"Where ya off to?" asked Charley, looking up at Sam, who still sat on his horse. "And cuss my forked tongue, ain’t this Mick Boone’s bay?"

"You might be right," Sam said.

"I heerd Mick loves this horse moren himself."

"Just borrowed it," Sam said. He thought it best to force Charley to do most of the talking. Dismounting, he put his rifle in its buckskin harness, led the bay and packhorses over to trees and hitched them, and turned, his pipe and tobacco in his hands. "All right, let’s have the pipe of peace."

Charley was no fool. His intuitions were quick and sharp; Sensing the double meaning in Sam’s words, he must have decided to lay his cards on the table, for he now said: "Heerd ya had a woman. Where is she?"

Sam was tamping his pipe. He now met Charley’s pale-blue gaze and the two men looked into the eyes of one another a long moment. "Who told you?" Sam said.

"Don’t recollect that neither. Mighta been Bill, mighta been Hank."

Sam looked up at the squaw, who was ready with a live ember. Both men sucked flame into their pipes and smoke into their lungs; blew streams of smoke out through nostrils and between lips; looked again into one another’s eyes; and pressed the burning tobacco down in the bowls. Deciding that it was useless to fence with this sly treacherous man and not much caring whether he learned a lot or a little, Sam said: "Dead. The Crows killed her. " In that moment Sam looked at Charley’s eyes but Charley was suddenly busy with his pipe.

Then for an instant he met Sam’s gaze and said, "Crows? Ya mean the Sparrowhawks? I find that onreasonable, Sam." After half a minute while both men smoked, Charley said: "Who tole you?"

"Moccasins."

During the five minutes they had been sitting by the fire, smoking and sparring, Sam had observed the position of Charley’s weapons and of his squaw. At his waist Charley had a revolver and a knife; his rifle was about eight feet behind him, leaning against camp trappings; and a wood hatchet lay within reach of his right hand. On sitting, Sam had not loosened his knife in its sheath: if he had to fight he did not intend to use a knife. He had been aware from the first that he might have to fight, for it was well-known over the whole Crow country that Charley was a friend of the Crows and an unpredictable man. He could blow hot and turn murderous in an instant.

The squaw stood at Charley’s right and a little back. Her right foot was only eighteen inches from the hatchet.

"It wasn’t only my wife," Sam said. "My unborn son too."

Charley again tinkered with his pipe. It was all his sense of the proper could bear to hear a whiteman call a red Injun his wife. But the son! Half-breed children were, for him, a species of animal only slightly above the greaser. With a thin smile in his beard that was close to a smirk Charley said, "Jist how on earth could ya tell it was a son?”

"The pelvic bones," Sam said. He had been keeping his eye on the squaw. He knew that she had never taken her black gaze off him, and he wondered if she had a knife hidden in her leather clothing. Charley was pulling at his pipe and looking at Sam. Sam decided that he might as well say what he had come to say.

"I figgered you might know who it was," he said.

"Wall now,” said Charley, taking the pipe from his yellow teeth. "Doggone it, Sam, how would I know? It was the Rapahoes, if ya ask me."

"It was the Sparrowhawks," Sam said, using that word instead of Crows so that Charley would not boil over. "I expect I’l1 take my vengeance and I thought they just as well know it. I thought mebbe you’d like to tell them. You can tell them this, if you want to, that if the ones who did it will come out and face me, three at a time, all of us with no weapons, I’ll leave the  others alone. If the chief won’t send the murderers out I intend to make war on the whole nation."

Charley took the pipe away from his teeth and left his mouth open. "The whole nation. Jist you?"

"Jist me," Sam said.

"So that’s why ya have Mick’s bay."

"Mebbe." Sam rose to his feet. "I figger the sooner you let the chief know the better it will be. I don’t intend to give him much time for medicine and powwows."

Charley stood up. "Wall now, Sam, ain’t ya a little onreasonable? The Sparrowhawks are good fighters. Ya know that. I figger ya will be gone beaver almost before ya git to the

Yellerstone."

"I might be gone beaver before the next Canada geese come over but there will be some bones for the wolves to pick; And don’t forget to tell the chief that I’ll leave my mark. I don’t want anyone blamed for what I do."

"A mark," said Charley, looking at Sam. He seemed fascinated. "And what," he asked softly, "will the mark be?"

"I’ll take the right ear."

"The right ear," said Charley, staring.

"Besides the skelp," Sam said.

"Wall, I’ll bc doggone," said Charley.

13

IT WAS FOUR redmen that he saw sitting by a camphre after dark, three days after he had left Charley. Sam had sensed the presence of Indians an hour earlier and had hidden his beasts in a thicket and gone forward as the wolf goes—among whitemen of the West the scout was known as the wolf. On each foot he had three moccasins of different sizes. He thought a small war party was there by the fire, on its way to another tribe to steal horses and take scalps; or that it was returning, with a scalp or two at its belt. The warriors would be smoking their pipes and thinking of themselves as very brave men. Perhaps they had feasted on buffalo loin. If their bellies were full they might be a little sleepy ....

As soundless as the wolf, Sam went forward. When a half mile away he could tell that the party was encamped on a small stream that flowed down a hillside through an aspen thicket. To the left was a tableland, from which he hoped to get a clear view of the camp. On reaching this he was delighted: the four warriors, sitting by a fire, were in plain view, in a small clearing by the streambank. It was a poor campsite for men who expected to see the next sunrise but they probably thought there would be no enemies in this area so early in the season. The mountain men would be heading for the posts with their packs; the redmen would be feeling only half alive after the long cold winter.

Sam stood in full view of them but he knew that in the dark they could not see him. He wished that somehow the Almighty could let him know if these were the men who had killed his wife and child. Wondering if Charley had taken the message to the chief, he studied the physical situation below and around him, until he knew the nature of the soil and plant life. It was still early spring; the old grasses and weeds along the stream and above the patches of snow were sere and whispering, like a million insects. It would not be easy to make a soundless approach through such grass but the soil was in his favor, for it was moist and soft. His three layers of moccasin skin would sink against it as if it were cotton. To learn if there were more than four of them Sam became a man who, to the impartial observer, would hardly have seemed human. He had drawn on his five senses for all the information they could give him and was now like a man intently listening, though actually he was consulting what he thought of as his danger sense. His physical posture was exactly that of the wolf when it felt itself in the presence of an enemy and stood stock still, trying to measure the danger.