Ghost Dance (12 page)

"Why?" asked Chance.

"Because I have talked with the Messiah," said Kicking Bear simply, "and He has told me it is true."

Chance felt a shiver move along his spine.

"You talked with the Messiah?" asked Chance.

"Yes," said Kicking Bear, "in the country of the Yellow Stones, where the water is like steam and the rivers burn, the Messiah came to me in a vision and He taught me the Ghost Dance and the Ghost Songs, and told me to teach these things to His children."

"How do you know what He said was true?" asked Chance.

"Does the Son of the Great Spirit lie?" asked Kicking Bear.

"I suppose not," said Chance.

"Look," said Kicking Bear. "I will show you." He got up and went to the corner of the cabin where he had leaned his Winchester. Carrying the weapon in his left hand he returned to the fire. "The Messiah," he said, "taught me to make the Ghost Shirts and I have taught this to the Hunkpapas." To Chance's surprise, Kicking Bear handed him the weapon. The Indian then went to a bundle of his belongings, containing his medicine bag, which lay near the door of the cabin. With his left hand Kicking Bear rummaged about through a blanket of items and drew forth a large buckskin shirt, dyed scarlet. He shook the shirt out and held it up for Chance to look at. There was a half-moon on the chest and the image of a buffalo on the back. It was a Ghost Shirt.

"When I wear this shirt," said Kicking Bear, "no bullet or knife can hurt me. The medicine of this shirt is strong."

"You should have worn the shirt this afternoon," said Sitting Bull, between puffs on the pipe. Chance thought he detected the faint glimmer of a smile in the chiefs eyes, but he could not be sure, for the expression of Sitting Bull was now as apparently imperturbable, as impassive, as expressionless as before.

"Yes," agreed Kicking Bear. "I should have."

Then Kicking Bear held the shirt before his body. "I will show you," said Kicking Bear to Chance, and motioned for Chance to pick up the weapon and fire at him.

"I don't want to shoot you," said Chance. No sixteenth of an inch of deerhide was going to stop a Winchester bullet, and Chance had enough troubles without worrying about shooting down Kicking Bear, prophet of the Ghost Dance. Grawson was enough to have after him. There was no point in having the entire enraged Sioux nation on his trail as well. Chance smiled to himself. "No thank you," he said to Kicking Bear.

"Shoot!" demanded Kicking Bear.

All Chance could think about was the dead bird in the medicine man's medicine bag, the leaves Kicking Bear had given him, the peelings of aspen. "No," said Chance, very firmly, "no thank you."

"I will do it," said Running Horse, and before Chance could stop him, Running Horse had pulled the rifle from his lap and discharged it point-blank at the chest of Kicking Bear.

"God!" yelled Chance, springing to his feet. The cabin was still ringing with the report of the Winchester and the smoke from the expended cartridge burned Chance's eyes and nostrils.

He expected to rush to the side of Kicking Bear but the Indian was still on his feet.

Running Horse could not have missed at that range, but there seemed to be no mark on the shirt, or Kicking Bear.

"I have seen this before," said Running Horse, handing the Winchester to Chance, who took it numbly.

"Now you see," said Kicking Bear, folding the Ghost Shirt on his knee with his left hand, "the Ghost Shirt is Big Medicine."

There was not even a powder stain on the shirt.

"In the spring," said Kicking Bear, "when the Messiah comes, the white men may try to stop Him, or try to kill Him again. That will be bad for the white men because then the true children of the Messiah, the Indians, will have to fight. They will have to take to the warpath to protect the Messiah." Kicking Bear now had the shirt half folded, half wadded up. "In the fight the Ghost Shirts will protect the Indians, but the soldiers will die, because they have no Ghost Shirts."

On an impulse Chance cocked the Winchester and, firing from the hip at the porcelain mug on a shelf across the room, pulled the trigger.

The bullet burst the mug into a thousand gleaming white porcelain fragments and sank two inches into the beam log behind the shelf.

Chance handed the weapon back to Kicking Bear and sat down, wanting to think things out.

Then Sitting Bull spoke. "The soldiers," he said, "may try to stop the Ghost Dance. That will be trouble. That will be war. My people will fight."

"Do you want that?" asked Chance.

Sitting Bull looked at him stolidly. "No," he said. "But my people will not stop the Ghost Dance."

"Why not?" asked Chance.

"Because they believe it is the will of the Great Spirit," said Sitting Bull.

"Do you believe it?" asked Chance.

"I do not know," said Sitting Bull. "Maybe it is true. I think it is hard to know the will of the Great Spirit."

"What will you do if soldiers come to take you away?" asked Kicking Bear.

"I will go with them," said Sitting Bull, taking a tiny twig and pushing it into the fire under the kettle.

"The Hunkpapa will not let their chief be taken away," said Running Horse.

Sitting Bull took the twig, now burning, and put it in the bowl of his pipe, relighting it, and then threw the twig away. He puffed once or twice on the long-stemmed pipe. "That is bad," he said, "for then many men will die." He puffed some more and then looked at Chance. "Then there will be war," he said.

 

 

 

 

Chapter Eight

 

It was the twelfth of December, 1890.

Winter, though its signs occasionally made themselves felt, was still holding off. On the whole it had been a strange, warm dusty fall. There had been no snow as yet.

When winter comes, thought Chance, it will come fast and hard.

For more than a month Chance had shared the quarters of Running Horse, a small one-room cabin which Running Horse had occupied alone since the death of his mother, two years earlier. There had also been a younger sister and two brothers, one younger and one older, all of whom had died of smallpox in 1866. Running Horse himself, Chance had observed, in tiny, scarcely noticeable pitted scars on his face and neck, bore the marks of the disease.

It takes a people time, thought Chance to himself, to build a resistance to disease, time for the disease to weed the stocks, leaving behind the surviving, the hardy. The fair resistance of the whites to this disease, still not adequate, had been purchased cruelly over centuries, generation by embattled generation.

Chance wondered if wool blankets from smallpox wards still found their way as gifts and trade goods to Indian encampments. Probably not, he thought, the Indians are no longer dangerous. And that was in the East, he told himself, when we were more barbarous, or more frightened.

And maybe it's not true, he said to himself, maybe it's not even true.

It's time I left, Chance told himself, I've stayed too long.

That night, as they shared their kettle, Chance decided to speak to Running Horse.

He wanted to give Running Horse something to thank him for the hospitality he had been shown, but he didn't know what. He knew Running Horse well enough to know that he would not accept white man's money, and Chance had nothing much else of value. Perhaps his watch, he thought. He could buy another.

But then Running Horse would want to give him something else, of comparable value, and what did Running Horse have of suitable value that he could really afford to spare? And if the gifts were not of somewhat equivalent value Running Horse would be shamed. Perhaps my shaving mirror, thought Chance, but that didn't seem right. This requires thinking, said Chance to himself. The whole problem is preposterous perhaps, but not here in this cabin at this time. This matter will be important to Running Horse, said Chance to himself, and thus it is important to me.

While he was ruminating these matters, the affairs of the world, in the figure of Joseph Running Horse, impinged on his meditations.

Running Horse, having finished the meal, was smoking across from him.

"Today," said Running Horse, "Sitting Bull gave me this. It was brought to him from the agency."

From inside his shirt Running Horse produced a paper, it was Harper's Weekly, and a handbill.

Chance took them quickly.

"There is your picture," said Running Horse, pointing to the handbill.

For an instant Chance's hand felt like shaking, but did not, and he was glad it did not.

Rather, saying nothing, he looked over the materials. After he had read them, he said, "You must thank Sitting Bull for me. It was good of him to see that I got these things."

Chance would be moving out in the morning.

In Harper's, there was a feature story, picked up from an Omaha newspaper, which had perhaps received it from a weekly in Good Promise, or perhaps the story had drifted in, carried by a homesteader, moving eastward, sold for fifty cents or so. It told of an outlaw surgeon, who had shot a soldier in Good Promise, South Dakota, and then treated his wound and disappeared. There was no picture but the description was not bad. Chance realized he must wrap the medicine kit inside the blanket roll from now on. The other item, the handbill, was a wanted poster, with his picture, a description, and the information that he was wanted for murder and that there was a reward of one thousand dollars, not for capturing or killing him, but simply for information leading to his arrest.

Grawson, thought Chance, he's saving me for himself.

The address to which the information was to be sent was an office number in a government building in Washington, D.C.

Why doesn't it just say Lester Grawson, Chance asked himself.

Chance clenched his fists, wadding the handbill in his right hand.

He was damn sure he was not wanted for murder, and if he was, there was no thousand-dollar reward. That was a fantastic sum of money–for anything–let alone for information.

There would be no reward.

Grawson might say so, but the reward would never be forthcoming, never. Still its promise might get him for Grawson. The promise would be sufficient. Chance could bitterly imagine the meaningless check drawn on the State of South Carolina which Grawson might, taking his prisoner into custody, bestow on some duped, grinning homesteader or bounty hunter, a custody that would end probably with a bullet in the back of Chance's head.

The resources of the law belong to Grawson, thought Chance, infuriated. Grawson, with his badge, his credentials, his forged warrant for arrest.

Even the handbill might have been, on Grawson's authority, printed in Washington and forwarded through standard channels. Chance wondered if anyone would have bothered to check on the matter. Why should they, he asked himself. Grawson has the official papers. Who would expect that Grawson, with his badge, his credentials, his warrant, his letters, was not employed in the work of the law but serving the ends of his personal vendetta?

He's a killer, thought Chance, and good people will bless his guns.

Chance considered surrendering himself to the authorities, informing them of Grawson's pursuit, but that would mean involvement at Standing Rock, trouble with the army in the Totter shooting, and at best the law could only tell him that Grawson must first attack, and then they would have a case, in short, that they were helpless until, in effect, Grawson caught and killed him.

So Chance would run again.

"I was told more by Sitting Bull," said Running Horse.

"What?" asked Chance.

"Today a policeman from the land of the Great White Father, at the end of the wires and rails, came to Standing Rock."

"Grawson?" asked Chance.

"I do not know," said Running Horse, "but he is looking for you."

Chance's heart stopped.

"How?" asked Chance. "How?"

"I do not know," said Running Horse.

Chance tried to think, clearly. The handbill, the fight in Good Promise, the army, the authorities.

"I think," said Running Horse, "that at the agency it is known a white man who heals is staying at the lodges of the Hunkpapa."

Chance nodded. Word of his being on the reservation might have drifted back to the agency, perhaps from talk of women at the ration points.

He had done what he could in the weeks with Running Horse to practice his craft, examining the sick, setting bones, treating sores, trying to get the Indians, if nothing else, to boil water and wash bandages. A number of Indians, learning of his presence, had made the trip to Running Horse's cabin to profit from his skills, some from as far away as forty miles. Yes, Chance said to himself, the word that a white doctor was on the reservation might well have made the rounds, and in this circuit might easily have been picked up by the Indian Police, who would then as a matter of course have reported it to the agent. Probably no one had been out to investigate already simply because of the Ghost Dancing. The entire reservation was a powder keg and the authorities were not eager to risk setting it off. The agent, or the army at Fort Yates, or even the sheriff in tiny Good Promise, might have put these things together, and sent the telegrams eastward.

Chance had little doubt that the sum of it was that Grawson was at Standing Rock, and would be looking for him. Grawson–whom he had left so far behind.

"Do you want me to kill him when he comes?" asked Running Horse.

"No," said Chance, "no."

"Then you will kill him," said Running Horse, taking a puff on his pipe.

"No," said Chance, "no."

Running Horse put down the pipe. "Why not?" he asked.

"I don't want to hurt anyone," said Chance. "I did once–I killed a man–I don't want to hurt anyone else."

 

* * *

 

The next morning, before dawn, Chance saddled the sorrel and mounted, intent on a quiet departure from the Standing Rock Reservation.

"Do not forget," said Running Horse, who watched him preparing to go, "you are my Brother and one of the Hunkpapa."