Chapter 20 — Sikes in Town
Sikes reached Prairie Center a little before ten o'clock, on a horse he had ridden half to death, and he came down the main street shouting before he was even off it.
He shouted that the band had attacked the settlers at Hay Coulee. He shouted it up and down the street, at the gathering knot of men and women in the falling snow — that Gray Elk's riders had fallen on honest men at their work, that there was shooting, that men were down, that Erik Halvorsen had led them to it, the Norwegian, him and his brother both, turned Indian-lover and worse. He had the story by heart — three hours of hard riding had taught it to him — and it fitted the town the way a key fits a lock cut for it. The town had been frightened since September. Frightened people do not examine a story that agrees with them. They load it.
Obadiah Flint came out of the land office with his plat book under his arm, and kept any surprise off his face with a lifetime's practice.
"This is what I warned against," he said, loud enough for the street. "I said the agency would not hold them. I said the bottom was untenable with a camp of hostiles on it. Now there's blood at the coulee, and I lay it at the door of every man who talked truce and parley while these people armed. The militia should have marched when I said march. Captain Alcott must answer for the delay — and Halvorsen for the rest."
"Amen to that," said someone, and "Where's Alcott now?" said someone else, and the crowd began to do the thing crowds do — become a single animal with a single direction, and the direction was toward horses and rifles.
It was Pastor Lindberg who stepped off the boardwalk into the snow, unarmed, and stood where the animal would have to walk through him.
"Friends," he said, not loudly, and the not-loudly did what shouting would not have done. "I have buried men from this town and christened their children, and I am asking you for one hour. One hour. Captain Alcott is not here to answer, and Erik Halvorsen is not here to answer, and the dead Sikes speaks of have no names yet. In one hour there will be more to know. A rope that is used an hour too early cannot be unused in the spring."
"You'd have us wait while they burn us out?" a man shouted.
"I would have you wait while God sorts the living from the dead," the pastor said, "which has never once been the work of a crowd before dinner."
It did not persuade them. But it slowed them, the way a gate slows water, and in the slowing, the hour began to run — and the hour was all the truth needed, because the truth was already on the road and coming at a trot with several hundred witnesses.
The first the town knew of it was the sound.
It came from the south, under the snow-muffled air, the way thunder comes through a wall — a drumming, a many-legged rhythm that got into the planks of the boardwalk. People stopped in the street. Heads turned. On the roof of the livery a boy climbed up and stood staring south with his mouth open, and then he began to point, shouting wordlessly, because what he was seeing did not fit into any story the town had been told that morning:
The herd was coming in.
It came up the south road in a dark, steaming river, horse upon horse, more horses than Prairie Center had ever seen in one body, the snow flying under them and their breath going up in clouds — and on its flanks, riding easy and open, were riders of the Red Willow band, and among them, mixed in as naturally as neighbors, were men of their own militia, and across a saddle in the middle of the procession, bound hand and foot and very much alive, was the foreman Dutch Kramer, with the scar through his left eyebrow — and at the head of it all, side by side, rode Erik Halvorsen and the chief's son Mato, bringing the Red Willow horses home through the town that had been told the band had fallen on innocent men.
Sikes stood by his foundered horse with his mouth open and nothing left in it.
Obadiah Flint looked at the herd, and at the brands on the hips going past his land-office door — clean brands, band brands, whole and untouched, every one of them a sworn statement in hide — and the crowd that had been one animal an hour ago became forty people again, doing their own arithmetic in the falling snow.
"The brands," somebody said quietly, at the back. "Look at the brands on them. Nobody rebranded a one."
"Nobody had time," said the storekeeper, in the tone of a man finishing a sum. "Or nobody ever meant to keep them. Just to have them gone."
Flint closed his plat book, slowly, and began, with great care, to say he was as deceived as any man, that Kramer had acted beyond his instructions, that the company deplored — but the herd was still going past, horse after horse, and a story told against several hundred witnesses on four legs is a story told to deaf men.
Captain Alcott came up out of the drag with snow to his stirrups and his face set like a church door. He did not raise his voice. He did not need to.
"Mr. Flint," he said. "Mr. Sikes. You will both of you come with me. There's a reckoning owed, and it's owed at Halvorsen's well, where this started, before the chief and all this town." He looked along the street at the faces turned up to him. "Bring your coats. And leave your rifles. By the truce of that yard, there'll be no guns past the well."