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Now and then when toiling and talking to her Sam would straighten and his keen eyes would search the hills around him. He had no doubt that Blackfeet, and possibly Crow, scouts had been spying on him and wondering what he was doing. What brave men they were! Ten, fifty, or a hundred of them could have come here to take him, for he had no friend, no help, within two or three hundred miles; and they would have come to take him, not one of them, or two or six, but ten possibly, or twenty or forty, but for the fact that they wouldn’t pay the price. Mountain men had taught them that at least two of them would die, perhaps three, in the assault, and it took a lot of rum, the smell of a lot of loot, including good rifles and plenty of ammunition, to lure them to the risk.
Having sca
Suddenly Sam turned from a beast he was ski
In a few minutes he had ten pounds of venison steaming over one fire and a whole loin slowly roasting in the embers of another. When the boiled meat was tender he took to her a tin cupful of broth and a slice of hot loin on a tin plate; and these, kneeling, he offered to her, saying. "You have to eat. These hot deer drippins will warm your i
While Sam puffed his pipe and looked over the scene his contempt for the red people and some of their ways fa
It was time to be off but he was reluctant to go. In a moment of mad male gallantry he had considered digging a well by the shack, but knew that he would have to dig to river level, a depth of a hundred feet. Should he ask her to go on a journey with him, not to be his night woman (he was not a lustful man, nor one to take advantage of the female’s helplessness) but to get her mind off her grief. But so far as he could tell, she had not accepted him as a friend. He was not sure that she was conscious of him, or of the wolves howling in the night, or of the flowing-through-mountains sound of the river’s waters. He was put out with himself because he lingered: it was the Almighty’s problem, not his. The evening of his eighth day here he forced himself to face her; and after looking down at her bowed head for several minutes he knelt and kissed her dusty brown hair, and said, close to her ear, "There’s a lot of meat for you in the house. I’m off to get a wife now, but I’ll be back soon."
He mounted his stallion and headed south up the river, but four times he stopped and looked back. In this situation a man simply didn’t know what to do. If she was determined to sit by the graves and die he guessed she had the right to die alone. No beast, no man, would molest her. His journey lay not over to the Bighorns, the Powder, Tongue, and Wind rivers, but to the Gallatin Gateway, the Beaverhead, and Chief Tall Mountain, whose oldest daughter, blooming into womanhood, was as lovely as the spring song of the bluebird or the alpine lily at the edge of a melting snowbank. A wife, he knew, was a huge armful of responsibility, and responsibility was the disease in man. But he was lonely, and twice as lonely after leaving the
woman by the graves.
The fourth time he looked back he saw her come through the doorway and, stand by the cabin. She seemed to be looking round her. If the lark at heaven’s gate had sung for him alone he could have been no more gladdened. She would be all right! She had only been waiting for him to go away! Dear God, be kind to her! He saw her go over and sink to the earth between the graves. Dear God, be kind to her! Feeling that all was well, he waved to her, knowing that she could not see him, and then rode till midnight, and was thirty miles from her and her gruesome sentinels when he found a thicket in which to hide and sleep. Dear God, he thought, kissing his hand and pretending that it was this mother’s cheek, dear God, be kind to her.
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HB WAS TEN miles beyond the woman’s sight when she heard her name called. "Kitty!" the voice said. It was her husband’s voice and that was her husband’s name for her. Getting to her feet, she looked round her with wild staring eyes and then began to run toward the massacre site. "John!" she called as she ran. After two hundred yards she stopped and looked in all directions, and listened; and called again: "John!" She felt that he was present and not far away. She was staring at the tree where she had seen him bloody and bent when she thought of her children. Turning, she ran back up the hill, expecting to find them sitting by the graves; and when she saw only the two mounds she looked at them, listening, her heart in her throat. "John?" she said. She went to the shack and looked inside. She looked toward the river, and remembering that their camp was down there, she ran toward it, in the ungainly wavering way of one who had had no food and water and almost no sleep for many days and nights. She looked back under the lean-to that her husband and sons had built but nothing was there. She looked round her and softly called: "John?" She listened, but there was only the river’s waters. Like a woman waiting for the man who would surely come, she stood by the lean-to for an hour, looking and listening.