By now the sun and the wind had dried the broad patches of prairie grass from the early morning’s rain, and the hoofs of their horses, Chance’s shod, raised dust with each print, which clung in the tangled, matted hair of the fetlocks, wet from the crossing of the river.
For a long time they rode, following the slow run of the bending river, making their way through clusters of cottonwoods where they occurred, and by now the sun was behind them and it was late afternoon.
Once they passed four horses grazing.
Pintos, said Chance to himself, Indian ponies.
But they saw no one.
Running Horse, pulling on the nose rope of his pony, stopped and lifted his hand.
Chance drew back on the reins, checking his mount.
They listened, and as Chance listened, a shiver struck like a snake the length of his backbone, and lifted the hair on the back of his head.
Carried on the wind from perhaps half a mile away was the sound of the Ghost Dance.
It was not in itself a frightening sound, but it could frighten people, and it did, white people, those who understood it and those who sensed what it might mean. Chance was one of those who sensed it.
The song itself was not frightening.
It was rather slow, rather monotonous, mournful perhaps, sad, but not frightening.
Unless one knew what it meant, or sensed it.
The sound came to Chance in fitful puffs, brought on the wind. Hearing it was like seeing something through fog, where you see it and then it disappears, and then it is seen again.
Looking ahead in the direction of the sound Chance could see a hazy pool of dust in the sky, a lake of floating dryness marking the place beneath which the moccasins of hundreds of human beings pounded the earth in a ritual alien to anything he knew, performing the prayer of the Ghost Dance.
This is a holy place and a sacred time, said Chance to himself. I do not belong here.
But when Running Horse kicked his pony ahead, Chance followed.
There didn’t seem to be any place to go back to.
They had not ridden fifty yards when a single rifle shot whined over their heads.
They hauled their mounts up short.
“Wait here,” said Running Horse, and, lifting his right hand high with the palm open, kicked his pony ahead, toward the direction from which the rifle shot had come.
By the time Chance had loosened the Colt in his holster and dried his hands on his shirt, for about the fifth time, he saw Running Horse, about two hundred yards away, waving him ahead.
Chance rode to join the young Indian, riding upright in the saddle, not bothering to look right or left. He knew he was now well within the range of the unseen rifleman and that the order of the moment might as well be the appearance of confidence, if not the reality.
He joined Running Horse at the top of a small rise, where they both dismounted.
Chance had not seen the rifleman who had fired at him, and this made him nervous.
He glanced around and finally spotted the man, two men actually, separated by about forty yards, each dug in. both a bit below the crest of the hill, behind rocks, under the tangled roots of a large sage.
Neither of them were looking at him now.
“Look,” said Running Horse, pointing downward from the rise.
Below them, in a dusty trampled area about as large as a square city block in Charleston, Chance saw the Ghost Dance.
From a distance, in the dust, it looked like a giant wheel, with no hub, only a rim, turning slowly to the left, on an invisible axis, wailing and crying as it turned.
There was no sound but the chant and the soft drum of moccasins in the dust.
Chance saw that the dancers were alternately men and women, which surprised him. The dance, he knew, for the Plains Indian was a proud masculine discipline, for warriors, and the squaws could only stand in the background, stamping their feet, keeping time, but here the squaws danced with their men.
This is the dance of a nation, thought Chance to himself. For the first time the Sioux nation, as a nation, dances.
Chance and Running Horse made their way downward, walking their horses.
To his surprise Chance was scarcely noticed.
The dancers did not seem to see him at all, and other Indians, mostly resting from the dance, or watching, paid him no attention.
Most of the dancers danced with their eyes half closed, their bodies lost in the monotonous, hypnotic rhythm of the turning wheel, moving always to the left, the leather of their moccasins pounding in the dust.
“See the Ghost Shirts,” said Running Horse, pointing to the shirts worn by the dancers, some of which were white, some scarlet. There was a sun, a rising sun, on the chest of these shirts, a representation of a buffalo on the back.
Chance nodded, wondering what it all meant, not wanting to ask Running Horse at the time, expecting him to tell him when he wished.
Suddenly Chance’s hair rose on the back of his neck.
There was a weird, shrill scream and an incredibly old woman, buckskin skirt flapping about her brown stick’s of legs, stumbled backward from the circle, her white braids flying, and took two or three steps backwards and then fell unconscious into the dust.
Her place in the circle immediately closed, and the wheel continued to turn implacably, at the same slow pace as before, to the same unbroken, repetitious chant. Not the beat of a moccasin in the dust was lost nor a single note of that wailing litany.
Chance made as though to go to the side of the old woman.
Running Horse held his arm. “No,” he said.
Chance saw three Indians approaching the old woman. Each of them carried a small flag, one blue, one yellow, and one white.
Their leader, a tall robust man with large, fierce eyes, squatted down beside the old white-haired squaw who lay unconscious in the dust. He thrust his yellow flag in his belt and leaned over the old woman.
“It is Kicking Fear,” said Running Horse, and his tone of voice suggested that Chance would of course know the name. Chance didn’t.
“See,” said Running Horse. “He carries the yellow flag. That is the color of the light of the spirit world. White is the color of the light of earth. Blue is the color of the sky world.”
Chance was watching Kicking Bear.