The Endless Sky (Cheyenne Series) (14 page)

      
Chase embraced the old woman. “I stayed with her until the end. She is at last truly free.”

      
“And so are you. I will have Kit Fox prepare food while you and Stands Tall talk. You will have much to say to each other, I think,” the old woman said judiciously as she scrabbled off with surprising swiftness.

      
Chase followed Stands Tall into the lodge where a small fire flickered gently against the approaching chill of dusk. His uncle motioned for him to take a seat as he himself did so, then began to prepare a pipe. After the ritual of pointing the stem to the sky, the earth and the four winds, he inhaled a draught of fragrant smoke, then handed it to Chase.

      
They smoked in silence for several moments. He knew Stands Tall would speak when it was time and it would be rude for him to break the silence first.

      
Finally, the older man set the pipe aside and studied his nephew's face. “I can see your father in you...and your mother. When the soldiers took you away, back to their cities, to your white family, I thought you lost forever.”

      
“I could not leave my mother again. Her brother was going to have her locked away in an evil place. While I was with the Cheyenne, her mind was destroyed. She would speak only in the tongue of the People and only about the old days when my father was alive.”

      
Stands Tall nodded. “Sometimes when life in one time is too much to bear, the spirit returns to a better one.”

      
“She killed herself to free me,” Chase said bleakly.

      
“And so you followed her wishes and came in search of us. Now that you have found us, what is it that your heart tells you to do?”

      
Chase looked up suddenly from where he had been studying the flames, surprised at the blunt question. “I have come to live with the Cheyenne.”

      
Stands Tall smiled. ‘That does not answer what I have asked you. Does your heart wish to be Cheyenne...or does part of it yet remain with the whites?”

      
Not a day had passed during months of wandering when Chase had not thought of the life he left behind, the woman he left behind. Stevie. How could he explain her to Stands Tall when he did not understand his own feelings? “My heart never belonged with the white man...” he began uncertainly. “They looked at me and saw an Indian, a savage in a silk shirt. No matter how diligently I studied in their schools, I was still considered ignorant. All those years when I lived in the house of my mother's father, I dreamed of the endless sky, of riding across the plains, of hunting the buffalo and becoming a warrior once again...of belonging.”

      
He felt uncomfortable under Stands Tail's scrutiny, as if his uncle waited for him to say more. Finally, he did. “There was a woman, a white woman whom my mother's father wished me to marry.”

      
“And did you wish this also?”

      
“She was not like the others. I...cared for her, but I could not have made her happy. I could not be white,” he said bitterly.

      
“And now you have come to see if you can be Cheyenne. You will not succeed if you feel only a debt of honor for your mother's sacrifice.”

      
That touched a nerve. Had he only left Stevie because it was Freedom Woman's dying wish? “No. My mother's madness had been touched by the Powers. She knew the marriage would have been doomed. I would have been doomed if I had not left. I've seen many things during my search for you. I've seen what the coming of the railroads has done in the south, slaughtering the buffalo, scattering other game, bringing settlers and miners in swarms...and the army to protect them and drive our people into the hot dry lands where they must live on a dole of putrid government rations.”

      
“What you say is true. One reason I decided to rejoin my grandfather's people here in the North was to escape that fate,” Stands Tall said softly.

      
“The rails are coming here, too. Already the rich spider people back east make plans to build through the north up all the way into the Yellowstone country. And the one called Long Hair, Custer, will bring his horse soldiers in the summer to scout the course of this railroad.”

      
Stands Tall pondered his nephew's news gravely. “I feared we could never escape.”

      
There was a dangerous glint in Chase's eyes as he said, “I cannot seem to escape Custer. Will your council allow me to join this band?”

      
“They will allow it. There are still a few among us who remember your valor at Washita. We could never have led those women and children to safety if you and the other young warriors had not held the Blue Coats at bay, fighting like wolves.”

      
“All of my friends were killed by the Long Knives. Only I was spared, because I was a powerful white man's grandson,” Chase said bitterly, remembering that awful day.

      
“They dragged you away bleeding and unconscious, chained like an animal. There was no dishonor in that for you. As a youth your hatred of the whites burned hot as a flame. Since then you have lived among them, learned their ways, even considered taking one to wife. We have fled before the Blue Coats for many seasons. What you have just told me means that soon there will be no place left to run. We and our Lakota cousins will be forced to fight. Can you kill the whites as easily now as you did at Washita?”

      
An image of Burke Remington flashed across Chase's mind, then blurred with that of the long-haired cavalry officer with the insane pale eyes, Custer, and his young lieutenant who took special delight in dispatching Chase's helpless wounded brothers. “Yes, I can kill them,” he replied with cold certainty.

      
Stands Tall nodded. “I will speak for you and tell of Washita for all to hear in the council. Then you will have your opportunity to live the Cheyenne way.”

      
“That is all I ask,” Chase replied simply, praying that it would work, that he could at last belong.

* * * *

      
Bodies lay sprawled grotesquely, some burned beyond recognition in the fires. Others had crawled clear of the lodges only to be hacked to pieces by rifle butts and hunting knives. An old woman lay cradling a parfleche filled with pemmican. Two small boys had fallen together, their skulls crushed, still clutching small bows in their hands, children's toys. A young woman stared sightlessly up at the brilliant azure of the sky with a bullet hole in her forehead. Her tunic was rucked above her thighs, which were parted obscenely and smeared with the seed from repeated rapes.

      
Chase stared down at the desolate remains of the small Lakota camp. In the months since he had come to live with his father's people, he had found a measure of peace, but the encroaching whites robbed him and the beleaguered Plains Indians of that peace, of their very lives with every vicious atrocity such as this one. How would it all end? Looking around at the obscenity, he feared the answer.

      
The trill of an icy stream mocked the horror-struck silence of the Cheyenne warriors around him as they made their way into the remains of what had once been a thriving camp. Blackened lodge poles, with their buffalo hide coverings burned away, stood like skeletons amid the cold ashes. Pottery lay smashed, the contents scattered by the restless winds, meat rotted in the warm sun and insects feasted on the remains. Blood pooled around the unburned corpses drawing flies which droned ominously on the still air. The metallic stench had grown all too familiar. Closing his eyes he saw that other village on the banks of the Washita, far to the south. When Custer's Blue Coats had finished, it looked much the same. Massacre, rape and mutilation.
And they dare to call themselves the civilized ones!

      
“White men who gouge the sacred earth for the yellow metal have done this. I say we turn our hunt to human game!” Pony Whipper cried, his face contorted with rage.

      
“The murderers might have been soldiers,” Chase said quietly. Random army patrols had been trespassing on their hunting grounds since spring.

      
“Do you fear the Long Knives?” Pony Whipper challenged, leaning across his horse's withers.

      
Several of the other warriors sucked in their breaths at the insult while Strikes Back and Plenty Horses, also Crazy Dogs, waited to see what Chase would do.

      
Chase stared intently at Pony Whipper, fighting the urge to knock him from his horse and kill him with his bare hands. Knowing that would be a violation of tribal law, he leashed his fury. “You speak like a foolish boy if you think a handful of warriors should attack a company of Blue Coats. We are armed with bows. Only two of us have guns.” He gestured toward Elk Bull's ancient muzzleloader with his own Sharps breechloader, the best he had been able to obtain in barter for his gold Howard watch. “These guns speak only once, but Long Hair's soldiers are armed with Henry repeaters, and the miners have even better Winchesters.” His voice was laced with scorn, daring Pony Whipper to make the first move.

      
“We will do nothing until we see to the dead. Their spirits cannot rest this way,” Elk Bull said forcefully, eyeing the two antagonists. He was an older warrior, chief of the village and the leader of this hunting party. The responsibility for keeping peace between the young hotheads fell to him.

      
Strikes Back and Plenty Horses murmured angrily while Pony Whipper glared at Chase, then spat in the dust with contempt, but made no reply. No one challenged Elk Bull. Several of the other warriors cast glances at Chase the Wind as everyone dismounted but no one said anything to the half-blooded son of Vanishing Grass. No one had to—Chase knew how they felt. In spite of his father and uncle's prowess as warriors, his white blood and the years he had spent in the East had left him tainted in the eyes of many, especially other young men eager to prove their worth in battle against the white invaders who perpetrated obscenities such as this.

      
Chase could not blame them for their distrust. All the years in eastern schools had imbued him with a lot of emotional and intellectual confusion that was not easy to slough off. Life with his father's people was primitive and at times harsh. He had grown soft and debauched during his college years. Since coming to Stands Tall's band last fall, he had not yet proven himself worthy.

      
Grimly they all applied themselves to the task of carrying bodies from the village to a series of small caves across the stream. All that could be done now was to seal the cave opening with rocks against the predators of nature. The predators of white society had already done their work so well there was no way to properly cleanse and dress the dead in their best finery as was customary. Everything they owned had been destroyed with them—or stolen by the white scavengers.

      
As he worked, Chase concluded that these marauders had likely been gold seekers, the riffraff who lived on the periphery of white society, cutthroat drifters in search of quick riches. The would-be miners must have stumbled upon this small camp and decided to help themselves to food, furs and females. Not that soldiers had ever been adverse to ruthlessly attacking a camp of Indians, killing women, children and old men along with the warriors. He'd seen that firsthand at Washita. But officers like Custer only killed for glory, to advance their military careers. Petty thievery seldom interested them.

      
Could Elk Bull keep Pony Whipper and the other Crazy Dogs from rushing off after revenge? It would simplify Chase's life if they did it and ran afoul of a well-armed patrol. Pony Whipper had taken a personal dislike to him from the first day they'd met. When the council agreed to let Chase join the band, Pony Whipper had been furious. Then to further complicate matters, Plenty Horses's sister, Kit Fox, had taken a fancy to Chase, after spurning Pony Whipper’s offer of marriage. Sooner or later he would have to deal with his enemy, but he could not simply kill him as he would have done back in Boston, for tribal law forbade one Cheyenne to take the life of another. The punishment for it was banishment.

      
The irony of the reversal did not escape Chase.

      
When they had done all they could for the dead Lakota, the small party of Cheyenne hunters began the trek back to camp. It was near dusk when they came upon the drunken white man who literally stumbled out of a stand of lodge-pole pine and into Elk Bull's horse, which shied, dancing backward in spite of its heavy load, for the pony carried a dressed deer the warrior had shot that morning.

      
Staggering back in goggle-eyed fear, the man turned to run, bellowing at the top of his lungs, “Injuns! Christ Almighty, Injuns!”

      
He got no farther than the edge of the trees before Pony Whipper had nocked an arrow and taken aim but Elk Bull's stern words prevented him from firing. “Do not kill him! Take him prisoner.”

      
Before the older man had finished speaking, Chase kneed Thunderbolt into a gallop and cut off the terrified man when he emerged from the copse of pines mounted on a shaggy mustang. Pony Whipper came from the opposite side but was too late. Chase had already knocked his captive from his horse and begun tying him securely.

      
When the white man started to cry out as Chase yanked him to his feet, Pony Whipper knocked him unconscious with his war club. “He'll slow us down deadweight like this,” Chase ground out as he struggled hefting the burly man across the saddle of the mustang and tying him securely.

      
They quickly rejoined the others and rode away in the opposite direction from which the man had come, hoping the rest of the
veho
had not heard the outcry. After about an hour, when there was no sign of pursuit, the hunting party halted.