Roman Nose nodded, impatient. “You are, High-Backed Bull. What do you, the first to ride in, have to tell me?”
The pony hurled flecks of foam as it threw its head from side to side—at a full gallop seconds before, then suddenly commanded to halt and stand obediently still by both rider and the man on the ground.
Bull gazed into the war chief’s dark eyes, wishing his own were as dark and truly Cheyenne as were those of Roman Nose. “The white men—”
“Yes, the half-a-hundred?”
Swallowing hard, Bull went on, “They are less than half a day behind now.”
“Do you think you know where they will camp tonight?”
Sensing pride that the war chief should ask such an important question of him, High-Backed Bull straightened on the pony’s back. “I cannot be sure, but I believe there is a place where they might find firewood along the shallow river, camp on the sandy bank.”
“How far?”
He thought a moment, rerunning the miles of race back through his mind. “Not far. I believe it would take us no longer than it would for a man to eat his supper.”
Roman Nose smiled, gazing off to the southeast, into the distance, as the Brule riders brought their ponies to a halt around him, kicking up dust in rooster tails, bringing the barking dogs and yammering, excited children as magnets would draw a scattering of iron filings.
“We must go tell Pawnee Killer!” shouted the war chief over the growing clamor. “Tell Tall Bull and Two Moon—get their ponies! We have a war council to attend.” He began to turn away into the crowd.
This time it was High-Backed Bull who reached down and snagged the war chief’s upper arm. “A war council?”
“Yes, my friend. We will plan our attack on the half-a-hundred who have followed us for many days, stalking our backtrail.”
“Then … at last we will fight these white men?”
For a considered moment Roman Nose stared back into the young warrior’s eyes, perhaps seeing there what few others might. “You hunger deeply to fight these white men, yes?”
“Any white man.”
Roman Nose nodded. “Perhaps for now any white man’s scalp will do, young one. Yet come a day, we both know you covet but one man’s scalp.”
“Come a day very, very soon, Roman Nose.”
“We will make quick work of these who follow us, like the meadowlarks follow the hawk … until the hawk finally tires of the game and turns—to strike!”
Around them the entire camp became pandemonium with the news on every lip. Young boys brought up ponies for the Northern Cheyenne chiefs, who mounted amid the wild cries for revenge, cries to punish the white stalkers. The Shahiyena sent their leaders off to hold a war council with Pawnee Killer and the headmen of the Brule camped upstream no farther than ten arrow-flights.
“May I come with you, Roman Nose?” Bull shouted above the commotion.
Turning his pony about, the war chief smiled. “You will not be allowed to attend the council, but—yes. Come. You will hold my pony while I sit with the others.”
“It will be an honor to care for your pony while you decide how the white men are to die.”
The emissaries from the Shahiyena camp reined their animals from the camp circle and loped upstream where moments before the excited Brule scouts had arrived carrying the news. Already the Killer’s headmen were hurrying to the chief’s lodge, where the buffalo-hide cover was being rolled up on one side to allow the breeze to cool the shady interior.
Just beyond the lodge stood a hide awning stretched across a framework of lodgepoles, providing shade for a half-dozen Lakota women scurrying about to start a fire to boil meat and fry bread for those attending the war council. First the men would fill their bellies, then smoke with prayers that the truth be spoken—and only then would there be talk of making a fight of it against the white men.
High-Backed Bull ground his teeth at that—impatient to whirl about and confront the half-a-hundred by himself if he had to—just to fight them was everything now. To take a scalp or two for his own honor. To see the fear well up in the eyes of the enemy, to know the white man’s heart had turned to water and he had likely soiled his pants at the mere sight of the Hotamitanyo—the mighty Dog Soldiers of the Shahiyena.
Roman Nose dismounted and handed the rein over to Bull. “Paint yourself, my friend. Make your medicine and that for your pony here. We ride as soon as this council is over!”
“To kill the white men? Kill all of them?”
“Does not the badger kill the field mouse when it tires of the chase?”
As Roman Nose disappeared into the council lodge, High-Backed Bull dropped from the back of his pony, taking it and the war chief’s toward the shade of the awning where the women chattered and brought their kettles to a boil. From a fringed pouch he carried over a shoulder, he took out three small skin bags, along with a fragment of mirror he had taken from a looking glass broken during a recent raid on a white settlement. Propping the shard of mirror in the fork of a nearby plum brush, Bull mixed the first of his dried pigments, earth colors all, with grease from the nearby Lakota kitchen.
Black. The color of victory.
From his hairline down to the middle of his nose, the young Shahiyena painted the entire top half of his face with black, from ear to ear. Next came yellow, color of the Life-giver in the sky above. He applied the yellow in long vertical stripes, each a fingertip wide, that ran down the lower half of his face until they reached his jawline.
Last to be applied was the brick-red ocher earth-paint, its crimson smeared between the yellow lines until the lower half of his face was striped with both the power of the sun and the provocative color of war. The color of blood.
For a moment more he admired his reflection there in the midday sun, the bright, greasy patterns smeared against his earth-colored skin there in that fragment of a mirror stolen from a smoking sod house a white family had raised along the Saline River, where for many generations the Shahiyena had hunted their buffalo.
Yes, Bull thought, smiling, approving of the work he had done on his paint. He strode over to paint potent, powerful symbols on his pony.
This face of mine will be the last sight many of those white men see this day! he told himself as he painted red circles around his pony’s nostrils, to give it the power of breathing wind this day.
Then I will open their bellies, rip out their hearts, and smear myself with their warm blood. I will revel, dancing on their steaming entrails, then smash their heads to jelly after I have torn their hair from their heads! How I will celebrate in the spilling of their white blood!
Of a sudden Bull’s hand stopped above its painting of the hailstones on the pony’s rear flanks, coldly remembering his own white blood. Half of his heart was white. Half of his blood. It made the sheer exultant happiness of this moment instantly turn to gall in his mouth, a taste so sour that he choked on it.
Bull spat on every last thought of his white father.
“Until I can dance in your blood,” he vowed with a growl under his breath, madly smearing the crimson paint in lightning bolts on the rear of the pony to give it speed in the coming fight. A look of cunning played summer shadows across his face.
“Until I can dance in my own father’s blood!”
6
IT’S TIME YOU went dry,” Jonah told the warrior.
“Dry?” the Shoshone asked, anxiously raking the back of a hand across his cracked lips.
“You gone and emptied me of what whiskey I rode out of Laramie with. Ain’t no more.”
Two Sleep blinked into the bright light, wishing he wore a white man’s hat to protect him from this torturous sun, then straightened stoically. “Better now, we are. Got no whiskey for me.”
