Over on his right, as he took his way up the river, were mountains, with peaks that rose eleven thousand feet above the sea. As he approached the mountains Sam studied their snowy summits and the forests blanketed with white, wondering how high up those flanks he could climb; for he wanted to swear an oath of vengeance, somewhere high above the earth. The snow up there in the pale sky haze might be fifteen feet deep but on the north side it ought to hold him. He would hide his beasts and fur packs in the foothills, and with his rifle and a little food he would climb as high as he could.
From the base of the peaks it was only a few thousand feet to their summits but it might take a man a week to get there. While wondering if he should be so romantic and foolish Sam thought of the lovely flowers that would now be blooming on the southern slopes, below the snowline. He would climb at least that far. And when at last he stood far up, in a night world, silent but for the winds, with the scent of flowers around him, he held fragrant bloom to his face, remembering the hours when he had put lupine and columbines and roses in her hair, and hung a mantle of flowers from her shoulders. What a lovely thing she had been when her eyes looked out from the wreath that framed her face and her lips smiled!
Half the night he waited for the golden lamp to rise out of the gray murk of the east. He was ready when his moment came. Standing on a crag of wind-swept precipice, his rifle at his left side, he looked up at the stars and the blue-gray of the first morning. When half the golden lamp was in sight he spoke. He asked the Almighty Father to look down on him in his trouble and his grief. Never in his life had he raised a hand against the Crow people, but had been their friend, yet when he was gone they came like wolves in the night to kill his wife and child.
They had known that this girl was a whiteman’s wife. They had known that she was alone, a thousand miles from her people and a long way from her man. She never had a chance to defend herself. There she sat, a baby in her, sewing on a shirt for her man or her child, or looking into the west for sign of her man; and without a moment of warning they had chopped her down. And there she had lain in the yard, dead, with her babydying inside her—there for the wolves and the magpies and ravens.
He paused there, wondering if he had said enough. There was more that he had wanted to say—to say that in the holy book it said that vengeance was God’s, but that in this case it was Sam Minard’s; to say that he intended to make war, singlehanded and alone, against the whole skulking cowardly Crow nation; to say, "From where I now stand until the day I die I swear upon the bones of my slain wife and child that I will kill every Crow warrior that crosses my path! "
That was it. That was what he had wanted to say. Was there something else? There had been words from Job, that his father had read at breakfast one morning—that his eyes did shine, and were like the eyes of the morning, or something like that. He had intended to shake his clenched fist at the Crow nation and hurl into the listening night such words of power and fury as would make the peaks tremble. But after coming to the flowers and remembering the flower-hours, and her eyes and smile, a gentleness of the morning or of heaven had touched him; and so be stood on the crag, his face to the morning sky, and became aware of himself as a man who had sworn a terrible oath of vengeance. Never had he really hated any man, or wished to kill any man, but this had been forced on him, and only the coward would blanch from it and turn back. The eyes of the morning, that was all he would need, and a little help from devine justice in the right places. And so he stood, the male on the mountain peak, making his vow of vengeance; and eight hundred miles north the female knelt in her tiny graveyard, before the angelic faces of her slain ones, and uttered a prayer to the same Father.
The sun was an hour high and the atmosphere a pale golden above the white when Sam turned down the mountain. He had gathered a whole armful of the lovely alpine lilies. On his way down he tried to lay his plans. He would take his pelts to Bridger and pay for the things he had bought; and the remainder he would take to the Laramie post, for that was close to Crow country. He would buy a faster horse if there was one, for there would be times when he would ride for his life. He would buy another Bowie, for there might be times in close fighting when he would need to lay their bellies open, right and left. He knew well that as soon as he had killed a few Crows every warrior in the nation would dedicate himself to his death. He would need a few of the toughest hides to make moccasins for his horse, to be put on when he approached an enemy camp; and he would need twice as much powder and ball as he had ever bought before.
As he went down the mountain flank he came to other flowers, creamy white with yellow centers, that he thought almost as lovely as the lilies. To make a basket he stripped off his leather shirt, and inside this he carried a bushel of flowers. On returning to his hidden beasts he took the bundle from behind the saddle, opened it, and literally wrapped and smothered the bones in flowers. The hair on the nape of the skull he kissed. Then, tenderly, with large clumsy hands, he folded bones and flowers within the blanket and made the bundle secure behind his saddle. During these moments he was thinking not of Loretto but of Milton Sublette, who in a fight with the half-breed John Gray had been stabbed so mortally that his associates, thinking he would die, had left him in the care of Joe Meek. Milton had got well and soon thereafter he and Joe had fallen into the hands of a party of hostile Indians. They would have been killed but for a chief and his lovely daughter, who in the dark of night had helped them to escape. Smitten by the girl. Milton not long thereafter had married her. Leaving her in the mountains, as Sam had left Lotus, Milton had gone east on a business trip and had died on his return journey; and within a year or two his wife was shot down by the Bannock Indians. This Indian girl, Meek had said, was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. But not, Sam told himself, as beautiful as Lotus.
While riding northwest to the Bridger post Sam decided that if he were to live another year, much less five or ten, he would do well to map a plan of attack. This thought led him to a long and careful appraisal of the nature of his enemies. There were some curious advantages on his side. The whiteman was far more adult than the redman, who, in fact, was only a child in his emotions—impulsive, hotheaded, and by turns craven or reckless. The whiteman, faced with danger, decided instantly and acted swiftly; the redman was in some measure inhibited by his burden of superstitions, and had to wait on medicine men and propitious signs. The whiteman had no boss, no chief. The redman was the servile creature of ritual and ceremonial—he spent a part of his life in such monkey business as touching the earth with the bowl of his pipe and then turning the stem upwards to invoke medicine magic. Even so, the redman thought the whiteman as brainless and vacant as the fool hen, as slow as the turtle, and as gullible as the antelope. Why, he asked, did the whiteman put the centers of logs in his fires, instead of the ends? Look! There they were, hours later, with the centers burned out and the ends lying on either side of a dying fire. It was true, Sam had decided, that the whiteman was buffalo-witted in some ways.
Well, one fact to keep in mind was this, that if sixty redmen faced an enemy every single one of them would figure that if one and only one of his party was killed he would be the dead man. If two were killed, or three or five, he would be one of them. It was for this reason that the warriors of most tribes would turn and run after one or two or three had been killed. The whiteman, on the other hand, figured that if only one of sixty were to die the odds were fifty-nine to one in his favor. He was likely to think the odds greater than that, for the reason that he did not look on himself as an average fighter.