“I never thanked you,” he says, “for bringing extra food to me while I was being taken as a prisoner to the fort. I want to do that now.”
I was afraid he would next start in on that old business about owing me a life, so I fixed to leave, but he says: “Wait. I want to apologize for the rudeness of my wife. She is a good woman, but she just cannot stand to be in the presence of white men, because they killed her father and mother.…
“Listen,” he says, “on the way here we crossed a fresh trail made by white soldiers. I think they are looking for this village, though the chiefs touched the pen and we are at peace.”
Younger Bear had the peculiar ability always to remind me of my proper race. I should have been armed against him, but I never was. When no issue was made of it, I’d generally be pro-Indian; and also if Old Lodge Skins or Sunshine was registering the complaint, maybe because they were sort of my kin. But the Bear always drew my blood on this subject.
“Maybe,” says I, “they are trailing the big war party that has just come in from raids on peaceful ranches along the Smoky Hill River. Or they could be looking for that white woman and child held by the Kiowa.”
He set his jaw real stubborn. “I don’t know about those things. I am not a Kiowa but a Human Being. I have not been raiding along the Smoky Hill River. Yet I suppose if a soldier sees me he will shoot at me all the same.”
He was right enough in that, and I for one didn’t know how to explain it. However, I resented his unstated suggestion that it was
I went back to my own tepee. Now I haven’t mentioned yet that while Sunshine’s father was dead and she didn’t have brothers, she did have three sisters, and they lived with us. One of them was also a widow and had two little kids. I was the only grown man in the establishment and had to hunt for the whole bunch. In return, them women done all the other work, and I reckon I could also have laid with them had I a mind to, though I never did with anybody but Sunshine, on account of until she got pregnant she alone exhausted me, and so far as since then was concerned, I might be a bit of a prude, but keeping a harem was never to my taste.
As I lay on my buffalo robe and looked at the swell or Sunshine’s pregnant belly, all I could think of was how Olga might at this very moment be carrying the seed of that savage in her. She was forever soiled. I could leave my lodge at any time, go back to civilization, take a bath, and be white again. Not her. The
While I was in this poisonous mood, little Frog toddled over and handed me the tiny wooden horse I had carved for him. He was now about the age of Gus when captured. I handed the toy back to him. He just looked real solemn at me and then at it, and put it down very careful on my bed and goes away. That was the first indication I got of the atmosphere inside the lodge, but then I noticed the women was all unusually quiet and the children of my widowed sister-in-law, a boy and a girl, who I might joke with or tell stories to before the meal was served, were keeping to their own area.
Sunshine served me up a bowl of roots mashed up with some berries. These ingredients had been gathered the previous summer and saved in a dried version. It was like taking a mouthful of mud.
“Where’s that cow haunch I brought in yesterday?” I asks in bad temper.
She looks scared but corrects me. “That was three days ago.”
“If I say it was yesterday, that’s when it was, unless you’re looking for a beating, woman.”
She quickly begs my pardon, saying: “You are right, yesterday. I am a stupid person and—”
“Oh, shut up,” I says. “There are too many mouths to feed around here. That’s why I can’t ever keep us in meat. Why don’t your sisters get married?” The women all put their heads down. I coughed to free my windpipe from a swallow of that sludge.
“If you think I am going to lay with you,” I addressed them generally, “you are crazy.”
One of them come over to Sunshine and whispered in her ear, and then my woman says: “My sister will go out to trade her beaded dress for meat, if you will wait.”
