crazy water.'
'I know about that,' Ten Bears put in. 'It's the water that burns the throat and makes people wild.'
'Yes. Don't let it into your camp. People can't stop drinking it. They get tired and fall down, or they get so crazy they can't see who they are. . they fight. .'
'Indian against Indian?'
'Indian against Indian. People get killed sometimes. One man I heard of gave his woman to a white man for pleasure just to get more of this water. People get sick when they drink it, yet they still want more when they get better. Don't let any of your people get hold of this water. It always brings trouble.'
As the Comanches sat in stunned disbelief, several of Wolf Robe's warriors beseeched him to tell something more. Wolf Robe's head twisted back and forth, trying to catch everyone at once. Then his hand went up for silence and he signed again to Ten Bears.
'Have you heard of the holy road?'
Ten Bears glanced over his shoulder at the warriors who sat and stood transfixed behind him.
'No,' Ten Bears finally replied. 'What is this holy road?'
Wolf Robe considered the question a moment. Then he turned and nodded to a warrior sitting close by. Wolf Robe sat as the new man rose to speak.
The Comanches paid close attention to this warrior. He was tall, even for a Cheyenne, and particularly resplendent in heavily beaded moccasins and leggings. His bone-pipe breastplate extended to his waist and a heavy disc of hammered copper hung about his neck. Tied in his scalp-- was a huge claw taken from a humpbacked bear. His eyes were lidded, his lips thin and delicate, his nose long and straight. The most spectacular thing about him, however was the tight-fitting white soldier jacket with its brass buttons lining one side of its open front and golden bars of fabric sewn on its shoulders.
'I am Fast,” he signed. 'I have smoked the pipe tonight. My words are true.'
Outside, Smiles A Lot was not aware of the stiffness in his legs, nor was he bothered by the light rain that was falling. He was not even aware of Hunting For Something. As a boy he had sometimes spied on high-level councils but that was only because he had nothing better to do. But
what had been a lark in his early youth was suddenly something more. He was spellbound by the exchange taking place between the two tribes' best warriors.
The new speaker's quiet presence stood in sharp contrast to the sublime action of his arms and hands. Perhaps it was because the boy outside had never paid attention, or perhaps he was witnessing a true master, but whatever the reason, Smiles A Lot remained entranced by the exquisite perfection of Fast's every gesture as he spun out his story.
'White men with long looking-glasses came into the country last year at the first melting of the snow. The whites had said they were going to build a road on which a fire wagon of steel would pull boxes on wheels behind it. We didn't want to see a road like this coming through our country. My brother and I and a few other warriors overwhelmed one of these parties while they were in camp. We killed all of them and took the long looking-glass and tried to see what the white men were looking at, but it was worthless. We never saw anything.
