“By white men,” she says without apparent passion. She was a winsome Indian, when I noticed, having a plump face like a berry and large eyes in a slightly Chinee slant and with a sheen across the underlying tear-sacs; fine though short brow beneath the vermilion parting of her hair. Her shining braids was intertwined with otter-skin, and she wore bright beads, with brass circles in her earlobes.
I started to ask Where, instead of Who, for she probably wouldn’t have told his name, when I heard the pounding of at least three riders on the plain above: unshoed horses, signifying Indians but whether Pawnee or Cheyenne I couldn’t say, and so far as that went, I disliked the approach of either in equal measure. Not speaking Pawnee, I might not get time to use the signs afore they had shot down this woman. If it was Cheyenne, well, that is obvious.
I mention this because you might question what I did next: grabbed that girl and hastened her back into the brush, the infant still at her pap, and crouched there with her, holding her still though she made no resistance.
The Pawnee arrived, for so they were as I could tell from their talk, and apparently inspected the ravine bottom from above but did not come down. Shortly they rode off, after I believe, from the sound, one had voided his water right from the saddle down the bank.
Yet me and the girl stayed where we was for some time, and it came to me that sitting on her heels she leaned her firm body back against me, taking support from it, and unwittingly in clutching her I had got through the side-lacings of the nursing dress and that unoccupied left breast of hers, weighty with milk, lay against my hand. Now I gently cupped it, I don’t know why, for I surely wasn’t lustful in that circumstance. But me and her and the little fellow, who had now went to sleep with his tiny mouth still quavering upon the protruded nipple, we was a kind of family. I had protected them like a father should, and like I had failed to with Olga and little Gus.
She leaned her head back and placed her warm cheek against my forehead. She smelled of suck, that sweet-sourish fragrance, and then of all them Cheyenne things I knowed of old: fire, earth, grease, blood, sweat, and utter savagery.
She says: “Now I believe you. You are Little Big Man, and I will be your wife now to replace the one you lost, and this is your son.” She puts him into my arms, and he wakes briefly up and I’ll swear, small as he was, grins at me with them beady black eyes. I felt right queer.
She says: “I think we had better be going. They will probably collect at Spring Creek.”
“Who?”
“Our people,” she answers as if that went without saying. “The Pawnee had great medicine today, but next time we will beat them and cut off their peckers, and their women will sleep alone and weep all night.”
I was still holding the baby.
“You have a beautiful son,” she says, looking at both of us in admiration, then takes him back. “Do you have any baggage for me to carry?”
I was still sort of stunned and didn’t reply, so she fixes the baby inside her bosom, cinches her belt so as to secure his legs, then crawls up the bank to where my dead horse was laying, takes off the blanket from it and the pad saddle and my coat which I had took off and tied behind, and slides back down. She looked disappointed that that was all she had to tote.
“The wolves will eat my father tonight,” she says. “We should put him on a burial scaffold, but there is no timber here and it is too far to carry him to where there are trees.”
Then she steps back so I can take the lead as a man should. I guess it wasn’t until that moment that I gathered her intent.
“We can’t go back to the tribe,” I says.
“Do you think the white men will let you have a Human Being wife?” she asks. She had a point there, though exaggerated. It wouldn’t be a crime, but it would sure seem odd to Frank North were I to come back from that fight with a family I had suddenly acquired from the enemy. I could of course present this woman and child as legitimate captives, only then they’d be let in for considerable abuse from the Pawnee and later be turned over to the Army at some fort, to be held for exchange with whites taken by the Cheyenne. This was what I had had in mind earlier on, with an idea to control the trade and reclaim Olga and Gus. But right now, at a fairly outlandish moment, I got realistic. I had never received one word that my white family was still alive, and I had checked the forts along the Arkansas. And those along the Platte while working on the railroad.
Truth was, I had just about decided they was dead without admitting it.
I says: “In the mood they’re in at the moment, the Cheyenne will shoot me on sight.”
My woman answered: “I will be with you.”
