Murder at Medicine Lodge (6 page)

White Bear was not speaking Comanche, but the interpreter was able to repeat him word for word and without a flaw. I looked at that man more closely and saw something no one else was paying any attention to. Directly behind the Comanche-speaking man stood Billy. With a hand shielding his mouth, he interpreted for White Bear, and Philip McCusker, the paid interpreter, merely repeated everything Billy said.

“I caught this filth murdering my buffalo. He was not killing for food, he was killing for sport. I beat him until he cried, ‘enough!' I have brought him to you for further punishment. I give you this promise, if he isn't punished, it will go hard for all of you.”

General Gettis was not a man who liked to be pushed. This was evident in the way he stood very tall, puffed out his chest, tightened his jaw. But this anger was not for his misbehaving officers. Following the line of his significant stare, his conspicuous wrath was focused on White Bear. The general issued orders in a snarling tone, and Major Elliot and the other officers were duly arrested, taken to that second tent. Now I felt I knew its use, but still did not understand its location. Nudging Hawwy, I asked in a low tone, “Why has a punishment tent been set so close to the Arapaho woman's?”

Coming out of a shocked stupor, Hawwy yelped, “What?”

After I repeated the question Hawwy answered in his painfully awkward Kiowa. “Not punish tent. Buug-lah tent.”

I considered this briefly, then pressed another question. “Buug-lah doesn't mind sharing his tent with punished men?”

Hawwy looked to the side then down at me. Hawwy was very tall. That single black eyebrow of his, furrowed at the bridge of his nose. “Buug-lah, he run 'way.”

“Why?”

Hawwy looked frustrated as he tried to make his awkward tongue form Kiowa words. “Stole horse. My chiefs want hang him.”

“Must have been a good horse,” I replied.

Hawwy sent me a frown, then shouted, as if I were hard of hearing, “Buug-lah run 'way!”

That is another thing I have never been able to tolerate about the Blue Jackets: their fondness for publicly hanging a man by his neck until he is dead. In the Kiowa view of life, when a man becomes unhappy with his band or his band chief, it is right for him to move on. When a warrior becomes discontent with his chief, he cannot be counted on to fight for him. The Blue Jackets failed to appreciate the sense of this. If one of their men left, they hunted him down, then treated him to a despicable death. They called this “discipline.”

*   *   *

Since that the first day of our being in Medicine Lodge, the generals had come to blame White Bear as the cause of every unnerving fracas. The promised wagons bringing food and gifts were nowhere to be seen on the horizon and the number of daily fracases, many of them generated by the Arapahos and Cheyennes, were mounting up. Still they blamed White Bear. Now there was the added insult of his beating up seven of their best officers. Never mind that these seven officers most certainly had it coming; the generals viewed White Bear as a threat to the peace negotiations and were eager to cut him down. But considering his importance in the Kiowa Nation, the generals had no idea how to discredit him in the eyes of the other chiefs of the Nations.

During the course of the next days, White Bear had completely forgotten Skywalker's warning. To be honest, everyone had. Much of the problem with any of Skywalker's warnings was his delivery. Unlike other Owl Doctors who practiced the dramatic along with their seer's craft, Skywalker's tone when prophesying bleak tidings was much too mild. Knowing this better than anyone, White Bear really should have known that the carefully measured words Skywalker spoke were intensely important. But, being a dramatic fellow himself, White Bear was too often more impressed by the Owl Doctors who shook rattles in his face and carried on in a frenzy. Skywalker never once acted like that. He simply said what he had to say and left it to the hearer to make his own choice. Which is exactly why White Bear, quite alone and riding home from the Cheyenne's camp, forgot what Skywalker had said.

Halfway between the two camps, a bright beam off to the right caught his eye. Curious, White Bear veered his horse in that direction and, when he was close enough to the source of the glow, drew to a stop. Recognizing the thing on the ground as the shiny object that Buug-lah had not allowed him to touch, White Bear jumped down from his horse and picked it up. Being a great believer in the old saying that whatever is found on the prairie is a lucky gift for the finder, White Bear hung the bugle from his breech-belt in the same fashion he'd seen the soldier wearing it. Yet his biggest mistake was believing that the soldiers would offer him many valuable gifts to secure the return of the bugle.

This is the way Indians think. It is not the way Blue Jackets think. Not realizing this, White Bear took himself, and the bugle, to their camp.

FOUR

I do not know, before this occurrence, just how aggressively the Blue Jackets had been searching for their missing man. I only know that when White Bear appeared in their camp with that bugle, that they were thrown into a great sense of urgency, two officers demanding to know exactly where White Bear had supposedly found the object. Through the Comanche-speaking man, he told them.

Five miles northwest.

Now this made no sense to them at all, for immediately northwest lay Fort Larned. It defied logic that an absconding soldier would ride in the direction of another fort. Most especially a fort which is as actively patrolled, and in a twenty-five-mile radius, as Fort Larned. Only a supremely stupid deserter would strike off in that direction.

Yet again I was with Hawwy in the Blue Jackets' camp when White Bear came boldly in, behaving just as arrogantly as he knew how to do. Needless to say, the Blue Jackets' reaction was not what he'd anticipated. Not one officer asked to have it back, nor were any gifts offered for its return. Instead White Bear was ordered out of their camp at riflepoint. As I would not stay where my chief was not welcome, I clambered onto my horse and rode out with him.

Too many think of Lone Wolf as a peace chief, a man anxious to appease Washington. The truth is, Lone Wolf—a tall man with craggy features—was in the main a slow talker, a man who preferred to remain quiet while figuring out the benefits or the disadvantages of any treaty talks. But when pushed, he had a notable temper. When he learned how one of his band chiefs had been treated, he formed a delegation and went to the soldiers' camp, where his temper exploded all over the generals. Undaunted, those same generals continued to insist that White Bear was nothing more than a common thief, and most probably a murderer.

Lone Wolf said “Prove it,” and the generals said that was what they intended to do. Lone Wolf countered, “As you have been so far unable to find your own man, we Kiowa will find him for you.”

The generals' response was, “The search will be continued solely by the army.”

Lone Wolf struck a compromise. Four men from our camp would accompany a new Blue Jacket search party. The generals said this was all right as long as one of our men wasn't White Bear. They also stated that their junior officers should not have chased him out of the camp, but put him under arrest and, now that he was back in their camp, that this was what they intended to do. Lone Wolf said the first Blue Jacket to touch White Bear would be the first Blue Jacket to die.

Alarmed, the generals had a conference. They still wanted White Bear to be under arrest, but agreed to allow Kiowa warriors to stand guard. Lone Wolf said that was all right with him, but that White Bear would not be under guard by anyone, not even Kiowas, inside the Blue Jacket camp—that the place for White Bear to be under arrest was in his own home. Realizing the principal chief of the Kiowas had been pushed as far as he would budge, the generals grudgingly shook Lone Wolf's hand.

With White Bear's honor at stake, the voting among our warriors for the four likely men to accompany the new search team was loud and furious. Keeping my mouth shut, I stood well back behind the crowd. Not a warrior or a tracker, it never occurred to me that I would ever be chosen. As far as I was concerned, I was simply there to listen. Skywalker had shouted down the warriors and now he was doing all of the talking. He said that no one had listened to him about coming to Medicine Lodge, and now, White Bear obviously hadn't been listening when he'd been told specifically not to touch anything he found on the ground. All of this trouble, he raged, could have been avoided if the people hadn't been greedy for promised gifts the army still had yet to give, and if White Bear had shown the barest trace of good sense.

The Cheyenne Robber took umbrage, jumping in to White Bear's defense. Skywalker was The Cheyenne Robber's adopted brother, but White Bear was his maternal uncle, a blood relative. Brotherhood aside, The Cheyenne Robber's first loyalty was to White Bear. Skywalker knew this, of course, but he was livid that The Cheyenne Robber was going against him. Their argument was rapidly becoming dangerous, as White Bear's lieutenants were entering the brotherly fray on The Cheyenne Robber's side, and the society of Owl Doctors were aligning themselves with Skywalker. The arguing was reaching a fevered pitch and guns were being drawn.

The generals were looking quite worried, knowing that it wouldn't take much for the Indians to stop yelling and begin shooting. The Blue Jacket chiefs were visably relieved when Lone Wolf and Hears The Wolf intervened. Their relief faded almost as rapidly as it had come, when Lone Wolf and Hears The Wolf began to argue.

Frankly, at this point, knowing that real danger had been averted, I stopped listening. Turning my face away, I glanced around the soldiers' camp. So many men, all of them dressed in identical fashion. I was wondering yet again just how they managed to tell one another apart, when Hears The Wolf's words entered my consciousness.

“But he's a logical choice!”

Looking pained, Lone Wolf replied tersely, “We're talking about someone who can't track, can't defend himself, can barely stay on a horse.”

Growling behind his teeth, Hears The Wolf stepped closer to Lone Wolf. “I know his faults, but even so, I vote for him.”

Lone Wolf's jawline clenched as his narrowing eyes bore into Hears The Wolf's. In carefully chosen words he said, “On account of White Bear, I've been made to look weak. If this problem isn't solved, I will have no voice at the peace talks.”

“You have my assurance,” Hears The Wolf said, “that this one will work for your benefit. And of all of us, he is the better choice. He has spent time among the Blue Jackets. He knows them.”

Now, that really should have been my clue, but it wasn't. While it was true that I had been spending a great deal of time at the Blue Jackets' camp, I had been spending every bit of that time with Hawwy—learning from him and trying just as hard as I knew how, to convince him to trade away some of his wonderful doctoring tools. You might well ask why I wasn't alerted to the possibility that it was me Lone Wolf was referring to with his unflattering remarks. That too is easily explained.

Lone Wolf was not at all like our former chief. Little Bluff had had a talent for bringing out the best in everyone. Recognizing that not all men were destined to be warriors, he encouraged men such as myself to do instead what they did best. Because of Little Bluff, at a very young age, I was recognized as a practical doctor and I brought this title with me into the new era. Had I been born later, still trying to find my way while Lone Wolf was principal chief, I would never have been recognized as anything more than a failure, because in his mind if you weren't a valuable warrior you might as well just go ahead and die—a judgment he had been very quick to give.

Almost immediately following his political victory, Lone Wolf had surrounded himself with only the best of the best. He then went on to publicly criticize any man unable to meet his stern standards. So on this day, when he was blowing off on the worthlessness of this latest unfortunate, it is wholly understandable that I had no idea he meant me. The real indicator that I had been the subject of his recent ridicule was when Raven's Wing grabbed hold of my arm and marched me to the front, placing me in the direct path of Lone Wolf's jaundiced eye.

The few words he spoke to me were bitten off and threatening. “Healer, once again you have come to my attention.”

I looked to Skywalker for assistance and found not a whit. It felt to me that I had been desperately seeking support from a complete stranger. He maintained this attitude as the four of us—Skywalker, Hears The Wolf, The Cheyenne Robber, and me—joined forces with the newly chosen men from among the Blue Jackets.

There were two officers and four enlisted men. Hawwy was the senior officer. The junior was Lieutenant Watts, simply called Danny by his superior officers. We called him Danny, too, and he seemed to like that. He was a slightly built young man; so slight that he didn't appear to weigh much more than my wife. This was the same young man I had seen so often with Buug-lah, and he looked just as pinch-faced as ever. He had bright blond hair, red-rimmed blue eyes, and a perpetually runny nose. Danny did not have an illness. At least not one I was able to cure. He could not stand dust, and the dusty, dry thin air of the high prairie was making his life a misery. I tried to help him, offering him a piece of bitterroot, but Lieutenant Danny only smiled and sniffled a “no, thank you.”

One of the four black soldiers was someone I already knew—William. His leg wasn't bothering him, I was pleased to note, for he walked quite easily toward his horse. I felt very proud of my skills. William was a nice-looking young man and something of a bashful person. Recognizing me, he sent an awkward half-smile. Then he glanced back to the young lieutenant, an anxious expression creasing his face.

The second black soldier was named Little Jonas. This name was supposedly a joke, because Little Jonas was as big and brooding as a thunderhead. He looked at all of us from narrowed, hooded eyes. His glare was so hard that it left all of us with the distinct impression that he would happily rip our hearts out without the slightest hesitation. Worriedly I began to wonder just how effectively a gentle man like Hawwy, or a lightweight like Snotty Nose (Lieutenant Danny), could control their hostile giant.