Max Brand - The White Cheyenne (Max Brand) (Literary Thoughts Edition)

I decided that I must elicit more information before I died with curiosity. I could not see this Running Deer now. He was merely a floating shadow of a man. All that I was searching for with greedy eyes was Lost Wolf—the man behind the man.

There were about sixty frontiersmen going by. They were riding either singly or in pairs, a wild motley of men and weapons and horses of all kinds and nationalities. Since there was a good deal of distance between the riders, it took a time for the train to go by.

As it wound along, I shifted my position a little and murmured confidentially in the ear of a companion:

“There’ll be a rumpus when Lost Wolf is brought in!”

He looked at me with a cross between suspicion and astonishment.

“Do you think he’ll ever be brought in?”

“Why not?” said I. “The best redskin in the world has to go down at last before white men’s wits and ways, I suppose. Don’t you think so?”

He continued to stare at me, but only with half an eye. The rest of his head was returning to the procession which still filed past, every man sitting particularly straight in the saddle, as if all sixty of them were extra proud because he had had a hand in the capture of a single savage. Which they were, too. Cheyennes were a brand of savage which could not be duplicated in any other part of the world.

Then my new companion said: “Since when did Lost Wolf have a red skin? Can you tell me that, stranger?”

It seemed peculiarly difficult to get any information about this chief out of the crowd. I stepped deeper among the men. I said to the first one whose eye I caught in passing:

“The Cheyennes are a great lot, with two chiefs like Running Deer and Lost Wolf!”

“Good heavens!” this man said in great dismay. “Have they made that fellow a chief, now? When did you get that news?”

He was immensely excited and sought to stop me and get more of the details of this bit of gossip, but I hurried away from him.

I decided that Lost Wolf was one of the queerest creatures in the world if he were an Indian so great that his mere friendship distinguished another brave and made him great. Yet if he were without a following as a chief and if he were even without a red skin—what was he, then?

If I had been curious before, of course, I was in a flame now. I decided that it was hopeless to try to draw out information from these people except by inference and innuendo—getting them to talk about something about which they thought I already knew. That is still the best way with your true Westerner, who still hates to explain the simplest matters to a stranger.

I mixed still deeper in the crowd, and as half a dozen riders went by on the tall, grand-moving horses which were being brought from the East to the plains, just as I had brought Sir Thomas, I said casually to a companion:

“It’s a queer thing that those little, ratty Indian ponies can keep away from real horseflesh like this! Still Running Deer and Lost Wolf and their kind must know how to make the most out of those runts!”

This time the man who had caught my words turned around and swore openly in amazement.

“Stranger,” said he, “who ever has seen Lost Wolf on anything but the finest hoss that ever stepped on grass?”

I slunk away.

From that moment I began to almost give up hope of ever learning anything about Lost Wolf. No matter what I suggested—and surely everything that I had said had been most probable—I seemed to be wrong—utterly and laughably wrong.

However, in a half-despairing fashion I determined to keep up my crossfire in the hope of raising a little news about the great and absent Lost Wolf.

I retired with Sir Thomas. As the last of the riders went past and most of the crowd followed, I began to pat the shoulder of my beauty, saying quietly to an old chap near by—one philosophical enough to let the others follow the procession without paying any heed to them:

“Well, partner, they’ll remember this day, I suppose, now that Running Deer has been brought in!”

“Aye, they’ll be apt to remember it!” said he.

It seemed to me that there was an evil light in his eyes. Therefore I added: “You act as though you were in doubt about it being a good thing to bring him in at all.”

His eyes glinted at me aside from under his shrubbery of brows.

“I doubt it, right enough,” said he.

I waited, sure that he was now excited enough to follow up his last remark without further urging on my part, and I was right.

“Oh, they’re pretty happy tonight,” said he, “but I say that they’re a lot of fools! Sixty brave men with the wits enough to get Running Deer, but without the wits to take his scalp and leave him dead out there on the plains!”

“Why,” I said, surprised by this calm brutality, “would that really be the best thing?”

He snapped out: “Suppose that you found a bear’s cub, would you take it home and then leave the door open after you got inside your cabin?”

He waited, glaring.

“Well,” he added, “how can the door of this town be shut? Will you tell me that? Shut fast enough to keep out Lost Wolf, when he comes raging and ramping into town?”

He was very much worked up and he went on: “There’s gunna be dead men around these parts before the morning ever takes a squint at Zander City. But I ain’t gunna be one of them. I’m gunna be off in the tall timber. I’m gunna jog right along!”

He started up and hurried off as though there were no time to lose.

I gaped after him in amazement. One would have thought that Lost Wolf was resistless wildfire!

My personal grudge and rage against the big Doctor was gone, by this time. Not that I had any reason, of course, for hating him the less, but because I had come on the trail of something much larger than he or I. I had before me the graceful figure of Running Deer, whom sixty frontiersmen could rejoice in capturing because he was the friend of Lost Wolf—who was neither chief nor even redskin!

I could learn what had happened this day concerning Running Deer, at the least.

Rene Laforce, that brutal and famous scout from Canada had been in Zander City the day before, when news was brought in that a party of Cheyennes had swooped down on the pasture lands near the town where a large number of horses were grazed, carrying off seven or eight score of them.

Laforce had reputation enough to be given command of the party of riders which started in hot pursuit. They rode fast enough to come up to the heels of the Indians. There were only some dozen or fifteen of these, but, like true Cheyennes under a dauntless leader, they had turned back and started to put up a running fight to keep off the whites, while two or three of the Indians kept the stolen horseflesh on the move.

The leader of this rear-guard action, which cost the men from Zander City three or four casualties, was the brilliant figure of Running Deer. Hard luck followed him at the last, however, and it was chance rather than the skill of the whites that brought him down. The pony he was riding stumbled, catching its foot in a hole in the ground, throwing the young chief so heavily that he was stunned. The Cheyennes turned back to fight for him, but they had no chance. A wave of a score of triumphant men whirled around Running Deer. With this living prize the party turned and started back toward Zander City.

Here was Running Deer among us, and yonder on the prairies was his friend, Lost Wolf.

“But,” said I, “I don’t see why Lost Wolf is so much to be feared, if he allows his friend to be carried off like that.”

I was told that Lost Wolf was not there; that he could not have been there, for had he been present the men of Zander City would have had to pay dearly for their captive.