charmed like the antelope in that surround and about to be similarly butchered-a number of our warriors had indeed slung their bows and were grasping war clubs and hatchets, expecting to knock the helpless soldiers from the saddle-when there was a multiple glitter from the blue ranks and above our song come the brass staccato of the bugle call.
They had drawn sabers and next they charged.
We stopped. There was six hundred yards of river bottom between them and us. Soon it was down to four, then three, and our singing petered out. The bugle was done by now, and no sound was heard but the thumping of a thousand iron-shod hoofs intermixed with scabbard jangle. And speaking for myself I never saw guidons nor uniforms nor even horses but rather a sort of device, one big mowing machine with many hundred bright blades that chopped into dust all life before it and spewed it out behind for a quarter mile of rising yellow cloud.
Now we was the paralyzed, and froze to our ground until the oncoming ranks was within one hundred yards, then seventy-five, and then we burst into fragments and fled in uttermost rout. The magic, you see, had been good against bullets, not the long knives.
I say “we” for effect. Actually, at a certain razor’s, or saber’s, edge of choice, I cut clean my Cheyenne ties, pitched Old Lodge Skins’s hat to the earth where it was shortly churned into trash by galloping hoofs, and with the free-swinging sash of my breechclout began to scrub the paint off my face, all the while yelling in English, which I hadn’t spoke for five years, so some of my urgency went into rhetorical matters.
What do you say at such a time that won’t make you sound like more of an Indian? My vocabulary was real limited, what with disuse, and I tell you the imagination ain’t at its best when a six-foot trooper, mounted on a huge bay, is thundering down on you with his pigsticker and all around is similar gentry pursuing your late family and friends who is running like stampeded buffalo.
Here’s what I said. I shouted: “God bless George Washington!” In between I was scrubbing my forehead on that breechclout flap, for which I had to bend forward in the saddle. Which saved my life, for that big trooper sickled his blade across precisely where my adam’s apple would have been under normal conditions. Well, that business about Washington hadn’t worked, so as he wheeled for a second swing, backhand, I yelled: “God bless my Mother!”
To evade his savage chop I had to go down on the offside of my pony, Indian-style, clinging by my shins, and rode in a circle while he dogged me all along, slashing the air but it made a fearsome snicker. Meanwhile the rest of the cavalry was pounding by, and I expected to be hacked from behind before this son of a bitch either hit me or understood what I was getting at. For he was big, and I don’t care what you say, for every inch a man grows over five foot five, his brain diminishes proportionately. All my life I have had a prejudice against overgrown louts.
This dodging went on long enough and with enough variations so I saw he could never touch me, on the one hand, and would never stop trying, on the other. He wasn’t much of a horseman: at the end of every slash the momentum of his saber-wielding arm would pull up the far knee and loosen his seat while the animal veered. He done this once too often, and I poked my moccasin over into his ribs and with a sudden jolt unhorsed him in a clatter of scabbard and spurs and the rest of that overload the soldier boys toted.
I dropped off my pony, trailing the war bridle from my belt, put a knee into each shoulder of that dazed trooper and laid the edge of my scalping knife across his bristly throat-the blunt side, in case temptation offered.
All of a sudden I recalled a number of choice phrases I had heard from grownups around Evansville.
“Now, you _______,” I says with great energy. “Do I have to cut your _______ throat to get it through your _______ thick head that I’m a _______ white man?”
His dumb look never altered, but he said: “Then why in hell are you dressed like that?”
“It’s a long story,” says I, and let him up.
CHAPTER 8 Adopted Again
YOU CAN PROBABLY READ about the fight in books because it was the first real engagement between the Army and the Cheyenne, causing quite a stir at the time. The soldiers claimed thirty Indians was killed in the saber charge, the colonel reported nine, and the truth was four dead, several wounded. It took place in the month of July, 1857.
That’s the kind of thing you find out when you go back to civilization: what date it is and time of day, how many mile from Fort Leavenworth and how much the sutlers is getting for tobacco there, how many beers Flanagan drunk and how many times Hoffmann did it with a harlot. Numbers, numbers, I had forgot how important they was. Kansas had also become a Territory, for all the difference it made to me.
That trooper, whose name was Muldoon, took me to the colonel when the excitement was over, and the way I told it was the Cheyenne had forced me on pain of death to join their war party, after having five years earlier killed my whole family and held me henceforward in brutal imprisonment. Muldoon vouched that I sure could have killed him but refrained from it. With the paint scrubbed completely off, and in a gray wool shirt and blue pants Muldoon lent me from his extras, about eight sizes too big, I appeared pretty harmless.
I didn’t have no need to worry. Regarding Indians you could tell anything in them days and have it swallowed, and sooner by the military than the civil, for the reason that a white soldier keeps up his nerve by believing his enemy is contemptible to the point of buffoonery. Some of them troopers thought Indians ate human flesh, for example, and had relations with their own daughters.
So the colonel expressed his sympathies, then tried to get some information out of me as to the location of the Cheyenne lodges and horse herd, as he proposed to burn the first and capture the second, but I acted as if rendered half idiotic by the tortures I had underwent for years and so eluded that. It turned out he found the camp anyway by merely following the trail, and burned the abandoned tepees. I was happy to see that Old Lodge Skins’s was not among them; Buffalo Wallow Woman and White Cow Woman must have took time to fold it up before fleeing. From there on, that general trail burst into many little ones, as is the Indian practice for evasion. The warriors, who had gone off to the east, would circle around later. Everybody would get together at some later time when the danger was over.
The Army mucked about that area most of the summer, at one point going as far west as Bent’s Fort and seizing the supplies there that was supposed to go as annuity payments to the Indians under the existing treaty, then coming back to the Solomon again. But they never found no more Cheyenne and at length returned to Fort Laramie.
I had of course been with them this while, being looked after by Muldoon, who found it convenient to forget I could have killed him with my hands tied behind me and pretend I was a helpless kid. Well, I let him, for he was a kindly slob. He used to make me wash a lot with strong Army soap, claiming I still stunk like a goat for weeks after I had left the Cheyenne. I believed
The other soldiers treated me the same, and other than having to listen to a lot of their stupid talk, I never actually suffered. On a campaign like that was an easier way to break back into white life than any other. At least we was outdoors and slept on the ground, and though that Army grub, chiefly sowbelly and hardtack, was garbage, I shot some game now and again, for I had retained my bow and arrow and my Cheyenne pony, and the soldiers liked red meat too, so that made me quite popular with them though I never talked much, which they laid to my weak-mindedness owing to years of captivity.
You might have thought the colonel would be interested in my experiences of five years’ barbarism, but he wasn’t. I wasn’t long in discovering that it is a rare person in the white world who wants to hear what the other fellow says, all the more so when the other fellow really knows what he is talking about.
I’ll say this, my medicine failed when we got to Laramie. I had not had anything in mind when I went white at the Solomon battle, except to save my life while not retreating. I sure didn’t figure out what such a decision would entail in the long run. I was away from civilization so many years that I forgot how everything is organized there: you don’t just move into someone’s tepee and let it go at that.
For example, we hadn’t been long at Laramie, where I was still bunking with the soldiers, when the colonel
