John Ermine of the Yellowstone (11 page)

Crooked-Bear spoke: “John Ermine, now it is time for you to play a man’s part; you must go with Wolf-Voice to the soldiers. I would go myself but for my crooked back and the fact
that I care nothing for either belligerents; their contentions mean nothing to me. My life is behind me, but yours is in front of you. Begin; go down the valley of the Yellowstone with Wolf-Voice;
if the Sioux do not cut you off, you will find the soldiers. Enlist as a scout. I am sure they will take you.”

The young man had felt that this hour would arrive, and now that it had come he experienced a particular elation. Early evening found him at the door of the cabin, mounted on one horse and
leading his war-pony beside him. The goodbye word was all; no demonstration on the part of either man to indicate feelings, although they both were conscious of the seriousness of the parting. The
horses disappeared among the trees, and the hermit sat down before his hut, intent at the blank space left by the riders. The revolt of his strong, sensitive nature against his fellows had been so
complete that he had almost found happiness in the lonely mountains. While always conscious of an overwhelming loss, he held it at bay by a misanthropic philosophy. This hour brought an acute
emptiness to his heart, and the falling shadows of the night brooded with him. Had he completed his work, had he fulfilled his life, was he only to sit here with his pale, dead thoughts, while each
day saw the fresh bones of free and splendid animals bleach on the hillsides that he might continue? He was not unusually morbid for a man of his tastes, but his thoughts on this evening were sour.
“Bah! The boy may come back; he has the habits of an Indian; he knows how to glide through the country like a coyote. The Sioux will not catch him, and I must wait and hope to see my good
work consummated. Nature served that boy almost as scurvy a trick as she did me, but I thwarted her, d——her!”

CHAPTER EIGHT

P
LAYING A
M
AN’S
P
ART

T
HE TWO MEN RODE SILENTLY, ONE BEHIND THE
other, trailing their led ponies; the hoofs of their horses going out in sound on the pine-needles, anon
cracking a dead branch as they stepped over fallen timber, or grunting under the strain of steep hillsides. Far across the wide valley the Shoshone range suddenly lost its forms and melted into
blue-black against the little light left

by the sun, which sank as a stone does in water. In swift pursuit of her warrior husband, came She of the night, soft and golden, painting everything with her quiet, restful colors, and softly
soothing the fevers of day with her cooling lotions.

Wolf-Voice and John Ermine emerged from the woods, dog-trotting along on their ponies after the fashion of Indian kind. Well they knew the deceptions of the pale light; while it illumined the
way a few steps ahead, it melted into a protecting gloom within an arrow’s-flight. An unfortunate meeting with the enemy would develop a horse-race where numbers counted for no more than the
swiftest horse and the rider who quirted most freely over the coulée or dog-town. The winner of such races was generally the one who had the greatest interest at stake in the
outcome—the hunted, not the hunter.

As the two riders expected, they traversed the plains without incident, forded the rivers, and two hours before sunrise were safely perched on the opposite range, high enough to look down on the
eagles. These vast stretches of landscape rarely showed signs of human life. One unaccustomed to them would as soon expect to find man or horses walking the ocean’s bed; their loneliness was
akin to the antarctic seas. That was how it seemed, not how it was. The fierce savages who skulked through the cuts and seams made by erosion did not show themselves, but they were there and might
appear at any moment; the desert brotherhood knew this, and well considered their footsteps. Seated on a rock pinnacle, amid brushwood, one man slept while the other watched. Long before nightfall
they were again in motion. Around the camp, Indians are indolent, but on the warpath their exertions are ceaseless to the point of exhaustion. It was not possible to thread their way through the
volcanic gashes of the mountains by night, but while light lasted they skirted along their slopes day after day, killing game with arrows which Wolf-Voice carried because of their silence and
economy.

These two figures, crawling, sliding, turning, and twisting through the sunlight on the rugged mountains, were grotesque but harmonious. America will never produce their like again. Her wheels
will turn and her chimneys smoke, and the things she makes will be carried round the world in ships, but she never can make two figures which will bear even a remote resemblance to Wolf-Voice and
John Ermine. The wheels and chimneys and the white men have crowded them off the earth.

Buckskin and feathers may swirl in the tan-bark rings to the tune of Money Musk, but the meat-eaters who stole through the vast silences, hourly snatching their challenging war-locks from the
hands of death, had a sensation about them which was independent of accessories. Their gaunt, hammer-headed, grass-bellied, cat-hammed, roach-backed ponies went with them when they took their
departure; the ravens fly high above their intruding successors, and the wolves which sneaked at their friendly heels only lift their suspicious eyes above a rock on a far-off hill to follow the
white man’s movements. Neither of the two mentioned people realized that the purpose of the present errand was to aid in bringing about the change which meant their passing.

Wolf-Voice had no family tree. It was enough that he arrived among the traders speaking Gros Ventre; but a man on a galloping horse could see that his father was no Gros Ventre; he blew into the
Crow camp on some friendly wind, prepared to make his thoughts known in his mother tongue or to embellish it with Breed-French or Chinook; he had sought the camp of the white soldiers and added to
his Absaroke sundry “God-damns” and other useful expressions needed in his business. He was a slim fellow with a massive head and a restless soul; a seeker after violence, with wicked
little black eyes which glittered through two narrow slits and danced like drops of mercury. His dress was buckskin, cut in the red fashion; his black hat had succumbed to time and moisture, while
a huge skinning-knife strapped across his stomach, together with a brass-mounted Henry rifle, indicated the danger zone one would pass before reaching his hair.

At a distance John Ermine was not so different; but, closer, his yellow braids, strongly vermilioned skin, and open blue eyes stared hard and fast at your own, as emotionless as if furnished by
a taxidermist. His coat was open at the front as the white men made them; he wore blanket breeches encased at the bottom in hard elkskin leggings bound at the knee. He also carried a fire-bag, the
Spencer repeating carbine given him by his comrade, together with an elk-horn whip. In times past Ermine had owned a hat, but long having outlived the natural life of any hat, it had finally
refused to abide with him. In lieu of this he had bound his head with a yellow handkerchief, beside which polished brass would have been a dead and lonely brown. His fine boyish figure swayed like
a tule in the wind, to the motions of his pony. His mind was reposeful though he was going to war—going to see the white men of whom he had heard so much from his tutor; going to associate
with the people who lost “ten thousand men” in a single battle and who did not regard it as wonderful. He had seen a few of these after the Long-Horse fight, but he was younger and did
not understand. He understood now, however, and intended to drink his eyes and feast his mind to satiety on the people of whom he was one.

As the sun westered, the two adventurers blinded their trail in the manner most convenient at the time; a thing not so difficult to do in the well-watered northwest as in the dry deserts of the
south; besides which the buffalo-hunting, horse-using Indians were not the equals of the mountain foot brethren in following trails. After doing this they doubled and twisted back on their track.
While the sun was yet bright they broiled their evening meat on a tiny fire of dry sticks. Blowing the tobacco smoke to the four corners of the earth, Wolf-Voice said: “We will be rich,
brother, if the Sioux do not get a chance to dry our hair; the soldiers always make their scouts rich; there is plenty to eat in their wagons, and cartridges cost nothing. The soldiers always
fight; they are like the gray bears—they do not know any better—and then is the time when we must watch close to get away before the Sioux have an advantage of them. They are fools and
cannot run. They are tied to the ground. If you get a chance to carry the talking papers from one white chief to another, they pour the money into your blanket. I have never had a paper to carry,
but I think they will give you one. If they do, brother, we will take the silver and get one of the white soldiers to buy us a bottle of whiskey from the settler.” And Wolf-Voice’s
malignant features relaxed into a peaceful state which made Ermine laugh outright.

A bottle of whiskey and ten thousand dead men—quite a difference, thought Ermine. “That is it—that is it,” continued the musing white man to himself; “he goes to
war for a bottle of whiskey, and I go for ten thousand men.” His unframed thoughts wrestled and twisted, lined and rounded, the idea of ten thousand men; yet the idea never took a form which
satisfied him. Ten thousand buffalo—yes, he had calculated their mass; he had seen them. Ten thousand trees—that, too, he could arrange; he had blocked them out on the mountainside. But
there were many times ten thousand men who had not been killed; that he gave up altogether. Nothing had saved him but blind faith in his old comrade.

Leaving the mountains again, they stalked over the moon-lit land more like ghosts than men, and by day they lay so low that the crawling ants were their companions. By the Elk River Wolf-Voice
pointed to a long, light streak which passed through the sagebrush: “Brother, that is the sign of the white men. The buffalo, when they pass once, do not make a deeper path than that, and,
brother, what is that in the road which shows so bright?”

Appropriating the gleaming thing, the Indian reached from his pony and picked it up, holding it close to his eyes for a moment before passing it to his companion. “What is that,
brother?”

Ermine examined it closely, turning it in the moonlight. “I do not know; it is a paper; I will keep it until daylight.”

A few steps ahead was found another glistening article, dropped by the passing soldiers. They knew what that was; it was the canteen, lost on the march, by a pony soldier. Wolf-Voice
appropriated it.

“We must not stay here; the trail is old, but the Sioux will be near the soldiers. They are between us and the white men; you may be sure of that, brother,” said one; and the four
ponies stumbled off through the sagebrush, melting into the night.

They stopped for the day at the head of a rocky coulée, eating dried meat for fear of making a smoke. Ermine drew the paper from his pocket, laid it on the ground before him, and regarded
it for a few moments; then he turned it round, seeing it was upside down by the writing on the bottom. “Bogardus,” he read on the left-hand corner. The image on the card spread, opened,
and flowered in Ermine’s mind; it was a picture—that was plain now; it was a photograph such as he had heard Crooked-Bear tell about—an image from the sun. He had never seen one
before. Wolf-Voice bent his beady eyes on the black and white thing, but it suggested nothing to him. Nature had not been black and white to his scarlet vision. The rude conventionalized lines
painted on the buffalo-robes differentiated buffalo, ponies, and men, but this thing—“Humph!” he lighted his pipe.