"About fifty years."

Bill pondered that a few moments, his eyes full and incredulous. "Why didden ye tell the chief ta send the killers out?"

"I told Charley to tell him but he won’t do it."

"No, he never would. This is what he’ll do." Old Twenty Coups, Bill said, would call all the braves into a big powwow and he would say to them, "Brave warriors, the bravest on the hull earth, one sleep, two sleeps, is a bad one; sleep he do not and hate he do and kill he do; like a ghost he is; a sharp knife he is and his gun is shore as shootin. Ye gotta raise his hair; let not the sun set nor the moon rise before this varmint is dead and skelped and cut up in little pieces."They would cut Sam loose from himself, they shorely would. The chief would call for volunteers and all the hottest bloods would step forth, eager to kill Sam Minard so they could wear an eagle feather as long as an elk horn. There was another thing that had just occurred to Bill, that itched him like wood ticks on his johnny. The Blackfeet, who already hated Sam, would be out to take him, alive, so the squaws could squat all over him, dropping their urine and dung; and so they could ransom him to the Crows for ten times a king’s ransom. God alive, he could see a thousand Blackfeet warriors after Sam, he shorely could. Was Sam keeping in mind the fact that the Crows were the best shots in the country with bow and arrow?—that in fact some of them could shoot straighter with it than most whitemen with a rifle? And there was another thing: had Sam ever seen the way the Dakotas and Assiniboins hung from the ceilings of their lodges? They cut through the muscles on their backs and chests and pushed leather ropes through the holes; and by these they were lifted off the ground, and by God they hung there for days and nights and you could hear their screams for miles.

Yes, Sam said, he had heard about it. He knew that Bill was trying to suggest the hazards and horrors but Sam did not want his brotherly concern or any man’s. He changed the subject.

"You think the woman on the Musselshell is all right?"

"I shorely do, Sam." She was wearing, Bill said, the same clothes she wore last fall; she looked stooped and seemed to be turning white; but all afternoon he watched her carry water up the hill. He expected that she was as crazy as a hoot owl but would get along. He expected that she would live a lot longer than Sam Minard.

"Anyone heard of her man yet?”

"Ner hair ner hide. He was gone beaver long ago."

"The red devils haven’t bothered her?"

"I didden find a sign anywheres."

Sam said, "I expect I better go up and see what I can do. I have some things for her."

When the two men parted, one to swim the Yellowstone and ride north, the other to go up the valley of the Bighorn, Bill put forth a hand, as Jim Bridger had done. He squeezed Sam’s hand and said: "Watch your topknot."

"Watch yours, Bill."

Before Sam reached the river he surprised two Crows chasing a bull buffalo and shot one off his horse. The other fled. Sam took the scalp and right ear. Wall now, he knew as well as Bill or any man that the chief would call his braves to a council of war. He would tell them that a terror was loose in the Sparrowhawk nation. Sam thought that possibly the old chief himself, as brave an Indian as ever went forth to battle, might take the warpath, though it was more likely that he would choose ten or fifteen of his bravest and pledge them never to rest until the enemy was dead.

Maybe Sam Minard’s days were numbered.

As the mountain men put the story together from Charley and others, the chief took his medicine men into his confidence and they agreed on the warriors most eligible for the honor. Because, like most primitive peoples, the chief counted by his fingers, the number he chose was ten. After a second powwow it was raised to twenty, but only to the shame and distress of every Crow brave: how absurd to think it would take twenty great warriors to bring down that clumsy and cowardly killer! The chief told them that any one of them could easily do it—old man that he was and full of winters, he could do it; but he wanted to give as many as possible a chance at the glory and two eagle feathers—for there would be two. Hundreds of warriors had clamored to be chosen.

The twenty picked for the glory were bold but not equally bold; wary but not equally wary; and skilled in hunting and war but not equally skilled. Wily old Twenty Coups knew that no two warriors were ever the same. His plan, therefore, was to call on all the skills of his people. Night Owl had so assiduously aped his totem that he was known as the ablest of the night hunters; it was believed that in pitch-darkness he could see as clearly as the owl. The chief knew this was not so but it was good for his people to think it was so. Red Feather was possibly the ablest strategist among the younger men; he had the cunning of the serpent, the craftiness of the fox, the resourcefulness of the wolf. Will Win was, in the chief’s opinion, the best tracker in the nation; he had such a powerful sense of smell that on hands and knees he could follow the scent of man or beast across geest or a talus slope. Mad Wolf was a reckless one and might be the first to die, if any were to die. Ever since his initiation into manhood he had wanted to go alone to take Blackfeet scalps. Medicine Bird was as expert as any with bow and arrow and had one of the fastest horses. Coyote Runs was the fleetest warrior in the nation; in a race of a mile or two, over hill and down, there was no other brave who could touch coup on his flying heels, Eagle Beak was of those men born and dedicated to the profession of killing; he had counted coup at seventeen, and by the age of twenty-two had scalped two Blackfeet and three Cheyennes. The chief thought he had no warrior who could go in a straighter line to the enemy. Wolf Teeth was one of the most skilled horsemen in a nation whose horsemen were the best on earth; with only a foot and a hand showing to his enemy he could, while his horse was on a dead run, hit an object the size of a man at a distance of a hundred yards. First Coup was a sullen and grimly tenacious brave who as a boy had, with incredible intrepidity, repeatedly risked his life to touch an enemy, before cutting him down with tomahawk and knife.

Those were nine of the warriors chosen. There were eleven more, all with special talents.

Twenty Coups, the mountain men learned, called his people into meeting, and after the evil powers were propitiated and blessings invoked, he told the multitude that a dreadful killer, a paleface and a mad dog, had vowed to kill every Sparrowhawk brave he could find. To justify his bitter malevolence he was telling this absurd and outrageous lie, that a party of braves had gone a whole moon down, where the Little Snake flowed north, and had killed the mad dog’s wife and unborn child. His medicine men had told him that the Cheyennes did it, urged on by the Arapahoes, who lived on coyote bones and bugs. The Sparrowhawks had always been friends of the palefaces, had fought side by side with them against their common enemies. This thing, this terror, was mad; he was the dog when it slobbered and drooled and clicked its teeth; he was like the hundreds who had flung themselves off precipices because their women and children by the tens were dying of the paleface diseases. He left his mark as a taunt and a challenge by cutting off the right ear.

They would not go as a war party, the few who were chosen, but singly and alone. Every one of them would have an equal chance to bring the mad dog down. The one who brought in the scalp and the right ear would win two eagle feathers; the one who brought him in alive would be made a chief. If this mad thing lied in craven fear, if it crawled into a dark cave to tremble there like the rabbit, or for any other reason was difficult to find and kill, the chief himself would go forth and find him. The honor, the heroism of an entire people were at stake. All the palefaces from the great salt water to the big blue, from the mountains far north to the rivers far south, would be waiting and watching to see how long it would take for a Sparrowhawk warrior to touch coup on this mad evil and bring its scalp in.