Текст книги "Mountain Man"

Автор книги: Vardis Fisher

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It would be fine if a man could read the price tag and pay it, and swoop. his golden-brown doll to his chest and ride away. But the redman, whose life was dull but for warpath and occasional feast, squeezed the last emotion out of everything that came his way. Sam well knew that after he had given presents and renewed the pledge of brotherhood he might have to indulge the old fraud in hours of mysterious silence, while the chief conferred with the more rapacious souls among his ancestors; or Sam might have to sit for so many hours smoking the spittle-saturated pipe of friendship that his stomach would turn, or for days he might have to wait, while the solemn-faced humbug pretended that a few thousand aunts and cousins were coming in from the distant hills.

It would be the same ordeal, no matter what tribe he went to.

Around the campfires with other trappers Sam had paid close attention to their talk about Indian women. Some of the stories he found incredible, such as that of Baptiste Brown, a Canadian, who gave almost two quarts of his blood as a part of the bride price; or of Moose Creek Harry, who was tomahawked by his bride on his wedding night. The misogynists among the trappers, such as Lost-Skelp Dan, thought all women the curse of the earth and would not listen to talk about them; but the gallants astonished Sam by the vehemence, sometimes the threats and violence, with which they defended their taste in red women. Solomon Silver swore by the Osages, Bill Williams by the Eutaws, Rose and Beckwourth by the Crows, Jim Bridger by the Snakes, William Bent by the Cheyennes, and Loretto by the Blackfeet. Sam had found different virtues to admire in different tribes. The Eutaws made the finest deerskin leather, and unlike the Crows, Arapahoes, and Blackfeet, they did not steal. On the other hand, they would beg until a man loathed the sight of them. A chief would bring forth all the children in the tribe and they would be crying their heads off and staggering as if with hunger, though there might be enough food stored to last all winter.

The Arapahoes placed hospitality next to valor. They set before a guest the best they had and protected his life with their own. Among this people a man took as many wives as he could pay for, but Sam had decided that one wife for him would be enough. Having met William Bent at Bent’s Fort and heard him speak highly of the Cheyennes, Sam had ridden across Cheyenne country. He had been told that the first lodge he entered would be his home as long as he wished to remain, and that lodge had happened to belong to Vipponah, or Lean Chief, who had gravely shaken Sam’s big right hand and cried, "Hook-ah-hay! Num-whit?" (Welcome! How do you do?) Food and drink had been set before Sam, and after a night in this lodge he had been favorably impressed by the manners of these people. The lodge, in the form of a cone of poles eighteen feet long, set on end with their tops loosely bound so the smoke could pass through, and covered over with skins and buffalo robes, had the fire in its center. No Indian ever passed between the fire and the persons sitting around it. Sam thought it strange that so many of the children had streaks of gray in their black hair, and that the boys to the age of six or seven went completely naked, whereas the girls were clothed from infancy. Lean Chief, observing Sam’s appraisal of the marriageable girls around him, explained how it would be if Sam were to bid for one. He would tie his favorite pony to the lodge of the girl’s father. If he was acceptable to the father and the girl, the next morning he would find his horse with his father-in-law’s horses. If not acceptable, he would find his horse where he had left it, with all the boys of the village around it, hooting and jeering.

Sam had thought of taking a wife from the Crows, before learning that they were the world’s biggest liars and most industrious horse thieves. Just the same, they were such a handsome high-spirited people that he had twice returned to look at the girls. He had become amused at the way he was looking at the women in different tribes, and wondered if any whiteman seeking a wife had gone forth to look at French, German, English, Jewish, and other women.

All in all he had found the Indian people to be of middle stature, with lean straight bodies and fine limbs, their black hair usually flowing loosely over their shoulders, their keen black eyes aglow with the joy of living. Some of them had hair so long that it reached the ground at their feet. Except for those who lived chiefly on fish, they had beautiful white teeth. Practically all the tribes ornamented their garments with porcupine quills, beads, colored stones, feathers, leather fringes, and human hair from the heads of their enemies, dyed various colors. They painted their faces with vermilion, ochre, coal dust, ashes, hump fat, and colorful fruit juices. They wore in their black hair beads, buttons, feathers, shells, stones, and just about anything that gleamed or glittered. It was not unusual to see a squaw with eight or ten pounds of glass beads attached to her skirt, leggins, and moccasins. All Indians liked to sing, but for whitemen the sounds they made were not melodic: their war song would begin on the highest note they could reach and fall note by note to a guttural grunt; but abruptly it was high and shrill again, and again falling, to rise and fall, until white people who listened felt numbed in their senses and chilled in their marrow.

In Sam’s opinion there were no handsomer Indians than the Crows. They were a dashing colorful people with above average intelligence; a few whitemen, like Rose and Beckwourth, had become chiefs in the Crow nation and had lived with this people a long time. Though the braves had saddles they always rode without saddles when hunting wild game, and no other men in the world could match them on a horse. As Windy Bill said, it made a man plain oneasy to see with what fantastic skill they could ride on a dead run, the left heel on top of a ham, the left wrist through a loop of mane, and shoot arrows or guns under the horse’s neck; or on a dead run pick up the fallen arrows. But they were a notoriously adulterous people. Bill, who had lived among them, said the men never seemed to be jealous; if they found a wife with a lover they gave her to a brute who was likely to beat the hell out of her. A Crow warrior’s highest ambition in life was to lift twenty scalps and to show such skill and valor that he would be allowed to wear in his hair the feathers of the golden eagle, as a badge of courage and rank. One who wore even a single quill was entitled to and received profound deference; one with a half dozen quills was regarded with awe.

On Sam’s first visit to the Crows he was smoking a pipe and for some reason laid his Bowie at his side. He became aware of a Crow standing by him and of what the brave was doing. The sly thief was standing over the knife and had got it between two of his toes, with the robe from his shoulders almost concealing it. He stood immobile perhaps a minute; then, the foot clutching the knife, moved slowly upward into the folds of the robe and a noiseless hand reached down. At this moment Sam rose swiftly to his feet, and seizing the Indian by his throat and bottom, literally pitched him end over end, with the knife spilling from the robe as he sailed through the air. Three years later, when the Crows would change the course of his life, Sam was to wonder if it had all begun in that moment.

After leaving Kate he rode up the Musselshell to the big bend, and then westward nearly a hundred miles before turning south to the Yellowstone. He rode up the Yellowstone until in hazy distance he could see the mark of its deep gorges, and left it to follow a tributary, for Windy Bill had said he would spend the summer here, hidden from his enemies. Sam was still five miles from Bill’s camp when he sensed that a horseman was aproaching. Sam halted, his rifle across his left arm, and waited. He was not at all surprised when he heard a bullet whistle past his ear. It was a way mountain men had with one another.

In a few moments Bill came in sight, and he was loud with mock apologies and welcome.

"Wall, wall now, ole-timer!" he said. "I heerd ye wuz under, I shorley did. I heerd a Blackfoot varmint cut ye loose from yore possibles and ye wuz plum gone beaver." This was merely the kind of banter that most of the free trappers flung at one another. They all expected to die violent deaths, and so pretended to be amazed on finding a friend still alive. Sam was grinning in his golden beard.

But Bill did not grin when by the supper fire he heard Sam’s tale of the woman up the river. She was gone beaver, he said; god-in-whirlwinds, the wolves would drag the skulls away and the first Blackfoot to come along would lift her topknot. "I feel awful oneasy about thet woman. Why didn’t ya bring her along?"

Sam said she wouldn’t come; it would break her heart to take her away from the graves. Besides, he had thought he would do a little chirking up and get a papoose for his medicine bag. With mock gravity. Bill looked all around him, as though to see this Indian tribe and that one, and decide toward which Sam was taking his romantic interest. "I don’t see no Burnt-Thighs," he said, "ner any Broken-Arrers, no Yankataus, no Pian-Kashas, no  Cut-Throats." These were all names for members of the Sioux nation. "It wooden be a Digger, I doan expect. Ner a Snake. Jist which one air ye headin torst nohow'?"

"The Flatheads," Sam said, refilling his tin plate with boiled elk.

"Wall now," said Bill, "I think ye be actin real plum smart, I shorely do. The Flatheads, they ain’t no better varmints. They’s the only red people ain’t killed a whiteman yit. But one thing, Sam, I allus figgered, the furder a man is from his in-laws the longer his marriage will last. The hull doggone tribe will expect ya to feed them if ye live within five hundred miles."

"I had thought of that," Sam said.

The Flatheads were good honey, said Bill, filling his pipe. They were scairt to death of the Blackfeet, so would never come to visit him because they would never dare leave home. Did he have his sugar plum picked out?

"I saw her last spring."

"She might be some other man’s filly now."

"Might be," Sam said.

"Chief’s gal?"

"Tall Mountain."

"Waugh! A princess!" said Bill. He fixed his large, rather bulging pale-blue eyes on Sam’s face. He reckoned he had seen the critter a year or two ago when he was pulling leather for Pare’s Hole. He knocked his pipe out, filled it, listened to the night sounds, sniffed the breeze coming up the creek, put the glowing end of an ember to his pipe bowl, puffed a few times, his bearded cheeks caving in with each puff, and said, "Wall now, I wish ye luck, I shorely do. As fer me, twenty-six winters has snowed on me in these here mountains and even a nigger or a greaser would larn a few things in all that time. I otta could tell bull from cow. I know deer is deer and grizzly paws ain’t a woman’s soft belly and a cactus ain’t her lips but I never could find the tracks in a woman’s heart."

He was having trouble with his pipe. He put another ember to the bowl and puffed hard; and at last he said, "Sam, let me tell ye. Fer ten year I packed me a squaw, a Cheyenne she war, and the meanest bitch ever bawled fer beads. I lodgepoled her on Dead Wolf Crick and traded her fer a Hawken gun. My next night-love, she war a Crow, and come hell or come high water thar warn’t enough beads and red paint in all of Sublette’s packs ta keep that squaw from cryin. I traded that-air bitch fer a packhorse. Doan git me wrong, I love the wimmins, but nigh on three years I put up with that Wolverine and she scratched me till I run blood from a hundred holes. Then I got me a buffler grass with dew on it—but lemme see—seems like as how the next was Bird Singin, a Pawnee. And she warn’t no better.

"I tell ye, Sam, if she be female, no matter if redskin, blackskin, or whiteskin, she will torment the life outta ye fer foofarraw. Day and night she wi1l. I know mountain men as has tried them all, even the Diggers, even the Snakes, even the niggers; and I been tole the nigger she is as sweet as Hank Cady’s honey. But I swear by the ole hoss that carried me safe twenty mile with fifty Blackfeet runnin outta their skins to lift my hair that wolf is wolf and female is female, and this ole coon can’t stand no more. But a young feller like you, he needs a dozen or so. A woman’s breasts it’s the hardest rock the Almighty made on this ole earth, and I can see no sign on it. I could track even a piece of thistledown but I never could see no tracks in a woman’s heart. Ye plan to come back this way?"

Sam said he ought to. He wanted to see the woman before going south to the Uintahs to trap. Bill said he might amble up the river to see if she was all right: it made him powerful oneasy to think of a white woman only a wide river from Blackfeet country and not a friend in three hundred miles. What was her name?

"Don’t know," Sam said. "She wouldn’t talk."

"Then she ain’t a woman. What should I take her?"

Jerked buffalo or elk; a big warm robe, if he had an extra; sugar, salt, Hour, and wild flower seeds, if he found any ripe along the way. He would take her a hull pile of stuff, Bill said.

"What’s the name yore sugar plum?"

Sam stared at his pipe. He had decided that his woman’s unpronounceable Flathead name would never do but he had not settled on a new name. Some wild flower, maybe—Lily, Daisy, Rose—there weren’t many flower names given to women. He might call her Lotus.

Bill did nothing to hide his skepticism. After looking at Sam a long moment he said, "I didden like the names my squaws so I give them all the same name. Lucy, it was. There war a gal named Lucy I liked when I was a kid. Sam and Lotus. Wall now, ye expect ta have some little Sams and Lotuses?"

"Sure," Sam said with a genial grin. "Two mebbe, one of each."

"Jist right," said Bill. "Wood ticks on my johnny. Ye know, Sam, I must have as many kids as a Mormon bishop. And did ye know them Mormons is all comin out here?"

Sam turned to look at him.

"That’s what I heerd, Sam. The hull doggone pligamus shit-taree, Brigham Young and all. In a few years we’ll be pushed right outta our homes. The Injuns have knowed it all along. Twenty year, thirty, there won’t be a butfler left—nothin from hell to breakfast but damn fools plowin ground and plantin cabbages. I ar a trapper an a mountain man but there ain’t no future fer my kind. They’ll push us inta Canada and then inta the ocean." Bill knocked his pipe out. He looked around him. "Ten thousan, twenty thousan, the hull pligamus mess is headed fer this country and if I wuzzn’t a Christian I’d hope they all starve to death. It makes me sick in my boudins jist ta think about it."

"Me too," said Sam, looking round him and wondering where he could sleep. Most of the mountain men whom he knew flung themselves flat on their backs, arms outflung like a babe’s, and snored with a violence that put a quiet sleeper out of his mind. Bill began with low rumblings and whistlings and wheezings that climbed steadily to a crescendo of gulping and roaring, and then to a shattering fortissimo. After a few bars that a man could have heard a mile away the wild clamor of frog music in Bill’s throat seemed to collapse among his tonsils and adenoids, and he gasped and gurgled and seemed about to die. But like a bullfrog with a bad cold, working out sonata variations on a theme, he would then blow out a few tremendous snorts, strangle until his whole body quivered in the torment, and begin again with the rumblings and whistlings, in another key.

Knowing that he couldn’t sleep within fifty yards of Bill, Sam said. "Reckon I’ll take a little stroll."

Bill turned on him the knowing grin of a man who had had more than his share of women. "Ye act restless," he said. "Yer lotus gal will take that outta you.”

"I reckon," Sam said. With his rifle he moved away into the woods. When Bill was asleep he would slip back for his bedroll and go down the creek a hundred yards. He looked up at the stars. The constellations said the time was about midnight.

6

IT TURNED out to be less of an ordeal than Sam had expected. Tall Mountain pretended that fifteen or twenty other trappers would be along any day to make offers for his daughter, each with ten packhorses laden with gifts. Sam smiled at that. The chief feigned astonishment that his brother Sam Minard, Chief Long Talons, had been able to spend so many moons away from this girl, who was lovelier than wild flowers, the sky, the clouds, and trees in their spring dress; for did the bull elk eager to mate with the cow hide in a thicket and sulk in his bull-powers? Sam explained in sign language that he had had to catch a lot of beaver, to trade for a lot of gifts, including the fine copper kettle he had brought for Tall Mountain, bravest and noblest of all warriors, to cook his elk in. Would he have dared to come with empty packhorse to the greatest chief on earth and offer for his most beautiful daughter a handful of cloudberries and a broken knife? The chief conceded the reasonableness of all that, and probed another spot. He said, with words and signs and interpreters, that he had had more trouble than a rabbit in a wolf’s den keeping this girl virginal for so long, denying her to other palefaces, who came snorting like studs and with mountains of gifts; turning away immense fortunes that included the fastest horses from the Crow nation, enough rifles to exterminate the Blackfeet, enough kettles to cook all the buffalo on the prairies, all because he so deeply loved his brother Chief Long Talons. His grief had been inconsolable. He had become very ill. For such devotion, patience, forbearance, did he not deserve some special gifts? Brother Long Talons said he surely did, and from his luggage drew forth a two-gallon keg of rum. When Tall Mountain’s black eyes saw what it was there came into them the joy seen in the eyes of small children. His bronzed face smiled. He was ready to get drunk.

Sam Minard never drank. In such frontier towns as St. Louis and Independence, and at trading posts, he had seen men full of rum and slow on the draw go staggering off with blood  gushing from their wounds. Now, with every amenity and duty fulfilled, he traded ammunition for a tough fleet pony and a buckskin bridle, handed its reins to his black-eyed child-wife, hung a revolver and a knife from her slender waist, and rode off into the south. She had no saddle but she had a robe under her. "Squawhorse," he had said, slapping the beast she sat on. He would teach her English, for he wanted his children to speak English. "Squaw hitch." He touched a packer’s knot on the packhorse. "Saddletree—stirrup—horn—latigo." He had decided that blood from a Lewis and Clark man was running in her veins, and he hoped that man was John Colter. While he studied her complexion she had looked at him with sober it childlike interest. Like all Indian girls, she heard that the pale men were cruel to their women; perhaps she was wondering how far from her people she would be when he knocked her senseless and tossed her out. But she responded to his words with open lips and a flash of her teeth.

"Lotus," he said, tapping her gently. "Mrs. Lotus Minard."

Her open lips said, "Lo—"

"—tus. Lo-tus. My golden-brown biscuit."

"Bis-kit?"

"Biscuit. My Injun filly. My wife."

Around them had stood hundreds of Indians, their black eyes staring. Cocking her head at her sisters in the manner of a bird, she had said, pointing to Sam, "Lawng Tallongs."

"Chief Long Talons and Princess Samson Minard. It’ll be a hell of a day for both of us if you turn out to be Delilah. Delilah Lotus, that’s you."

"Sam," she said. She knew his white name."Tall." Her people on his first visit had asked him what he was; he had held his hand about six feet four inches above the earth and had said. "Tall."

As he rode south from the village, with Lotus trailing him, he was thinking that for a few days they would be safe in Flathead land. These Indians not only had never killed a whiteman, or robbed or deceived one, so far as whitemen knew; they were noted for their courage, prudence, candor, and piety. Their children were taught never to fight, except in self-defense—or, as the Indians put it, never to go hunting for their own graves. A tenet of their faith forbade them to seek vengeance.

How, Sam wondered, riding along the eastern flanks of the Bitterroots, would Lotus want to train their children? Most Indian fathers were sentimental fellows who doted on their sons, crooning to them and telling them tales of valor; but they had little patience with one who showed cowardice or rebelled against tribal disciplines. Sam had seen a six-year-old Crow son in a screaming tantrum, in midwinter, and had looked on with amazement as the father poured pail after pail of ice water over the shrieking and shivering lad. He had seen mothers set naked babes only a few months old outside in the snow, and leave them for ten or fifteen minutes; when the infants were brought into the warmth of the lodge they had waved their arms and howled with delight. Hank Cady had once said, in one of the rare evenings when he uttered more than ten words, that he could forsee the time when white children wouldn’t be worth knocking on the head. Well, Sam Minard’s would be wonderful, a boy and a girl, and he would love them like the old dickens.

He gave his Lotus the first of many surprises when he dismounted, took a Don Giovanni stance, and burst into baritone song. Pretending that she was Donna Elvira’s maid and that the horse she sat on was a window ledge, he serenaded her, giving to the aria all the soul he had. If she had a voice he would teach her to sing. He again astonished her when they stopped to make camp. She had supposed that her lord would smoke his pipe while she gathered wood for a lire, fetched water, and prepared supper for him; but Long Talons lifted her off her pony, held her to him a few moments with her feet ten inches off the earth, his lips kissing in her black hair; and then made a fire and set out a supper of dried buffalo, stale biscuits, and a pot of coffee—a hell of a marriage feast, he told her, but there would be better tomorrow. He opened a tin of sugar, and touching a fingertip to his tongue to moisten it, touched the sugar and again his tongue. He then took her hand, touched her finger to his tongue and to the sugar and kissed the sugar off her finger. When he looked at her eyes there was such childlike wonder in them that he had to smile. While he was setting the food out and she was wondering what kind of man this could be who did the labor of women, she looked round her and saw bushes black with berries. Seizing a cup, she hastened away and returned with the cup brimming. Sam poured half the berries into her tin plate and half into his own and sprinkled sugar over both.

"I see you’l1 make a good wife," he said; and again astonished her when, bending low, he turned her face up and kissed her berry-stained lips.

Blessed Eros, it was good to have a bride in your arms and be riding away over the world. It was good to be for a few days in friendly country where a man could sleep. He was more than two hundred miles from the Blackfeet, four hundred from the Crows, six hundred from the Eutaws. After they had eaten she stared at him, fascinated, as he washed the dishes in a cool mountain stream. For most Indians the only dishcloth was a dog’s tongue. He hobbled the beasts, piled bedding against a tree, leaned against the bedding, filled and fired his pipe; and then, looking over at Lotus, said gently, "Come to your man." She must have understood his eyes, if not his words, for she moved over until he could take her arm and draw her down at his side. He snuggled her comfortably against the robes, put his strong left arm around her, and looking up at the sky, said, "Look down, Almighty One, and see your Adam and Eve here in the garden. She fed me the berry-apples but I don’t kallate we will sin till she gets used to me." Looking round at her face, he said softly, "Poor little Lotus—Lilah, left all your people to go with me. I’ll be a good husband." That was not what he wanted to say; he guessed he was not much of a gallant. She would look up to meet his eyes but he could read nothing in the black depths. His left arm drew her a little closer, his left cheek sank to the lustrous warmth of her hair. His temple moved down till it touched her temple. Then he held his breath, for he could feel her pulse beating against him, at a hundred throbs a minute. Putting his pipe aside, he sat up straight, and taking her hands, laid them, backs down, across his big left palm'. He then studied the lines. As a youngster he had known what some of the lines were supposed to mean. It looked to him as if the lifeline had been chopped off at the shoulders, but in another line there were two children, and that was good. He brought her hands to his bearded mouth and kissed both palms. Then he turned toward her, and framing her face, tried to look deep into her black eyes but it was like looking into a bottle of black ink with a light under it. He patted her knees, again put his left arm round her, and taking up his pipe, filled it from a deerskin pouch. It was while he was tamping the tobacco that she moved swiftly away from him and returned with a glowing ember.

A few minutes later he again put his pipe aside and took his mouth harp. In turn he played and sang. "Au clair de la lune," a French chanson of the eighteenth century; "The Toubadour’s Song"; "Green Grows the Laurel" but in the middle of this he broke off to tell her that far south, in Kit Carson land, they were calling it lilacs. He would play a phrase, sing it, and play it again; and all the while she intently watched him, like a child determined to understand.

"Flies in the pemmican, skip to my Lotus

Flies in the pemmican, skip to my Lotus,

Flies in the pemmican, skip to my Lou!"

She gave him a marvelous smile for that: she knew the word "pemmican."

"You know, Mrs. Minard, I think I’ll send for a banjo."

"Ban—jo."

"Banjo." While pretending to strum an instrument he made banjo sounds with his lips. When he left home the only banjo he knew was the long-necked fretless instrument, used in black-faced minstrel shows, English ballads, and popular Irish and Scottish tunes of the day. A letter from his brother David said there was now a banjo with five strings and frets in the fingerboard, and that the playing style was changing from chording to a developed solo. That all sounded good.

"Hey, git along, git along Josey!

Hey, git along, Jim along Joe!"

She smiled at him. He brought her hands to his lips and kissed them, both backs and palms, and then the lingers. He thought they were getting along all right. When the moon rose above the trees he pointed and said, "Moon."

"Moon."

"A Mozart moon." When the moon was round and melonripe, like the one up there, he wanted to make his mouth organ sound like a French horn, so that he could play a horn solo; he wanted to express the music in winds, the murmuring lullabies in flowing water, the exquisite bird arias, the great lovers’ sighs made by trees—for the Almighty, his father had told him, had the finest orchestras and the most magnificent symphonies in the world. It was his father who had told him that Knecht’s "Musical Portrait of Nature" had fertilized the soil for Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony. On the pianoforte his father had striven to paint tones—to evoke mental images with auditory impressions; on his mouthpiece Sam could do a fair imitation of the flute, cello, and oboe, but he failed completely when he tried to bring forth the round golden bell-tones of the horn.

"What fun we’ll have," he said, squeezing her. "No taxes, no policemen, no government, no neighbors, no preachers—only the four of us, eating and sleeping, playing and singing." He turned and lightly kissed her forehead, cheeks, lips, but she gave no response. He had thought that Eve was the same in all women. Did she know that some of the finest singers on earth were birds? On their long ride south they would hear them, the meadow lark, the hermit thrush, the wood thrush, the grosbeak, the oriole. He guessed he would have one more pipeful and they would roll in. Standing, he looked at the bluff above them and at the country roundabout, to be sure that the only approach an enemy could make was from the front. He then sat, and while he smoked and looked at his wife her gaze moved over his face, as though to fix it in memory, or as though marking the differences between red faces and white. He supposed she did not know what to make of Whiteman music, or of his kissing, for the redmen did not kiss their women. Perhaps she was wondering when he was going to take her, with the brutal and savage passion with which most of the males of the mammalia took their females. Poor little Lotus! She would have a few more days of peace.

Yes, it was a Mozart moon. September was almost here; at this season the nights in the high northern mountains seemed to have been lifted off the glaciers. But he had plenty of bedding. Putting his pipe away, he rolled her into a buffalo robe as though she were a doll. Raising the part on which her head lay, he dragged pine needles and twigs under the fur so that she would have a kind of pillow, though he was not sure that the red people used pillows; and he put the revolver and knife within a fold of the robe, within swift reach of her hand. If enemies came, he said to her, he would get four and she must get two. He now wrapped a robe around him and lay at her side, with the rifle between them. A thousand stars were out, and the moon among them looked like a round golden note from a French horn. Sam was not a religious man in the sense of creeds and churches but he felt a powerful affinity to the earth and to the heavens and to all the living things around him, except the professional killers. He looked at the moon and the stars and began to talk.