whiskers a-swimming in gore; had been crawling along the line and got up too high for a second, his last. Then Custer come along, erect no more but his belly scraping the gravel. There was blood on him, too, splattered from someone else, I believe, for he was not yet wounded.
“Cooke,” he says, and nudged the adjutant’s lifeless form. “Cooke, take an order for Benteen.” And then spitting the dust and stones out of his mouth, he says, “Cooke, write this down: ‘Come quickly, and the day is ours.’… Have you got that, Cooke?”
“He’s dead, General,” I says.
“Get the name of the man who said that, Cooke,” Custer snapped, his eyes red-veined and not looking either at me or the adjutant but towards the head of my fallen pony.
I don’t know, I guess I felt sorry for him then, so I took up the role of Cooke and he never detected the difference.
I says: “Yes sir, I’ll take care of it.” And Custer mumbled some and rolled over on his back, his hands behind his neck, and looked into the sky and smiled as if at secret knowledge. Another of them great arrow-masses vaulted overhead, catching sunlight on the ground edges of their iron points, and coming down like sleet through his field of vision.
He never wavered-and as it happened, these was doing less damage now, for there wasn’t many targets left to hit-but says in an easy tone of voice, like a genial scholar:
“Taking him as we find him, at peace or at war”-them arrows come swooshing down to stick upright all over dead men and horses-“at home or abroad,” Custer goes amiably on, “waiving all prejudices, and laying aside all partiality, we will discover in the Indian a subject for thoughtful study and investigation.”
I took time to discourage about fifty savages from advancing for a minute or two; I was fast running out of shells, for as our number dwindled I fired more frequently in compensation. And while I was so doing, Custer lay a-chattering away to himself.
As I reloaded, I heard him say: “It is to be regretted that the character of the Indian as described in Cooper’s interesting novels is not the true one. Stripped of the beautiful romance with which we have been so long willing to envelop him, transferred from the inviting pages of the novelist to the localities where we are compelled to meet him, the Indian forfeits his claim to the appellation of the
A rift opened up above him, and he smiled at the blue sky there revealed, lecturing at it with a dirty finger.
“We see him as he is, and, so far as all knowledge goes, as he ever has been, a
Well, he had an altogether appropriate subject, you could not deny him that, and his discourse was being embellished by the gunfire and howling of five thousand individuals of the very race; and I thought I could hear the devilish screeching of the women from the quarter nearest the river, and knowed what they was up to: clubbing the last sparks of life from our boys who lay wounded there, and mutilating all.
But that parting of the smoke took my attention then, for it lengthened gradually towards the southeast on some random current, and after a time you could see a good three mile across the stretch of ridges and bluffs by which we had come to this place, and the sun was on that far high point where Custer had took his second sight of the village, where I seen in Reed’s young face the beginning of the death in which he now lay.
And a tiny flicker showed there! No Indian lance-pennon was large enough to be visible at the distance, no war bonnet would flutter so, a flapping blanket would be darker, bigger; besides, all the Indians in creation was investing our hill. It had to be a cavalry guidon, I reckoned, had to be, though I surely could not verify the color at that range.
“General!” I says, yelling through Custer’s monologue. “Look there, look there!”
Now you recall his crazy lone gallop towards the ford, from which Mitch Bouyer rescued him, and afterwards he turned normal again and done as good a job of leading as a man could under the circumstances. Well, he had seemed even farther gone at present, what with that raving, but I kept a-shouting at him anyway, and finally he moved his dull eyes towards the east, and then instantly they ignited.
“That’s Benteen!” he snapped, and scrambled to his feet, erect again amid the hail of missiles and impervious to them. “Come on, boys,” he shouted to the sprawling quick and dead along the ridge, “give a volley to direct him!”
Then caught up his own guidon from the lifeless clutch of Hughes, who had now expired, and waved it in great semicircles, and on the signal of one remaining lieutenant with an arm all bloodied, we sounded in unison whatever pieces still functioned, twenty carbines maybe and some pistols, enough to make a goodly report.
Then a bugler was called around for, but none was left. So Custer had us salvo again, and he was about to order a third when the officer informs him we wouldn’t have enough shells left for another. Now I seen some of the Indians towards the outside of the throng against us, off a half mile or more, mount their ponies and head towards the peak where Benteen was supposed to be, and reckoned they had seen him too.
The distant flicker continued for a spell, getting no closer, and then the smoke from the volleys drifted across our view and cut it off forever. The last hope, and not a real one at that, maybe, for I expect he could never have got through with his hundred and Reno’s similar number, and they too would have been slaughtered. Well, you can read how he made a try and was discouraged by that movement of Indians in his direction, and him and Reno retired to the hill where they was soon besieged by the host who had finished us off.
But I’ll say this, and it might be biased on account of my own situation: Benteen never tried hard to relieve us. At this time only a few hundred Indians started against him, whereas we retained thousands. He had the pack train with its reserve ammunition; we possessed too few cartridges to sound a third volley. He hadn’t done no fighting yet at all; our carbines was jammed,
Reno might have been a coward, but not Benteen, who wasn’t afraid of nothing: not Indians, and not Custer, and besides, he was an honorable man, so well liked by the troops that I had got tired of hearing how wonderful he was. Which might have been my personal predilection against popularity, being generally alone in the white world as I had always been, but Custer was about to die now, while Benteen survived, and you have to admit that makes a difference.
So we fought on and no help came and one by one the remaining guns fell silent, but the Indians still didn’t make no overrunning charge, just surged ever closer so that we was as if upon a diminishing island in a river at flood. Finally I fired my last carbine shell, broke the stock against the ground and poured gravel into the breech; it wasn’t permanently ruined but at least no savage could turn it against me without some prior work. Then I drawed my Colt’s and thought to get the knife out of my left boot-top, but discovered that arm was altogether lifeless owing to the wounded shoulder: no pain, just gone to board. Well, by time it come to blades I didn’t reckon to be still among the quick, anyhow, so let the idea drop.
Around then, Custer come back. He had gone to the extremity of our position, still trying to signal Benteen with the guidon, I expect, and while there an Indian ball had splintered off the flagstaff halfway along, so he was now holding it by the stub. But as to his person, he was yet untouched by enemy fire, however ravaged by smoke and dust and heat and madness.
I looks up at him, and blue eyes glittering within that mask of dirt, still staring southeast into the white fog, he says aloud though to himself: “Benteen won’t come. He hates me.”
I had stopped worrying about him standing erect: it didn’t matter much now whether he was hit, and then too it did provide some inspiration even for me, for I tell you it was absolute death from two foot off the ground on up, now. A fly couldn’t have got through unsinged, so we didn’t draw no more of that insect, though them that was there, feasting on our broken flesh, by the same token couldn’t get away when engorged.
Custer wasn’t singing, like Old Lodge Skins at the Washita, addressing his gods and walking in the magic way of the Cheyenne. No, the General stayed intact because he was Custer, better than anyone else, basically invulnerable even in defeat, and always right. You got to admire that type of conviction, even when you resent it. And I did both.
I says: “Hates you so much he would let two hundred others die to do you in?”
“Spite,” says Custer slowly, “spite and envy. I’ve had to face them my life long.”
He was speaking quiet, and there wasn’t enough noise left of our firing now to obscure a word. “I would have liked to be his friend, but envy intervened. For each of my achievements I have paid bitterly in lost affection. People love only the weak, teamster. Now make a joke of that.”
He was quite clear, you see, more so than at any time since we had come upon the ridge. He recognized me
