Badlands Bloodsport

“You did some good shooting during those attacks, and red John notices the good shooters. I want you out here so they don’t think you’re going to kill Touch the Clouds from hiding.”

Slappy puffed up with pride. “I am a dangersome son of a bitch, ain’t I?”

“Savage as a meat axe,” Fargo said in a sarcastic voice.

Both men fell silent as the line loomed closer, then slowed their ponies to a walk as they studied this curious sight. Touch the Clouds halted the group and they counseled among themselves for perhaps five minutes. Then, as one, each brave notched his bow or aimed his trade rifle at the two white skins.

“Well, Trailsman, we’re gone beavers,” Slappy muttered.

“Put some stiff in your spine,” Fargo muttered back. “They’ll satisfy their curiosity before they kill us.”

“Well, there’s some pumpkins! I got time to piss before I die.”

Fargo proved right. Touch the Clouds, flanked on either side by two braves, rode forward to parley.

“If this is a cunning white man’s trick,” Touch the Clouds greeted them in his heavily accented English, “I will flay your soles and make you walk on hot embers before I kill you. If you have straight words, I have ears.”

“Only this,” Fargo replied. “You have killed some of us. We have killed some of you. Both sides fought bravely, no man showing the white feather. Now I will help you to save your tribe.”

Touch the Clouds translated this foolish statement to the four braves with him. None altered their stoic faces, but contempt was clear in their eyes.

“Save our tribe?” Touch the Clouds scoffed. “Fargo, are you crazy-by-thunder? We can take you now like a bird’s nest on the ground. I have no ears for such foolish words.”

Fargo rolled his head over his right shoulder, indicating the fodder wagon. “The man from the Land of the Grandmother Queen, the one who killed your herd spy and violated Hunt Law, is in that wagon. I have tied him up. He is yours to take back to your tribe.”

Fargo counted on the fact that the Cheyennes had not seen the actual shooting. Touch the Cloud’s next words confirmed this.

“Give? Would you make me a squaw? Fargo, you sing the brave-heart songs, and I will take no joy in killing you. But we are the fighting Cheyenne and we will take! We saw two men fleeing, two men in long black coats and foolish round hats. How can we know which one did the killing? We mean to capture both and kill all those who have sheltered them.”

“You won’t have any trouble capturing the other. Just ride back through the malpais following the trail made by bluecoats. You will find his dead body.”

“You speak bent words. We did not kill this man.”

“No, he was killed by the man in the wagon. It was over a woman.”

Touch the Clouds translated again for his companions, and this time contempt hardened all five faces.

“Over a woman?” Touch the Clouds repeated. “Truly, now I will believe you. White men kill with no respect for the importance of dying.”

“Yes, the red man is noble,” Fargo said, scorn sharpening his voice. This was no time to show submissive weakness. “I have seen a Cheyenne warrior grab a white baby by the ankles and dash its brains out against a tree. Is this the respect you speak of?”

A sudden anger squall rose in Touch the Clouds’ face. “I have spoken, hair-face. Your ‘offer’ is cowardly and foolish. Only we can save our tribe. You will die where you stand!”

23

Touch the Clouds opened his mouth to give the command.

“Now, Slappy,” Fargo said.

Slappy handed the drawing to Fargo, who quickly turned it around so the others could see it. This was the moment of truth for the beleaguered whites: If Touch the Clouds or his companions had seen white men’s portrait art before, Fargo’s long shot would fail—and at first he feared it had done so.

The first reaction of all five braves was unremarkable. Their eyes, accustomed only to the wavy lines, crude figures, and symbolic shapes of the Cheyenne winter-count, were now staring at something altogether new to their world: a lifelike portrait of a living brave astride his mustang. They simply refused to understand it and were incapable of even knowing what all these bold black lines meant.

Then, all of an instant, Touch the Clouds sucked in a sharp, hissing breath. His face lost much of its color, and he nervously nudged his pony back a few paces. The others, too, followed suit, one even turning his pony in fright and riding back to join the others. All pretense of an “expressionless face” was gone now as the remaining four braves showed fear, wonder, and confusion.

“It cannot be me,” Touch the Clouds managed. “Yet it is, most certainly! And my buckskin . . . how can I be sitting my horse, speaking now, yet frozen on this . . . this thin piece of bark?”

A massive weight lifted from Fargo’s shoulders. But landing the dally rope did not mean the horse was corralled.