paint that hadn’t been altogether washed off by his bath. I had had a feeling all along on this visit that he didn’t recognize me-that is, of course he knowed I was white though dressed like a Cheyenne, but did not connect me with his boyhood. The only other time I had seen him since the old days had been that once when he was a Contrary, lost in his backwards scheme.
Well sir, he don’t say a thing now until we finish off our chuck and wipe our hands upon our garments and go outside, and there is Olga and some other women fleshing a fresh hide that is staked down upon a spot from which they have swept the snow-her big bottom is pointed towards me, and I would never have recognized it, for back in the old days Olga was robust but never portly. And little Gus runs by, ducking an imaginary bullet fired from a stick-gun by a brown playmate who he must have euchred into impersonating a white enemy. Only a son of mine could have pulled off such a trick, and damn me, that incident touched me more than anything so far. That was the closest I come to calling him, saying: “I’m your Pa, boy. Don’t you recall your old Daddy?”
But of course I never, for it wasn’t the place nor the time, and how in hell would I ever explain the get-up I was wearing to a five-year-old. I’m telling the truth here, and the truth is always made up of little particulars which sound ridiculous when repeated. But I’m prepared to say that maybe I didn’t take back my wife and boy because I was wearing them buffalo horns, when everything was said and done.
Well, I took leave of Younger Bear and renewed the invite to come and eat at my lodge the next day and went so far in a bravado intended to cover up the emotion I felt on seeing Gus as to add: “And bring the whole family!”
The Bear suddenly come from his coma and says to me, very keenly: “You have decided to stay.” So he did recall me.
“I never thanked you,” he says, “for bringing extra food to me while I was being taken as a prisoner to the fort. I want to do that now.”
I was afraid he would next start in on that old business about owing me a life, so I fixed to leave, but he says: “Wait. I want to apologize for the rudeness of my wife. She is a good woman, but she just cannot stand to be in the presence of white men, because they killed her father and mother.…
“Listen,” he says, “on the way here we crossed a fresh trail made by white soldiers. I think they are looking for this village, though the chiefs touched the pen and we are at peace.”
Younger Bear had the peculiar ability always to remind me of my proper race. I should have been armed against him, but I never was. When no issue was made of it, I’d generally be pro-Indian; and also if Old Lodge Skins or Sunshine was registering the complaint, maybe because they were sort of my kin. But the Bear always drew my blood on this subject.
“Maybe,” says I, “they are trailing the big war party that has just come in from raids on peaceful ranches along the Smoky Hill River. Or they could be looking for that white woman and child held by the Kiowa.”
He set his jaw real stubborn. “I don’t know about those things. I am not a Kiowa but a Human Being. I have not been raiding along the Smoky Hill River. Yet I suppose if a soldier sees me he will shoot at me all the same.”
He was right enough in that, and I for one didn’t know how to explain it. However, I resented his unstated suggestion that it was
I went back to my own tepee. Now I haven’t mentioned yet that while Sunshine’s father was dead and she didn’t have brothers, she did have three sisters, and they lived with us. One of them was also a widow and had two little kids. I was the only grown man in the establishment and had to hunt for the whole bunch. In return, them women done all the other work, and I reckon I could also have laid with them had I a mind to, though I never did with anybody but Sunshine, on account of until she got pregnant she alone exhausted me, and so far as since then was concerned, I might be a bit of a prude, but keeping a harem was never to my taste.
As I lay on my buffalo robe and looked at the swell or Sunshine’s pregnant belly, all I could think of was how Olga might at this very moment be carrying the seed of that savage in her. She was forever soiled. I could leave my lodge at any time, go back to civilization, take a bath, and be white again. Not her. The
While I was in this poisonous mood, little Frog toddled over and handed me the tiny wooden horse I had carved for him. He was now about the age of Gus when captured. I handed the toy back to him. He just looked real solemn at me and then at it, and put it down very careful on my bed and goes away. That was the first indication I got of the atmosphere inside the lodge, but then I noticed the women was all unusually quiet and the children of my widowed sister-in-law, a boy and a girl, who I might joke with or tell stories to before the meal was served, were keeping to their own area.
Sunshine served me up a bowl of roots mashed up with some berries. These ingredients had been gathered the previous summer and saved in a dried version. It was like taking a mouthful of mud.
“Where’s that cow haunch I brought in yesterday?” I asks in bad temper.
She looks scared but corrects me. “That was three days ago.”
“If I say it was yesterday, that’s when it was, unless you’re looking for a beating, woman.”
She quickly begs my pardon, saying: “You are right, yesterday. I am a stupid person and-”
“Oh, shut up,” I says. “There are too many mouths to feed around here. That’s why I can’t ever keep us in meat. Why don’t your sisters get married?” The women all put their heads down. I coughed to free my windpipe from a swallow of that sludge.
“If you think I am going to lay with you,” I addressed them generally, “you are crazy.”
One of them come over to Sunshine and whispered in her ear, and then my woman says: “My sister will go out to trade her beaded dress for meat, if you will wait.”
I happened to know of the one that made this offer, that the shirt was the sole item among her possessions for which she could have got any more than a dried bone. And it wasn’t much itself, being stained and patched and there was places where the beads had fell off. We wasn’t a rich family, I can tell you that, having only one man in the place, and that man me, who never did no raiding of the settlements, and we didn’t have association with the traders, who I wouldn’t have wanted to see me anyhow, and I didn’t own any horses apart from the pony give me by Old Lodge Skins.
“No,” I says now. “I am not hungry.” I was some ashamed, but ashamed to show it. I knowed why none of them had got married, too. Because they was living in the tepee of a white man, and the Cheyenne braves would not come and hang about such a door and play their medicine flutes in courtship. Especially since, as the years had gone on, there was an ever greater surplus of females in the tribe, owing to so many men having been killed. I had put a curse on them girls, I reckon. But whose idea had it been to take Sunshine for a wife? Not mine.
“I am sorry you are angry with me,” says Sunshine now. She had put in a full day’s labor, including the chopping of firewood and then drug a great load of it on a buffalo robe for a quarter mile to our lodge. She was all ready to have that kid any time now. When the moment came, she would throw down her hatchet, retire behind a tree, and have it in the snow, and then chop the rest of her quota and bring back both child and cottonwood logs.
“Sit down here and eat,” I says. “I’m not angry with you.”
Which she did, shoveling in that mush with a big horn spoon, and the rest of them likewise, with a sound like an army tramping through a swamp. If I hadn’t been a fool at business back in Denver, by now I could have been setting in my own big house, dining off porcelain and silver and sent me to England for a baldheaded butler wearing a swallowtail coat. If my Pa hadn’t been crazy, God knows what I would have been. I guess everybody toys with ideas like them.
When Sunshine was finished and had picked off her dress the bits of grub what slipped off the spoon, and also some from the earthern floor, for she was still bothered-they all was, even though my mood had sweetened-when she done that and took her bowl and mine to go clean them, she hesitated and says in a low tone:
“When will you kill him?”
“Who?” I asks, getting irritated all over again, for I knew very well what she meant, and remembered my
