Far as the Eye Can See Read Online Free PDF

democratic,” Preston said. He spit more juice. “I been among them. I’ve traded with them and lived with them as neighbors.”
    It got quiet for a spell. I could hear the other fire crackling and folks talking low. The children was all asleep.
    “Anyway,” Preston said, “they killed his wife, and Red Top went on the warpath. He started killing white folks, and when he did, he never left the mutilation to the women. He and his braves did it themselves. They killed forty or fifty whites at Fort Buford, then rode on north to Canada. He’s been raiding from there ever since. Killed hundreds in Minnesota, I heard.”
    “The army will get him,” Joe Crane said.
    “Red Top’s a old man now,” Preston said. “Probably in his seventies, and I heard tell that he’s blind. But nobody ever caught him.”
    I picked up a small twig and stirred the fire with it. “Theo didn’t say nothing about Red Top, nor Wahpekutes.”
    “I don’t want nothing to do with Blackfeet, neither,” Preston said. “They’re like the Pawnee. They don’t like nobody.”
    We talked like that for a while, and gradually the moon sank behind the distant trees. Joe Crane and Preston went back to their wagon, and I lay down with my head resting on my pack roll, and let the fire die. I fell asleep for a while.
    It must have been near dawn when the Indians come. They was not interested in battle. Seemed like they only wanted to show how brave they was. I thought at the time maybe they was just trying to scare us away. They rode around us, yipping and cawing like hawks. Theo told all of us to hold our fire. “I’ll clobber the first man who fires his gun,” he said, and he meant it. He stood by his wagon, watching us, while the Indians danced and circled around screeching to beat all. I could hear children crying in one of the wagons. The Indians wasn’t shooting, neither. Whenever one of them felt like it, he would ride right up to where we waited for him, guns at the ready, and touch one of us on the head or shoulder with his lance. Theo still would not let us fire a shot. His woman fed sticks into the campfire at the center of camp, and all of us watched the Indians riding around us in the orange morning sun and yellow firelight. Their horses was small and lean and very quick. It looked like each pony was a part of the Indian on his back, like one brain moved both of them.
    I stood next to Cricket behind Theo’s wagon, and I got hit twice on the top of the head with a Indian lance. I didn’t even see who hit me until I felt it and then I’d hear the “Yip, yip” and feel the breath of the damn horse as the brave whirled around and rode away. One kept riding up into the firelight—just a few feet from Joe Crane’s wagon—and he’d wave a long spear with a red bandana on the tip of it.
    “That’s Sioux,” Theo said. “Red Top’s bunch.”
    I heard him say that, and something broke down inside myself. I mean, I felt something give way in my gut. I only heard “Sioux” and “Red Top.” As that fellow with the red bandana on his lance rode up the hill toward me, I aimed my rifle and shot him in the forehead. The Indian fell off his horse like a sack of meal. The rest of them broke and run down the hill.
    Theo turned to me and stared with them small black eyes.
    “I got him,” I said.
    “You got him, all right. You son of a bitch. Now we’re in for it.”
    “You said it was Red Top. I thought the rules had changed.”
    “That wasn’t Red Top, you damn fool.”
    “I heard you say it.”
    “Did I tell you to fire?”
    “No. But you said Red Top and I figured . . .” The way he was looking at me made me stop.
    He shook his head with disgust. “Well, now we’re riding into trouble.” He left me there and walked over to the fire. He threw a bearskin over the main campfire and herded all the women into the wagons. He got them to lay down as close to the floor as they could. Then he come back and got everybody in