“Understand, if we go on together, it is in my world, The People’s world, and not this world of Americans who have lost their way.”
They kissed.
“I shall be happy with you anywhere that you wish to take me. As you have said, there is nothing between us now. You have made up to me, and revenged me, for everything the Americans have done to me, My Slayer of Enemy Gods.”
“You must not call me that; it is wicked to call a human being by such a name.”
She answered him with another kiss. He thought he had never seen her look so happy. For the first time since he had known her, she looked as young as she was, a year or so younger than himself. Her face was full of peace.
They fell to planning. Reckoning their resources, they concluded that they had amassed the astounding sum of three thousand dollars in money, goods, and horses. He did not want to take what came through her lover, but she said:
“No; I took it like spoils in war. It was war I made with him. And you made it yours when your arrow struck him. And we both paid for it, I think.”
“Perhaps when he gets well he will send policemen after us.”
“No, I know him. He will say nothing; he will be ashamed, I think.”
XX
I
During the interval, Laughing Boy moved most of his horses a couple of days’ ride farther north, not far from Zhil Clichigi, where he penned them in a box canyon in which there was a spring and still a little feed. He bought provisions at a trading post on the road to T’o Hatchi. Slim Girl had confessed to him that the story about the warrant out for him on account of the Pah-Ute had been a lie, but, all things considered, she felt it best that he stay away from town. He said that it had seemed a little odd that there should be so much trouble over a Pah-Ute.
“No,” she said, “they do not want any shooting.”
“That is true. Whenever there is cause for a fight, they want to send men to do the fighting, and only let us come as guides, like that time with Blunt Nose. They must be very fond of fighting, I think, and they have not enough of their own, so they do other people’s fighting for them. It is a good thing and a bad thing.
“I do not understand them, those people. They stop us from raiding the Stone House People and the Mexicans, which is a pity; but they stop the Utes and the Comanches from raiding us. They brought in money and silver, and these goods for our clothes. They bring up water out of the ground for us. We are better off than before they came.
“But yet it does not matter whether they do good things or bad things or stupid things, I think. When one or two come among us, they are not bad. If they are, sometimes we kill them, as we did Yellow Beard at Kien Dotklish. But a lot of them and we cannot live together, I think. They do good things, and then they do something like taking a child away to school for five years. Around Lukachukai there are many men who went to school; they wear their hair short; they all hate Americans. I understand that now. There is no reason in what they do, they are blind, but in the end they will destroy everything that is different from them, or else what is different must destroy them. If you destroyed everything in me that is different from them, there would only be a quarter of a man left, I think. Look at what they tried to do to you. And yet they were not deliberately trying.
“Well, soon we shall be where there are few Americans, very few. And we shall see that our children never go to school.”
“Soon we shall be where there are very few Americans”; that thought was constant in his mind. He was very happy, it was like a second honeymoon. He had kept all the good things of life, and he had saved himself. He saw that his wife depended on him; she was very tender and rather grave. He understood her gravity, in view of her wound and all that had happened. Soon in new surroundings there would be cause for only happiness. A little readjustment, a little helping her into a less comfortable life, but her courage would make nothing of that.
She was very tender and very grave, and she was thinking a great deal. That crisis like a blast of white light had shown her life and herself, it had ended her old independence. She had unravelled her blanket back to the beginning, and started again with a design which could not be woven without Laughing Boy, and she knew that there could be no other design.
It would not be easy at first to be competent and satisfactory up there; to make herself accepted and liked, to do the dull things, to watch sheep and make her own bread. But she would, and she could. They would go to Oljeto, Moonlight Water, a pretty name and a pretty place, if a childhood memory were true. She had relatives there, and it was far from the long arm of the Americans—wild country, with the unexplored fastnesses towards Tsé Nanaazh and the Pah-Utes. That would be better than dealing with his relatives at T’o Tlakai, and it was near
