Cheyenne Gold E-Book

Max Brand

• Herausgeber: Ktoczyta.pl
• Kategorie: Krimi
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

The most dangerous killer in Alaska, Menneval sends a certain Bill Ranger to California in search of information about his father and son Crosson. After many setbacks, Bill finally finds the Crossons in the woods. The life of father and son is shrouded in deep mystery. Bill will be with them to become a member of incredible adventures and bloody skirmishes.

Leseprobe

Contents

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 19

CHAPTER 20

CHAPTER 21

CHAPTER 22

CHAPTER 23

CHAPTER 24

CHAPTER 25

CHAPTER 26

CHAPTER 1

THE White Horse stood at the head of the Sacred Valley. He did not know that it was the special domain of the great god of the Cheyennes, Sweet Medicine. He did not know that even the air of this valley was holy, feared by man. He only knew that there was peace unutterable between the cliffs on either side, and the gateway between towering rocks through which the river slid out into the canyon beyond. He knew that this was not like any land through which he had ranged in the days of his wild, free running, before the man had found him.

The grass was more dense, more richly green. The trees were rolling clouds, immensely large, and the very water had a snowy taste of purity.

Where in the world, besides here, could there be found buffalo ignorant of guns and therefore fearless in their numbers, or mountain sheep who grew pig-fat in the meadows of the lowlands, or tall mountain goats who forgot the heights to which they had ascended, since they needed no safety guards of high climbing? Where could be found the herds of tall deer and the flashing disks of antelope who were fearless also?

The White Horse lifted its head to the wind, which ruffled his mane and sent a silken flash through the length of his tail. On that wind he read the story of a thousand odors, and all of them told him of peace. His own sides were sleeked over a little with peace, even by these few days of resting in the Sacred Valley. His nerves were as still as the waters of the little lake just below the waterfall.

Above the chanting of the cascade he heard a thin, shrill, commanding whistle, small as the cry of a hawk from heaven. He shook his head and answered at a gallop. He turned into a white streak of speed that flung his tail straight out behind him, and so he came to the still margin of the lake.

There Red Hawk awaited him. White men called him Rusty Sabin, but he looked more like his foster fathers, the Cheyennes. And Red Hawk was also known as the White Indian, because as a child he had been stolen by the Cheyennes and raised by them. As he sat on his heels clad in only a breechcloth, he washed the last pan of black mud. The eddy cleared the sediment away. With a quick, whirling motion he caused the cloud of soil to rise, to bubble over the side of the pan, and now the stream flowed clear and free into the dish. At the bottom there was a glittering remnant. He lifted the pan, poured the water out of it, and then into the cup of his hand transferred that remainder of golden bright pebbles and dust. It was very heavy. It was heavier than lead. He had washed more than a hundred dollars of virgin gold out of the lap of the earth in that single effort.

He poured the bright flash of it from one hand into the other; then he dropped the stuff into the mouth of the second buckskin sack. The other one was already full, and this one now was brimmed to the lips. He stuffed in a quantity of leaves and then sewed the mouth of the sack shut, using for a needle the slender, curving end of a rib and for a thread a bit of the sinew of a rabbit.

After that, he saddled the White Horse, who had been loitering around him sniffing at the sacks, biting gingerly at the long red hair of the master. He snorted when the weight of the sacks was lashed to the saddle. How many other horses had carried forty thousand dollars in gold on their proud backs? But the White Horse preferred the living weight of his master.

Then Rusty Sabin–whom all the Cheyennes knew as Red Hawk–pulled the moccasins onto his feet and tied about his waist the belt which supported the knife with the sixteen-inch blade on his left hip, the Colt revolver–that new and deadly weapon–on his right. To his own taste, the knife was the more significant weapon. He had made it in those old days when he had first been among white men. Now he had returned to the valley in search of gold and had found it. When he carried this load of wealth back and married Maisry Lester, he would settle down to a white man’s life in some eastern city, wearing hot, stiff, constraining clothes, a band of stifling cloth about his neck, polished and hard leather on his feet.

Every step that he took down the valley was a step towards the new life, a step away from the old.

He came to the mouth of the valley, the straight cliff on the one side, the standing rock, like a huge fist, on the other. The river ran with a hiss of speed through the middle, and the big trees leaned out far, on either side, shadowing the water, leaving only a narrow trail on one side of the stream.

When he came to the mouth of the gorge, Rusty Sabin halted and struck a small fire.

He said in the Cheyenne tongue, “White Horse, lie down in honor of the Great Spirit.” The white stallion instantly crouched like a dog. Rusty Sabin shook back his long hair and went on, “Sweet Medicine, I have come into your own house and taken something away from it. All my Cheyenne people think that this is very wrong. But I have come in under your eye. You see that I have not tried to steal anything away in the middle of the night, but I have remained day by day. I have killed none of the sacred cattle, the sheep, the goats, the buffalo. If you had been angry with me, surely you would not have taken the food from my hand. However, now I sit on my heels and talk with you, asking forgiveness for anything I have done that may be wrong. Give me a sign of favor or disfavor before I go away.”

He listened through a long moment. There was only the soft, ominous murmur of the water as it fled through the entrance to the valley. And then, high above him, he heard the scream of an eagle or a hawk. Hastily he looked up. It was an eagle. It was an unhappy omen. And he cried out:

“Sweet Medicine, are you sending me away like this? Are you giving me an angry word? Don’t you understand that this is our farewell? I never shall be able to come again. Speak to me kindly before I go far away to my own white people.”

He listened with a canted head, his hands turned up in supplication. But he heard nothing except the murmur of the sullen water. He stood up, at last, heavy of heart.

The white tepees of the Cheyennes, all made of the hides of cow buffalo, all well sewn, all well painted, all half sacred with the images which decorated them, rolled over a swell of the prairie not far from the bank of the stream.

As Rusty Sabin walked along, two miles away from the town, a crowd of the Indian boys on their wild ponies came racing, spied on him from a distance, and then charged down on him suddenly.

One of them carried a broken lance, leveled for mischief. Another had an old hatchet poised in his hands. At least three galloped with sharp arrows on the string, and every one of them had knives. So many mountain lions would have been less dangerous than this sudden flight of warriors-in-the-making; but Rusty Sabin walked straight on, without so much as lifting a hand.

That valley of young death came sweeping on until it was half a dozen paces away. Then it parted to the right hand and to the left. The White Horse pranced a little and crowded up close to his master. But Rusty Sabin walked on through the dust that had been beaten into his face and gave no sign.

A sudden uproar broke out of the Indian camp. From it thrust a volume of mounted children, first of all, like sparks before the flame, and after them came thundering the whole warrior weight of the encampment, braves painted and unpainted, dressed or half naked, just as they had risen from siesta, or from a feast, or from the philosophical smoking of a pipe. Each of them had grasped some sort of weapon, a rifle, a spear, bow and arrows; some brandished only knives, but as they came towards Rusty they shook the sky with their uproar. But whether young chiefs or common warriors without distinction, all of them acted like madmen determined to kill their enemy if possible. Some dropped down along the sides of their horses and aimed under the throat or over the neck of the pony arrow or rifle. Others dashed straight in with hatchets raised for the kill.

But the whole crowd split to right and left and with the howling of fiends gathered again in the rear of Red Hawk.

Again only one rider rushed up to Rusty Sabin. It was a young chief with more than one red-stained coup-feather in his headdress, and with a wide-bladed lance in his grasp. He landed on the bounding run, as the boy had done, and stood suddenly before Rusty Sabin, his hand raised in the air. He was a statue in gleaming copper, gloriously beautiful. He was in his early twenties, not a whit older than Rusty Sabin himself, and yet he carried himself with the unspeakable dignity of command.

Rusty paused and answered that salute with a lifted hand, in his turn.

“Ah, hai, Standing Bull!” he cried.

Standing Bull could not speak for a moment. Therefore a sort of fierceness blazed in his face before he caught the hand of Red Hawk. Long before, they had mixed their blood together, and therefore he repeated the oath of the blood brothers:

“Your blood is my blood; my blood is your blood. Your life is my life; my life is your life.”

Rusty Sabin spoke with him, word for word, and then they smiled on each other.

Standing Bull said, “If my brother has loaded his horse like a squaw coming back from a buffalo hunting, let him put the weight now on this horse of mine. The pinto is good enough for Standing Bull, but Red Hawk cannot enter among the Cheyennes riding anything but the White Horse.”

Rusty, laughing, changed the precious weight of those buckskin sacks from the white stallion to the red bay of Standing Bull. On the back of the White Horse he rode into the town of his adopted people.

Standing Bull, as the blood brother of this man, had taken precedence over the others, but now the rest of the warriors darted up close to him, one after another, shouting:

“Remember me, Red Hawk. There is a feast waiting in my tepee for you.” Or, “Why do you listen to the others? I have fresh buffalo tongues and a squaw who knows how to cook them.” Or, “I have a buffalo robe as soft as spring grass. Come to me, Red Hawk.”

Through these welcomes he rode into the inner circle of the camp and saw a tall form disappearing into one of the largest of the big tepees that made that innermost round. It seemed that the man was trying to escape to seclusion before the noise surrounded him. But as though realizing that he had been seen, the chief medicine man of the tribe now turned and lifted his face in a brief salute and gave to Red Hawk a fleeting glimpse of the tall, bent body, and the long face, placidly cruel, smiling with age.

Rusty Sabin rode past with an answering salute equally brief. A shudder far more lasting than the gesture passed through his body. More than once he had opposed Running Elk, and always victoriously, but there was something in his blood that told him trouble from that formidable brain lay ahead of him.

A girl flashed to the entrance flap of a tepee and shrank back again. In her place appeared a white man with a fat body and a bearded face, the beard formed towards a point at the chin not by trimming but by stroking with the hand. He wore glasses. And now he hurried out, waving his hand.

“Ah hai! Lazy Wolf!” called Rusty Sabin. Lazy Wolf was an easy-going white man, who had long made his home with the Cheyennes, and was Red Hawk’s firm friend.

He jumped down from his horse and caught the hand of the white man. But he did not feel from this man the same slight chill that came over him when he greeted other whites of his own race. The skin of Lazy Wolf might be white, but his heart, like that of Rusty, was very largely Cheyenne. It was by his own choice that he lived with his red brothers.

“Come in, Rusty,” he said. “Bring in Standing Bull with you...”

“Go in with him,” said Standing Bull. “I pass on to my tepee. When the feast is prepared and the best warriors have gathered to it, then you shall come to me, brother. But go in now with this other friend. He is a lazy man, but we know that he is brave. Peace to you, brother. While I am gone, remember me!”

Rusty Sabin went into the lodge of Lazy Wolf, who closed the tent flap in haste after him.

“When you come,” said Lazy Wolf, “you always bring a great dust with you.” He turned to address the flashing-eyed girl who was his daughter by an Indian wife now dead. “Do you know why he stays away so long at a time, Blue Bird? It’s because he wants the shouting and the cheering and the racing of horses, and the yelling, and the waving of hands with weapons in them. That’s what he wants. So he never stays long. As soon as the shouting dies down, Rusty goes on again.”

“Why do you speak English to him, father?” asked the half- breed girl. “Welcome, Red Hawk! Here is a new willow bed for you to lie on... and if you grow chilly with the evening, here is a painted robe. Lazy Wolf paid ten horses for it! Isn’t it beautiful? Here is a back rest. I made it all, even the feathering. Put your shoulders and your head back against it. So!”

“You see,” said Lazy Wolf, “that she praises everything she offers to you as though she were about to make a sale to a trader. Women are like that, Rusty. Confound them, they have to put a price mark on everything.”

“Listen to them shouting for you, Red Hawk!” said the girl, laughing with pleasure. “How they love you! Do you hear the squaws? There are babies born since you were last with the tribe–babies who never have seen your famous face. Go to the entrance of the tepee and let them see you.”

“I can’t do that,” said Rusty. “I don’t want to show myself like a little boy with his first tomahawk.”

“You must go!” she said, catching him by the hand. “There–stand up. Take this painted robe and throw it over your shoulder. Take this red pipe in your hand–here are some feathers for your hair–”

“Hush! No, no!” said Rusty. “I’ll go, but I don’t want to be decorated.”

He picked up a doeskin robe, light and soft and supple as velvet, and tossed it over his shoulders. Then he pulled back the entrance flap and stood before the people. The majority, now, were women and children. Behind them young braves sat on their horses together with a good scattering of more seasoned warriors who had returned to camp too late to see Rusty when he entered.

A great outcry came from all these people.

And, sure enough, a dozen women were holding up little laughing babies to look at the returned wanderer.

“Call the word to us! Give us the word! Oh, Red Hawk, call the word to us,” the women began to chant.

He lifted his hand. A mortal silence passed over them.

“I come from before the face of Sweet Medicine,” he said loudly. “I have lived under the hollow of his brows for many days. He gave me peace and good hunting. I give it to you again, out of this hand–I pour it upon you–peace and good hunting.”

He dropped the entrance flap again. Men and women and children were crying out with happiness. But Rusty sighed.

He shook his head.

“How long I have been away!” he said. “How very long! It seems to me that some of the faces are older, and some of them are missing.”

“Why did you have to put the robe of that silly white woman about you, Red Hawk?” asked the Blue Bird. “Since you went to live among the white people, have you become like them–ashamed of your body?”

“Perhaps I have,” said Rusty. “I don’t know. Things happen both to the mind we know and the mind we do not know. Among the white people, one changes every day. They are not like the Cheyennes, who never alter from father to son to grandson. They are a changing people. The red men are like the rocks that stand at the entrance to the Sacred Valley–”

“Sweet Medicine, have mercy upon us,” whispered the girl, swiftly, automatically.

“The red men do not change, but the white men change–even the manner of the clothes they wear they continually are changing. The women know how to put on new faces every day. Everything there is strange to me... Why should I be ashamed of my body? I am strong. I am not a cripple. And yet when I thought of facing the eyes of even the Cheyenne squaws and girls, I felt ashamed. That is all very strange.”

“It is time for you to dress for the feast,” suggested the Blue Bird. “Do you hear them? Listen! Do you hear the war songs? All the braves are remembering their deeds in battle, now that you have come home. Ah, I wish I could be there tonight inside the tepee of Standing Bull and listen to the counting of the coups. Do you hear them singing about their deeds already? The hearts of all the young boys are aching, and all the warriors who never have counted a coup are sitting in darkness, with their heads down, praying for battle. That is because you have come home to us. One brave man makes a whole tribe great! Because of one brave man, every warrior becomes a hero–the women bear bigger children–the children have hearts so great that they will not cry in the night! Shall I dress you, Red Hawk?”

“Will you?” said he.

“Yes. But you never paint your whole body, do you?”

“No, I never do that. You know why.”

She hung her head. “Yes,” she murmured, “I know why.”

He formed himself to say calmly, “It is still a pain to me to remember that I could not stand the torment of the tribe initiation. Perhaps Sweet Medicine sent that punishment on me. But of course it is too late to stand for the initiation again. If a lad fails once, he cannot have a second chance. But that is cruel. That makes the sickness in my heart, Blue Bird.”

“Look,” said Lazy Wolf. “The little fool is crying about it!”

Rusty touched her face.

“It is true! Your face is wet! What’s the matter, Blue Bird?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Nothing. But to think that you should have had such grief and shame–you–you–ah, Red Hawk!”

“Go on!” commanded her father. “Paint the red hawk on his chest, since that’s all the ornament he’ll have. Do it well, Blue Bird. You know how, by this time. I tell you, Rusty, that she’s been painting the thing even on stones. At every encampment, on everything–always a red hawk–to remember you by, I suppose.”

“Well, that’s strange,” said Rusty. “I’d think that you could remember a friend like me without painting a red hawk, Blue Bird.”

“Ah,” grunted the trader, “you never will have a brain in your head, Rusty!”

The girl got out the paints and the brushes. She began to paint a pouncing hawk with wings furling back and beak and cruel talons extended.

He bent his head and looked down to his chest. The wings of the stooping hawk extended right across his breast from shoulder to shoulder.

“How beautiful!” said Rusty Sabin. “Ai! Ai! To think that I never shall be able to see it right side up!”

“But you shall,” said the girl, and brought out a square mirror which she held up before him, laughing. He stared at the picture of himself, enchanted.

“And now you can dress,” said Blue Bird. “Here are the whitest deerskin leggings–you see how they are fringed? Here is a shirt worked with porcupine quills of every color. Here are the beaded moccasins.”

“Ah, how lucky if they should all fit!” said Rusty.

“Lucky?” murmured Lazy Wolf. “Well, you may call it luck if you wish–but I’d call it foolishness!”

In the lodge of Standing Bull the assemblage was so choice that not a single man was present who had not counted at least five painted feathers which represented the number of men each had killed–an honor far greater than the taking of five scalps. For that matter, it was known that Red Hawk never had taken a scalp in all the days of his life; but the smallest boys could not look on him without a shudder of admiration.

All of them were profusely painted in the most ceremonial style in whites and blacks and reds and yellows of fantastic design, so that they looked far from human.

Only Rusty Sabin himself carried on his breast the single design. By his failure, in his eighteenth year, to endure the tortures of the initiation into manhood, he had forfeited the proud privilege of being painted as a good Cheyenne should be for an important occasion.

The feast was short because the food was simple. It was washed down with water and, as a special luxury which showed the magnificence of Standing Bull as a generous host, with tea sweetened with sugar to the point of nausea. Rusty Sabin had lost some of his Cheyenne tastes. He barely was able to swallow that drink and keep on smiling.

Afterwards, when the guests had departed, Red Hawk sat for a long time with Standing Bull and watched the dying of the fire. The son of the chief, excited by the strange events of the evening, whimpered now and then in his sleep, and the soft voice of the squaw hushed the child.

At last Standing Bull said, “How is it in your heart, Red Hawk?”

Rusty answered, “It is like a March day when the sun is bright and the wind is cold from the snow. I am Cheyenne, but I must go to live with my own people.”

“Could you forget them?” asked Standing Bull.

“Whenever I look at the color of my skin, I must remember.”

“Remember them, then, but stay with us. We have paid a price for you. A Cheyenne father has loved you; a Cheyenne mother has nourished you. The god of the Cheyennes has spoken to you.”

“These are all great prices,” agreed Rusty, shaking his head, “but my mother was a white woman, and the price she paid down for me was her life, which Dull Hatchet took, and her scalp, which the Cheyennes carried away.”

“Does her spirit come near you still?” asked Standing Bull.

Rusty put his hand on the green scarab which hung from his neck. “You know, brother,” he said, “that when the scalp is gone from the head the spirit will not go to the Happy Hunting Grounds. Therefore her ghost is still wandering in the air. She is always near me. When I am with my people, the Cheyennes, I am glad, but she is unhappy. When I am with the whites, I am sad, but she is happy.”

“If she paid down the price of her life,” said Standing Bull gloomily, “then you belong to her and must do as she bids you do. I am sorry for you, Red Hawk. How long do you stay with us now?”

“I go in the first gray of tomorrow’s light.”

“Ah, that is a sorrow for me. I shall ride part of the way with you if I may.”

“You shall ride with me, and bring with you ten of your best braves. Each of them shall take extra horses and saddles on which goods may be packed. When you return with them, there will be new rifles for all of the warriors who follow you. There will be some of the light woolen blankets that the white men weave with machines. There will be medicine against fevers, and knives of strong steel, and hatchets, and axes, and whole packages of beads, and eagle feathers, and everything that makes an Indian rich. There will be something for every man, and every woman, and every child in the tribe. You will stand in the center of the encampment and you will give out the gifts according to the rank and age of each. Every time you make a present you will say, ‘This is from the hands of Red Hawk. In this way he says farewell to his red people.’”

“Are you so rich?” asked Standing Bull.

“I have been made rich by Sweet Medicine,” said Red Hawk.

“Sweet Medicine have mercy upon me!” murmured the young chief, swiftly. “I shall ride with you in the morning, brother. But ai, ai! What an ache there is in my heart!”

During the night the messages were sent. In the first gray of the morning, when even the dogs of the village still were asleep, twelve riders issued from the town and traveled across the prairies, each of them with ten or a dozen extra horses driven ahead in a swiftly running cluster.

They passed over the rolling country. They entered the lifeless flat of the true prairie, a green sea, a trackless plain where a compass would be needed for travel, or else the faultless instinct and memory of a red Indian. The prairie made them diminish. Within the immense horizon man and horse became traveling specks.

CHAPTER 2

WHEN the tap came at the kitchen door of the little house in Witherell, Maisry Lester was wrapping a blanket about her father. The weather was bland, but as soon as the day ended a dampness came into the air from Witherell Creek and the consumptive fever of Richard Lester was apt to begin again at that time of the day. So his daughter would start up the fire in the kitchen stove and make him comfortable again with a bit of warmth before he went to bed. There he sat with his head bent over a book while she hurried to answer the tapping at the door.

When she opened, Rusty Sabin stood there, laughing. But she shrank for a moment away from him. His suit of white deerskin made his skin seem darker than the mere sun could dye it; and his hair was almost as long as it had been in the old, wild days when she had first known him. Besides, he was all aflash and radiant with colored work of porcupine quills, like a fragile armor; and his feet glistened with an inlaying of beads. So she shrank for one instant as if from a wild Indian; then she ran into his arms.

He held her there, laughing. Her face was upraised, but he did not kiss her. That was a white custom which he had at last learned, it was true; but now he seemed to have returned to his old Indian ways, which did not permit of such intimacy. To any Indian a kiss was unclean.

He began to wave his hand over her shoulder to Richard Lester, Maisry’s father, and Lester, shouting a happy welcome, started to rise.

Rusty ran and prevented him. Then he turned and called out in Cheyenne, and there appeared on the threshold six feet of immensity–Standing Bull himself, with the fierce beauty of an Achilles on his face. The young chief carried in his hand a long-barreled rifle, and his other arm was raised to the ceiling as he said, “How!” in a voice of soft thunder.

Rusty presented him.

“My brother, Standing Bull,” he said. He chattered for a moment in Cheyenne. The Indian turned his expressionless face to one and then to the other of the white people. His dignity was more perfect than that of a senator.

“Your brother, Rusty?” exclaimed Richard Lester. “You mean your foster-brother, of course?”

“No, no. My blood brother. We have exchanged blood. We are the same flesh and the same spirit. Standing Bull is my brother.... Seat yourself, Standing Bull. Here is a chair for you. No, you’d rather sit on the floor, I know.... Ah hai! What do you think of him, Maisry?”

“I never saw such a man–does he understand a word of English?”

“Not a word.”

“What shall we do for him?”