Even while the old man was haranguing his people a messenger came in with the terrible news that The Terror had slain another brave, just south of the Yellowstone; and two days later had killed a war party of three as they sat by their fire. These bodies, like those of the four, had been laid parallel with one another, their bloody skulls to the west; and from every skull the right ear had been sliced off. The chief was so outraged that his face turned the color of the red clays along the Yellowstone and his old body trembled. But for the arthritis in his joints and the blindness in his eyes (sun blindness and snow blindness) he would have put on his war paint and gone forth. His braves were not what they had been before the whitefaces came with their diseases and firewater. He must have felt as all leaders feel when, looking sharply at their people, they sense in them a moral degeneracy that portends the end of the nation.
He went ahead with the rites that would insulate the twenty warriors from harm. He personally saw that each of them had his medicine bag, his best weapons, and his choice of a horse from the large herds. At the encampment on Tongue River he bade farewell to each of them as he rode away, alone, into the southwest. The braves were garbed in their most colorful raiment, with a long headdress streaming like a banner in the wind. They were twenty handsome young men—twenty of the finest warriors from one of the most remarkable of all the Indian nations—all dedicated to a single and irrevocable mission; Rarely in human history had twenty such superb fighters gone forth to bring down one man, every one a specialist in certain skills, every one hoping that he would be the lucky and famous one. Within a few weeks news of the vendetta would reach trappers and traders as far away as the Rio and the Athabasca.
Jim Bridger gave the news to old Bill Williams. Bill’s long thin sunken face, looking as if it had been covered over with poorly tanned leather and was about to crack open in its deep dried-out seams, turned unusually grave. His small pale eyes with the abnormally small pupils looked into the north country, where at that moment, he had no doubt, Sam Minard with naked knife was slipping up to a Crow. The wrinkled bloodless lips sucked at a corncob pipestem. He took the stem away from his broken teeth and said:
"Ya said twenty?"
"Charley says. The best in the hull doggone nation."
"How many has Sam got so far?"
"A few. I heerd only yisterdy he got the one called Mad Wolf.”
Bill sucked at his pipe a few moments. "Wonder if he’d like some help."
"I reckon not. He figgers to do it alone."
"He jist might at that," Bill said, and went on smoking.
Jim Bridger at his post on Black’s Fork had been telling everyone who came along what Sam proposed to do. He knew most of the men in the West, for he had been a partner in the Rocky Mountain Fur Company, and after that had been with the American Fur Company, until he built his own post. Possibly no man in the West had a fuller knowledge of its mountains, rivers, valleys, passes, and trails. Thinking of Sam and the mad impossible task he had undertaken, Jim would recall that hour in 1832 when a redman shot an arrow into his back. The head of the arrow had remained in his flesh and bone for more than two years; it was then dug out with a knife by Marcus Whitman, a missionary to the red people. Jim shivered a little when he thought of all the stone arrowheads that would be speeding toward the fiesh and bones of Sam Minard.
When Three-Finger McNees came to the post and heard the story he fixed one eye on Jim while the other seemed to be looking off to the Bighorns.
"You say he got Mad Wolf?"
"So I heerd."
In a hand-to-hand fight, McNees said, Sam was a match for any five redmen, and for any two white men, with doggone few exceptions. He was a holy rip-snorter. He would take care of himself unless they ambushed him or crawled up on him when he slept. Had the old chief put on his war paint?
"They say he’s clum his hoss fer the lass time. It’s the young bucks tryin ta take Sam off of the bay." Mebbe they would, mebbe they wouldn’t, said Jim, who like all the mountain men was a realist. Today you were here and a-snortin with funk like a bull with his tail up, and tomorrer you were gone. If McNees saw Sam he might tell him that there was now a better rifle than the one he had; and the Colt revolver had been improved. As for the rest of it the mort, the note sounded on a horn at the kill would be ringing over the hull damn land.
Did any man know where Sam was pitching his camp? Right in the Bighorns, Jim had heard.
After shooting Mad Wolf while the reckless idiot was creeping up on him, apparently determined to make a coup, Sam had crossed the Yellowstone and gone north to see the woman on the Musselshell. He rode right up to her door, said, "How are you?" and in that moment observed that her hair had turned white. By her cabin he set food, buckskins, a pouch of flower seeds, and after staking his horses on the river bottom he gathered stones from the area roundabout and piled them a few feet from the graves. He said he didn?t know if she understood him when he spoke to her, or even if she listened. She had seen his wife last fall. Well, the Crows killed her and the baby that was in her and all he had now was their bones. He was going to build a stone cairn and put them in it. Having told her this, he waited, hoping that she would speak, but she was as silent as her dead ones. She was sitting between the graves, with her Bible on her lap.
On the river bottom this evening Sam smoked and brooded, and tried to see himself more clearly in life. Now and then he wondered if he was making a fool of himself. But when he thought of the vivacious Indian girl who had been his wife, and of the depths of his longing for a son, and when he contemplated again the bitter black cowardice of the killers, the old rage boiled up in him and he was eager to be off to the warpath. The next day he laid the stones, chinking them with river mud. It was harder than he had thought it would be to immure the bones—to say farewell to them, to touch them for the last time. He guessed he was a pretty sentimental fellow. He wondered if the mountain men would have laughed if they had seen him pressing his lips to the skull of his wife; holding the skull of his son in his two hands and pressing it to his cheek; and reaching in to touch them a last time before putting in the last stone. He looked over at the woman and her Bible, wishing that the bones in there could be blessed and delivered into the care of the great Giver who had set the rainbow as a guerdon to innocence; wishing that Beethoven’s choral finale on the "Ode to Joy" could be played softly, forever and ever, by this cairn, and for this woman and her children.
God in heaven, what a thin unwashed ragged forlorn poor critter of a thing she was, with nothing but her Bible and two graves! Life was a riddle, damned if it wasn’t: less than a year ago he had been holding his darling close and dreaming dreams—and now both darling and dreams were entombed in a pile of stones. Less than a year ago he had been singing madrigals with the birds and now he was on the warpath. A year ago this woman and her husband and children had been making the long trek to what they believed was fabulous land, an Eden or a paradise, their hearts and souls big with hopes and visions; and now four of them were slaughtered and she was lost by two graves among four whitened skulls. It was not the Father’s fault if His children were damned fools who couldn’t make decent use of the wealth and beauty He had given them, or get along with their neighbors. Perhaps the Almighty had long ago rued that hour when He put Adam and Eve on a planet with larks and thrushes and mockingbirds, water ouzels and geese and squirrels and blue jays and the whole diapason of music; because all these things seemed so much more in tune with land and water and sky. Sam hoped that someday he would laugh again and sing and play his music. Someday, perhaps. Meanwhile he had his own private war, and a lesson to teach as only killers could be taught.