He was aware of activity behind the cabins, the neighing of horses, the sharp cries of women.
With the first shots the squaws had unpicketed the animals and where skin lodges stood, they had been struck.
Already the poles of travois, loaded, were being lashed to the sides of ponies.
There were more shots.
Across the way he could see Old Bear firing from his cabin door.
There were some Indians on the roofs of some of the cabins, firing.
Suddenly through the sporadic shots and the sudden splintering and chipping of wood about him Chance heard, thin, but clear, in the distance, the notes of a bugle.
This was the first it had occurred to him that there would be soldiers.
They had been waiting in support of the Indian police, had heard the firing, and were now riding in.
Old Bear, terrible in his enraged frailty, leaped into the dirt street, even in the line of fire, calling for the Hunkpapa to withdraw.
It might have been planned.
For all Chance knew it had been, at least in its general outlines.
While a handful of Indians kept the cabin under fire the rest faded back, running to their lodges and cabins.
Their horses and their goods were ready.
Winona, the bundle of goods in the striped blanket on her back, slipped from the cabin and scurried along its side and behind it.
Running Horse’s pony was at hand, picketed behind the cabin. He did not own a saddle.
Chance went to the corner of the cabin and picked up his saddle and saddlebags. He saw that Winona had rolled and bound his blankets across the back of the saddle.
Chance slipped from the cabin, carrying his saddle and gear. No longer were the police in the cabin firing, though he could see a rifle muzzle projecting from one of the windows. He supposed they were finished fighting. They had heard the bugle. They would stay where they were. Perhaps even the rifle in the window was simply propped up. They would stay in the cabin until the soldiers came.
The notes of the bugle sounded again, this time much closer.
Now even the firing of the Hunkpapa was done, and Chance supposed that the rear guard had fallen back, to cover the retreat which must now be underway.
The camp seemed fairly quiet now; even the dogs were gone. There would be some fires in the cooking holes, here and there, that would burn down to ashes in time. Near the wagon in the street behind which some men had earlier been firing, there was a sack of spilled corn, and a handful of sparrows had fluttered down to peck at it. It seemed very quiet. There were, of course, a number of Indian police, maybe twenty or more, hiding in the dead chief’s cabin, too frightened or too wise to come out, probably both.
Before the cabin there were a number of bodies, mostly Indian police, clearly recognizable by the short hair and the blue uniforms, and other Indians. One body Chance would never forget, a heavy body, stocky, old, with long black hair that had not yet been braided that morning, hair streaked with white hair that had never been cut. It lay wrapped half in a blanket, stained with red about the size of a saucer on the side facing Chance, twisted in the dust not far from the door of the cabin, the body of a man who had been kind to Chance, that of a proud man, a calm man, resourceful and wise, who had loved his people and their land, and council fires and antelope, and the giving of gifts and the hunting of buffalo, and the blue sky and the prairie and the feathers of eagles.
Chance turned away and went behind the cabin.
Running Horse and Winona were waiting for him.
Running Horse helped him saddle his horse and then the three of them, Winona with her bundle riding behind Running Horse, joined the orderly retreat of the Hunkpapa, who by now had mostly disappeared in the brush along the Grand River.
They would head for the ancestral retreat, called by the white men the Bad Lands, where the sudden arroyos and rugged hills might defy regiments of long knives.
At the head of the long, ragged string of Indians, and ponies and travois and dogs, rode Old Bear, his eyes fierce and hard, the chief of the Hunkpapa.
When the cavalry from Fort Yates, flag and pennon fluttering, thundered into the camp of Sitting Bull, shouting, brandishing their sabers, brave in the sound of their bugle, they found nothing, only the empty camp and, of course, some Indian policemen in one of the cabins.
Needless to say, they also did not find Edward Chance, which proved to be a particular disappointment to two men who rode with them, Lester Grawson and Corporal Jacob Totter.
Above the camp, on Medicine Ridge, watching, not moving, stood the solitary figure of Kicking Bear, medicine man, he who had brought the Ghost Dance to Standing Rock.
The death of Sitting Bull would enkindle the Sioux and the Cheyenne.
The news would spread like the sweep of a wind-driven burning prairie from Standing Rock to Pine Ridge, to Cherry Creek and throughout the departments of the Platte and Dakotas.
The messenger would say, “Sitting Bull is dead.” And the warriors would gather their ponies and take up their weapons.
For the first time in years, the feet of the Sioux and their brethren, the Cheyenne, would be on the warpath. This would be the Holy War, the war of the Ghost Dance.
It was wrong, for spring was the time, not winter, with the coming snows and the ice and wind, and the barren prairie and the lack of food.
Kicking Bear stood on Medicine Ridge.
He watched the soldiers and the Indian policemen milling about the cabin of Sitting Bull, hitching up a wagon for a body.
When the soldiers and policemen had ridden away, when the wagon too was gone, Kicking Bear turned his back on the camp of Sitting Bull.
There was nothing more to be done.
Strange was the will of Wakan-Tonka.
It had begun here, the Holy War, here on the muddy banks of the Grand River.
Lucia Turner was up and about the soddy.
She lifted off one of the range lids and stirred the fire. This morning she was using kindling in the range, rather than cow chips or twisted grass. Perhaps it would put Aunt Zita in a better mood.
Lucia had been awakened that morning early, around dawn, by gunfire in the distance, coming from the direction of Sitting Bull’s camp. She had hurriedly dressed and climbed to the top of the hill, on which the school stood, but she had seen nothing. Then, after a time, she had returned to the soddy, puzzled, a bit frightened, hoping there was nothing wrong. She had heard firing before, and usually it had been due, as it happened, to drunken Indians. But usually that sort of firing took place late at night, not at dawn.
The pile of kindling behind the soddy had been diminishing rapidly. All that was left of it now was a coal bucket filled with it, sitting beside the range.
Lucia, too, of course, preferred a meal prepared over a wood fire.
Several weeks ago Lucia had purchased a cord of fuel for one dollar from a man in a wagon who did business with the agency, but he no longer came as far into the reservation as the soddy.
If worse came to worse Lucia might hitch up the buckboard and drive down to the Grand River. There she might find a fallen cottonwood and get some of the dried branches. Perhaps she could hire Joseph Running Horse to cut the wood for her.
He had come by the soddy yesterday to ask for Mr. Chance’s medicine kit.