Far as the Eye Can See by Robert Bausch Page B

this time at a slower pace. I rode out front by myself and kept us going due east once we got back to the river. We got to Fort Hays just after sunrise, crossed back to the north side of the river and joined Theo’s circle of wagons.
    He was not happy to see us. And the Swedes we was leading wasn’t too happy, neither, but they was glad to be alive. For a while there I was a kind of hero because I had led them out of the danger of them wild Indians.
    Then those same wild Indians come riding up to the fort right behind us. They still had the wagon with them, the mules hauling lodgepoles and tepee skins, and the women and children. Colonel Harding, who spoke the language, rode out to meet them. He had Theo with him. They talked for a bit while the rest of us watched, our guns and rifles ready to fire. I stood next to one of the wagons with my carbine resting on the top of a wagon wheel, and I was aiming at the center of the big Indian who did all the talking. It was so quiet, all you could hear was a dog barking somewhere in the camp, and the wind whipping through the tops of the trees. Then Harding and Theo come back to where we was all waiting. Theo got off his horse and walked up to me, shaking his head. Harding stayed on his horse but he come over in front of me, too, right next to Theo. The Indians turned their horses and trotted a few hundred feet to our left, near the river, and started dismounting and unpacking the mules.
    “They’re going to camp here for a while,” Theo said.
    “What’s going on?” I said.
    “Who did the shooting?” Harding wanted to know.
    “General Cooney,” I said, at the same time that he said, “I did.”
    “You killed a innocent man,” Theo said.
    “He pulled a knife,” I said.
    “He wanted to show it to you—he was offering it to you as a gesture of goodwill.”
    “It didn’t look like goodwill to me,” General Cooney said.
    “He was just going to show it to you,” Theo said. “He was proud of it. He wanted to trade it for something.”
    I wasn’t feeling like a hero no more. It was damn hard to look Theo and Harding in the face. All I could say was “You really believe that?”
    “I don’t know many Indians that lie,” Theo said. “That’s the one thing you can count on. They don’t bother to lie.”
    “Yeah, well,” I said. “Just about everybody lies about something.”
    “That older gentleman over there is Chiischipaalia. That means ‘Twines His Horse’s Tail.’ One of the great Crow medicine men.”
    “He didn’t look like no chief,” Cooney said.
    “They all look like chiefs,” Harding said. “These are Crow Indians. We ain’t never had to fight them. They’re on our side.”
    I had nothing to say to that.
    “Well,” Cooney said, “I sure am sorry about it.”
    “You’re going to have to do better than that,” Harding said. “You got to give them something.”
    “What?”
    “You own more than one horse?” Harding said.
    “No.”
    “They want something from you. You ought to make it pretty valuable.”
    “Can I buy another horse from you?”
    Harding rubbed his white-gloved hand under his chin. “I’ll sell you one, but you give them Indians that one you’re riding. That’s what the young fellow you killed wanted to trade the knife for.”
    I shook my head. “The devil take me.”
    The two Swedish gentlemen, again with hats off, come over and seemed like they wanted to ask something. “You may as well settle in here for a while,” Theo said to them. “We’ll all start out again soon.” Then he turned and looked at me. “That okay with you?”
    “Certainly,” I said. My face felt hot and swollen. “I didn’t want to lead no train anyway.”
    “You did all right getting them back here,” Theo said.
    It was later the next say that he found out I’d led them on the south side of the river. He didn’t think much of that. “You would not of even run into Twines His Horse’s Tail’s bunch if you’d done what I said