in Ground?”
And the Crow man quickly responded, “Yes, he is a friend of mine.”
“No,” Arapooesh snapped, his eyes coming back to Scratch. “I asked the white man.”
“I am Bird in Ground’s friend.”
“Are you a friend of the Crow?” asked the chief.
For a moment he thought, then said, “I am the friend of all Crow who do not steal from me. I am friend of all Crow who have honor.”
The chief seemed to measure the heft of those words, then replied, “My people like horses very much. Sometimes we find horses, we take them for our own—”
“I have never done a thing to hurt the Crow,” Bass interrupted angrily.
“This is a good man, Arapooesh,” Bird in Ground explained. “He listens to our people talk and tries to understand. He even tries to understand about a woman who was born in this man’s body.”
As Arapooesh regarded Bass, he scratched his smooth, plucked chin and finally said, “Tell me, Bird in Ground … tell me the names of the men who stole the white man’s horses.”
Clearing his throat, plainly nervous, the man-woman toed the snow before him and eventually spoke the names of the five he believed were the raiders.
Arapooesh’s eyes narrowed with concern. “You are certain?”
“These are the five I saw come to camp this morning with the two ponies and the half horse.”
“But,” Arapooesh said, wagging his head, “these are not …”
“They stole from the white man. They stole from the man who is my friend. Stole from one who has done no wrong to our people.”
As he drank in a deep breath, his chest swelling in contemplation, the chief finally turned away to raise his voice over the crowd. “I call for these five to come here so that I may talk to them: Red Leggings, Comes Inside the Door, Crow Shouting, Sees the Star, and … and Pretty On Top.”
As several voices in the crowd took up the cry, echoing those five names and shouting the chiefs command through the village, the rest in the great throng started to murmur and whisper. Just when Bass was coming to believe that the five would not dare show their faces, the crowd parted in a rush of noisy excitement. Through that widening gap stepped the five.
Titus blinked his eyes, recognizing the tall, thick curl heavily greased and pinned atop one of the thieves’ heads. He was Hannah’s tormentor.
Suddenly seething all the way to the soles of his feet, Scratch started to lunge forward—then stopped abruptly. Shocked: for the first time looking closely at the five, into the faces of those horse thieves, into the eyes of these … boys.
He whipped around on Bird in Ground, flushing with sudden rage. “W-what is this!” he sputtered in English, then asked in that foreign tongue. “These are boys!”
“Boys,” the chief repeated in Crow as the five came to a stop near Arapooesh, eyeing the white man suspiciously. “Yes, they are boys.”
“We are men now,” disputed the one with the tall greased curl on his head.
Bird in Ground sneered. “You are men because you stole three horses from one white man?”
“Three was all he had,” said another of the youngsters, then laughed with the rest.
“So you did take this man’s horses?” Arapooesh asked, silencing them.
Perhaps believing that he had good reason to boast, the one with the curl said, “We went out to steal horses, Arapooesh. We stole some and brought them back to our camp.”
“But you stole a lone man’s horses!” Bird in Ground protested.
The curled one snorted, “I will not be talked to like this by a creature who has a manhood between his legs but does not want to be a man!”
As swiftly as a camp robber swoops down to raid the meat-drying racks, Bird in Ground lunged forward and smacked his flat hand across the youth’s face. “Pretty On Top!” he shrieked. “I am a person of honor … one who is strong enough to kill you with my bare hands!”
Arapooesh stepped between Bird in Ground and the youngster as Pretty On Top started for the man-woman. “There will be no fighting between my people today.”
“No woman talks to a warrior like this—”
“You are not a warrior!”
Again the youngster leaped for Bird in Ground, his hands thrashing like claws ripping the air.
But Arapooesh restrained him. “What he says is true, Pretty On Top. You are not a warrior.”
Wounding crossed his face: Pretty On Top slowly brought the fingers of one hand up to touch the bright-red mark on his cheek where he had been slapped. But it was plain that his feelings suffered more pain than had his flesh. “How will you ever call me a warrior, or how will any man ever ask me to come along on a scalp raid … if you won’t even consider me a man when I steal a white man’s horses.”
“The white man,” Arapooesh started to explain, “he is not our enemy.”
“Ever since the first white men came to our country,” Pretty On Top argued, “our people have stolen their horses.”
Sees the Star agreed, his head bobbing. “The Crow have never killed a white man.”
“You will never steal from this man!” Bird in Ground demanded.
Pretty On Top snorted with laughter. “Is this white man your …
Some of the young people in the crowd sniggered behind their hands.
Bird in Ground’s cheeks flushed with anger. “Little boys like you will never understand the ways of a real man,” he declared, putting his face up close to the youth’s, “because you will never grow up to become a man.”
This time the tall adolescent swung his arm back, ready to slap the older man, when his wrist was suddenly caught in the trapper’s mitten.
“That’s right. You’re no man yet,” Bass grunted in Crow as he pushed the strong youth’s arm down, “because a man would never strike a friend.”
Pretty On Top seized the wrist of the hand the white man had clamped on him, and for a moment they glared into one another’s eyes. “You are no friend of mine!” And he tried to fling Bass’s arm aside.
Instead, Scratch slowly released his grip. “I am a friend of the Crow. I am a friend to all men of honor and bravery.” He turned to look into the face of Arapooesh, saying, “Until the Crow blacken their faces against me, I will be a friend to your people. Your friends are my friends. Your enemies … they are my enemies too.”
“My people, we are not many,” the chief exclaimed as he laid his hand on the big youth’s shoulder. “We cannot afford to turn away any man who says he is our friend, any man who says he will stand against our enemies with us.”
Some of the women in the crowd trilled their tongues in approval, and several of the old men raised their voices in triumph.
“It was good you came to us this winter,” Bird in Ground said.
With a smile Scratch replied, “I did not intend to visit your camp this soon.”
With his strong hand Arapooesh turned to Pretty On Top so that he stared the tall youth directly in the eye. “We have this problem of the white man’s horses.”
“They are our horses now!” the youth barked in protest.
Bird in Ground lunged up to shout, “You stole from a friend of ours!”
“You’ve never stolen a horse in your life!” Red Leggings snapped as he came to stand beside Pretty On Top.
Arapooesh laid his other hand on Red Leggings’ shoulder. Now he clamped his hands down hard and said to them, “We do not steal from those who are our friends.”
The five youths started to sputter in protest, but the chief dug his fingers into the shoulders of the two until their knees began to buckle and they howled in pain.
“But we went out to risk our lives!” Pretty On Top wailed. “We wanted to show our people we were brave enough to go on a pony raid of our own!”
And Comes Inside the Door agreed, “If the older warriors weren’t going to ask us along on the raids they were leading, then Pretty On Top said we would have our own raid to show our bravery!”
