Red Men and White. Wister Owen
said Pretty Eagle. His voice seemed to enrage Cheschapah.
“Heh! it is always pretty good!” remarked Spotted Horse.
“I have done this too,” said Pounded Meat to his son, simply. “Once, twice, three times. The Crows have always been better warriors than the Piegans.”
“Have you made water boil like me?” Cheschapah said.
“I am not a medicine-man,” replied his father. “But I have taken horses and squaws from the Piegans. You make good medicine, maybe; but a cup of water will not kill many white men. Can you make the river boil? Let Cheschapah make bigger medicine, so the white man shall fear him as well as the Piegans, whose hearts are well known to us.”
Cheschapah scowled. “Pounded Meat shall have this,” said he. “I will make medicine to-morrow, old fool!”
“Drive him from the council!” said Pretty Eagle.
“Let him stay,” said Pounded Meat. “His bad talk was not to the council, but to me, and I do not count it.”
But the medicine-man left the presence of the chiefs, and came to the cabin of Kinney.
“Hello!” said the white man. “Sit down.”
“You got that?” said the Indian, standing.
“More water medicine? I guess so. Take a seat.”
“No, not boil any more. You got that other?”
“That other, eh? Well, now, you’re not going to blind them yet? What’s your hurry?”
“Yes. Make blind to-morrow. Me great chief!”
A slight uneasiness passed across the bantering face of Kinney. His Seltzer salts performed what he promised, but he had mentioned another miracle, and he did not want his dupe to find him out until a war was thoroughly set agoing. He looked at the young Indian, noticing his eyes.
“What’s the matter with you, anyway, Cheschapah?”
“Me great chief!” The raised voice trembled with unearthly conviction.
“Well, I guess you are. I guess you’ve got pretty far along,” said the frontier cynic. He tilted his chair back and smiled at the child whose primitive brain he had tampered with so easily. The child stood looking at him with intent black eyes. “Better wait, Cheschapah. Come again. Medicine heap better after a while.”
The Indian’s quick ear caught the insincerity without understanding it. “You give me that quick!” he said, suddenly terrible.
“Oh, all right, Cheschapah. You know more medicine than me.”
“Yes, I know more.”
The white man brought a pot of scarlet paint, and the Indian’s staring eyes contracted. Kinney took the battered cavalry sabre in his hand, and set its point in the earth floor of the cabin. “Stand back,” he said, in mysterious tones, and Cheschapah shrank from the impending sorcery. Now Kinney had been to school once, in his Eastern childhood, and there had committed to memory portions of Shakespeare, Mrs. Hemans, and other poets out of a Reader. He had never forgotten a single word of any of them, and it now occurred to him that for the purposes of an incantation it would be both entertaining for himself and impressive to Cheschapah if he should recite “The Battle of Hohenlinden.” He was drawing squares and circles with the point of the sabre.
“No,” he said to himself, “that piece won’t do. He knows too much English. Some of them words might strike him as bein’ too usual, and he’d start to kill me, and spoil the whole thing. ‘Munich’ and ‘chivalry’ are snortin’, but ‘sun was low’ ain’t worth a damn. I guess – ”
He stopped guessing, for the noon recess at school came in his mind, like a picture, and with it certain old-time preliminaries to the game of tag.
“‘Eeny, meeny, money, my,’”
said Kinney, tapping himself, the sabre, the paint-pot, and Cheschapah in turn, one for each word. The incantation was begun. He held the sabre solemnly upright, while Cheschapah tried to control his excited breathing where he stood flattened against the wall.
“‘Butter, leather, boney, stry;
Hare-bit, frost-neck,
Harrico, barrico, whee, why, whoa, whack!’
“You’re it, Cheschapah.” After that the weapon was given its fresh coat of paint, and Cheschapah went away with his new miracle in the dark.
“He is it,” mused Kinney, grave, but inwardly lively. He was one of those sincere artists who need no popular commendation. “And whoever he does catch, it won’t be me,” he concluded. He felt pretty sure there would be war now.
Dawn showed the summoned troops near the agency at the corral, standing to horse. Cheschapah gathered his hostiles along the brow of the ridge in the rear of the agency buildings, and the two forces watched each other across the intervening four hundred yards.
“There they are,” said the agent, jumping about. “Shoot them, colonel; shoot them!”
“You can’t do that, you know,” said the officer, “without an order from the President, or an overt act from the Indians.”
So nothing happened, and Cheschapah told his friends the white men were already afraid of him. He saw more troops arrive, water their horses in the river, form line outside the corral, and dismount. He made ready at this movement, and all Indian on-lookers scattered from the expected fight. Yet the white man stayed quiet. It was issue day, but no families remained after drawing their rations. They had had no dance the night before, as was usual, and they did not linger a moment now, but came and departed with their beef and flour at once.
“I have done all this,” said Cheschapah to Two Whistles.
“Cheschapah is a great man,” assented the friend and follower. He had gone at once to his hay-field on his return from the Piegans, but some one had broken the little Indian’s fence, and cattle were wandering in what remained of his crop.
“Our nation knows I will make a war, and therefore they do not stay here,” said the medicine-man, caring nothing what Two Whistles might have suffered. “And now they will see that the white soldiers dare not fight with Cheschapah. The sun is high now, but they have not moved because I have stopped them. Do you not see it is my medicine?”
“We see it.” It was the voice of the people.
But a chief spoke. “Maybe they wait for us to come.”
Cheschapah answered. “Their eyes shall be made sick. I will ride among them, but they will not know it.” He galloped away alone, and lifted his red sword as he sped along the ridge of the hills, showing against the sky. Below at the corral the white soldiers waited ready, and heard him chanting his war song through the silence of the day. He turned in a long curve, and came in near the watching troops and through the agency, and then, made bolder by their motionless figures and guns held idle, he turned again and flew, singing, along close to the line, so they saw his eyes; and a few that had been talking low as they stood side by side fell silent at the spectacle. They could not shoot until some Indian should shoot. They watched him and the gray pony pass and return to the hostiles on the hill. Then they saw the hostiles melt away like magic. Their prophet had told them to go to their tepees and wait for the great rain he would now bring. It was noon, and the sky utterly blue over the bright valley. The sun rode a space nearer the west, and the thick black clouds assembled in the mountains and descended; their shadow flooded the valley with a lake of slatish blue, and presently the sudden torrents sluiced down with flashes and the ample thunder of Montana. Thus not alone the law against our soldiers firing the first shot in an Indian excitement, but now also the elements coincided to help the medicine-man’s destiny.
Cheschapah sat in a tepee with his father, and as the rain splashed heavily on the earth the old man gazed at the young one.
“Why do you tremble, my son? You have made the white soldier’s heart soft,” said Pounded Meat. “You are indeed a great