Читать книгу Thunder Moon Strikes - Frederick Schiller Faust - Страница 3

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Thunder Moon had ridden his great stallion, Sailing Hawk, a thousand miles. Soon he would reach his goal—the home of Colonel Sutton and his wife. Twenty years before, a Cheyenne chief, Big Hard Face, had kidnapped the Suttons’ infant son, taking the child to his lodge, where he had brought him up as his own. As the years passed, the boy, Thunder Moon, earned a reputation as the finest young warrior of the Suhtai, one of the tribes of the Cheyenne nation. Never had he taken the war trail in vain.

Then a chief of the Omissis had tricked Big Hard Face into taking his daughter, the beautiful troublemaker Red Wind, as a gift. Yet when Thunder Moon offered to marry her, she repulsed him. He was white, she said, and he should go back to the white people. Angered by the taunts of the girl, and despite the pleas of Big Hard Face and the old chief’s aunt, White Crow, Thunder Moon set out with the brave Standing Antelope to find his father and mother.

Not long after they had left the Suhtai village, Thunder Moon and Standing Antelope joined a wagon train of white hunters. The time came, however, when they had to leave the caravan and plunge into the lands of the whites as Big Hard Face had done so long ago. Now at last the journey had ended.

It was well past midnight when they reached the Suttons’ house. Suddenly a mounted band of youths surrounded them. Led by young Jack Sutton, Thunder Moon was brought before the colonel and accused of stealing Sailing Hawk, his own stallion.

Angered by his parents’ bewilderment at Thunder Moon’s resemblance to the colonel and by his words that he had come to learn what his name might be, Jack Sutton reacted with fury. It was his sister, Ruth, who ran to her father.

“I know what his name is!” she exclaimed.

“The devil you do! What is it, then?”

“It’s William Sutton, and he’s your own son. Don’t you see? He’s come back! He’s come back to you!”

Whatever the emotion of the others when the excited Ruth Sutton made this announcement, no one felt more keenly than her brother, Jack, though his sentiment may have differed from the rest. For as the eldest child, the only son, he had naturally expected to come into the majority of his father’s great fortune. And though perhaps Jack was no worse than the next man, this announcement thrust him literally to the heart. Whatever his first thought might have been, certainly his first movement was to touch the pocket pistol that he carried with him always, like most of the gay lads of that time. And perhaps he recalled a picture seen a little earlier that morning, when this danger to his hopes then stood with the marsh behind him and fifteen armed men before. One shot would have done a great work, at that lucky time. But now the time was past.

There was no opportunity for the others to observe the expression on the face of Jack, for they were all too busily engaged on the subject of this suspected horse thief.

The poor colonel, utterly taken aback, caught his wife and drew her to him, and stared for a moment at Thunder Moon as though he were looking at a leveled gun rather than at a lost son. And Ruth Sutton recoiled. Her keen eyes had seen a resemblance, but the mark of the wilderness was visibly upon him, and she was frightened.

Only Mrs. Sutton went unafraid to the strange visitor. She drew herself out of the arms of the colonel, and, going to Thunder Moon, she took those terrible hands that Pawnee and Comanche and Crow knew and feared.

“You are William!” she cried softly. “Ah, you are my dear boy come back to us! Only tell me! Will you tell me?”

“My heart is sad,” said Thunder Moon, and he fought back an impulse to take her in his arms. “My heart is sad. All that I know is what an old man of the Suhtai told me. He sent me here. But of myself I know nothing.”

“You see, father,” broke in the matter of fact voice of Jack, “we’d better go a bit slowly. God knows no one wants him to be the true Sutton more than I do! But we have to have more proof than the resemblance of two faces. We have to have something better than that. You see—he isn’t a bit sure himself.”

“How could he be sure? He was an infant when he was stolen!” exclaimed the colonel, who was turning from white to crimson.

“And as for the word of some lying Indian—some old chatterer—”

“I tell you, Jack, you mustn’t speak that way!” cried Mrs. Sutton. “Isn’t there a call of blood to blood? I felt it when I first saw him! Randolf, do something! Let me be sure!”

The colonel hesitated, looked about wildly, and finally said, “Let’s try to be calm. Let’s make no mistake. It would be too horrible to think that we had him back again and then find it was only a fraud. You understand? Let’s try to work out the testimony! Somebody tell someone to give those young fools outdoors some mint juleps—or anything that will keep them quiet! We have to think this out. We have to feel our way to the truth!”

“Here! Here’s the truth!” said Mrs. Sutton.

She snapped open a little pendant at her throat and showed a miniature that was painted on the inside, showing her husband as he had been when he was a young man. The colonel looked at it gravely and long; then he raised his eyes as though afraid of what he must see. And the result was a start of amazement and joy.

“By heaven!” cried the colonel. “He’s most like! He’s certainly most like! Jack, examine this! William, if you are he, forgive us for going slowly now—but once you’ve been admitted to our hearts, then there’ll be no uprooting you!”

“I speak little English; talk slow,” said Thunder Moon, knitting his brows with the effort of listening.

“Poor boy!” breathed Mrs. Sutton. “My poor boy! Oh, I believe you!”

“Martha! Will you be still?” cried her husband. “Are you going to make a baby of him before we’re sure that the thing is settled?”

“If he’s not Indian,” said Jack, “I’d like to know where he got that color of skin. He’s dark enough to be a red man—or a smoky mulatto, I’d say. Could the sun do that?”

Thunder Moon turned his head and looked calmly, judicially, toward the youth.

“You’ll have trouble on your hands in a moment, Jack,” said the colonel. “He doesn’t like that way you have of putting things, you can see.”

“My dear sir,” said the boy, “I don’t want to stand between a brother and the light. But I’m simply trying to make us all use our common sense. That’s only fair and right, I take it. What do you say to that, Ruth?”

She, pale, tense, eager, raised a hand as though to brush the question away from her; all her being was busied in devouring this stranger-brother with her glance.

But Thunder Moon said in his deep voice—a soft voice, but one that filled the room: “I understand. My face is dark. You want to know why. You ask the sun. He will tell you.”

Then, letting his robe fall from his shoulders, he stripped off his shirt of antelope skin with a single gesture. Brightly and beautifully beaded was that shirt so that it glistened like a particolored piece of chain mail in his hand; but there were no eyes just now for the fine shirt for which his foster father, Big Hard Face, had paid five good horses, five horses ready for the war trail, a strong knife, and a painted horn. Instead, there was a gasp, as every glance fastened upon the body of Thunder Moon, naked to the waist.

If he had broken any conventions, he was totally unconscious of it. He raised an arm along which the interlacing muscles slipped and stirred, and he pointed to his body.

“See,” said he, “that my skin is not all dark. This is paler. Yet I see that it is not as pale as yours.”

With that he waved his hand toward them as though inviting their closer inspection.

The colonel, indeed, had taken a quick stride toward him, with an exclamation of admiration; but Jack moved back a little and became rigid, as though he were responding to a challenge with proud defiance.

“It isn’t all a question of color,” said Jack firmly. “Of course, if he’s an impostor, he wouldn’t be such a fool as to come to us unless his skin were actually white. But the thing to decide on is the testimony. I don’t know. It’s rather queer, though. Taking a fellow on the strength of his face. Such things have been tried before. Clever devils! Use a striking family resemblance to worm their way into a million or so. Cheap at twice the price, you know.”

“Would an impostor be ignorant of the English language, Jack?” asked the colonel sharply.

“Ah, sir,” and Jack smiled, “of course he’ll say that he is a Cheyenne. Why—that’s not hard to say. Just be reasonable, please. You know that I could learn a bit of Indian ways, pick up a few of their words, and then say that I had passed most of my life on the prairies. Why not? Then I wouldn’t have to answer a lot of embarrassing questions as to where I’d spent my days. Isn’t that clear?”

It was, after all, a telling point. Some of the enthusiasm faded from the gentle eyes of Mrs. Sutton, and she looked anxiously to her husband.

He saw the appeal in her glance.

“I know, Martha!” he said. “I’m doing my best. But I’m not a prophet, and I can’t look through the secrets of twenty years as if they were glass, you know. Look here, my young friend, tell us how we can be sure that you have spent all of this time with the Cheyennes?”

“I cannot understand,” said Thunder Moon simply.

“I thought he wouldn’t,” sneered Jack.

“I say,” repeated the colonel more loudly, making a vital effort to be clear, “will you tell us how we can know that you really spent those years with the Cheyennes?”

“And by the way,” said Jack, “if you can talk just as well, you might put on your clothes, you know.”

Thunder Moon with one gesture, as he had removed the shirt, donned it again. He swept the robe around his shoulders.

“Young man,” he said sternly to Jack, “what coups have you counted and what scalps have you taken that you raise your voice and that you talk when chiefs are here?”

Even Jack blinked a little at this, but recovering himself instantly, he said coldly, “That’s well done. Clever, by gad! Worthy of the stage, and a big stage. But we want some good, and sound, actual proof that you’ve been with the Cheyennes all this time.”

The color had been growing slowly in the face of Thunder Moon and now it became a dangerously dark crimson; and his eyes glittered as he stared at Jack.

“Do not ask me; do not ask my friends,” he said at last. “Ask the enemies of my people. Ask Sioux, ask Comanches, ask Pawnees, ask Crows. They know my face. They have seen it in the battle. No man has asked, Where is Thunder Moon in the battle? No, for they have seen me. So ask them and bring them here. They will tell you if I am a Suhtai!”

There was a stunned silence after this remark so filled with conviction and disdain.

But Jack, who in a way was playing desperately high for stakes that were worth winning, now broke in, “After all, my friend, you can’t come over us as easily as that! Of course, we’re a thousand miles or so from the hunting grounds of the Sioux and the rest of ’em, whatever you called ’em. Facts, however, are facts. And it seems to me that you should be able to give us some proofs—some plain proofs—that you’ve been with the Cheyennes all this time under the name of Thunder Moon, or whatever you may be called, or say you are called!”

“Steady, Jack,” said the colonel. “By gad, he looks a bit dangerous, just now!”