gathered her intent.
“We can’t go back to the tribe,” I says.
“Do you think the white men will let you have a Human Being wife?” she asks. She had a point there, though exaggerated. It wouldn’t be a crime, but it would sure seem odd to Frank North were I to come back from that fight with a family I had suddenly acquired from the enemy. I could of course present this woman and child as legitimate captives, only then they’d be let in for considerable abuse from the Pawnee and later be turned over to the Army at some fort, to be held for exchange with whites taken by the Cheyenne. This was what I had had in mind earlier on, with an idea to control the trade and reclaim Olga and Gus. But right now, at a fairly outlandish moment, I got realistic. I had never received one word that my white family was still alive, and I had checked the forts along the Arkansas. And those along the Platte while working on the railroad.
Truth was, I had just about decided they was dead without admitting it.
I says: “In the mood they’re in at the moment, the Cheyenne will shoot me on sight.”
My woman answered: “I will be with you.”
So that is how I rejoined the Human Beings. I didn’t have no regrets, leaving behind only my horse with the blacksmith in Julesburg and my share in our little hauling business. As to my sister Caroline, I ought to say that just before I had went down to Julesburg, she told me Frank Delight, the whoremaster and saloonkeeper, had asked her hand in matrimony, and she was inclined to entertain the proposition favorably.
I won’t detail our route down the ravine to an intersecting one and then on, coming out behind a hill that obscured us from the Pawnee, no more of which we encountered. And continued mile upon mile of rise and fall, during which night overtook us, and that woman arranged some brush and roofed it with blankets and we slept therein, cheek-by-jowl against the chill you usually get at night upon the prairie, where the wind blows all the time.
The next day we reached Spring Creek and along it found a gathering of the tribe, with remnants like us still coming in. As I expected, I had a close call or two with some of the young Dog Soldiers, but my woman drove them off me like she said she would, for she had a fierce tongue and concentrated purpose.
Old Lodge Skins had got a new tepee since last I seen him, but I recognized his shield hanging before the entranceway.
“Wait here, woman,” I says, and she did as told, and I went within.
“Grandfather,” I says.
“My son,” he greets me, as if I had seen him last two minutes ago. “You want to eat?” He had the most equable temperament I ever knowed in a man.
He looked the same to me when I could make him out, except his eyes stayed closed. I figured he was dreaming, and sure enough he proceeded to paint a verbal picture of the incidents in that ravine.
“I saw you were returning to us,” says he. “There was nothing you could have done for Shadow That Comes in Sight. He knew he would die today and told me so. Our medicine was no good against the many-firing rifles. Perhaps we should not have gone again to the iron road, but the young men wished to destroy another fire-wagon if they could catch one. It is very amusing to see the great thing come snorting and puffing with a spray of sparks as though it would eat up the world, I am told, then it hits the road which we have bent into the air and topples off onto its back, still steaming and blowing, and dies with a big sizzle.”
Next to him I took a seat and we smoked then, of course. And observing that through all this procedure he had not opened his eyes, I decided at length he could not and had the bad manners, maybe, to inquire.
“It is true that I am blind,” he admits, “though the rifle ball did not strike my eyes but rather passed through the back of my neck, cutting the tunnel through which the vision travels to the heart. Look,” he said, opening his lids, “my eyes still see, but they keep it all within themselves, and it is useless because my heart does not receive it.”
His eyes did look bright enough. I reckon it was the nerve which had been cut or stunned in some manner.
“Where did that happen, Grandfather?” I handed him back the long pipe.
He looked some embarrassed, and the smoke stayed inside him a great time before it come gushing from his mouth and nose.
“Sand Creek,” he finally says.
And I groaned: “Ah, no!”
“I remember your advice,” he says, “but we did not go up to the Powder River, after all. Instead we went to the treaty council. I shall tell you how it was. Hump had never attended a conference, and it was one of his needs to own a silver medal like my own. And then our young men said: ‘Why shouldn’t we get presents from the white men for talking to them? We are always in the north, and these Southern Cheyenne get everything.’ I must admit,” Old Lodge Skins goes on, “that I did not myself mind having a new red blanket.
“So that is why we turned around and came back, and we touched the pen with the white men sent by their Father, and Hump received his medal and the young men their new pipe-hatchets, knives, and looking-glasses, and then we were going to the Powder River, but the soldier chief said: ‘You must stay in this place. That is what you agreed to do when you touched the pen.’ But I tell you I did not understand that. However, I know very little about treaties, so I believed the soldier chief was right, and we stayed, though that country was very ugly, with no water and no game. And then the soldiers attacked the village where we were camping with Black Kettle, and they rubbed out a great many of us, and that is where I was hit in the neck and became blind.”
Then I feared the worst and asked after Buffalo Wallow Woman.
“She was rubbed out at Sand Creek,” says Old Lodge Skins. “And White Cow Woman too. And Burns Red in the Sun and his wife Shooting Star. And Hump and High Wolf and Cut Nose and Bird Bear.”
“My brother Burns Red in the Sun.”
“Yes, and his wife and children. And many more, whom I will name only if you intend to mourn them, although that was several winters ago and now they will have reached the Other Side where the water is sweet, the buffalo abundant, and where there are no white men.”
The latter designation he pronounced nowadays in a special way: not exactly hatefully, for Old Lodge Skins was too much a man to sit about and revile his enemies. That was for a loser, like the Rebs what lost the Civil War. And he wasn’t a loser. He wasn’t a winner, maybe, but neither was he a failure. You couldn’t call the Cheyenne flops unless they had had a railroad engine of their own which never worked as well as the U.P.’s or had invented a gun that didn’t shoot straight.
Just to check my impression, I asks him: “Do you hate the Americans?”
“No,” he says, closing up his gleaming though dead eyes. “But now I understand them. I no longer believe they are fools or crazy. I know now that they do not drive away the buffalo by mistake or accidentally set fire to the prairie with their fire-wagon or rub out Human Beings because of a misunderstanding. No, they
“But white men believe that everything is dead: stones, earth, animals, and people, even their own people. And if, in spite of that, things persist in trying to live, white men will rub them out.
“That,” he concludes, “is the difference between white men and Human Beings.”
Then I looked close at the scalp he stroked, which was of the silkiest blonde. For a moment I was sure it come from Olga’s dear head, and reckoned also he had little Gus’s fine skull-cover someplace among his filthy effects, the stinking old savage, living out his life of murder, rapine, and squalor, and I almost knifed him before I collected myself and realized the hair was honeyer than my Swedish wife’s.
I mention this because it shows how a person’s passion can reverse on the instant he is reminded of his own loss. I had just been moved by Sand Creek, and the next minute was ready to kill him.
Now, Old Lodge Skins took cognizance of my state though blind.
“Have you,” he asks, “a great sorrow or is it only bitterness?”
So I told him, and he never heard of the incident in which Olga and Gus was taken. He could not have lied. I have said that it is amazing what and how Indians know about events far distant from them; but likewise there are things they do not hear. In that era the capturing of white women and children was commonplace. A Cheyenne of
