Dances With Wolves

CHAPTER XXIX

As he fell asleep that night, Dances With Wolves realized that something had begun to gnaw at the back of his mind. When he woke the next morning, it was still there, and though he knew it had something to do with the presence of white hunters a half-day’s ride from camp and with his dream and with Ten Bears’s talk, he could not put his finger on it.

An hour after dawn, when the camp was being dismantled, he started thinking about how relieved he was to be going. The winter camp would be even more remote a place than this. Stands With A Fist thought she was pregnant and he was looking forward to the protection a faraway camp would give his new family.

No one would be able to reach them there. They would be anonymous. He himself would no longer exist, except in the eyes of his adopted people.

Then it hit him, hit him hard enough to set his heart into a sudden, crazy fluttering.

He did exist.

And he had stupidly left the proof behind. The full record of Lieutenant John J. Dunbar was written down for everyone to see. It was lying on the bunk in the sod hut, secure between the pages of his journal.

Since they had little to do, Stands With A Fist had gone off to help some of the other families. It would take a while to find her in the confusion of the move, and he didn’t want to lose time with explanations. Every minute of the journal’s existence was now a threat.

He ran for the pony herd, unable to think of anything but retrieving the telltale record.

He and Cisco were just coming into camp when he ran into Kicking Bird.

The medicine man balked at what Dances With Wolves told him. They wanted to be under way by noon and would not be able to wait if the long round trip to the white soldier’s fort took longer than expected.

But Dances With Wolves was adamant, and reluctantly, Kicking Bird told him to go ahead. Their trail would be easy enough to follow if he was delayed, but the medicine man urged him to make haste. He didn’t like this kind of last-minute surprise.

The little buckskin was happy to be racing across the prairie. During the last few days, the air had turned crisp, and this morning the breeze was up. Cisco loved having the wind in his face, and they breezed over the miles to the fort.

The last familiar rise loomed ahead of them, and Dances With Wolves flattened down on his horse’s back, asking him to take the last half mile at a full run.

They blew over the rise and shot down the slope to the old post.

Dances With Wolves saw everything in one stupendous flash.

Fort Sedgewick was alive with soldiers.

They covered another hundred yards before he could pull Cisco up. The buckskin pitched and whirled madly, and Dances With Wolves was hard-pressed to calm him. He was struggling himself, trying to comprehend the unreal sight of a bustling army camp.

A score of canvas tents had been thrown up around the old supply house and the sod hut. Two Hotchkiss cannons, mounted on caissons, were parked next to his old quarters. The tumbledown corral was jammed with horses. And the whole place was seething with men in uniform. They were walking and talking and working.

A wagon was sitting fifty yards in front of him, and in its bed, staring at him with startled faces, were four common soldiers.

The outlines of their faces were not clear enough for him to see that they were boys.

The teenage soldiers had never seen a wild Indian, but in the few weeks of training following their recruitment, they had been reminded repeatedly that soon they would be fighting a deceptive, cunning, and bloodthirsty foe. Now they were actually staring at a vision of the enemy.

They panicked.

Dances With Wolves saw the rise of their rifles just as Cisco reared. There was nothing he could do. The volley was poorly aimed and Dances With Wolves was thrown clear as they fired, landing on the ground unhurt.

But one of the bullets caught Cisco square in the chest, and the slug tore through the center of his heart. He was dead before he hit the ground.

Oblivious to the shouting soldiers rushing toward him, Dances With Wolves scrambled back to his downed horse. He grabbed at Cisco’s head and lifted his muzzle. But there was no life in it.

Outrage took him over. It formed a sentence in his mind. Look what you’ve done. He turned to the sound of rushing feet, ready to shout out the words.

As his face came around, the stock of a rifle slammed into it. Everything went black.

He could smell dirt. His face was pressed against an earthen floor. He could hear the sound of muffled voices, and a set of words came to him distinctly.

“Sergeant Murphy . . . he’s coming to.”

Dances With Wolves turned his face and grimaced in pain as his broken cheekbone made contact with the hard-packed floor.

He touched his injured face with a finger and recoiled again as the hurt shot along the side of his head.

He tried to open his eyes but could only manage one. The other was swollen shut. When the good eye cleared he recognized where he was. He was in the old supply house.

Someone kicked him in the side.

“Here, you, sit up.”

The toe of a boot rolled him onto his back, and Dances With Wolves scooted away from the contact. The rear wall of the supply house stopped him.

There he sat staring with his good eye, first at the face of the bearded sergeant standing over him, then at the curious faces of white soldiers clustered around the door.

Someone behind them suddenly shouted, “Make way for Major Hatch, you men,” and the faces in the doorway fell away.

Two officers entered the supply house, a young, clean-shaven lieutenant and a much older man wearing long, gray side whiskers and an ill-fitting uniform. The older man’s eyes were small. The gold bars on his shoulders carried the oak leaf insignia of major.

Both officers were looking at him with expressions of repulsion.

“What is he, Sergeant?” asked the major, his tone stiff and cautious.

“Don’t know yet, sir.”

“Does he speak English?”

“Don’t know that either, sir . . . Hey, you . . . you speak English?”

Dances With Wolves blinked his good eye.

“Talk?” the sergeant queried again, putting his fingers to his lips. “Talk?”

He kicked lightly at one of the captive’s black riding boots, and Dances With Wolves sat up straighter. It wasn’t a threatening move, but as he made it, he saw both officers jerk back.

They were afraid of him.

“You talk?” the sergeant asked once more.

“I speak English,” Dances With Wolves said wearily. “It hurts to talk . . . One of your boys broke my cheek.”

The soldiers were shocked to hear the words come out so perfectly, and for the moment, they faced him in dumb silence.

Dances With Wolves looked white and he looked Indian. It had been impossible to tell which half was real. Now at least they knew he was white.

During the silence, other soldiers had again crowded around the doorway, and Dances With Wolves spoke at them.

“One of those stupid idiots shot my horse.”

The major ignored this comment.

“Who are you?”

“I’m First Lieutenant John J. Dunbar, United States Army.”

“Why are you dressed like an Indian?”

Even if he’d wanted to, Dances With Wolves couldn’t have begun to answer the question. But he didn’t want to.

“This is my post,” he said. “I came out from Fort Hays in April, but there was no one here.”

The major and the lieutenant held a brief conversation, whispering into one another’s ear.

“You have proof of that?” questioned the lieutenant.

“Under the bed in that other hut, there’s a folded sheet of paper with my orders on it. On top of the bed is my journal. It will tell you all you need to know.”

It was all over for Dances With Wolves. He dropped the good side of his head into a hand. His heart was breaking. The band would leave him behind for sure. By the time he got clear of this mess, if he ever did, it would be too late to find them. Cisco was lying out there dead. He wanted to cry. But he didn’t dare. He just hung his head.

People left the room, but he didn’t look up to see who it was. A few seconds ticked off and then he heard the sergeant whisper coarsely:

“You turned Injin, didn’cha?”

Dances With Wolves lifted his head. The sergeant was bending over him with a leer.

“Didn’cha?”

Dances With Wolves didn’t answer. He let his head fall back into his hand, refusing to look up until the major and lieutenant had appeared again.

This time the lieutenant did the talking.

“What is your name?”

“Dunbar . . . D-u-n-b-a-r . . . John, J.”

“Are these your orders?”

He was holding up a yellowed sheet of paper. Dances With Wolves had to squint to make it out.

“Yes.”

“The name here is Rumbar,” the lieutenant said grimly. “The date is entered in pencil, but the rest is in ink. The signature of the issuing officer is smeared. It’s not legible. What do you have to say about that?”

Dances With Wolves heard the suspicion in the lieutenant’s voice. It began to sink in that these people did not believe him.

“Those are the orders I was given at Fort Hays,” he said flatly.

The lieutenant’s face twisted. He looked dissatisfied.

“Read the journal,” said Dances With Wolves.

“There is no journal,” the young officer replied.

Dances With Wolves watched him carefully, sure he was lying.

But the lieutenant was telling the truth.

A member of the advance party, the first to reach Fort Sedgewick, had found the journal. He was an illiterate private named Sheets and he had slipped the book into his tunic, thinking it would make good toilet paper. Sheets heard now that a certain journal was missing, one that the wild white man said was his. Maybe he ought to turn it in. He might be rewarded. But on second thought, Sheets worried that he might be reprimanded. Or worse. He’d done time in more than one guardhouse for petty theft. So the journal stayed hidden under his uniform coat.

“We want you to tell us the meaning of your appearance,” the lieutenant continued. He sounded like an interrogator now. “If you are who you say you are, why are you out of uniform?”

Dances With Wolves shifted against the supply house wall.

“What is the army doing out here?”

The major and the lieutenant whispered to one another again. And again the lieutenant spoke up.

“We are charged with recovering stolen property, including white captives taken in hostile raiding.”

“There has been no raiding and there are no white captives,” Dances With Wolves lied.

“We will ascertain that for ourselves,” the lieutenant countered.

The officers again fell to whispering, and this time the conversation went on a while before the lieutenant cleared his throat.

“We will give you a chance to prove your loyalty to your country. If you guide us to the hostile camps and serve as interpreter, your conduct will be reevaluated.”

“What conduct?”

“Your treasonable conduct?”

Dances With Wolves smiled.

“You think I’m a traitor?” he said.

The lieutenant’s voice rose angrily.

“Are you willing to cooperate or not?”

“There is nothing for you to do out here. That’s all I have to say.”

“Then we have no choice but to place you under arrest. You can sit here and think your situation over. If you decide to cooperate, tell Sergeant Murphy, and we will have a talk.”

With that, the major and the lieutenant left the supply house. Sergeant Wilcox detailed two men to stand guard at the door, and Dances With Wolves was left alone.

Kicking Bird stalled for as long as he could, but by early afternoon, Ten Bears’s camp had started the long march, heading southwest across the plains.

Stands With A Fist insisted on waiting for her husband and became hysterical when they forced her to go. Kicking Bird’s wives had to get rough with her before she finally composed herself.

But Stands With A Fist wasn’t the only worried Comanche. Everyone was worried. A last-minute council was convened just before they pulled out, and three young men on fast ponies were sent to scout the white man’s fort for Dances With Wolves.

He’d been sitting for three hours, fighting back the pain in his battered face, when Dances With Wolves told the guard he needed to relieve himself.

As he walked toward the bluff, sandwiched between two soldiers, he found himself repulsed by these men and their camp. He didn’t like the way they smelled. The sound of their voices seemed rough to his ears. Even the way they moved seemed crude and ungainly.

He peed over the edge of the bluff, and the two soldiers started him back. He was thinking about escape when a wagon loaded with wood and three soldiers rumbled into camp and skidded to a stop close by.

One of the men in the wagon bed called lightheartedly to a friend who had stayed in camp, and Dances With Wolves saw a tall soldier amble over to the wagon. The men in the bed were smiling at one another as the tall man came near.

He heard one of them say, “Look what we brung ya, Burns.”

The men in the wagon took hold of something and heaved it over the side. The tall man standing below them leaped back frightfully as Two Socks’s body landed at his feet with a thump.

The men in the wagon leaped out. They taunted the tall man as he backed away from the dead wolf.

One of the woodcutters cackled, “He’s a big ‘un, ain’t he, Burns.”

Two of the woodcutters lifted Two Socks off the ground, one taking his head, the other his back feet. Then, accompanied by the laughter of all the soldiers, they started to chase the tall man around the yard.

Dances With Wolves covered the ground so quickly that no one moved until he’d slammed into the soldiers carrying Two Socks. In short, chopping strokes he pounded one of them senseless with his fist.

He sprang after the second man, knocking his feet out from under him as he tried to run. Then his hands were around the man’s throat. His face was turning purple and Dances With Wolves saw his eyes begin to glaze when something struck him in the back of the head and a dark curtain dropped over him again.

It was twilight when he regained consciousness. His head was throbbing so hard that he didn’t notice at first. At first, he only heard a light rattle when he moved. Then he felt the cold metal. His hands were chained together. He moved his feet. They were chained, too.

When the major and lieutenant came back with more questions, he answered them with a killing glare and spat out a long string of Comanche insults. Each time they asked him something, he answered in Comanche. Finally, they tired of this and left him.

Later in the evening, the big sergeant placed a bowl of gruel before him.

Dances With Wolves kicked it over with his manacled feet.

Kicking Bird’s scouts brought the dreadful news in around midnight. They had counted more than sixty heavily armed soldiers at the white man’s fort. They had seen the buckskin horse lying dead on the slope. And just before dark they had seen Dances With Wolves being led to the bluff by the river, his feet and hands in chains. The band went into evasive action immediately. They packed up their things and marched out at night, little groups of a dozen or less, heading in all different directions. They would rendezvous days later in the winter camp.

Ten Bears knew he would never hold them back, so he didn’t try. A force of twenty warriors, Kicking Bird and Stone Calf and Wind In His Hair among them, left within the hour, promising not to engage the enemy unless they could be sure of success.

Major Hatch made his decision late the same night. He didn’t want to be bothered with the thorny problem of a savage, half-Indian white man sitting under his nose. The major was not a visionary thinker, and from the first he’d been baffled and afraid of his exotic prisoner.

It didn’t occur to the shortsighted officer that he could have used Dances With Wolves to great advantage as a bargaining tool. He wanted only to get rid of him. His presence had already unsettled the command.

Shipping him back to Fort Hays seemed a brilliant idea. As a prisoner, he would be worth much more to the major back there than out here. The capture of a turncoat would stand him in very good stead with the top brass. The army would talk about this prisoner, and if they talked about the prisoner, the name of the man who caught him was bound to come up just as often.

The major blew out his lamp and pulled up his covers with a self-satisfied yawn. Everything was going to work out nicely, he thought. The campaign couldn’t have asked for a better beginning.

They came for the prisoner early the next morning.

Sergeant Murphy had two men pull Dances With Wolves to his feet and asked the major, “Should we put him in uniform, sir, spruce him up some?”

“Of course not,” the major said sharply. “Now, get him in the wagon.”

Six men were detailed for the trip back: two on horseback up front, two on horseback in the rear, one to drive, and one to guard the prisoner in the wagon bed.

They went due east, across the rolling prairie he loved so much. But on this bright morning in October there was no love in Dances With Wolves’s heart. He said nothing to his captors, preferring to bump along in the back of the wagon, listening to the steady clank of his chains as his mind considered the possibilities.

There was no way to overpower the escort. He might be able to kill one, or perhaps even two. But they would kill him after that. He thought of trying it anyway. To die fighting these men would not be so bad. It would be better than landing in some dismal jail.

Every time he thought of her, his heart would begin to crack. When her face would start to form as a picture in his head, he forced himself to think of something else. He had to do this every few minutes. It was the worst kind of agony.

He doubted that anyone would be coming after him. He knew they would want to, but he could not imagine that Ten Bears would compromise the safety of all his people for the sake of a single man. Dances With Wolves himself would not do that.

On the other hand, he felt certain they had sent out scouts and that they knew by now of his desperate situation. If they’d hung around long enough to see him leave in the wagon, with only six men to guard him, there might be a chance.

As the morning dragged on, Dances With Wolves clung to this idea as his only hope. Each time the wagon slowed to gain a rise or lurched down into a draw, he held himself breathless, wishing for the swish of an arrow or the crack of a rifle.

By midday, he had heard nothing.

They’d been away from the river for a long time, but it was coming up again. Searching for a place to ford, they followed it for a quarter mile before the soldiers up front found a well-traveled buffalo crossing.

The water wasn’t wide, but the breaks around the river were exceptionally thick, thick enough for an ambush. As the wagon creaked down the incline, Dances With Wolves kept his eyes and ears open.

The sergeant in charge called for the driver to stop before they entered the stream, and they waited as the sergeant and another man crossed over. For a long minute or two, they probed the breaks. Then the sergeant cupped his hands and called for the wagon to come along.

Dances With Wolves clenched his fists and shifted to a squatting position. He could see nothing and he could hear nothing.

But he knew they were there.

He was moving at the sound of the first arrow, far faster than the guard in the wagon, who was still fumbling with his rifle as Dances With Wolves looped the hand chain around the man’s neck.

Rifle fire exploded behind him and he yanked the chain taut, feeling the flesh beneath it give as the soldier’s throat caved in.

From the corner of his eye, he saw the sergeant tumble forward off his horse, an arrow deep in the small of his back. The wagon driver had jumped over the side. He was knee-deep in water, firing wildly with a pistol.

Dances With Wolves landed on top of him and they grappled briefly in the water before he could work himself free. Using the chain like a two-handed whip, he lashed at the driver’s head and the soldier turned limp, rolling slowly in the shallow water. Dances With Wolves gave him more vicious whacks, stopping only when he saw the water turning red.

There was yelling downstream. Dances With Wolves looked up in time to see the last of the troopers trying to escape. He must have been wounded because he was flopping loosely in the saddle.

Wind In His Hair was right behind the doomed soldier. As their horses came together, Dances With Wolves heard the dull thud of Wind In His Hair’s skull cracker as it crushed the man’s head.

Behind him it was quiet, and when he turned he saw the men of the rear guard sprawled dead in the water.

Several warriors were jabbing lances into the bodies, and he was overjoyed to see that one of them was Stone Calf.

A hand grabbed his shoulder and Dances With Wolves spun into the beaming face of Kicking Bird.

“What a great fight,” the medicine man crowed. “We got them all so easy and no one’s hurt.”

“I got two,” Dances With Wolves yelled back. He lifted his chained hands into the air and cried out, “With these.”

The rescue party didn’t waste any time. After a frantic search, they found the keys to Dances With Wolves’s chains on the body of the dead sergeant.

Then they jumped on their ponies and galloped away, taking a course that swung many miles to the south and west of Fort Sedgewick.