Return of the Tall Man Page 3

  The latter made a brave show of refusing the tidbit, but when Ben made a series of flowery signs signifying that such a small gift was poor repayment indeed for the hospitality offered him, the old man gave in.

  “My son’s skin is white,” he waved, “but his heart is red. He thinks like an Indian. His father thanks him.”

  With that, the old man sucked out the jellied brain and eyes of the rodent, tossed the emptied skull to his woman. The squaw caught it deftly. Popping it into her wide mouth, she ground it noisily three times with her bone-hard gums, gulped it down with an echoing belch and smiling nod of acknowledgment for Ben, the original donor.

  Now the ice was broken. When, some minutes later, the council pipe of salt-marsh reed and piñon burl came out and was lighted and passed around, Ben’s carefully introduced question about the white baby girl of Arapaho Wells was received in a friendly way and not with the stony silence which customarily would have greeted any such white inquiry concerning a white child who, presumably, had met an Indian fate.

  In this case, though, however friendly, the red reply was not encouraging.

  Yes, the white-haired shaman admitted, the Paiutes did know something of this girl child. And it was good that the Tall Son had come when the men of the village were away in the Conger Mountains hunting sheep and antelope. For in this way the old ones could tell their visitor what they knew, and he could take his leave with the information freely. In the old days, things had been different. Then the red man and the white had been friends. Now even the Paiutes, a peaceful people, were angry with what went on. But the Tall Son was of the old manners, and he should have what they knew and welcome.

  “Thank you, father,” motioned Ben. “What is it that you can tell me of the little one?”

  “Only this,” replied the other, hands moving to frame the words with eloquent clarity. “When the spotted sickness had passed from among our people, we went back to see how we might help those white people. We feared they would have taken the sickness from our visit, and it was but fair that we should try to find out and to help them.

  “We did find them, and they were in a poor place. It was three suns along the Goose Creek Trail toward the big wagon road, the one that goes to the Nez Percé country. You know that road, don’t you?”

  Ben nodded that he did, gesturing, “Yes, what happened there?”

  “It wasn’t there; I said on Goose Creek.”

  “All right, what happened on Goose Creek?”

  “On Goose Creek the Snakes found those poor wagon train people before we could find them. You know the Snakes? The Shoshoni? Washakie’s people?”

  Ben shook his head. “No, are they a bad people?”

  “Well, bad to us and to the Nez Percés, whom they especially hate. But ordinarily they are like the Absarokas, the Crows. They get along pretty well with the white man. Indeed, Washakie, their great chief, is the friend of all white men and was the same at that other time, too. But the leader of this hunting band which had found that wagon train, he was a bad Indian. Also, he was much taken with the young mother of this baby that you seek.”

  “She was not the true mother,” explained Ben. “The baby was given to her by the true father when the true mother died in that camp of the spotted sickness. Now it is this same true father who has sent me to find his small daughter, if she yet lives.”

  It was the old shaman’s turn to shake his head.

  “I do not see how she can still live, but the Great Spirit Father is strange in his ways. It may be that he will lead you to her.”

  He paused, summoning up the details scattered by two and a half decades of desert wind.

  “That bad Snake chief tried to take the woman from her husband’s wagon. There was a fight. The Indians got excited. You know how that is. When all was done, only the young woman, her husband, and the baby girl remained living of the whites. The chief saw the husband trying to crawl away and hide. He caved in his head with the butt of his rifle. Then he took his hair, leaving him there as a corpse. The last that is known to us of this woman and the yellow-haired baby is that the Snakes took them off with them, back to their home in the high mountains.

  “This much we were told by the husband, who was not dead and who lived by his deep heart alone, until we came along, and he could charge us with the story of the bad Shoshoni. We trailed the Snakes a few days. Maybe three. That’s how we knew they were going home. So that’s it; there is no more to tell.”

  He slashed his hands abruptly in the ending sign and Ben asked quietly:

  “But the child was alive the last you knew?”

  “Yes, we could hear it crying that third night before we turned back. It must have been a very pretty baby for the Snakes to let it cry like that. Or perhaps the mother was so attractive in her body that the chief softened and was not himself. Who can say? What would be gained by guessing? But, yes, you are right. The child was yet alive when we came away. It was a blue-eyed child, incidentally; did I tell you that? The husband made sure we understood that. And the color of the hair. He said it would be important when his people came looking for her; when the Pony Soldiers were told the Shoshoni had stolen a white mother and child, and they came to free them and to punish the Indians for the killing on Goose Creek.”

  Ben nodded, face darkening.

  “Could you tell me, father,” he asked after a moment, “what Shoshoni chief this was? Of what land? In what high mountains?”

  The shaman’s hands answered quickly.

  “The chief was Crowheart. The Horse Creek band. Their high home place is called Mountains of the Wind. But how will this help you, my son? You don’t know the way, and we do not dare guide you upon it. Do you then have some magic you have not shown us? Something that will take you there, where we your friends cannot?”

  “Yes, father, I have,” replied Ben and brought forth the oilskin pouch.

  The Paiutes had never seen a map drawn on paper. They crowded around Joe Meeks’ pictographic chart with intense interest. It took a little patience on Ben’s part but the old shaman was very bright and soon began to “see the land” as Meeks had set it down. Beginning with his own village and Old Sawtooth, he was able to show Ben precisely where he must go to find the Shoshoni country. Ben marked very carefully upon the map the place where the old man’s finger stopped moving. He drew the symbol, cursing fervently under his breath.

  His new destination was but a day’s pleasant journey down Union Pass to Wind River in northwest Wyoming Territory—the better part of five hundred arrow-flight miles straight back toward Montana!

  4

  Blood Brother

  Malachi, his iron shoe plates long since ground away to nail-shank nothingness, could go but a certain gait, riderless. Carrying Ben, he refused to go any gait at all. The result was a working compromise. Ben walked. All the way to Wyoming.

  It was mid-April before the comrades topped Union Pass, dropping down it to strike a tributary which led them to Wind River. At this point their luck changed. Bankside of the Wind, they met Frank Go-deen.

  Go-deen was a Milk River half-breed from the Canadian border buffalo country. Short, potbellied, legs bowed, and muscular as a Barbary ape, he proved a ribald, sunny-natured rogue. Despite his forbidding appearance—a buffalo lance-blade slash across nose and mouth had left him with a perpetual leering tick—Ben had no choice but to trust him. Indeed, Go-deen left him little option in the matter. Assuming from Ben’s dark skin and slanted eyes, and, despite his camp-barbered, coarse blond hair, that the newcomer was a brother outcast of the half-blood bar sinister, Go-deen was friendly by mistake as well as by instinct.

  Ben, finding it to his advantage, did not argue the natural illusion. Why debate bloodlines when social acceptance might mean the difference in keeping and losing his scalp. This was Indian country. When in it, and given such a gratis opportunity to do so, act like an Indian. Th
ere was no single, better way to prevent falling hair on the frontier. Ben and “brother Frank” hit it off first-rately from the opening word.

  As to Ben’s quest, he had struck a bonanza in the garrulous breed. When innocently “started up” over that first night’s fire by Ben’s query as to the possible existence and whereabouts of a Shoshoni band called the Horse Creeks, Go-deen demonstrated himself to be a human talking machine with whom the taciturn Ben had no chance. Falling farther and farther behind in his attempt to stay within conversational reach of the Milk River gossip, and since he had set him going on the right track with his opening question, Ben simply sat back and kept his ears uncovered.

  Ah! Yes, indeed, his companion led off, there was a Horse Creek band of the Wind River Shoshoni. And, yes, indeed, Frank Go-deen knew a little something of them. Now if the Tall Brother would refrain from interrupting, he, Go-deen, would undertake to supply what he knew of those Horse Creeks. It was little enough, but if there were no more rude detours and a man were permitted the free flow of the conversation, he might get it said by bedtime.

  Ben merely grunted, waving him to proceed.

  Go-deen, scowling fiercely, warned that the grunt and the wave were absolutely the final interference with his story which he would tolerate. With which threat, and not waiting to see how it was obeyed, he launched into his tale with a will which would not have been turned aside by a buffalo stampede.

  The Horse Creeks were a renegade family branch of old Washakie’s main Snake Clan. It seemed that many years before, their chief Crowheart had broken Washakie’s official word of peace with the white man. He had taken a comely white woman out of a small wagon train over on Goose Creek in the Idaho country.

  When Washakie heard of this deed and demanded the woman for prompt return to the army people at Fort McGraw (“that is just a ways down here on the Popo Agie River”), Crowheart brought the woman to Washakie with her left breast cut off and a skinning knife wedged to the blood guard between her kidneys. For this the old chief ordered him seized and taken to the big Pony Soldier fort at Laramie. But Crowheart was very cunning. He killed two guards and got away near Point-of-Rocks, a very famous place on the old Oregon Road. The one that went to the Nez Percé country by the easy way, by South Pass. Surely the Tall Brother would know of that way?

  Ben felt constrained to nod an acknowledgment here and did so. Immediately, Go-deen upbraided him:

  “Be quiet! Will you not keep still? How is a man to order his thoughts when another will not keep his mouth shut ten seconds?”

  Ben kept his grin inside, enjoying its acid bite privately. Go-deen, interpreting his bowed head as tacit admission of surrender, swept graciously on.

  “Anyway, from that time Crowheart and his personal following, a blood-knit family band of no more than five or six lodges, enjoyed the life of double outlaws, hunted alike by red man and white. As the charge was murder in either case, the fugitives lived like ghosts. For a long while they disappeared. It was thought they had died out or drifted apart. The army still believes this, and Washakie no longer troubles to tell them otherwise. Yet the truth is far different, as you shall see.”

  He stopped, eying Ben and giving him a chance to say something. Ben held his head down. Go-deen nodded his satisfaction.

  “Those Crowheart people are still together,” he continued. “They live at a place known to me, in some very good meadows not far from here. You just go up Horse Creek to the shadows of the Red Tops. Those are the very high peaks you saw from the pass this afternoon. And I will tell you something else. I talked less than a week ago to the old chief himself. Yes, I mean Crowheart.

  “He lives up there with his son, a bad Indian like himself. They have a few lodges and are waiting for the new grass to come high enough to fatten their pony herd against the summer business—horse stealing from the Nez Percés.

  “Do you know the Nez Percés, Tall Brother? They are a strange people from Oregon and Idaho. Their name means ‘Slit Nose,’ and they raise those great spotted horses called Appaloosa. One of those leopard horses is worth ten Sioux ponies or fifteen Shoshoni. The Nez Percés raise them, and sheep and fat cattle, too, on ranches and in pastures exactly as the white men. At least, it is said they do. For myself, I have never been to their far land. Indeed, I have seen but few Nez Percés, and those few from a good safe distance. Did I say they were a fierce people? Wagh! They’re the best fighters there are. Proud? They won’t sit at the same fire with a Shoshoni or a Sioux. They fear no Indian. Not even these tough ones here in the buffalo country, where the Nez Percés come to hunt the curly cows. Even the Oglala Sioux, the great Crazy Horse’s people, to whom I am related on my mother’s side, fear them. As for the Shoshoni, who will otherwise fight a grizzly bear, just mention the name Slit Nose and they will leave you there standing in a cloud of horse dust.”

  Now if there were anything else the Tall Brother wished to know of the Horse Creeks, or of the Nez Percés for that matter, let him ask it. The answer would be prompt and complete; providing, of course, he could keep his mouth closed while it was delivered.

  Ben was by this time almost afraid to raise his head, but the reported death of Amy Johnston’s foster mother forced him to encourage Go-deen. Further, after the many weeks of conversing only by hand sign with the purebloods met on the trail or by pidgin pack mule in camp with Malachi, the half-breed’s colorful command of English was not altogether harsh music on the hungry ear.

  “There was a child,” he said, “blue-eyed and with yellow hair. Perhaps six months old; a girl. It’s known she was with this woman when Crowheart took her out of that wagon train. You know anything about that?”

  Go-deen shook his head.

  “I never heard of a child. Neither did Washakie, I can guarantee you. If he had, he would have chased Crowheart clear through the Land of the Grandmother. Excuse me, that’s what we Milk Rivers call Canada. Anyway, Washakie never knew of any white child with Crowheart, or he would still be after him. No, there was no child. Not unless …”

  “Unless what?” said Ben.

  “Crowheart had one squaw from our Milk River band. A poor one, tough as a crow, all bones and no breasts. We called her Magpie. If I remember the price right, Crowheart paid six solid-colored ponies for her. The sale tells the tale. This Magpie never grew the Shoshoni’s seed. Always wanting a child and twenty years trying in vain, she may have taken the white baby when Crowheart killed the mother. She may even have killed the mother herself. The breast gone sounds like squaw’s work. And there was also an old story in that direction. But that Crowheart would take the blame to shelter a barren old Milk River hag smells of fish to me. I don’t believe it. I know that old devil. He would gut his own mother for a plug of tobacco. But, anyway, there’s your ‘unless.’ If Magpie took the child, it may still be up there …”

  He broke off to point into the night, north toward the joining of Horse Creek with Wind River. Then, he concluded abruptly:

  “But I will tell you one thing; if you find her, you won’t find a white woman.”

  “What …” said Ben, following a bit slowly.

  Go-deen nodded, spat shruggingly into the fire.

  “You will find an Indian,” he said and turned his back on Ben, pulled up his blanket, broke wind, and went at once to sleep.

  5

  A Beautiful Thought

  “What do you think?” said Ben. “Ought we to risk it?”

  Go-deen shook his head. They lay in the boulders at the edge of the meadow, slightly above the grazing pony herd and its lone watchman. “Ordinarily I would say yes, let’s grab him and have a talk. But now I don’t know.”

  “What’s the trouble?”

  “I recognize that fellow.”

  “Who is he?”

  “He’s called Iron Eyes; he’s a bad one.”

  “He doesn’t look bad.”

  “Neither does
Crowheart.”

  “You talk in circles. How did we arrive at Crowheart?”

  Go-deen looked at him witheringly.

  “I brought you here, is that right? I told you those are the Horse Creek lodges yonder in the pines. There. Where we see the smoke. Do I lie? No. Also I pointed out to you that the ponies down there belong to the Horse Creeks. Already we understood that the Horse Creeks are headed by Crowheart, a very bad Indian, and that his son inherits from the sire. So again I say I don’t know if we should grab him or not.”

  Ben gave him a bewildered glance.

  “Grab who?” he asked. “Did I say anything about going after Crowheart or his son? Why don’t we just worry about that horse guard for right now?”

  “Exactly what I’m doing.” Go-deen grinned, as quick with his crazy smirk as with his mock-savage scowl. “That’s the boy down there. Iron Eyes. Crowheart’s son.”

  Ben gathered the reins of his temper. Traveling with this off-centered Milk River mental case was about like sharing a bag with a good-natured rattlesnake—everything depended on the next shake of the sack.

  “Thanks for telling me,” he said acidly.

  Go-deen shrugged.

  “You talk too much. You don’t give a man a chance to say anything. I could have told you that was Iron Eyes ten minutes ago.”

  “Except that I talk too much, eh?”

  “Exactly.”

  “I see. Well, in that case I will shut up and let you talk a while. What I suggest you talk about is how the hell we’re going to get any information out of these Horse Creeks without grabbing one of them. You say they’ll kill a white man sure. And I’m not about to bank on them taking me for Sitting Bull. So if I vote down walking in and asking them nice about the little girl, and you veto the idea of blind-jumping the horse guard yonder, how do you propose to find anything out? Now take your time, I don’t want to stampede you. I’m getting a great respect for the fine balance of that brain of yours.”