"I’m going now," he said, standing by her and looking down at her white hair. "I’l1 be back before long." He bent low to touch his lips and his fingers to her hair, and then he was gone. Kate did not look up. She did not turn once to look after him as he rode up the river and disappeared.
15
HE WAS RIDING up a long mountain flank of aspen when he sensed it. At once he stopped to get his bearings. He did not recognize this area but a man could not know every one of the thousands of aspen hillsides. There were mountains south of him and across the southwest; he knew them by sight but he was on a strange trail. All redmen except the cricket-eating Diggers and the fish-eating tribes on the lower Columbia were experts in the art of ambush. It was in ambush that one small immigrant train after another was perishing.
Turning, he rode back down the trail at a fast gallop. After four hundred yards he swerved sharply, and leaving the buffalo path, headed for a summit, hoping there to be able to overlook a wide area. In this he was disappointed; and so he sat, unable to see more than a few hundred feet, and sniffed and listened. The bay raised his ears to the direction from which they had just come. Sam was wondering what had warned him; there were so many things in nature that give signals—the kingfisher, red-winged blackbird, wren, bittern, chipmunk, ground squirrel, magpie, crow—the wild world was full of them and a man had only to learn their ways. Something had told him that he was in the presence of an enemy. Because he had hidden his packhorses and was on a very fleet horse he chose one of his favorite stratagems. He would make a run for it until he found a spot he liked; and so, going at full speed, he descended from the summit and took another path, his eyes looking for a hill with jutting ledges. His was the cougar’s trick, which he had observed three separate times.
The cougar—or panther or mountain lion—usually stalked his prey at their watering holes. If the hole happened to be on a stream that flowed close to an overhanging ledge of stone, the beast would crouch on the ledge and wait; and when the animals were drinking he would leap to the back of deer, antelope, elk, buffalo, or wild horse. Leaping to the shoulders, he would sink his claws deep into flesh and at the same moment reach for the throat with his long powerful teeth; and if it was one of the smaller beasts he might with a swift movement seize the head and wrench it backward, breaking the neck.
Sam was looking for a vantage point where he could leave the path, leap off his horse, and advance swiftly to meet the enemy. After two miles of forcing the bay at top speed he saw it. The trail rounded a hill. Barely past the point was a forest of trees. Rushing off the path and a hundred yards into the woods, Sam leapt down, and leaving his lathered beast to recover his wind, he ran forward and stood behind a tree. He was not surprised when no Indian came in sight. He now hastened through the woods and up the hill. On hands and knees, crawling swiftly, he went forward to a bluff above the path and looked down. Back there on the trail, two hundred yards, was a Crow warrior, the paint on his face glinting like gold in the noon sunshine. He sat on a tall sorrel pony, looking and listening. Having no doubt that this was one of the twenty, Sam watched him through a lattice of leaves. He could have shot him off the horse at that distance but on thinking it over he decided to walk out in plain view and give the man a chance.
The moment he was in full view he gave the Crow war cry and raised his gun. But he did not fire. His sharp eyes were watching the enemy’s movements; it seemed to Sam that the redskin was deaf or paralyzed. He would have sworn that for a full ten seconds the fool sat there, his black eyes staring at the giant who stood a hundred feet above him and two hundred yards away. Sam could imagine how the eyes shone, with a gem of light in their center; and the tenseness of the clutch on the gun, and of the thighs clasping the pony. suddenly the Indian came to life and brought his rifle up; in that instant Sam fired and the pony fell. Almost at once the redman was on his feet. Again with electric suddenness his long rifle came up but Sam had ducked down and back to reload. When ready he shot up into full view and the Indian’s gun in that moment exploded. In the next instant Sam fired and saw the man stagger. Sam dropped to his knees to reload. Knowing that this young warrior had momentarily lost his nerve and fired wildly, Sam doubted that he was one of the twenty: more likely he was a green youngster who had taken a gun and slipped away to find glory.
Running to his horse, Sam mounted and rode into the forest above the bluff. The pony was dead and the warrior had disappeared. There was nothing to do but watch and wait. If, as Sam imagined, this was a youngster, eager to cover himself with honors and an eagle feather, he was alone; but if he had been scouting for a war party the three shots would bring it in. While waiting, Sam wondered if he would not soon be weary of this night-and-day stalking; if he should have gone to the old chief and demanded the right to meet the killers; or if he should have gone back to his people for a visit. He had considered all these alternatives and rejected them; reconsidered and rejected again, for the reason that all the red people were fantastic liars and cheats. Anyway, the chief would have sworn by all his dead ancestors that none of his braves was guilty.
There was still another matter, Sam told himself as he sat in tall grass, looking out and down. The Crows were now claiming broader lands than they had ever occupied—all the country that bordered the Musselshell on the south and east. This included the woman and her graves and the cairn. So far as Sam could tell, it included lands claimed by the Blackfeet. If these implacable enemies, with their age-old feuds, were to go to war they might, when their blood got real hot, murder the woman; if they did that, half the mountain men in the country would march against them, and there would be enough blood to turn a river red. If there were only good trapping spots close to the woman he would live there and watch over her and someday take her back to her people. But there were no good beaver ponds within two hundred miles of her.
While looking down at a dead horse and waiting he also dwelt on the fact that warriors from other tribes would now try to capture him, knowing that the Crows would pay a fabulous price for him. Windy Bill had been emphatic about this two weeks ago when they puffed their pipes after breakfast and drank black coffee.
Sam, he said, would look worse than a stillborn child in a putrefied forest after they were done with him. Old Jake Moser’s nephey he had trapped on the Heely—wall now, the Comanches had wanted him, and so the Rapahoes they caught him, and when the squaws were done with him you cudden a-tole if he was man or coyote. Some people they were good at one thing, like sailing the sea; and some at another, like being a lying politician; but the Injuns they were the best on earth at torture. Bill could jist see the squaws slaverin as they looked at Sam, he shorely could. If Sam were fool enough to let the Blackfeet take him alive they ought to open his skull to see if there was anything in it.
"I don’t figger they’ll take me," Sam said.
Had any man ever, who was taken? "Sam, I wisht ya would think it over, I shorely do."
Bill had proposed that twenty mountain men should ride into the Crow village on the Tongue and demand the murderers from the old chief; they would tell him that if the killers of Sam’s wife were not handed over the mountain men would bring the Blackfeet and the Cheyennes against them, and the Sioux for good measure. Sam had refused to consider the proposal; this, he felt, was his own private feud. He felt that no life but his own should be risked. Doggone it, Bill had said, the Blackfeet would be trailing Sam day and night. As for himself, he’d rather face a grizzly or ten bitch wolves than a Blackfeet squaw with a knife in her hand.