The chief came to the lodge himself an hour later. He came alone, without the men who had sat along his wall, and he seated himself on the robe Rides Far laid for him and accepted a cup of coffee boiled in a tin pail, and drank it slowly, and looked at the two brothers for a long time before he spoke. When he did, his daughter put his words into English, and Wes found after a while that he had stopped hearing her voice and heard only the old man's meaning, as if the words were passing through clear water.
"When my daughter brought this young man out of the river," Strikes Twice said, "I told her he would die. She told me he would not. She is usually right, and she is always stubborn, so we did as she said. In the second winter I took him into my family as a son. He hunts with my nephews. He counts our cattle. Among my people that makes him my son, and it makes him her brother, and it makes him a member of her mother's clan, which is the Newly Made Lodge clan. You understand this? He is not a white man staying with us. He is one of us. And now a man has shot him in the dark and another man is writing lies about him on paper."
"I understand," Wes said.
"Good. Now listen. I have thought about this for six days. I have thought about it the way you think about a river before you cross it." The old man set down his cup. "The agent is a liar, but he is not a fool. He has a law that says white men who live among us without his permission can be put off the reservation by his police. Eli was a sick man found in a river, and then he was my son, and Dorran did not care until now. Now he will say Eli has no right to be here. He will say you have no right to be here. He can put you off tomorrow and no one will stop him."
"But a white man who marries a woman of the tribe," Rides Far said, translating, and then added on her own account, "this is true, I have heard the agent say it himself, he complains of it constantly—a white man who marries into the tribe has a right to live on the reservation with his wife. The agent cannot send him away without a reason he can write down. He becomes a relative. And our relatives are not alone."
The chief spoke again.
"My father says: if you marry into this family, then you are not a cowboy who used to ride for Pike. You are the husband of the daughter of Strikes Twice, and the brother of the man who was shot, and you have a right to speak for him. When you go to the soldiers, you go as one of us, with a family behind you, and a band of forty lodges behind the family. When the agent's police come to this camp asking for a renegade, they find instead a man with a wife and a lodge and in-laws and a great many horses, and they have to go away and think about what to write next." The old man's eyes rested on Wes, steady and dark. "And while they think, my son gets well. That is the reason. It is not a joke. I am too old to make jokes about my daughter."
Wes looked at Rides Far, who was looking at the fire.
"Ma'am," he said quietly, "what do you think of all this? It's your life he's bargaining with. Not mine."
Rides Far raised her eyes, and for the first time since he had met her she looked surprised.
"My father is not bargaining with my life," she said. "This was my idea."