The boy said something in Sioux, probably that he was digging or hunting. Chance made out the word “rattlesnake.”
“Go slowly,” said Chance in Sioux. He wanted something like “Be careful,” but he didn’t know the expression.
The concern on his face was read by the boy, who laughed.
“I watch,” said the boy, and he had spoken in English.
It was not yet winter, but it was late fall. The snakes, Chance supposed, would be hibernating, somewhere in nests under the frost line.
“You speak English,” said Chance.
“If I want to,” said the boy.
“Good boy,” said Chance in Sioux.
The boy laughed.
Chance asked to see the stick and the boy handed it up to him. Chance sharpened it with the bowie knife at his belt and handed it back to him, wiping the knife on the side of his pants, then sliding it back into his sheath.
“What’s your name?” asked Chance.
The boy told him and Chance didn’t understand.
“In English,” asked Chance.
“William Buckhorn,” said the boy.
Chance knew he hadn’t said “William” before.
Chance wondered why he was digging for snakes. It was a foolish and dangerous thing to do. He supposed the boy’s parents might have sent him off to kill snakes, and bring the skins home. He shuddered. It was a stupid, foolish thing to do. Dangerous.
Chance, in both English and his smattering of Sioux, tried to convey his objections to the lad who listened intently.
The boy thanked him and then returned to his digging.
As Chance turned to go, the boy, not looking up, said, “You are the man they are looking for.”
Chance stiffened in the saddle. “Who?” he asked.
“At the agency,” said the boy. “Two men. One from far away with red hair, very big, very strong. And a soldier from Fort Yates two yellow stripes.”
It would be Grawson, thought Chance, and someone to help him, to guide him through the reservation, to furnish another gun. Two stripes. A corporal. Maybe Totter. “What does the soldier look like?” asked Chance.
“Like all white men,” said the boy.
“That’s not much help,” said Chance.
“He has a crooked nose,” said the boy, looking up and smiling, making a gesture across his face, as though his nose were being bent to one side.
It would be Totter, thought Chance. Both of them. Grawson and Totter. I’ve got to get out of here. Still there’s no immediate hurry. They won’t come this far out, not with the Ghost Dancing. I’ll have time. “Thanks,” said Chance to the boy, and then, in Sioux, told him that his heart was light that he had spoken with him, that he was happy to hear what had been told him.
Then Chance bid the boy farewell, mistakenly addressing him as a man, which mistake did not displease the boy, and rode away.
Before Chance had left, the boy had said, first in Sioux, then in English. “I am William Buckhorn. Let the snakes watch out.”
Then he had gone back to his digging.
Lucia Turner was alone in the soddy.
Aunt Zita, more than an hour ago, had put on her black carriage gown, taken the buckboard, her box of Bibles and pamphlets, and departed for the ration point, an area marked on the prairie not far from the administration buildings of the agency.
There she could preach to the Indians.
“It’s Saturday morning, ration day,” had said Aunt Zita that morning.
“Yes,” Lucia had said.
“They’ll have to come in for their handouts,” had said Aunt Zita, pulling on her black gloves.
“Then you can preach to them,” observed Lucia.
“Man lives not by bread alone,” had said Aunt Zita.
“You are kind to think of the Indians.”
“My duty,” had said Zita.
“Blessed are the merciful,” Lucia had said.
“For theirs is the Kingdom of God,” Aunt Zita had added.
“For they shall obtain mercy,” Lucia had corrected.
“Not unless they repent their heathen ways,” had said Aunt Zita, and turned curtly and left the soddy.
A moment or two later Lucia had heard the buckboard rattle away.
Aunt Zita, staying overnight at the agency, would not be returning until the next day, perhaps about evening.
As yet Aunt Zita had not been given permission to use the building set aside as a Protestant meetinghouse, primarily because her credentials, perhaps in order in heaven, had not seemed sufficiently impressive to the agent at Standing Rock, a most prejudiced decision in Aunt Zita’s mind, undoubtedly motivated by ulterior considerations. His name was, after all, McLaughlin, and he would be Irish, and was undoubtedly a secret and sinister instrument of papism, diabolically attempting to propagate Romish superstitions among the innocent heathen of Standing Rock.
He had even had the gall to point out to Aunt Zita that her presence on the agency was lawful only by virtue of her kindred relationship to the schoolteacher, Miss Lucia Turner.
You shall not foil the work of God, Aunt Zita had told him.
I hope that I shall not, he said.