Then I collapsed, panting, on a grassy knoll, and dimly through my dizzy eyes I saw that the men, relaxing gladly, were sitting down around me and taking out their silver tobacco boxes.
“A Shoshi man,” said Perolli, “with one of Pultit. I don’t just get it; something to do with the blood feud. Let me listen.”
We sat on the grassy knoll that seemed to be the edge at the end of the world, so far below it the valleys lay, and listened while the men of the tribes that were “in blood” talked easily together of unimportant matters and offered one another cigarettes.
The Shoshi man had taken off his turban and wore on his handsome head only the tiny round white cap, hardly larger than the curved palm of a hand, that covered his scalp lock. Around its edges the hair was shaved clean to the skull, and with his weather-browned face and scarlet sash bristling with knives he looked altogether the savage.
He was an exile from his own tribe, we learned. A man of the tribe had killed this man’s brother in a quarrel over irrigation water; the chief men of the tribe had called a council and deplored the murder, condemning the murderer to pay ten thousand kronen to the murdered man’s family. This had been done, but the brother rebelled against the decision. Blood could be paid for only in blood, he declared; such was the ancient Law of Lec, and who were the men of these young centuries, that they should set aside that law? Therefore he had shot and killed the man who had killed his brother, and, sending his wife to the chiefs to return the ten thousand kronen, he had fled to the house of a friend in Pultit.
Now it is the law that when the chiefs of a tribe take council together and arrive at a decision, they must consult all the members of the tribe involved in that decision; when they all agree to it, it must be carried out. The honor of the chiefs is involved. If any party to the agreement breaks it, then all the chiefs, together and separately, with all masculine members of their families, must not rest until they kill that man and clear their honor. So seven chiefs of Shoshi, with all their sons and brothers, were hunting this Shoshi man.
“As it should be,” said one of our men, judicially, and quoted their proverb, “A goat is tied by the horns, a man by his word.”
“That may be,” said the Shoshi man, retorting with another, “but ‘where the tooth aches the tongue will go.’ This matter was a sore tooth to me, and I had no sleep until I killed that man who killed my brother. As to the money, I have returned it. Money will not buy my brother’s blood.”
The men fell silent, smoking. “But why hasn’t he been killed before now?” I demanded of Perolli, when their words had been translated to me.
“He is traveling with his friend, the man of Pultit,” said Perolli. “He is under that man’s protection. If the chiefs of Shoshi kill him, they will be in blood with the tribe of Pultit, whose hospitality they will have violated. Shoshi is already in blood with Shala, and——”