Brand, Max - 1925 Read online

  "If an unlucky bullet or an arrow found the heart of Rising Sun," said the chief, between his puffs, "my tribe would be left in darkness."

  Chuck shook his head.

  "It is good that a man have a squaw," said Standing Bear. "You are now one of my nation. You must have children. Their hands will be strong for you when your hands are weak, friend." He stretched out his own huge paws. "I, Standing Bear," he continued, "have empty hands. I have many horses and many squaws, and my teepee is filled, and still it is empty, and the heart of Standing Bear is empty also. I have no children."

  He dropped his head for a moment. For the first time in my life I pitied that fellow.

  "There was only my brother's son," went on the chief, "but what we thought was a hawk now wears the feathers of an eagle and begins to fly with his kind."

  Here he looked at me - a left-handed compliment, along with a black look that gave me a chill.

  "He has left the nest of his father," said Standing Bear. "He strikes with Black Bear's claws" - here he touched my rifle - "and he speaks with Black Bear's tongue. But that is good. An eagle is greater than a hawk."

  Another compliment, but it did not mask the soreness of his heart.

  "But you, friend," said Standing Bear to Chuck, "have taken no hawk from our tribe and made it your own. It is good that you should have a squaw."

  Chuck Morris stared at me, and I stared back at him. Then he shrugged his shoulders. "Well, Standing Bear," he said, "if you really wish it, I suppose...."

  I broke in: "We must talk this over, Morris."

  Chuck scowled at me, as a man scowls when he hears the voice of his own conscience. "I suppose that I must," he calmly stated.

  "It is good," said Standing Bear, favoring me with another black look. "I shall wait in my teepee to learn what Black Bear has said to Rising Sun."

  He got up and walked out with that measured stride that belongs to nothing on earth but an Indian chief. The moment he was out of hearing, I said to Morris: "Good heavens, Chuck, you don't mean that you'll make yourself a squaw man?"

  It was the most brutal way of putting it, and I had chosen that way on purpose.

  "We've been here a couple of years," said Chuck uneasily. "We may be here a couple of years more."

  "But at the end of that time, or some time, you'll go back to your own kind. Then what will you do with your wife?"

  "Squaw," said Chuck sharply. "Not wife... squaw."

  "It's the same thing."

  "Not at all. There'll be no marriage ceremony."

  "Not our kind of ceremony, but what serves just as well for these people."

  "There's a difference. You know as well as I do that they shuffle their wives about pretty freely. A man can divorce his wife at any sun feast, and she can do the same by him with a stroke on the drum. Is that a real marriage... when it can be broken up at any time either the man or the squaw feels like breaking it up?"

  I was afraid to argue with him, because argument merely fixes a man's mind on what he has already decided. I said: "There's another angle. What about the children?"

  Chuck flinched again. "They'd be happy with the tribe," he said.

  "Maybe they would, but would you be happy without them? They'd be a part of you. They'd belong to you. Confound it, Chuck, half of their blood would be white."

  "You take it too seriously," said Chuck. "Besides, I'm lonely as the devil in my teepee. You have Sitting Wolf to amuse you. And his mother and stepmothers are glad enough to do your cooking and take care of your teepee. But Standing Bear's squaws are mighty tired of working for me as well as the chief. I really need a servant, Lew. I really do. Besides, some of these Indian girls are pretty."

  "You mustn't do it," I said, getting a little hot.

  He looked very gravely at me. Then he dropped his hand on my shoulder. "Why, Lew, if you really don't approve, of course I'll let the thing drop right here."

  I knew he meant it. He would have chopped off a leg to please me in those days, and how many times since I have wished to heaven that I had forbade the whole thing on the spot. But I thought, as I looked up at him, that I was a fool to try to control the ways of such a man as Chuck Morris. He was twice as wise as I - older, more experienced. Besides, I hated to buy him off through his affection for me. It rarely pays to bribe a person through affection. It costs you part of their love. They may give up what they want in order to take your advice, but they never forget. All of this came storming through my brain.

  At last I said: "I don't know enough to lay down the law to you, Chuck. If you marry an Indian girl... call it something else if you don't want to call it marriage... it will be a horrible thing in the end."

  "Tut," said Chuck. "These matings have happened before, and the Indian girl always gets tired of her white man and runs off with one of her own kind."

  I smiled at the idea of one of the girls running away from Chuck Morris. "Think it over, backward and forward and, when you come to a conclusion, go tell Standing Bear what you've decided. I haven't a right to persuade you."

  He let out a big breath of relief. I could see how much he had been dreading my ban on this affair.

  "As far as that goes," he said, "I've already pretty well decided what I want to do. I can talk to Standing Bear now."

  I went with him, pretty sick at heart. We found the old warrior in his teepee with a couple of his squaws whom he sent away on the run with a single grunt. One glance at Rising Sun set a glitter of triumph in his eyes, and he smiled at me a little, as much as to say that he had discovered I was not so strong with my friend as he had thought.

  "Very well," said Chuck, "I've thought it over and talked it over with my wise friend, Black Bear, and I've decided that you're right. A squaw would be good for me. But what squaw should I take?"

  Standing Bear said: "There is no girl in the tribe too beautiful or too proud to be the squaw of Rising Sun. You must let your eye and your heart choose for you. Standing Bear will not speak."

  "How am I to go about this thing? Do I simply begin to pay court to some girl?"

  "In the evening and in the morning," said the chief, "the girls go down to the stream for water, and the young braves wait for them on the bank. When they see the girl they love coming, they throw a blanket around her, because it is not good that other eyes should see the face of the woman who listens to the man. If she does not wish to hear him, she will send him away at once. If she cares to listen, she will hear him on ten evenings, and on the tenth she will make him an answer. When you hear that answer, come back to me, Rising Sun, and tell me what you have heard. Then I will give you counsel."

  That was all. I could tell by Chuck's light step as he went out of the tent that he was very happy and very excited about the whole affair. I did not need to ask him what girl he had in mind. There was only one of whom he could think for an instant, and that was Zintcallasappa, The Blackbird. She was by no means the pure Sioux strain. Her mother had been the daughter of a trapper who had gone back to her kind, and the white blood was visible at a glance in the girl. She had black hair and eyes, to be sure, but no Indian ever had eyes so big and so tender, or hair so soft and thick, or such a mourn. And her smile was the smile of a white woman. It had always startled me when I saw it, and it really made my heart jump a little.

  I simply said: "It's The Blackbird?"

  He shrugged his shoulders. He was too keen for the business to give me an answer in words.

  BLACKBIRD GIVES HER ANSWER

  I was sitting in my teepee that evening - as gloomy as any man in the world - and waiting for news, when a shadow fell across the entrance. I saw Sitting Wolf standing there with an unstrung bow in his hand. I jumped up at once and went to him.

  He made his voice big and strong so that no womanish tremor might come into it. "The white men," he said, "beat their dogs when they snarl and snap. Sitting Wolf has been a snapping dog. He has brought a whip to Black Bear."

  He offered me the bow, and I took it. There were ha
lf a dozen passing, and they paused to look on. An Indian who offers himself for punishment is a strange sight, and an Indian, no matter how young, who is willing to endure a public shame is simply a miracle. Yet, Sitting Wolf folded his arms across his breast and waited. That was a tough piece of wood, that bow, but there was such a burst of emotion in me that I snapped the bow in two in my hands and threw the pieces away.

  "A white man," I said, "never strikes his brother. It is near the time for the evening meal, Sitting Wolf. Sit here with me."

  We sat down side by side, until he saw where the book lay, crumpled in a corner. He jumped up, ran to it, sat down by the firelight, and tried to read, smoothing the wrinkled pages tenderly. I think that, take them all in all, there were never other Indians like the Sioux, and there was never a Sioux like Sitting Wolf.

  Before dark Chuck Morris came in, and I saw what had happened in his face. I sent Sitting Wolf out, and he broke into his story at once.

  "Do you know how old she is?" he asked.

  "Seventeen."

  "You know a good deal about her, then?"

  "Yes."

  "You rascal, Lew, have you had an eye on her, too?"

  Now that he had committed himself, I thought, there was no use in holding him back. I merely said: "She's beautiful, Chuck."

  "You've never seen her. You've never seen her," he repeated. "Well, she's seventeen, and I suppose that it's been a year since any young brave popped a blanket over her head and asked her to be his squaw."

  I could understand that. "She's sent them all about their business," I said. "They are tired of feeling the sting of her tongue. She told Spotted Buck, I believe, that he ought to become a man before he wanted to have a squaw."

  Morris smiled. "I waited by the bank," he explained. "This springtime has the blood of the braves up. There were a round dozen of them, waiting for the girls... five or six at a time huddled under blankets, muttering. Finally The Blackbird came. What can I call her besides that stupid name... Zintcallasappa? It takes an hour to get it off the tongue. When I saw her coming, I began to feel a bit uneasy. I wanted to put the thing off until tomorrow. Confound it, I remembered that I had never spoken half a dozen words to her since I came into the tribe. There's always something about her that discourages familiarity. Those young fellows, who would give their eyeteeth for her, don't know what to do when she looks at them with frost in her eye. And I felt just that way."

  He fell to dreaming, with a strange little smile about the corners of his lips.

  I urged him on: "What happened, Chuck?" Because I knew that he had spoken to her.

  "Oh," said Chuck, "when she came nearer and saw me, she stopped a little, and I thought that her head went up just a trifle. And she went on past me, hurrying a little with her eyes fixed straight before her. But I knew that she was seeing me, and I thought there was a bit more color in her face ...in a word, I did exactly what the chief suggested. I went up to her with half my blanket trailing over my arm. I didn't throw it over her head. I simply took her inside it."

  He paused again. I was immensely excited. I said: "Get it over with, Chuck, will you?"

  "Oh, well, there's no one like her!"

  "She said she was willing to marry you, I suppose?"

  He corrected me like a shot. "She said nothing... and I said nothing about marriage. I simply told her how pretty she is, and how devilishly restless it made me to see her...and such stuff, you know. I forget all of it." He made one of his irritating pauses again.

  "Well?" I shouted at him.

  "Did you ever see a prairie fire start, Lew?"

  "What the devil has a prairie fire got to do with her?" I thundered.

  He leaned back against a lodgepole and began to smoke his pipe, lifting his head to watch every rising puff, as though he saw a face in it. "Did you ever watch May come rippling over the prairie?"

  "Damn May," I said. "I'm waiting to hear something about Zintcallasappa."

  "Did you ever watch a still lake blossom when sunset came along, Lew?"

  I could stand it no longer. "You're talking like a jackass, Chuck. I don't want to hear any more of your maunderings."

  He waved his hand, still with the same wonderful smile and the same far-looking eyes. "She was like that," he said. "She seemed a little frightened, just at first. Then she put up her face and looked me over as though I were a new book." Morris sighed and shook his head, as though he regretted that some of the picture was already fading in his memory. "She said, `Do you wish to take me to your teepee?'

  "`I do,' I said. `But will you come, Zintcallasappa?'

  "`I cannot speak until the tenth day,' she said.

  "`But what shall I guess?' I asked. `I shall lose my mind waiting ten whole days and wondering. Let me guess only one little thing... that you do not hate me.'

  "Ah, Lew, I would give ten years of my life to see her always as she was just then when she smiled at me. She went on down the riverbank, still smiling back to me, not caring a damn how many of the young bucks saw her. After that... well, I came staggering home here with my head full of fire."

  That was the story of how Chuck Morris won The Blackbird, put down in his exact words, because I have them all in my mind, exactly as they were when he spoke them. But it was not over a minute before the end of the ten days - not a minute. Most Indian girls would not have given him so much as a glance, no matter how they loved him. But though The Blackbird had let him know instantly that she loved him, she would not give her promise. And when he saw her for the tenth time on the bank of the river, she simply said: "I shall go to your teepee, if you have the consent of my father."

  Her father was Lame Beaver and a notorious lover of firewater, but he was a good-natured brave and had enough courage to fight one hundred men at once. We both went to Standing Bear and told him the good news.

  He said: "I knew that Zintcallasappa was not a fool. Now take two or three of your best horses and tie them at the lodge of Lame Beaver. If they are taken into his herd, then his daughter will be brought to you.. .she is yours and has been bought. If the horses are returned to you, Lame Beaver is not satisfied. You must take him more horses. If he sends those back ...up to nine or ten horses... then you know that he does not wish to give you his daughter."

  "What can be done then?" asked Morris with anxiety.

  "Nothing," said the chief.

  "I'd find something to do, though," said Morris, and he doubled his big fist.

  "There is no need to worry," said Standing Bear. "Lame Beaver is not drinking firewater. He will do as a man of good sense should do."

  We picked out four horses from among Morris's five. I gave him two of my own four, and then he went to the lod ge of Lame Beaver and tied the gift at the entrance. Half an hour later they were in Lame Beaver's herd! Of course, the entire village knew about it instantly. They made a procession past Morris's lodge all that evening, grinning at him, giving him little presents, and wishing him well. Morris himself was in second heaven.

  Finally I said to him: "Chuck, why not marry her? You certainly will never care more for anyone else."

  He snapped his hand at the sky. "No man could ever care for any woman as much as I care for her. But where is there a minister to marry us?"

  "We'll be at a settlement or near one by the fell."

  "By the fell? By the end of ten years, you might as well say. I may be dead and bleaching on top of a rack of poles by that time. Lew, are you made of steel and ice? I'm only a man, and I love The Blackbird. What a delicate and lovely thing she is."

  Every minute there was a weight on my heart. I half trusted in what he said. He swore that as soon as they came near whites, he'd marry her in the white man's way. But I had a doubt. No one could be sure what Chuck Morris would be thinking when he had turned around the corner of tomorrow.

  All of Zintcallasappa's family came around the next morning and brought The Blackbird herself in their van, while they followed, carrying all sorts of presents for the new family t
hat was starting up. I watched her go in at the entrance and stand there, looking up to golden-haired Morris without a smile, but with a sort of worship. Then she passed on into the shadow of his teepee. That was the clue, after all, to the whole affair, I think, now that I have the long road of the years to look down. She not only loved Morris, but she worshipped him as a sort of god, as though he were in fact the rising sun.

  BALD EAGLE

  I have talked as though all were peace and quiet during this time. As a matter of fact, it was about a month before the day when Chuck Morris took The Blackbird for his squaw that the shadow of Bald Eagle fell across the Sioux. You must understand that there was never any real peace between the Pawnees and the Sioux. Those horse-stealing Pawnees were never so badly beaten that for the sake of a fine young stallion they wouldn't risk another war. But, as a rule, they were routed. They simply hadn't the numbers to combat us. Sometimes they beat a war party of the Dakotas. Sometimes they stepped down and blotted out a village. But in the end they always had the worst of it, so far as I know. The Pawnees were a strong people and hard fighters. But there were three hundred thousand Sioux - as the United States government itself was to learn one day. If the Pawnees grew too daring, the Sioux banded together and sent out a great wave of warriors that washed the Pawnees dizzily west and north and left great villages a drift of white ashes, a few small heaps of black cinders.

  Now a new chief appeared among them and began to strike right and left. First he appeared when a tribe of the Sioux called the Brules were towing their household stuffs across a narrow river. That was done by putting a lot of lodgepoles together to make a raft. Then the poles were lashed together, the belongings were heaped on the raft, and thirty or forty braves jumped in and harnessed themselves to the raft to pull it across. That was the way it was always done.

  Chuck and I rigged up a pair of light sculls and used to jog across the rivers in no time, but, even in Standing Bear's own tribe, the old ways were considered the best ways. Standing Bear finally took to the oars himself, but Three Buck Elk never would have anything to do with such dangerously advanced doings. It was while the Brules were making one of these passages over water that a little war party of Pawnees made their appearance. They had no horses with them. They had crawled miles perhaps, through the long prairie grass of the early summer, and now they popped out on the edge of the river. There were nearly one hundred bucks in the water. The braves on shore were butchered straightaway, though even they outnumbered the Pawnees - an Indian taken by surprise is no good for fighting. After the ones on dry land were finished, the rest was perfectly simple. Those Pawnees started picking off the swimmers, and they dropped every one of them. Not a soul among the braves escaped.