Part 18 (2/2)
In a far day a leper cloaked his head and hung a tinkling bell at his girdle, so that hale men might have warning of his evil case and hold aloof. For kindred reasons the Lone Wolf, when now his ”medicine” was lost, killed his pony, broke his pipe-stem, and blackened his face. In this sorrowful guise he went afoot the long journey to his home village on the Cimarron, and all who met him by the way knew him at sight and turned their backs upon him, for that thing below a caste, a man who has lost his ”medicine.”
The Lone Wolf's ”medicine” had been an exceeding strong ”medicine,” and this served to give his loss an emphasis. He had worn it through a dozen battles, and it so cunningly protected him that, while others fell about him knocked over like ninepins, nothing save and except one bullet from a Gatling was able to leave its mark upon him. The Gatling had nicked him; and the furrow it turned was visible on the cheek of Lone Wolf.
This untoward scratch was solvable only upon a theory that the ”medicine” of what paleface fired the shot must likewise have possessed uncommon potentialities.
When boyhood ceased for the Lone Wolf and he trembled on the threshold of existence as a full-blown buck, in deference to Cheyenne custom he had wandered abroad and alone upon the blizzard-whipped plains, and frozen and starved and prayed and mourned for seven nights and days. In the end, cold and hunger and self-hypnotism did their work, and the Lone Wolf began to see shapes and hear voices. These told him how to compound his ”medicine,” so that thereafter he should be wise as the owl in peace, fierce as the eagle in strife.
The ”medicine” bag was to be sewed from the skin of an otter, dressed with claws and tail and head and teeth as though filled with grinning life. Inside the otter-pelt ”medicine” bag were to be hidden charmed tobacco, slips of sacred cedar, a handful of periwinkle sh.e.l.ls, as well as twenty other occult odds and ends, the recondite whole, together with the otter-skin pouch, to be and remain his ”medicine” forevermore.
The Lone Wolf followed, religiously, the ghostly directions. He caught and skinned and tanned and sewed his otter, and then invested the precious bag with those chronicled weird fragments of matter. To these latter, as all must admit, the lip of bat, and toe of toad, and eye of newt-so valuable in witchcraft-or the negro necromancer's dried snake's head, and left hind foot of a graveyard rabbit killed in the dark of the moon, are as children's toys; and so thought the Lone Wolf. When complete, he hung his ”medicine” about his neck, and felt himself a proud, big warrior and a man. He had never been parted from it, were it day or night, or war or peace. He had even worn it during his school days at Carlisle, saving it from curious professors, who might have decried it as some heathen fetish, by wearing it under his calico s.h.i.+rt.
Now it was gone, eaten up by the hungry Beaver, and the name of the Lone Wolf had been dropped from all the aboriginal roll calls of good repute.
Not alone among the Cheyennes, but in the estimation of every Indian that yelped between the Yellowstone and the Rio Grande, the unlucky Lone Wolf, with a lost ”medicine” bag to his discredit, was utterly abandoned and undone.
And the worst feature of the case was that the Lone Wolf could not make a new ”medicine.” Since the Great Spirit invented the inst.i.tution of ”medicine” and placed it upon earth, all men have known that one may create his ”medicine” but once. Any second attempt serves only to introduce one to a covey of malevolent spirits, whose power will be exercised to wet one's bowstring, blunt one's arrow, lame one's pony, and break one's lance. No, the Lone Wolf could not make another ”medicine.”
Was there no hope for the Lone Wolf?
About an even century before the Lone Wolf slumped into that quicksand crossing of the Beaver, and was robbed by the waters of his otter-skin ”medicine,” Mr. Goldsmith wrote a three act oratorio, called it ”The Captivity” and sold it to Dodsley for ten guineas. Among other tuneful commodities in said oratorio contained, Mr. Goldsmith penned the following:
The wretch condemned with life to part, Still, still on hope relies; And every pang that rends the heart Bids expectation rise.
Hope, like the gleaming taper's light, Adorns and cheers our way; And still as darker grows the night, Emits a brighter ray.
Since he knew neither the one nor the other, it is fair to a.s.sume that when Mr. Goldsmith wrote the above he was thinking as deeply on the Lone Wolf as on you. Certainly the habit of hope therein set forth is as prevalently sweeping among savages as among civilised folk. The Indian does not hope for the same things, but to what extent and in what direction his antic.i.p.ations stray he hopes as industriously as ever hoped any white man of you all. And so it was with the unhappy Lone Wolf. In this, his darkest hour, there remained the glimmer of a hope.
When the Great Spirit fixed his commands against making a second ”medicine,” a fiat necessary lest a ”medicine” easily replaced degenerate to be a trivial gewgaw creature of small moment, he left open, should one lose one's ”medicine,” a single gateway of relief. One might conquer, in such pinch, an enemy, strip him of his personal ”medicine,” and thus redeem one's self. The ”medicine” of that dead foe would take the place of the lost ”medicine,” and by its virtues rehabilitate the victor and restore him unto what tribal place was his before his own original ”medicine” had disappeared.
In this black hour of his fortunes, the Lone Wolf upheld his heart with this. He might go north, and knock over some casual p.a.w.nee or inadvertent Sioux. Hundreds of these at this season would be met with among the buffaloes. True, it would be a long, hard trail; but not so long nor so hard as the life-trail of the Lone Wolf when now he was without caste or tribal countenance.
Stripping himself of feathers and hawk-bells and bearclaw necklace and every form of ornament, wrapped in his raggedest blanket, with a daub of mud in his hair as one who mourns, without word or sign to any concerning his purpose, the Lone Wolf turned his back on the Cimarron and wended northward. His face paints were black, for his heart was sad.
The only matters about him that did not tell of woe and bankruptcy, and warn one of an Indian without fortune or future, were his pony and his arms. These showed of the best, and this weapon-care was not without a reason. More than ever would the Lone Wolf require a pony tireless as the storm and as swift, and lance and bow and knife without flaw or fault; for now when he had lost his ”medicine,” he was singularly undefended and weak. No one knew better these latter helpless truths than did the Lone Wolf. It was by no means sure that a child might not overcome him-he who, but a fortnight before with his otter-skin ”medicine,” had been a thunderbolt of war. Wherefore, with his heart little, his courage water, his bow an arc of weakness, his arrows no better than windle-straws, and his lance as forceless as a cornstalk-for losing one's ”medicine” means all these grievous conditions of undefence and inability to smite-it behooved the Lone Wolf to provide as much as he might, with prudence and farsighted care, in favour of a possible success.
The Lone Wolf would have no help from the good ghosts, for these had left him with the lost ”medicine.” What ghosts might still be riding in his disgraceful company, were bad ghosts. So far as they did anything they would do harm, not good, and the best he might look for at their hands was a sort of ghostly non-interference.
There was a least slant ray to encourage the latter hope. If the Lone Wolf had the luck to cross up with a p.a.w.nee or a Sioux as contemptible as himself, the ghosts would not choose between them. In such miserable coil of coyote-snap-coyote, the disgusted ghosts would stand afar off.
They would be content with the outcome, whatever it was, and refuse to contaminate their vapourish hands by mixing in the business.
That was the one favouring chance that lay before the Lone Wolf. To have full advantage of it, he wore his best weapons and rode his best war pony. If he happened upon a p.a.w.nee or Sioux, disreputable in the eyes of G.o.ds and men, he might yet be saved from out those fires of disgrace that were consuming him. He would kill that p.a.w.nee or Sioux, and wash himself free of stain with his victim's ”medicine.”
On the other and more likely hand-since good is more rife than evil-were he to encounter an Indian, tribally eminent and high, one who stood well with his people and of whose company therefore the most exactingly exclusive ghost need not feel ashamed, the Lone Wolf knew the upcome.
His fate was written; he was no better than a dead Cheyenne. To these poor conditions the Lone Wolf tacitly agreed. And wherefore no? What death was not preferable to a life of endless ignominy-the life of one who has lost his ”medicine?” Such indeed were the thoughts to skulk in the mind of the Lone Wolf like quails in corn, as he rode forward on his quest.
The Lone Wolf could not expect to find that required p.a.w.nee or needed Sioux short of the Platte or perhaps the Yellowstone. He resolved to go thither by way of Dodge. The Lone Wolf was not wanting in a kind of sapiency. Now that his own weapons were undeniably weak-he could only know how weak when he had tried them, and the news might come too late-he decided to purchase a rifle of the palefaces. Such a weapon would not have been sapped of its powers by any former possession of his own, and he might possibly corral that ”medicine” he sought before it had been long enough in his hands to have degenerated. With this wisdom in mind, the Lone Wolf drove before him two pack ponies, laden to the ears of robes and furs. This sumpter stuff would buy that rifle, with its accompanying belts and cartridges.
The Lone Wolf knew Mr. Masterson, and liked him. They had both fought at the 'Dobe Walls and gained a deal of respect for one another. Also they had met since at sundry agencies; and in good truth it was the Lone Wolf who told Mr. Masterson how many of those charging savages went under in that hot fortnight of fight.
”How many of you did we blink out?” asked Mr. Masterson, who had his statistical side.
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