Now and then when toiling and talking to her Sam would straighten and his keen eyes would search the hills around him. He had no doubt that Blackfeet, and possibly Crow, scouts had been spying on him and wondering what he was doing. What brave men they were! Ten, fifty, or a hundred of them could have come here to take him, for he had no friend, no help, within two or three hundred miles; and they would have come to take him, not one of them, or two or six, but ten possibly, or twenty or forty, but for the fact that they wouldn’t pay the price. Mountain men had taught them that at least two of them would die, perhaps three, in the assault, and it took a lot of rum, the smell of a lot of loot, including good rifles and plenty of ammunition, to lure them to the risk.

Having scanned the horizon, he told the woman about Hank’s breakfasts, for thought of them had made his mouth water. If Hank was expecting an overnight guest he was sure to have on hand a pint or so of the wonderful wild-bee honey, a quart of rendered hump fat, or, better, marrow fat, to use as butter; a dozen wild geese or duck or sage hen eggs, if these were in season; and the finest elk in a thousand miles. His breakfasts of elk steaks dripping in their sizzling hot juices, a gallon pot of coffee, browned biscuits sopping wet with marrow fat, golden honey, huckleberry jam, or an electuary of mixed wild fruits, no mountain man ever forgot. Someday maybe she would go with him and they would have breakfast with Hank. Hank wouldn’t run off at the mouth, as Windy Bill did, or Powder River Charley; if he said ten words in twenty-four hours he felt exhausted.

Suddenly Sam turned from a beast he was skinning, and standing straight and tall, looked at the woman, his face a wonder to behold. It was as if there had suddenly entered his mind the words of various wise men, for whom there had been in the human female a natural superiority—her greater compassion, for one thing, that strove to succor the helpless and defenseless; her greater devotion, for another, that could oblige her mother-heart to sit for days and nights by the graves of her children, without food or drink, and probably (Sam would have said) without sleep. The wonder in his face was this larger view of women, to which this woman had brought him. Did she intend to sit here all fall, winter, and spring? he asked her. Would she go with him to find a boat or a wagon train? Did she not think that the Almighty up there, looking at her, would want her to shake out of this, and eat and sleep and go on living? "I’ll tell you," he said. "I’ll boil a pot of this fat buck and have a cup of broth with you."

In a few minutes he had ten pounds of venison steaming over one fire and a whole loin slowly roasting in the embers of another. When the boiled meat was tender he took to her a tin cupful of broth and a slice of hot loin on a tin plate; and these, kneeling, he offered to her, saying. "You have to eat. These hot deer drippins will warm your innards and make the world look better." He drank broth and ate raw liver and about three pounds of loin. He then filled his pipe and scanned the earth around him. It was foolish to think that this woman could long endure here, if the redmen resolved to take her scalp and weapons; it would be best to spread the word to all the free trappers that she was here, who would then spread it among all the Indian tribes, with the warning that if a redman took her scalp the vengeance of the mountain men would demand ten scalps for every hair of her head. The skulls out there on the stakes were the only language the redmen could read.

While Sam puffed his pipe and looked over the scene his contempt for the red people and some of their ways fanned his emotions until he was in a red heat of anger. The contempt, on both sides, had its beginning in the earliest association of redmen and white, and became a law of their lives as fixed as the redman’s death chant or the whiteman’s fatalism. The redmen could not understand why the whitemen gave priceless treasure for the pelts of beaver and otter, which for them had little value in a land where beaver were as thick as trees. The whitemen could not understand why the redmen were eager to trade a pile of pelts for a piddling trifle—a handful of blue beads, a piece of glittering metal. "He’s like the coon," Windy Bill said. "If it shines he’s gotta git his paw on it." Each thought the other fantastically stupid, and his low opinion of the other’s mind and values gave zest to slaughter and scalping. If redmen had set four white skulls on stakes mountain men would have laughed loud in the heavens. If Wind River Bill had been here to view Sam’s handiwork he would have said, "I reckon that-air will send them heller-skelter torst their tipees." To the pine and juniper hills and the wind rising in the north Sam said he guessed it would, and was satisfied with his labor.

It was time to be off but he was reluctant to go. In a moment of mad male gallantry he had considered digging a well by the shack, but knew that he would have to dig to river level, a depth of a hundred feet. Should he ask her to go on a journey with him, not to be his night woman (he was not a lustful man, nor one to take advantage of the female’s helplessness) but to get her mind off her grief. But so far as he could tell, she had not accepted him as a friend. He was not sure that she was conscious of him, or of the wolves howling in the night, or of the flowing-through-mountains sound of the river’s waters. He was put out with himself because he lingered: it was the Almighty’s problem, not his. The evening of his eighth day here he forced himself to face her; and after looking down at her bowed head for several minutes he knelt and kissed her dusty brown hair, and said, close to her ear, "There’s a lot of meat for you in the house. I’m off to get a wife now, but I’ll be back soon."

He mounted his stallion and headed south up the river, but four times he stopped and looked back. In this situation a man simply didn’t know what to do. If she was determined to sit by the graves and die he guessed she had the right to die alone. No beast, no man, would molest her. His journey lay not over to the Bighorns, the Powder, Tongue, and Wind rivers, but to the Gallatin Gateway, the Beaverhead, and Chief Tall Mountain, whose oldest daughter, blooming into womanhood, was as lovely as the spring song of the bluebird or the alpine lily at the edge of a melting snowbank. A wife, he knew, was a huge armful of responsibility, and responsibility was the disease in man. But he was lonely, and twice as lonely after leaving the

woman by the graves.

The fourth time he looked back he saw her come through the doorway and, stand by the cabin. She seemed to be looking round her. If the lark at heaven’s gate had sung for him alone he could have been no more gladdened. She would be all right! She had only been waiting for him to go away! Dear God, be kind to her! He saw her go over and sink to the earth between the graves. Dear God, be kind to her! Feeling that all was well, he waved to her, knowing that she could not see him, and then rode till midnight, and was thirty miles from her and her gruesome sentinels when he found a thicket in which to hide and sleep. Dear God, he thought, kissing his hand and pretending that it was this mother’s cheek, dear God, be kind to her.

4

HB WAS TEN miles beyond the woman’s sight when she heard her name called. "Kitty!" the voice said. It was her husband’s voice and that was her husband’s name for her. Getting to her feet, she looked round her with wild staring eyes and then began to run toward the massacre site. "John!" she called as she ran. After two hundred yards she stopped and looked in all directions, and listened; and called again: "John!" She felt that he was present and not far away. She was staring at the tree where she had seen him bloody and bent when she thought of her children. Turning, she ran back up the hill, expecting to find them sitting by the graves; and when she saw only the two mounds she looked at them, listening, her heart in her throat. "John?" she said. She went to the shack and looked inside. She looked toward the river, and remembering that their camp was down there, she ran toward it, in the ungainly wavering way of one who had had no food and water and almost no sleep for many days and nights. She looked back under the lean-to that her husband and sons had built but nothing was there. She looked round her and softly called: "John?" She listened, but there was only the river’s waters. Like a woman waiting for the man who would surely come, she stood by the lean-to for an hour, looking and listening.