Corn Woman and her young among them, but the gun smoke was thick now and closed across about that time, and when it cleared a trooper’s horse was shot under him and fell into my line of vision. I was distracted by the sight of them saddlebags, where the cavalrymen generally packed their extra ammunition. I run towards it, but before I got there the animal clumb to its feet and galloped away riderless. Just stunned, I reckon. But the trooper was hurt worse. He lay with his left boot at a strange angle from his upper leg. He was a young fellow, hardly beyond a boy, with a newly started mustache. Him and me, our eyes met, and a blaze come into his as they was windows in back of which somebody just fired a torch, but it was dying caused it and not recognition, for the next instant his head pitched forward showing the back of the skull busted open like an orange. And the Cheyenne who did it, using a wooden war club embedded with a triangular blade of rusty iron, took the lad’s carbine and cartridge belt and dashed for the river, whooping, but got his own as he leaped the bank, belched blood as he hit the water, and sank in frothing commotion.
Already the troops had passed into the lower reaches of the village, the noise suddenly half-distant as if from a fight in the room next door. I had a mind to go back to my lodge and fetch the cartridges from underneath Digging Bear, but knew the soldiers would soon reverse for the clean-up and my activity might bring them down on where Sunshine was hid, so I run among the other tepees, and that was when I saw the stout body of Black Kettle, sprawled near his lodge door. He had signed his last treaty. Sand Creek and now this. His wife lay nearby, still dying.
Old Lodge Skins, I thought: I must get to him. He’d be helpless now, with no sons and blind. So I doubled back, for his tepee was near my own, and on the way I passed numerous dead Indians and almost got shot by a wounded brave I didn’t know, but he went under before he could stretch the bowstring. The incident brought my appearance to mind. I hadn’t cleaned the black paint from my face of the day before-it keeps your nose and cheeks warm in winter-but some of it must have been scraped away in this or that activity since. Aside from that, my hair was wholly exposed. Well, I didn’t know what to do about it at the moment.
I plunged in through the entranceway of Old Lodge Skins’s tepee. Sure enough, he was still there. But he was not abandoned. Them two young wives of his was trying to get him to flee. The one had a baby strapped to her back. The other was especially wrought up, and automatically went for me with her butcher knife, though she used to see me often.
I held her off on the muzzle of my empty gun, and says: “You women run for it. I’ll help Grandfather.”
“Kill me then, too,” cries Tassel Woman, who had that knife.
“Get on out, you fool!” I yells, and stepping to the side, fetches her a swat in the ample hindquarters with the stock of the Ballard. “Go down to the river.”
That shook some sense into her, and the other with the baby said: “I believe you”; and they left.
“My son,” Old Lodge Skins remarked, quite casually. “Sit down beside me and we will smoke.”
Would you believe it? That old man set there upon his buffalo robe and commenced to fill his pipe.
“Grandfather, have you lost your wits? The bluecoats are wiping us out. We have only the time of a bird flight to get under the riverbank before they turn back.”
“Black Kettle is dead,” said he. “I know it. I am blind and cannot fight. Yet neither will I run. If it is my day to die, I want to do it here, within a circle.”
Well, I could see from the set of his leathery old jaw that talk from me would never stir him.
I says: “All right, I will light the pipe.” He stuck his head forward, I grabbed away the pipe stem with my left hand, and with my right fist I hit him full force upon the chin. My hand was perfectly stunned, I couldn’t unclench it. Old Lodge Skins, however, setting there like a rock, appeared undamaged.
“You are worried too much, my son,” he said. “Your hand slips upon the pipe. Give me the brand. I will light it myself. Then we shall smoke, and your worry will lift and fly away like the little buffalo bird.”
I didn’t think I’d ever regain the use of my right hand, so I brought him a glowing coal in my left. By now the shooting outside was coming back in our direction. What I had intended to do with that blow, you see, was to knock him unconscious and carry him to the river. I now considered cold-cocking him with my rifle butt, but it was likely his head was even harder than his jaw, besides being padded with that coarse, thick hair.
He puffed on the pipe and offered the usual smoke clouds to East and West, etc. By God, I thought, he is sticking to it, he is an Indian to the core. You know how you think about foreigners, savages, and so on, that in an emergency they’ll be just like yourself, even to talking English. But it was me who had to become Cheyenne here.
I got the eloquence of desperation. “The river is part of the great circle of the waters of the earth,” I says in the highest, squeakiest voice I could imagine, in mimicry of the falsetto of classic Cheyenne oratory. It seemed to work: Old Lodge Skins come alert and put down his pipe.
“The sacred waters flow through the body of the earth as the blood runs within a man and the sap within a tree. All things are joined in this great current. O White Buffalo Spirit, hear me! Lead your children to safety by the river!”
I don’t want you to think I was mocking anything at this point. Get into a battle and see how derisive you feel. No, I felt the call then. It might have been an instinct for preaching inherited from my Pa, but I was right exalted.
Not so much so, however, that I failed to see Old Lodge Skins picking up a huge old muzzle-loader from where it had laid beside him. My God, I thought, he’s going to shoot me for trying to save him, the crazy old galoot.
Then I heard a noise at the door and turned, and a soldier crouched there, thrusting in a pistol and trying to see through the dim light.
The chief set up from where he had laid back with the five-foot barrel between his moccasin toes. He had sighted on sound.
“Go get his hair, my son,” said he. “Then we will talk some more about the river. Maybe I will go there.”
“It’s probably too late already,” I says. “Now they will come like coyotes to a rotting carcass. I won’t argue with you any more.”
I took an arm and pulled him to his feet. He never resisted in the slightest. I reckon he had decided to go: otherwise I’d never of moved him, I’m sure of that. I slit the tepee cover with my knife and prepared to lead him out.
“Wait,” he said. “I must take my medicine bundle.” This was a sloppy parcel about three foot long and wrapped in tattered skins. Its contents was secret, but I had once peeked into that of a deceased Cheyenne before they put it with him on the burial scaffold, and what his contained was a handful of feathers, the foot of an owl, a deer-bone whistle, the dried pecker of a buffalo, and suchlike trash: but he undoubtedly believed his strength was tied up in this junk, and who was I to say him nay. So with Old Lodge Skins. I got his bundle from a pile of apparent refuse behind his bed.
Then we started out again.
“Wait,” the old man said. “My war bonnet.” He never wore this item since I knowed him, because I think I have said that Cheyenne chiefs did not go in for display: they was generally the plainest of the men you’d see. He kept his in a round rawhide case hanging from a tepee pole.
“Perhaps you would like to see it?” he asks. “It is very beautiful and a reminder to me of my fighting days as a young man.” He actually starts to undo the case.
“Some other time, Grandfather,” says I, hanging it on my shoulder by its leathern string.
About that time, a number of carbines begin to pour lead into the tepee; it sounded like we was in a beehive. But do we leave? No, Old Lodge Skins has first to get his sacred bow and quiver of arrows, and then a special blanket, and of course his powder horn and shot bag, and his pipe and tobacco case. I am loaded down with this crap, and the United States Cavalry is blowing out the front of the lodge.
I commence to curse in English and howl in Cheyenne, and try to push him through the slit I cut, but no use, he stands embedded like a tree and puts on the rest of his jewelry: bracelets, bear-claw necklace, breastplate of tiny bones, and the lot.
Now the soldiers set fire to the face of the lodge. I guess that’s when I might have started to cry. I didn’t care about being killed no more, would indeed have welcomed death, I think, if I could have got the suspense over. I say crying; it might have been laughter. Whatever, it was hysterical.
