Lucia nodded.
Chance looked on the luster of her eyes, the new softness of her face. He held her wrist, noting the deep rhythm of the blood moving through her body. When she spoke her voice for an hour or so would be a bit lower than normal.
Chance smiled and kissed her.
He rose and slung the Indian blanket that was his only wrap over his left shoulder.
He would write to her from California. She would join him there.
Then suddenly as he stood there, looking down upon her, seeing her as beautiful and as his love, he felt as though the room suddenly darkened and as if his heart stopped beating for that instant.
It seemed then as though the walls of his hope trembled, and the towers of the future which had seemed so shining, so bright with promise, crumbled.
Suddenly it seemed as though the air was gone, as if the sun had vanished, leaving the pelt of night behind, the darkness of which was marked by not a star.
“Edward?” she asked.
“It’s nothing,” he said.
It would be wisest, of course, not to write, but to try to forget, best for her probably, maybe best for him.
“Edward?” she asked.
“It’s nothing,” he said, “nothing.”
What sort of life would it be for her? What sort of life could it be for her?
“You love me?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said.
“You frightened me,” she said, “-how you looked.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
He turned and went to the door of the soddy, fumbled with the latch, pushed it up.
At the door he turned to look on her once again, and as he looked, tears formed in his eyes, because he knew that he should not send for her, that if he loved her he could not do so.
“Good-bye, Lucia,” said Chance.
“Edward!” she cried.
But he was gone, and in a bound he had mounted his horse and the soddy was behind him.
“We’ll take good care of her for you,” Mrs. Carter had called after him.
He thought he heard Lucia’s voice cry his name again, perhaps from outside the soddy, but the sound was indistinct in the wind and covered by the hoofbeats of his horse.
In a few seconds Chance, crying, reined his horse sharply to the left, turning it to follow the travois tracks and the pressed grass that marked the trail of the Sioux.
In an hour he had rejoined the band.
The winter morning was crisp, the air as brittle and clear as thin ice. It was the 29th of December, 1890, at the banks of Wounded Knee Creek.
The lodges of the Minneconjou, also on the whole sheltering the Hunkpapa of Old Bear, irregularly dotted the still prairie, like some silent, natural formation, not the habitats of men. The barkless tepee poles showed like bones through the weathered hide of the old skins that clung to them.
The camp was quiet.
Not even a cooking fire rippled the still December air above the lodges. None of the dogs crept through the camp to smell for food. They lay curled in the ashes of last night’s fires, their eyes open, not willing to move.
Outside the perimeter of the camp, soldiers walked in pairs, calling the signals of their post. The sentries walked in short, shuffling steps to keep their feet warm. They carried their weapons at right shoulder arms, their free hands unmilitarily buried in the refuge of their blue greatcoats, except when officers checked the watch. The breath of the sentries hung about their rifles like gunsmoke, eventually drifting upward and behind them.
Yesterday afternoon the soldiers had appeared.
The Sioux had been on their second day of the march when the shout, “Long Knives!” hurtled like a volley of shots the length of the long, ragged line.
Chance had not counted on soldiers surprising the Sioux on the prairie, coming to escort them to Pine Ridge.
Chance supposed there were about five hundred of them.
On the left and the right they had appeared, dust moving into the sky about twelve hundred yards away, on both sides.
Old Bear had ridden the line of the Sioux, crying out, “Do not fire! Do not fight!”
About two hundred yards away, the two converging forces of cavalry reined in, their sabers out of the sheath, their colors flying.
Chance had strained his eyes to make out the small triangular flag in the distance.
Running Horse had read it easily. “Seven,” he said. And he had added to Chance. “That is bad.”
Chance nodded. He, like everyone else, had heard of the Custer Massacre, but it had only been a thing in newspapers when he had been fourteen or fifteen years old; then he had read about it in a book or two. It had always been distant, remote, something that had happened to someone else on the other side of the world, meaning nothing much to him, nothing that wasn’t abstract.
But somehow Chance felt that that event, that had been to him only a few lines of newsprint, a paragraph or two in a book, had not yet finished.
Not all of the Seventh Cavalry of course had been wiped out with Custer, only the detachments which he had personally led. There would be large numbers of career men left who would remember Custer, and their comrades, from fourteen years before. Chance could well suppose that these men might instill as a matter of course newer recruits with their own anger, their own vehemence. The Seventh might, for all Chance knew, suppose itself to have a score to settle; they might suppose, for all he knew, that there was a blot on that small, defiant triangular flag whipping in the wind some two hundred yards away, a blot to be rubbed out, a blot that had waited fourteen years for its cleansing.
Chance watched while Old Bear and Big Foot rode slowly out to meet the commander of the cavalry forces.
When the chiefs returned they told the braves to put away their weapons. The white man had come to go with them to Pine Ridge. There was to be no fighting. This pleased most of the warriors, who had little inclination to fight with an enemy four times as strong, particularly with one’s starving women and children at one’s back. Some of the men, the younger ones, like Drum, urged fighting, but they received for their show of bravery only the passive stares of the older men.
Chance melted in with the Indians, pulling the blanket more about his shoulders. He had wanted to go only as far as Wounded Knee and pull out before any soldiers arrived.
Old Bear rode through the ranks to Chance. He paused before him, his eyes sad. “There are men with the Long Knives who want to know if a white man is with us,” he said. “They want to find such a man.”
“What did you tell them?” asked Chance.