“No,” I says now. “I am not hungry.” I was some ashamed, but ashamed to show it. I knowed why none of them had got married, too. Because they was living in the tepee of a white man, and the Cheyenne braves would not come and hang about such a door and play their medicine flutes in courtship. Especially since, as the years had gone on, there was an ever greater surplus of females in the tribe, owing to so many men having been killed. I had put a curse on them girls, I reckon. But whose idea had it been to take Sunshine for a wife? Not mine.

“I am sorry you are angry with me,” says Sunshine now. She had put in a full day’s labor, including the chopping of firewood and then drug a great load of it on a buffalo robe for a quarter mile to our lodge. She was all ready to have that kid any time now. When the moment came, she would throw down her hatchet, retire behind a tree, and have it in the snow, and then chop the rest of her quota and bring back both child and cottonwood logs.

“Sit down here and eat,” I says. “I’m not angry with you.”

Which she did, shoveling in that mush with a big horn spoon, and the rest of them likewise, with a sound like an army tramping through a swamp. If I hadn’t been a fool at business back in Denver, by now I could have been setting in my own big house, dining off porcelain and silver and sent me to England for a baldheaded butler wearing a swallowtail coat. If my Pa hadn’t been crazy, God knows what I would have been. I guess everybody toys with ideas like them.

When Sunshine was finished and had picked off her dress the bits of grub what slipped off the spoon, and also some from the earthern floor, for she was still bothered-they all was, even though my mood had sweetened-when she done that and took her bowl and mine to go clean them, she hesitated and says in a low tone:

“When will you kill him?”

“Who?” I asks, getting irritated all over again, for I knew very well what she meant, and remembered my earlier aim though I didn’t wish to, which accounted for my annoyance. “You just better,” I says, “keep out of what doesn’t concern you.”

Sunshine squats and smooths out that buffalo robe next to mine. “I’ll make a nice bed for her,” she says, “and give her my best red blanket. And the white boy can sleep next to our nephew Spotted Pony, if he likes it there.”

I says evenly: “The white woman with Younger Bear is not my wife and the boy is not my son. My family was killed upon the Arkansas River.” I reached for a bow that was hanging from a lodgepole behind me, which I used to hunt when saving powder and lead. And I says: “If I hear any more talk about the matter from you, old woman, I’ll give you a beating that you won’t forget.”

Sunshine had took on considerable flesh with her pregnancy-though even so she was slimmer than Olga-and showed a real moon-face as she now grinned. And directly the rest of the women and the kids cheered up, though I had spoke softly and they was eating loud, and they commenced to chatter and laugh like they did normally, for it was ordinarily a happy lodge.

See, they had all thought I would rub out Younger Bear and take Olga and Gus back and that accounted for my earlier meanness: that I was working myself up for the killing, and I don’t wonder they figured I might not have stopped with the Bear but murdered them all as well, for Cheyenne women knowed where high passion could lead a man.

Well, they could set their minds to rest, for Little Big Man was not a-going to make any trouble for anybody. On the other hand, I was more or less obliged to honor my invite to entertain Younger Bear and his family on the morrow. After that, I was done with the matter. I had no intention of getting in thick with Mr. amp; Mrs. Bear and going on exchanging dinners one after the other. I didn’t expect Olga, the way she changed, ever to find out the true state of affairs-for I’d be wearing that buffalo hat and black facial paint, and she never would be looking for me-but one of the Indians no doubt would smell it, for they was keen about such matters. Not Younger Bear, in his stupidity and conceit, but Little Horse, probably, or one of my own women. Or maybe Gus, and that would kill me.

So I figured to run off right after dinner on the following day and go back to the railroad. I had now got what I rejoined the Cheyenne to find, such as it was.

That was the state of mind in which after a while I pulled a number of animal skins and dirty blankets over me and tried to sleep. The women and children had also retired, but the fire was banked with enough logs to keep it burning all the night, otherwise we would have froze even within our multiple wrappings, for frigid air entered between the door-lacings and from beneath the lodge skin. Occasionally I could hear my pony stamp against the cold outside. I had picketed him near the entrance rather than meadowed with the rest of the herd. Being he was my sole animal at this time, I couldn’t afford to have no Pawnee run him off; though I had not heard of any in the area.

As to the report of a soldiers’ trail by Younger Bear, I took that to be some more of his foolishness. We was down here now on the reservation assigned to the Cheyenne at the Medicine Lodge council, so why should they be after us? I mean Old Lodge Skins’s band. If they looked for anybody, it would be that war party that had come in to the villages downriver. But the whole business was unlikely in this weather. Nobody fought in the winter, least of all the U.S. Army, whose big horses could never negotiate that crusted snow.

I thought about a lot of stuff like that, for I couldn’t get to sleep. I might have determined to be done with the matter of Olga and Gus, but it was far from done with me. The veins in my temples was throbbing, and my groin was giving me trouble. I mean it felt as if I was pursing up there, like a dried apple. After a time it occurred to me that I was feeling lust in a different form from any I had hitherto knowed, especially while with the Indians. I have told you it was Sunshine who was ardent, rather than yours truly. Well, now I reached over for her, completely forgetting her present condition.

What I touched was the summit of her big belly, through the robes, and she was awake right smart, getting out her hand and rubbing mine.

She says: “Wunhai’s feelings are hurt by what you said.”

That was the sister what offered to sell her beaded dress for meat. Her name meant “Burns”; maybe she had singed her finger when a girl or something. She was right comely and the youngest of Shadow’s offspring, a couple years beneath Sunshine and favoring her as to the eyes and glossy hair but slim as a willow wand. When I thought of it she recalled for me my old girl friend Nothing before she got married and turned fat and ill-tempered; poor Nothing was another killed at Sand Creek.

Anyway, I had up to now regarded Wunhai as a sister-in-law, white fashion, never having adapted the Cheyenne view of such things. What Sunshine meant had hurt Wunhai’s feelings was that statement I had made earlier to the effect that I would not lay with any of them other women.

I patted Sunshine’s belly and withdrew my hand. As usual, my trouble lay in deciding whether I was finally white or Indian. If the former, I had ought to go to sleep: Olga’s having went savage was her problem, not mine. On the other hand, I commenced to realize the responsibility I had for Sunshine’s sisters: it wasn’t enough to support them. On account of me they was old maids. I had ought to do something, for they was a good bunch of women. Maybe I was being hypocritical, I don’t know; you figure it out. Next I remember, I had rose and slipped through the fireglow halfway around the circle of the tepee and was kneeling by Wunhai’s robe. Her eyes gleamed through the shadow I threw across her.

“I’m sorry for what I said,” says I.