daylight, with his whole camp looking at me. I did not come in the dark.
He is not worthy of that. He is a liar, and there is a shadow across his
eyes. The ponies are not here. They are far away--where the poor blind
Yellow-Eyes cannot see them even in dreams. There is no man of the
Chis-chis-chash here who knows where the horses are. Before the liar
gets his horses again, he will have his mouth set on straight,” and the
Bat turned slowly around, sweeping the circle with his eyes to note the
effect of his first speech, but there was no sound.
Again the trader ventured on his wrongs--charged the responsibility of
the Bat’s actions on the Chis-chis-chash, and pleaded for justice.
The aged head chief again arose to reply, saying he was sorry for
what had occurred, but he reminded McIntish that the young warrior
had convicted him of forged words. What would the white chief do to
recompense the wrong if his horses were returned? He also stated that
it was not in his power to find the horses, and that only the young man
could do that.
Springing again to his feet, with all the animation of resolution, the
Bat’s voice clicked in savage gutturals. “Yes, it is only with myself
that the white liar can talk. If the chiefs and warriors of my tribe
were to take off my hide with their knives--if they were to give me to
the Yellow-Eyes to be burnt with fire--I could not tell where the ponies
lie hidden. My medicine will blind your eyes as does the north wind when
he comes laden with snow.
“I will tell the white man how he can have his ponies back. He can hand
over to me now the bright new gun which lies by his side. It is a
pretty gun, better than any Indian has. With it, his powder-horn and his
bullet-bag must go.
“If he does this, he can have back all his horses, except those I choose
to keep. Is it good? I will not say it again. I have spoken.”
[Illustration: 07 I will tell the white man how he can have his ponies back]
The boy warrior stood with arms dropped at his sides, very straight in
the middle of the tent, the light from the smoke hole illuminating the
top of his body, while his eye searched the traders.
McIntish gazed through his bushy eyebrows at the victor. His burnt
skin turned an ashen-green; his right hand worked nervously along his
gun-barrel. Thus he sat for a long time, the boy standing quietly, and
no one moved in the lodge.
With many arrested motions, McIntish raised the rifle until it rested on
its butt; then he threw it from himself, and it fell with a crash
across the dead ashes of the fire, in front of the Bat. Stripping his
powder-horn and pouch off his body, violently he flung them after, and
the Bat quickly rescued them from among the ashes. Gathering the tokens
and girding them about his body, the Bat continued: “If the white liar
will march up this river one day and stop on the big meadows by the log
house, which has no fire in it; if he will keep his men quietly by the
log house, where they can be seen at all times; if he will stay there
one day, he will see his ponies coming to him. I am not a boy; I am
not a man with two tongues; I am a warrior. Go, now--before the
camp-soldiers beat you with sticks.”
IV. The New Lodge
The Yellow-Eyes had departed, and at the end of four days the Bat and
Red Arrow drove a band of thirty ponies and mules upon the herd-grounds,
where they proceeded to cut them into two bunches--fifteen horses for
each young man. This was not a bad beginning in life, where ponies and
robes were the things reckoned. The Bat got down from his horse and
tossed a little brother onto it, telling him to look after them. The
copper-colored midget swelled perceptibly as he loped away after the
Bat’s nineteen horses, for the twentieth, which was the war-pony, was
taken to be picketed by Big Hair’s Lodge.
As the Bat stalked among the Chis-chis-chash, he was greeted often--all
eyes turned to him. No mere boys dared longer to be familiar; they only
stood modestly, and paid the tribute to greatness which much staring
denotes. The white man’s new rifle lay across his left arm, his painted
robe dragged on the ground, his eagle-feather waved perpendicularly
above the dried Bat’s skin, the sacred red paint of war bloodied
his whole face, and a rope and a whip--symbols of his success with
horses--dangled in his right hand, while behind him followed the smart
war-pony, covered with vermilion hand-prints as thickly as the spots
on a brook-trout. The squaws ran from their fleshing, their chopping
or their other work to look at the warrior who made all the camp talk.
Wisdom mellowed by age, in the forms of certain old men, sat back and
thought disturbedly of the future, as is the wont of those who have
little time to live. They feared for the trade with the Yellow-Eyes, for
no Chis-chis-chash could forge iron into guns and knives, which were
the arbiter between the tribes. This the Bat had brought upon them. But
still they thought more than they said; warriors as promising as this
young one did not often appear.
There was a feast at the lodge. The Bat told his exploits to the
warriors, as he strode about the night-fire in the tepee, waving his
arms, giving his war-yell until he split the air and made his listeners’
ears ring. The medicine Bat had made him strong; it had opened the way
and he had proved his faith. He sang while a man beat on a dried skin
drum:
“Hi-ha-s’ yehe’s’ yeye’!
‘Hi-he-e’ yehe’ e’ yeye’!
‘Hi’ niso’ nihu’-Hi’ yeye’!
‘Hi’ niso’ nihu’-Hi’ yeye’!”
And the yelping chorus came from the fire-lit circle, “Hi ya--hi y
a--hi--ye’ye’!--ya’--ya’--ya’--ya!--e’ e’ e’.”
On the morrow, men from the military order of the “red lodges,” the
“miayuma,” came to the Bat with charcoal, and he fasted many days before
undergoing his initiation. The sacred symbols of the body, their signs
and ceremonies, were given him, and he had become a pillar in the
Chis-chis-chash social structure.
The nights were growing cold, and occasional bleak winds blew down from
the great mountains, warning the tribe to be about its mission. The
loads of dry meat made the horses weary, when the camp was broken;
the tepee-poles were bright and new, and the hair began to grow on the
ponies.
One day, as they moved, they could see far ahead on the plains the
colorless walls of Fort Laramie, and the wise-men feared for their
reception, but the pillage of the traders’ horses sat lightly on
the people. The Yellow-Eyes should have a care how they treated the
Chis-chis-chash. It was in their power to put out the white man’s fires.
The Bat’s people were an arrogant band, and held their heads high in the
presence of aliens. Their hands were laid heavily and at once on anyone
who stood in their path. All the plains tribes, the French Indians at
the posts and the Yellow-Eyed trapper-bands stood in awe of them. With
the exception of the chief, the people had never been inside of the
second gate at Laramie. They traded through a hole in the wall, and
even then the bourgeois Papin thought he played with fire. Their haughty
souls did not brook refusal when the trader denied them the arrangement
of the barter.
The tribe encamped, and got rid of what ponies, robes and meats it could
dispose of for guns and steel weapons, and “made whisky.” The squaws
concealed the arms while the warriors raged, but the Chis-chis-chash in
that day were able to withstand the new vices of the white men better
than most people of the plains.
On one occasion, the Bat was standing with a few chiefs before the
gateway of the fort. M. Papin opened the passage and invited them to
enter. Proudly the tall tribesmen walked among the _engages_--seeming to
pay no heed, but the eye of an Indian misses nothing. The surroundings
were new and strange to the young man. The thick walls seemed to his
vagabond mind to be built to shield cowards. The white men were created
only to bring goods to the Indians. They were weak, but their medicine
was wonderful. It could make the knives and guns, which God had denied
to the Bat’s people. They were to be tolerated; they were few in
number--he had not seen over a hundred of them in all his life.
Scattered here and there about the post were women, who consorted with
the _engages_--half-breeds from the Mandaus and Dela-wares, Sioux and
many other kinds of squaws; but the Chis-chis-chash had never sold a
woman to the traders. That was a pride with them.
[Illustration: 08 Nothing but cheerful looks followed the Bat]
The sisterhood of all the world will look at a handsome man and smile
pleasantly; so nothing but cheerful looks followed the Bat as he passed
the women who sat working by the doorways. They were not ill-favored,
these comforters of the French-Creole workmen, and were dressed in
bright calicos and red strouding, plentifully adorned with bright beads.
The boy was beginning to feel a subtle weakening in their presence. His
fierce barbarism softened, and he began to think of taking one. But he
put it aside as a weakness--this giving of ponies for these white men’s
cast-offs. That thought was unworthy of him--a trade was not his wild
way of possessing things.
He stood quietly leaning against a door on Papin’s balcony, observing
the men laboring about the enclosure, his lip curling upward with fine
contempt. The “dogs” were hewing with axes about some newly made carts,
or rushing around on errands as slaves are made to do. Everyone was busy
and did not notice him in his brown study.
From within the room near by he heard a woman sing a few notes in an
unknown tongue. Without moving a muscle of his face he stepped inside
the room, and when his eye became accustomed to the light, saw a young
squaw, who sat beading, and wore a dress superior to that of the others.
She stared a moment and then smiled. The Bat stood motionless for a long
time regarding her, and she dropped her gaze to her needlework.
“I’ nisto’ niwon (You were humming),” spoke the statued brave, but she
did not understand.
Again came the clicking gutturals of the harsh Chis-chis-chash tongue:
“Whose squaw are you?”--which was followed by the sign-talk familiar to
all Indians in those days.
The woman rose, opening her hand toward him and hissing for silence.
Going to the door, she looked into the sunlighted court, and, pointing
to the factor who was directing workmen, replied,
“Papin.” He understood.
She talked by signs as she drew back, pointing to the Bat, and then
ran her hand across her own throat as though she held a knife, and then
laughed while her eyes sparkled.
Again he understood, and for the first time that day he smiled. There
are no preliminaries when a savage warrior concludes to act. The
abruptness of the Bat’s love-making left room for few words, and his
attentions were not repulsed except that the fear of her liege lord out
by the carts made her flutter to escape that she might reassure herself.
She was once again covered by the sweep of the warrior’s robe, and what
they whispered there, standing in its folds, no man can tell. The abrupt
entrance of Papin drowned all other thoughts, and filled the quiet fort
with a whirl of struggles and yells, in which all joined, even to the
dogs.
The outcome was that the Bat found himself thrown ignominiously into
the dust outside the walls, and the gate slammed after him. He gathered
himself together and looked around. No one of his people had seen the
melee from which he had emerged so ingloriously, yet humiliation
was terrible. Nothing like this had occurred before. Cowardly French
half-breeds had laid their hands on the warrior’s body, even on his
sacred bat and eagle-plume; and they had been content to throw him away
as though he were a bone--merely to be rid of him.
His rage was so great that he was in a torpor; he did not even speak,
but walked away hearing the shrieks of the squaw being beaten by Papin.
Going to the camp, he got a pony and rode to the hills, where he
dismounted and sat down. The day passed, the night came, and morning
found the Bat still sitting there.
He seemed not to have moved. His eyes burned with the steady glare of
the great cats until, allowing his robe to fall away, he brought out his
firebag and lighted his pipe. Standing up, he blew a mouthful of smoke
to each of the four corners of the world; then lowered his head in
silence for a long while. He had recovered himself now. The Bat no
longer shrieked, but counciled coldly for revenge. His shadow beside him
was blood-red as he gazed at it.
Presently he mounted and rode toward camp; his eyes danced the devil’s
dance as they wandered over the battlements of Fort Laramie. He wanted
a river of blood--he wanted to break the bones of the whites with stone
hatchets--he wanted to torture with fire. He would have the girl now at
any cost.
After eating at Big Hair’s lodge, he wandered over to the Fort. He said
not a word to anyone as he passed. An old chief came out of the gate,
turned the corner, saw the Bat, and said: “The white chief says you
tried to steal his squaw. His heart is cold toward our people. He will
no longer trade with us. What have you done?”
The Bat’s set eyes gazed at the old man, and he made no reply, but stood
leaning against the walls while the chief passed on.
No one noticed him, and he did not move for hours. He was under that
part of the wall behind which was the room of the woman, and not
unexpectedly he heard a voice from above in the strange language which
he did not understand. Looking up, he saw that she was on the roof. He
motioned her to come down to him, at the same time taking his rifle from
under his robe.
The distance was four times her height, but she quickly produced a
rawhide lariat, which she began to adjust to a timber that had been
exposed in the roof, dirt having been washed away. Many times she looked
back anxiously, fearful of pursuit, until, testing the knot and seeming
satisfied, she threw her body over the edge and slid down.
The Bat patted her on the back, and instinctively they fled as fast as
the woman could run until out of rifle-shot, when her new brave stayed
her flight and made her go slowly that they might not attract attention.
They got at last to the pony-herds, where the Bat found his little
brother with his bunch of ponies. Taking the cherished war-pony and two
others, he mounted his new woman on one, while he led the other beside
his own. They galloped to the hills. Looking back over the intervening
miles of plain, their sharp eyes could see people running about like
ants, in great perplexity and excitement. Papin had discovered his woes,
and the two lovers laughed loud and long. He had made his slaves lay
violent hands on the Bat and he had lashed the girl, Seet-se-be-a
(Mid-day Sun), with a pony whip, but he had lost his woman.
Much as the Bat yearned to steep his hands in the gore of Papin, yet
the exigencies of the girl’s escape made it impossible now, as he feared
pursuit. On the mountain-ridge they stopped, watching for the pursuing
party from the Fort, but the Cheyennes swarmed around and evidently
Papin was perturbed.
[Illustration: 09 The ceremony of the Fastest Horse]
So they watched and talked, and fondled each other, the fierce Cheyenne
boy and Minataree girl--for she proved to be of that tribe--and they
were married by the ancient rites of the ceremony of the Fastest Horse.
Shortly the tribe moved away to its wintering-grounds, the young couple
following after. The Bat lacked the inclination to stop long enough to
murder Papin; he deferred that to the gray future, when the “Mid-day
Sun” did not warm him so.
As they entered the lodges, they were greeted with answering yells, and
the sickening gossip of his misadventure at Laramie was forgotten when
they saw his willing captive. The fierce old women swarmed around,
yelling at Seet-se-be-a in no complimentary way, but the fury of
possible mothers-in-law stopped without the sweep of the Bat’s elk-horn
pony whip.
Before many days there was a new tepee among the “Red Lodges,” and every
morning Seet-se-be-a set a lance and shield up beside the door, so that
people should know by the devices that the Bat lived there.
V. “The Kites and the Crows”
The Bat had passed the boy stage. He was a Chis-chis-chash warrior now,
of agile body and eager mind. No man’s medicine looked more sharply
after his physical form and shadow-self than did the Bat’s; no young man
was quicker in the surround; no war-pony could scrabble to the lariat
ahead of his in the races. He had borne more bravely in the sun-dance
than all others, and those who had done the ceremony of “smoking his
shield” had heard the thick bull’s-hide promise that no arrow or bullet
should ever reach the Bat. He lost the contents of his lodge at the
game of the plum-stones--all the robes that Seet-se-be-a had fleshed and
softened, but more often his squaw had to bring a pack-pony down to the
gamble and pile it high with his winnings. He was much looked up to
in the warrior class of the Red Lodges, which contained the tried-out
braves of the Cheyenne tribe; moreover old men--wise ones--men who stood
for all there was in the Chis-chis-chash, talked to him occasionally out
of their pipes, throwing measuring glances from under lowering brows in
his direction to feel if he had the secret Power of the Eyes.
The year passed until the snow fell no longer and Big Hair said the
medicine chiefs had called it “The Falling Stars Winter” and had painted
the sign on the sacred robes. The new grass changed from yellow to a
green velvet, while the long hair blew off the horses’ hides in bunches
and their shrunken flanks filled up with fat. As Nature awoke from the
chill and began to circulate the Indians responded to its feel. They
stalked among the pony herds, saying to each other: “By the middle of
the moon of the new Elk Horns, these big dogs will carry us to war.
There the enemy will know that the Chis-chis-chash did not die in the
snow. There will be blood in our path this grass.”
Red Arrow and the Bat prayed often together to the Good God for fortune
in war, as they sat in the lodge running their eyes along their arrows,
picking those which were straightest, and singing:
“This arrow is straight
This arrow is straight
It will kill us a man
It will kill us a man--”
and the Bat boasted to his chum: “When I come to the enemy, I shall go
nearer than any other Red Lodge man. I shall have more scalps to dance
and no bullet or arrow can stop the Bat when he strikes his pony with
the whip.” Red Arrow believed this as much as the boaster did, for men
must believe they will do these things before they do them. “Red Arrow,
we will not go with a big war-party. We will go with Iron Horn’s band of
twenty warriors. Then next winter at the warriors’ feasts when we tell
what we did, we will count for something. Red Arrow, we will see for the
first time the great war-medicine.”
The boys of the camp herded the ponies where the grass was strongest,
and the warriors watched them grow. It was the policy of the tribe to
hang together in a mass, against the coming of the enemy, for the better
protection of the women and the little ones, but no chiefs or councils
were strong enough to stop the yearning of the young Cheyennes for
military glory. All self-esteem, all applause, all power and greatness,
came only down that fearful road--the war trail. Despite the pleadings
of tribal policy Iron Horn, a noted war- and mystery-man, secretly
organized his twenty men for glorious death or splendid triumph. Their
orders went forth in whispers. “By the full of the moon at the place
where the Drowned Buffalo water tumbled over the rocks one day’s
pony-travel to the west.”
Not even Seet-se-be-a knew why the Bat was not sitting back against his
willow-mat in the gray morning when she got up to make the kettle boil,
but she had a woman’s instinct which made her raise the flap to look
out. The two war-ponies were gone. Glancing again behind the robes of
his bed she saw, too, that the oiled rifle was missing. Quickly she ran
to the lodge of Red Arrow’s father, wailing, “My man has gone, my man
has gone--his fast ponies are gone--his gun is gone,” and all the dogs
barked and ran about in the shadows while Red Arrow’s mother appeared in
the hole in the tepee, also wailing, “My boy has gone, my boy has gone,”
and the village woke up in a tumult. Everyone understood. The dogs
barked, the women wailed, the children cried, the magpies fluttered
overhead while the wolves answered back in piercing yells from the
plains beyond.
Big Hair sat up and filled his pipe. He placed his medicine-bag on the
pole before him and blew smoke to the four sides of the earth and to the
top of the lodge saying: “Make my boy strong. Make his heart brave,
O Good Gods--take his pony over the dog-holes--make him see the enemy
first!” Again he blew the smoke to the deities and continued to pray
thus for an hour until the sun-lit camp was quiet and the chiefs sat
under a giant cotton-wood, devising new plans to keep the young men at
home.
Meanwhile from many points the destined warriors loped over the rolling
landscape to the rendezvous. Tirelessly all day long they rose and fell
as the ponies ate up the distance to the Drowned Buffalo, stopping
only at the creeks to water the horses. By twos and threes they met,
galloping together--speaking not. The moon rose big and red over
their backs, the wolves stopped howling and scurried to one side--the
ceaseless thud of the falling hoofs continued monotonously, broken only
by the crack of a lash across a horse’s flank.
At midnight the faithful twenty men were still seated in a row around
Iron Horn while the horses, too tired to eat, hung their heads. The
old chief dismissed his war-party saying: “To-morrow we will make the
mystery--we will find out whether the Good Gods will go with us to war
or let us go alone.”
Sunrise found the ponies feeding quietly, having recovered themselves,
while the robed aspirants sat in a circle; the grass having been removed
from the enclosed space and leveled down.
A young man filled the long medicine-pipe and Iron Horn blew sacrificial
puffs about him, passing it in, saying: “Let no man touch the pipe who
has eaten meat since the beginning of the last sun. If there are any
such he must be gone--the Good Gods do not speak to full men.” But the
pipe made its way about the ring without stopping.
Iron Horn then walked behind the circle sticking up medicine-arrows in
the earth--arrows made sacred by contact with the Great Medicine of the
Chis-chis-chash and there would hold the Bad Gods in check while the
Good Gods counseled.
Resuming his seat, he spoke in a harsh, guttural clicking: “What is said
in this circle must never be known to any man who does not sit here now.
The Bad Gods will hear what the Good Gods say in such an event and the
man who tells against them will be deserted by the Good Gods forever.
Every man must tell all his secrets--all the things he has thought about
his brothers since the last war-medicine; all the things he has done
with the women of the tribe; all that the Gods have whispered in his
dreams. He must tell all and forever say no more,” and Iron Horn rested
on his words for a moment before continuing his confession.
“Brothers, I am a great medicineman--no arrow can touch me--I do not
fear men. I am too old for the women to look upon. I did not say it at
the time but when the sun was low on the land last winter I made it turn
blue for a time. I made it cold in the land. Our horses were poor and
when I made the sun blue we crusted the buffalo and killed many with our
lances. Brothers, it was I who made the sun blue in the winter.
“Brothers, I love you all--I shall say no more,” and Iron Horn threw
tobacco on the earth in front of him.
A young man next to him dropped his robe from about his body and with
fierce visage spoke excitedly, for it was his first confession, and his
Indian secretiveness was straining under the ordeal. It was mostly about
gallantries and dreams--all made like the confessions which followed.
They were the deeds and thoughts common to young Indian men. They
ministered to the curiosity of people whose world lay within the camping
circle of their small tribe, and they were as truthful as a fear of God
could make them, except the dreams, and they too were real to the Indian
mind.