There was no preacher and no vow. There was a feast in the lodge of Strikes Twice, with boiled tongue and pemmican sweetened with chokecherries and coffee so strong it could have floated a horseshoe, and there was a procession of Rides Far's relatives on her mother's side carrying gifts to the chief's lodge, and another procession of her father's relatives carrying gifts back. Wes, who had no relatives within fifteen hundred miles except the one lying wounded behind a striped blanket, had worried about this. He had nothing to give.
"You have a rifle," Rides Far pointed out.
"It's a Winchester '76. It's the only good thing I own."
"Then it is a good gift."
So he carried the rifle to the lodge of Strikes Twice, and laid it across the chief's knees with the cartridge belt coiled on top of it, and the old man looked at it and then at Wes and said something that made the whole lodge burst out laughing.
"He says," Rides Far murmured, "that it is the first time a man has paid for one of his daughters with the gun he was too cold to hold."
But the chief kept the rifle, and that evening the boy who had doctored Deacon's foot led four horses to the door of Rides Far's lodge, two bays and a buckskin and a spotted gray, and tied them there, and Wes understood that he had been answered.
* * *
He learned quickly that there were rules, and that nearly all of them were invisible until he broke one.
The first and most important concerned his wife's mother. Her name was Good Lodge Woman, and she was small and quick and had a laugh like a magpie, and from the day of the wedding onward she did not once look at him or speak a word to him directly. If he came into her lodge she turned her back. If they passed on the path between the lodges she drew her blanket over her face. When she wished to tell him something—which was often, because she had firm opinions about how much he ate and how badly he sat a horse bareback—she said it to Rides Far, loudly, in his hearing, and Rides Far repeated it to him without expression.
"My mother says you will freeze if you do not wear the moccasins she made you instead of those boots."