Ghost Dance (24 page)

Chance reached for the Colt, which he kept next to him, and shook the holster and belt from the weapon.

Swiftly he went to the door, the weapon in his hand. It smelled clean and ready. He had cleaned and oiled it last night.

Chance saw Winona take down the hawk feathers from the rafter and his own medicine kit, and put them in the striped blanket. He noted that the medicine bag of Joseph Running Horse, like the young Indian, was gone.

Yesterday morning Joseph Running Horse, borrowing a white man's hat, had ridden casually to the Turner soddy, requested and had been given the kit. He had brought it back to the cabin, in case Chance might return. Neither he nor Chance had expected him to return as soon as he had, or in the company of Old Bear, Drum and the two braves.

Yesterday morning now seemed a long time ago.

Chance edged the door open.

There was an angry, milling crowd of Sioux outside Sitting Bull's cabin. And Chance could see the blue uniforms of Indian police.

He put the weapon in his belt and, unobtrusively, left the cabin, to see what was going on.

He saw Sitting Bull, half dressed, shoved from the cabin by a large Indian policeman.

At the sight of the chief the crowd cried out.

"Go away!" cried the Indian policeman. "Go away!" He waved his pistol at the crowd. He held Sitting Bull by the right arm.

The crowd surged closer, against the rifle muzzles of the police.

Sitting Bull lifted his hand. "No!" he cried. "I will go with them. Do not fight!"

The Indians hesitated.

Chance slipped closer. He saw the Indian policeman suddenly thrust his large revolver in the old chief's side. "Go away," said the man, "he is coming with us." The man's voice had been fierce, loud, but it had almost broken.

Chance edged into the crowd deeper.

Sitting Bull looked at the man, speaking calmly. "Yes," he said, "I am going with you. Do not shoot."

Someone near Chance cried out, "Do not go with them!"

The Indians among whom Chance stood pressed in ever closer, pushing against the rifle muzzles, and the rifle muzzles tried to hold them back, but they still came forward, some shoved by those behind, and the muzzles of those thirty odd rifles, brown fingers on the triggers of each, were pushed back like a fence of sticks by the movements of soil and rock and the Indian policemen, some of them, felt the logs of the chief's cabin terminating their retreat, holding them and the blue uniforms where they were, penned in, encircled by their brethren, the free Sioux, muttering, many of them armed.

Many of the Indian police kept looking, almost frantically, down the backtrail.

It puzzled Chance.

Old Bear, who stood with his rifle in the doorway of his cabin, watched. There would not yet be the sight of a cavalry pennon. There was not yet the peal of the distant bugle. The soldiers were too far away. They would not come until they heard gunfire.

Old Bear, calmly, loaded his weapon.

The soldiers would come.

Voices in the crowd shouted encouragement to Sitting Bull, threats against the policemen. Chance's Sioux was adequate to follow most of what was said, and there could be no mistaking, in any language, the mood of the throng–fury.

"Do not go with them, Sitting Bull," someone shouted. "They will put you in the stone houses!" shouted another. "They will kill you on the prairie!" cried out another man. One man brandished his rifle and called out to his fellows, "Let us kill the Short Hair Dogs!" Another cried out, "Sitting Bull, if you go with them, you are afraid of the white men!"

Sitting Bull, to Chance's surprise, seemed calm.

He scarcely seemed to pay that much attention to the cries, or to the push of the pistol muzzle in his side.

Rather he seemed to Chance to look over the heads of the policemen and the crowd, to the height of Medicine Ridge, across the Grand River, perhaps across the prairies which his people had once ruled as nomadic kings, a people whom he had once led on horseback, rifle in hand, feathers in his hair, across green prairies shaking to the hoofbeat of the bison.

No one knows what was in Sitting Bull's mind, nor why he said what he did, but he looked at the Indian policeman, the burly, short-haired policeman, so much the master with his white man's gun, and said, "I will not go with you."

The revolver shot was abrupt, decisive, point-blank, half muffled in the flesh and blanket of the chief.

The body of Sitting Bull, dead, had not fallen to the ground when through the circle of stunned Sioux, past Chance, there hurtled a shrieking, dark shape that leaped on the Indian policeman, bearing him to the dirt.

It was Drum, unarmed.

A policeman turned to fire, and a shot exploded in his ear and he spun backwards, the blue circle broken. The other policemen opened fire at the range of inches into the bodies that pressed against them, and other weapons, those of the Hunkpapa, fired into the segments of that shattered cordon.

Drum had wrested the policeman's pistol away and knelt on him, screaming, firing the last five shots into the man's face.

Suddenly Chance saw Running Horse grappling to his right with an Indian policeman. Running Horse, like Drum, carried no arms.

One of the Indian police shouted to his fellows, "Inside!" and turned to enter the cabin of the dead chief, but now Old Bear raised his rifle and fired once, and the man jerked and clutched at the door of the cabin, trying to get in, and then in the time it takes to try to breathe his hands froze on the sides of the door barring the entrance.

There were more shots, both from the police and the Hunkpapa.

The man in the doorway was torn from the opening and pitched aside by the other Indian policemen, who swarmed in the door. Chance heard a shot from inside the cabin. He learned later that one of Sitting Bull's sons had been shot by the police.

The door closed and rifle barrels poked out the windows firing at the crowd that now scattered, Chance running with them, getting back to the shelter of Running Horse's cabin. Running Horse himself was nowhere in sight. The policeman with whom he had been grappling was dead, though whether Running Horse had killed him, or someone else, Chance did not know.

An Indian to the left of Chance stumbled, caught in the back by a bullet, his hands flying back over his head, and pitched into the dirt.

Then Chance was at the cabin entrance, and inside. He swung the door open, and knelt inside the opening, his weapon drawn. He would not kill with it, but he was willing to fire on the cabin, to keep the police penned inside, to keep them away from the windows, to save as many lives as he could.

Chance squeezed off a shot at the cabin wall, chipping some bark from the wall, about a foot from the right side of the window.

To his amazement he saw Drum, still in the line of fire, not more than ten yards from the cabin, kneeling over the body of the Indian policeman. He had taken a knife from the man and Chance did not care to watch what he was doing.

But the young fool was mad. He would be killed.

Drum worked calmly, the bullets flying about him, bullets from both sides.

Drum was on his feet now, the scalp, wet and red with blood in his hand, held over his head, and Chance, from where he knelt inside the cabin door, could see the blood running down Drum's arm, staining the sleeve which had fallen ripped to his shoulder.

Drum walked slowly away from the cabin, holding his trophy high.

The rest of the Indians had drawn back. Chance could see them here and there, firing from cabin windows, from around the edges of cabins, from behind boxes and a wagon, firing on Sitting Bull's cabin.

And from inside the cabin rifles thrust forth from the windows, and the Indian police, crowded in the cabin, besieged, fired as they could, where they could, trying to answer the ring of encircling snipers, trying to answer the sharp, sporadic cracks of the miscellany of weapons beneath whose sights they found themselves.

And through this cross fire, unscathed, walked Drum, the scalp held high over his head, looking neither to the left nor right.

"Get down," yelled Chance to Drum as he passed the cabin.

Drum turned and looked at him.

"I wear the feather of an eagle," said Drum, quietly.

"Get under cover," yelled Chance.

Drum turned to face the cabin of Sitting Bull. Still the bullets tore about him. The rifle muzzles in the windows of Sitting Bull's cabin jerked and discharged their fire, and more bullets pelted the cabin from the fire of the Hunkpapa.

It was as though Drum lived a charmed life.

The young Indian, facing the cabin of Sitting Bull, lifted the scalp even higher over his head and shook it. He called out to the police in the cabin, "It is I who have done this, Drum, the son of Kills-His-Horse, your enemy."

The scalp was wet in Drum's angry fist, the blood appearing between the clenched fingers of his fist, moving down the wrist.

"It is I," he cried, "Drum, the son of Kills-His-Horse, one who wears the feather of an eagle, one who is your enemy, one whose feet are set upon the warpath."

Then, angrily, Drum thrust the scalp in his belt and turned and walked from the line of fire, going behind the cabin, perhaps heading for his own lodge, to gather his weapons.

Running Horse moved swiftly along the side of the cabin and pressed inside, past Chance.

"My brother," said he.

"My brother," said Chance.

Winona handed Running Horse his weapon, and he worked the bolt, seeing that the girl had loaded it, slid the bolt forward, locked it. Then she gave him a handful of bullets. Most he put in his medicine bag; five he held between his teeth. Then he slipped out of the cabin, moving behind it, to take up some position out of Chance's view.

Chance thought of following him, but supposed it didn't much matter.

He was aware of activity behind the cabins, the neighing of horses, the sharp cries of women.

With the first shots the squaws had unpicketed the animals and where skin lodges stood, they had been struck.

Already the poles of travois, loaded, were being lashed to the sides of ponies.

There were more shots.

Across the way he could see Old Bear firing from his cabin door.

There were some Indians on the roofs of some of the cabins, firing.

Suddenly through the sporadic shots and the sudden splintering and chipping of wood about him Chance heard, thin, but clear, in the distance, the notes of a bugle.

This was the first it had occurred to him that there would be soldiers.

They had been waiting in support of the Indian police, had heard the firing, and were now riding in.

Old Bear, terrible in his enraged frailty, leaped into the dirt street, even in the line of fire, calling for the Hunkpapa to withdraw.

It might have been planned.

For all Chance knew it had been, at least in its general outlines.

While a handful of Indians kept the cabin under fire the rest faded back, running to their lodges and cabins.

Their horses and their goods were ready.

Winona, the bundle of goods in the striped blanket on her back, slipped from the cabin and scurried along its side and behind it.

Running Horse's pony was at hand, picketed behind the cabin. He did not own a saddle.

Chance went to the corner of the cabin and picked up his saddle and saddlebags. He saw that Winona had rolled and bound his blankets across the back of the saddle.

Chance slipped from the cabin, carrying his saddle and gear. No longer were the police in the cabin firing, though he could see a rifle muzzle projecting from one of the windows. He supposed they were finished fighting. They had heard the bugle. They would stay where they were. Perhaps even the rifle in the window was simply propped up. They would stay in the cabin until the soldiers came.

The notes of the bugle sounded again, this time much closer.

Now even the firing of the Hunkpapa was done, and Chance supposed that the rear guard had fallen back, to cover the retreat which must now be underway.

The camp seemed fairly quiet now; even the dogs were gone. There would be some fires in the cooking holes, here and there, that would burn down to ashes in time. Near the wagon in the street behind which some men had earlier been firing, there was a sack of spilled corn, and a handful of sparrows had fluttered down to peck at it. It seemed very quiet. There were, of course, a number of Indian police, maybe twenty or more, hiding in the dead chief's cabin, too frightened or too wise to come out, probably both.

Before the cabin there were a number of bodies, mostly Indian police, clearly recognizable by the short hair and the blue uniforms, and other Indians. One body Chance would never forget, a heavy body, stocky, old, with long black hair that had not yet been braided that morning, hair streaked with white hair that had never been cut. It lay wrapped half in a blanket, stained with red about the size of a saucer on the side facing Chance, twisted in the dust not far from the door of the cabin, the body of a man who had been kind to Chance, that of a proud man, a calm man, resourceful and wise, who had loved his people and their land, and council fires and antelope, and the giving of gifts and the hunting of buffalo, and the blue sky and the prairie and the feathers of eagles.

Chance turned away and went behind the cabin.

Running Horse and Winona were waiting for him.

Running Horse helped him saddle his horse and then the three of them, Winona with her bundle riding behind Running Horse, joined the orderly retreat of the Hunkpapa, who by now had mostly disappeared in the brush along the Grand River.

They would head for the ancestral retreat, called by the white men the Bad Lands, where the sudden arroyos and rugged hills might defy regiments of long knives.

At the head of the long, ragged string of Indians, and ponies and travois and dogs, rode Old Bear, his eyes fierce and hard, the chief of the Hunkpapa.

When the cavalry from Fort Yates, flag and pennon fluttering, thundered into the camp of Sitting Bull, shouting, brandishing their sabers, brave in the sound of their bugle, they found nothing, only the empty camp and, of course, some Indian policemen in one of the cabins.