woman’s arm. No one else was going to tell the man he should not have cuffed the old woman aside when she’d cried out, trying to remove the white man’s claws from her granddaughter’s arm.
No one, that is, except Johnny Bruguier.
As he looked back now, he thought how things had a way of sweeping him up and carrying him along before he knew it. Like a spring torrent of winter runoff rushing between two narrow creekbanks. He had his own knife at work on a piece of ash, carving a new stem for an uncle’s pipe. How the old men loved to spend much time with their pipes and telling stories this season of the year. When the bad words and the loud talk started, Johnny already had his knife out. When the white man pulled his knife, everything hurried by in a blur.
He remembered the girl being flung aside, landing in a heap atop her old grandmother. He remembered the size of that white man’s knife as he lunged for Johnny. And the last thing Bruguier was ever able to recall was the look in those walking dead eyes as the two men grappled. Those eyes no longer seeming dead at all, but lit with a bright, cold fire—such hate Johnny had never before seen.
Nor had he ever thought he would see so much blood pour out of a man. Something inside Bruguier had told him to put out the fire in those eyes, but Johnny did not know how he’d accomplished that, for he could remember nothing more until he was standing over the white man thrashing on the floor, bleeding from a dozen or more serious wounds, the floor beneath him slicking with dark puddles of blood and a greasy coil of gut. Too much blood, he had told himself. Too much for any man to lose and still live.
The white man died at Johnny’s feet, his thrashing stopped, rolling onto his back to stare up at Bruguier with those walking dead eyes. But now he would no longer walk. And the fire was gone from them as they gazed blankly at the half-breed who had killed a white man before so many witnesses.
How the trader had started hollering, reaching under a counter for his big two-shoot gun. How Johnny had looked at the others, both Lakota and half-breed there in the store, sensing instantly that they would not dare tell the truth about what had happened. Afraid. Cowed. So shamed by their need for the moldy flour and rancid pig meat that they would not tell the truth.
Johnny fled Standing Rock on a stolen horse. And had been running ever since.
First to Bear Butte to find solace and help for his troubled spirit among the religious places he had heard so much about. Not that he had never been religious—certainly not like his father’s Catholicism. Nor had he paid much attention to the beliefs of his mother’s people. But he had remembered enough to know about Bear Butte, enough to feel the place call out to him.
For most of that hard winter he had clung close to the slopes of Bear Butte, hunting, sleeping, keeping an eye out in those early days for any from Standing Rock who might follow him. Only with the waning of winter did he finally relent and allow himself to believe no one would come for him.
So he wandered south to the Black Hills, that country the white man’s government wanted back from the warrior bands so all white men could come and dig for the yellow rocks that made them hungry for whiskey and whores. It was no problem finding work in those settlements just beginning to dot the Black Hills: unloading wagons brought up from the rail depot at Sidney, Nebraska; helping build sluice boxes; cleaning up after all the puking white men in those great saloons covered with tent canvas, closed-in places that smelled of urine, sweat, and the desecration of that sacred land. There was work enough for any man willing to work. Johnny worked.
Until that summer afternoon he was tapped on the shoulder by his white employer. Bruguier straightened over his mop and slop bucket.
“You know anythin ‘bout this?” With a crackle the man noisily unfolded a stiffened parchment with a likeness of Johnny printed on it in black ink. Words, too.
“What’s this?” Bruguier had asked.
“Says you’re wanted, mister.”
“For what?”
“Murder. You kill someone?”
His eyes must have given him up when he looked away, unable to look the white man in the face.
“Tell you what, mister,” the white man continued, “you best be on your way and now. These here posters is going up all over town. They’ll be up all over the hills afore the sun sets tomorrow. Likely you’ll be as easy for others to spot, just as easy to catch. Then some miner’s court decide to hang you.”
To this day Johnny remembered clear as sunrise how that white man with dirt caked down in those deep wrinkles on his face and the wattle of his neck had pantomimed a rope dropping over his head, tightened, then strangled at the end of that noose. As calmly as he could, Johnny had nodded and set his mop against the wall. Then turned away, not once looking over his shoulder.
He stole another horse that day, the biggest one of those tied at the side of the saloon. Not one of the horses out front at the rail, but back in the shadows, an animal with a blaze face and two front stockings. It looked strong enough to carry him fast and far. But the best thing that made Johnny decide on the horse was what was tied behind the saddle: a thick blanket roll, wrapped in an oiled slicker, along with those two saddlebags stuffed to their limit. Plain to see that horse and rigging were ready for the trail.
Bruguier kicked the animal into a gallop as soon as he put the last tent behind him, heading west toward the setting sun. East and north meant trouble. That’s where the white men were, with their pictures and their stories of murder, the nightmare of their hanging ropes that choked off the only chance his spirit could fly out of his mouth when he breathed his last. No man must die that way.
The only direction for him lay to the south and west. There was damned little of the white man north of the Platte or south of the Yellowstone, clear to the Big Horn Mountains. Especially that summer after the Lakota and Cheyenne had whipped the pony soldiers something fierce in two big fights. He set off to find sanctuary among his mother’s people—that, or this journey would be his suicide.
Beside his fire that first summer night after fleeing the white man’s settlements, Johnny unfurled the oiled rain poncho and rolled out the blankets inside their bedroll, a long canvas sack. Within he found a pair of well-worn batwing chaps.
“A cow-boy,” he murmured to himself as he stood to hold the chaps against his hips, admiring the way they fluttered as he pranced around the fire ring—just the way the long fringe on Lakota leggings fluttered with a man’s every step.
The next morning he put on the weathered chaps, running his hands over the dark oiled color of the leather. He had worn them ever since. Had them on that early morning he caught sight of the smoke rising from many fires beyond the low range of hills in the distance. By the time he reached the top of a far knoll, the smoke had dissipated and the village was already in motion for the day, slowly making its way north by west—back toward the Owl River.* Bruguier cautiously followed them all day, watchful of outriders protecting the massive line of march, all those women and children and travois, which would have stirred up a lot of dust had it not been for the season of the rains. By the time the procession went into camp, Johnny had them figured for Lakota. One band or another— but Lakota for sure. How he wanted to taste the words on his tongue once more, and forget the white man’s language for the rest of his days.
Riding down from the slope slowly, he saw several of the young warriors turn and notice him while lodgepoles were being set in their proper order, lodge covers being unfurled over the first. Johnny kicked that big American horse in its flanks and rolled into an easy gallop. With a burst of noise and a flourish of the hat he ripped from his head, Bruguier shot past the warriors coming out to challenge him—dashing straight into the camp, knowing enough to aim for the center of the great village. Dead in the middle of the two horns of the crescent, he would find the chief’s lodge. There he should be safe—despite the fact that he was dressed in white man’s clothes. Despite the whole summer of bloody warfare against the white man.
Already he could see that he could not make it to the center of camp. Suddenly there were too many horsemen forming up, galloping to meet him. His way was blocked.
In panic, his eyes shot over the nearby lodges being raised. But ahead, close at hand, there was a big one. Well painted with dream symbols. A tripod stood outside with many scalps hanging from it. This man must surely be a war chief. Besides, it was one of the few already erected and close at hand.
Outside the big lodge he dismounted before his horse even stopped, and ducked within the lodge door without ceremony. Outside the children screeched in their high voices, the women shouting to their men that a white man had just invaded their camp, a lone white man. But inside the lodge all remained eerily quiet.
Before him the middle-aged warrior looked Johnny over carefully. The wrinkled, copper-skinned woman said nothing at all, but went back to laying out the buffalo robes and blankets while her husband eventually went on
