the blue murk, contributed no little, and them ejectors stuck, the spent shell locking in the breech. Some worked at it with their knives, breaking off the blades to no purpose. That type of thing might make for a panic while a hundred Indians slither towards you personally, but the fact is that I never saw no disorder among our troops once the situation turned desperate. The Sioux later claimed that a whole platoon down on Keogh and Calhoun’s front committed suicide; I never saw such and won’t believe it happened.
There wasn’t no cowards up on the ridge. When the carbines jammed, the men used their revolvers, about as effective as spit-balls like the schoolboys throwed back in Missouri. And the Indians being so numerous, it was hard to see a casualty among them when we dropped one, so had no encouragement from whatever toll we took.
Counting what was left of Troop C below the cutbank and those of us up top, I reckon we now numbered seventy-five to a hundred. No more firing could be heard from the direction of Keogh, and it had long since been silent towards the right, where Yates’s command and the Gray Horse Troop had obviously gone under, though you couldn’t see through the pall.
I was working my Winchester constantly towards the Cheyenne and might have hit a few from behind the carcass of that Ree pony, who I had shot in the forehead in necessity but regret, for he done a a fine job when the chips was down. I didn’t know then that his old master Bloody Knife had been rubbed out down in the valley with Reno, but on looking back, I reckon
That was the trouble: lay flat and you’d get pinned, stand up and you faced gunfire, roll under a horse’s belly and you was temporarily safe but out of action, letting the Indians advance to where they eventually could walk in and kill you like a snake.
Now General Custer did not consider such a decision for himself. He was walking about through all this and had so far come untouched. And I don’t mean crouching, but striding erect and pointing, sometimes with both arms out in different directions like a standing cross, in which case he must have been a target of maximum visibility against the sky for them Indians lower down. Occasionally he’d fire his Bulldog pistols, always with a classic stance he must have learned at West Point, elbow bending like a steel hinge, forearm rigid. Arrows flashing by him, lead singing, he was as if upon the firing range of some quiet fort.
He was a spectacle for fair, though strewn with dust from short-cropped head to leathern toe, sweat- streaked, blue shirt open at the neck, face like coarse stone from the stubble of beard. And smiling! By God if he was not, and you could hear his raspy voice going along the ridge, calling men to fill a gap here, commending some others for holding on there, ever confident and of good hope.
“Splendid, splendid,” he says, standing there above me, and just as I took a breath, having missed a crawling Indian down the slope with the last three shots then in the magazine, and looked at him, a Cheyenne arrow come close enough by his neck to have feather-whipped it.
I says: “General, won’t you get down?” But had no more luck with that than anything I had ever said to him in our whole history.
He stared back with eyes like blue gems through the dust on his countenance, fanatic as an idol, and he says: “Splendid, boys! We have them on the run now!” And went along the skirmish line, kicking the troopers’ boots in encouragement, only some of them covered the feet of dead men.
Well, his example might have been heartening to the ones who could see it. I recognized he had gone crazy again, like when charging the ford alone, which surely accounted for the failure of the arrows and lead to touch him, for missiles are reluctant to strike a man who has gone out of himself by reason of madness or medicine.
I turned back to shooting Indians, or trying to, as they squirmed through the tall grass below and their serpent heads popped up briefly, always slightly elsewhere than anticipated, for they was expert from birth at this type of fighting and though I had been trained to it myself, the advantage was nullified by our position on that gravel- topped ridge with no cover but the fallen animals.
Next we come under new fire from a neighboring rise sixty-seventy yards to the southwest, signifying that F Troop had definitely went under, for they had commanded that slope. The loud reports of Government carbines was heard everywhere, pointed towards us, quite a different sound from when they are with you, shooting away, and easy distinguished from the pop of weapons with a lighter load.
The hostiles grew better-armed by what they captured, turning our own weapons against us, not even troubled with them ejectors: having all the time in the world, they wouldn’t fire so fast as to overheat the breech. They was getting plenty of ammunition from the saddlebags of the troops what had been rubbed out, whereas we was running low. The pack train was somewhere back the trail, and if you recall, Custer had sent it several messages to come on; but there was a nice problem in how it could get through the enemy host. Indeed, I supposed it had itself got wiped out by now, along with Reno and Benteen: not a stupid conclusion when you understand I reached it while riding a splinter, so to speak, on a roiling ocean of hostiles, amidst a smoke-fog which lifted now and again only to reveal a further loss.
Now it was C Troop, there below, all gone except a handful what scrambled up to us and fell behind the horse-corpse barricade, some hit in the back while so doing and belching blood onto the present occupants who pulled them in to add to the growing mortuary. Tom Custer was not of that number, so had got his, I expect. And young Reed was near me, one minute a-working his expensive sporting rifle and the next stone dead with his mouth open and tongue turning black, and I never saw Boston at all: he had probably dropped on our ride up from the river.
So as man, the General had lost two brothers, a nephew, and very likely his sister’s husband; as commanding officer, the better part of five troops; as cavalryman, his mount. In smaller things, his hat was gone and one revolver; the other he was firing, down on one knee now. His pants was tore, and most of the buttons off his double-breasted shirt, where he had ripped it further open to relieve the heat.
Mark Kellogg, the journalist, lay on his face in the gravel, presumably gone under though there was not a tear on his back anywhere, and from his coat pocket protruded the rolled foolscap of his last dispatch, never sent. Sergeant Hughes, what carried Custer’s personal guidon, was terribly hurt from a gut-wound that curled him up on the ground like a caterpillar around the point of a sharp stick, yet somehow he kept the banner from touching dirt. It hung limp except when feebly stirred by the passing of arrows.
I haven’t mentioned my own wounds, though I had received a couple. I had been struck in the left shoulder by a ball from a muzzle-loader, I reckon, for it had enormous power behind it, lifting me right off the prone position, reversing my head with my boots, so my spine whomped onto the ground and I couldn’t breathe for a minute. But I returned to place directly and got the Indian who done it, for he seen me go over and confidently exposed himself while reloading and nobody else was left to fire at him for thirty yards on either side of me. I give him one in the breastbone and let it go at that, having to conserve ammunition; down he went, and his pals pulled him back into the grass to die or recover, I would never know.
They done the same with all their casualties, whereas ours lay around us, and the dead horses, and owing to the heat the latter was ready to ripen soon, the laid-open flesh already growing dark, and there was even more flies on that hill than Indians, for commotion don’t touch that miserable little beast. I had a few at my bleeding shoulder, feeling their tiny feet where I still could sense no pain. I had also been scored across the cheek by an arrow, at an angle so that the blood trickled into the corner of my mouth, from which salty taste I discovered it in the first place.
But that hangover, now, that was altogether gone, along with the depreciating effect of no sleep for two days: nothing like a massacre to clear your head. I don’t believe my sight was ever keener, before nor since. Too bad there was nothing to use it on but savage enemies and sage, since I figured my seeing would soon end along with everything else. There couldn’t have been over thirty-forty of us left. I don’t know how long we had fought so far; sometimes it seemed like a whole lifetime and at others as brief as a sneeze since that gallop down Medicine Tail Coulee and then up onto the ridge.
I was conscious of somebody falling nearby and turned and seen it was Lieutenant Cooke, his magnificent
