The Traveler

Previously:

A cowboy finds Sarah in the desert and puts her out of her misery.

Chapter 9

I put the woman out of my mind and continued west. Traveling across the plain is a lonely trek, but it suited me. I never minded the solitude. A man who doesn't like to be alone doesn't like himself. That's all there is in the west.

The west was where I was meant to be. I never felt the need to be around people. To me it seemed that the more people there were, the more trouble there was. I was convinced that people were never meant to live around each other. It's hard to kill another man if you never see one.

The west was a perfect place to put my philosophy to the test. A man could live forever here without having to be around anybody. That meant never having any problems as far as I was concerned.

I rode for two days and came to the tribe that had banished Sarah. That's where I learned her name. I was safe riding into the Indians' camp alone. They gave passage to a man who posed no threat.

Funny thing about Comanche. If they had ridden up on me a mile outside of camp, they would have stripped me, staked me out on the desert floor, and skinned me with their flint knives, but a man riding directly into their camp received no more than a passing glance.

The Indians asked if I had seen a crazy woman. I denied seeing her. There was no telling what their reaction would be if I told them I had killed a demon possessed woman. Indians believed that a devil woman was protected by the spirits.

The Comanche believed that everything had a spirit. The trees had spirits. Wolves had spirits, even dirt had a spirit. They always offered part of their food to the spirits. They would cut off a piece of meat, hold it up to the sky and then bury it. They probably wouldn't take kindly to my killing Sarah's spirit.

At night, I would join the Indians in smoking a pipe. It was their way of communicating with the spirits. After the pipe, the Indians would usually dance around the fire. Sometimes, I would join them. Even I could do an Indian dance. I thought I could but my movements were uncoordinated and jerky. The Indians laughed at my attempts.

“You don't have the spirit of dance in you. You must have great happiness or great sadness. You have neither. You're white. You're stuck between spirits.”

________       _______       _______
 

Ten Bears told me where Comanches came from. "One day, the Great Spirit collected swirls of dust from the four directions in order to create the Comanche people. These people formed from the earth had the strength of mighty storms.

A shape-shifting demon was also created and began to torment the people. The Great Spirit cast the demon into a bottomless pit. To seek revenge, the demon took refuge in the fangs and stingers of poisonous creatures, and continues to harm people every chance it gets."

I guess that's as good an explanation as any. It was better than my theory that they came from dogs. When Ten Bears saw that I accepted this story, he went on and told me about where buffalo came from.

To be continued . . .