and I also saw the big ghostly shapes of the gray wolf, a nasty creature, and the noise of them fangs tearing at limp flesh and the growls and whines was quite unpleasant.
I just had to start a fire, for the sight of so much carrion gives a wolf the confidence to take on something living. I was scraping among the ashes of the tepees, trying to find a coal still burning, when I heard the sound of horses coming from downriver. Custer had carried out his bluff, you see, threatening the villages in that direction so the Indians would strike them and run without hitting him; then he turned and come back.
Wolves, coyotes, and me melted away. I don’t know where the vermin went: I retired into the brush, and more listened to than watched the column troop through the razed village. Then, after the rear guard had passed, I fell in a quarter-mile behind and followed them at this interval some hours up the valley of the Washita to where they finally made camp. Oh, but it was a cold and barren march for me, the desolation adding to the temperature. My only solace was that them troops dwelt in a similar predicament as to the weather. But they had comrades in misery, whereas my recent partners was dead or dispersed.
Soon they lighted great bonfires which illuminated the riverbottom. Well, I could just as soon cut Custer’s throat after I singed my shanks a little, I thought. Indeed, without so doing it wasn’t likely I could lift my knife for the shivering. So I snuck through the picket line and pushed up close through the throng about one blaze.
Some soldier wrapped in an Indian blanket says: “You ain’t got a chaw?” I shook my head. The reflection of the flames flickered in his blear-eyes. He says: “Wasn’t that a brilliant idea of Hard Ass’s to leave the packs and overcoats behind? I reckon he’ll get another medal for that.”
A fellow on my other side says: “I don’t doubt he kept his own overcoat and a side of bacon which his striker is frying up at this minute.”
“Custer’s luck, hey boys?” This come from the blear-eyed fellow, and someone else said hush or Hard Ass would hear him.
“Screw him,” says Blear Eyes. “What’s he gonna do, put me on half rations?”
The other soldier says: “He’ll have a hole dug right through the snow and throw you in it, boy.”
“He will?” I asks, trying to seem a natural part of this group.
“Will he? You must be a recruit or you’d know he done the very thing on the campaign a year ago last summer. Ask Gilbert,” nodding at a long, thin soldier with a crooked nose and a growth of whiskers who was rubbing his skinny hands towards the fire. This man says: “Yeah, we was in the field and he never had no guardhouse. Some of us boys showed up late for call, so he had this hole dug in the ground, thirty foot square, maybe fifteen deep, and throwed us in, then put boards acrost it. Fierce hot it was under the sun, and there was too many of us to lay down all at once.”
“Then Hard Ass himself goes over the hill to see his old lady,” Blear Eyes says. “Runs right off an Indian campaign. And you know all that happened to him? Suspended from command for one year, and he goes back to Michigan and spends it fishing.”
Gilbert says: “I don’t condemn the bastard for running back to his woman, much as I hate him, for there’s a pretty piece of fluff.”
“That right?” says I. I was fair warmed now and beginning to plot my course.
“Oh my yes. You ain’t never seen Miz Custer? I tell you when you do you’ll howl and lay down and lick the dirt, boy, and go to bed next night with Rosy Palm and her five sisters. That’s the difference between a general and a private. Hey, who’s for going over to the prisoners and getting us an old squaw?”
The conversation degenerated from that point on, as you might expect if you know anything about an army, and I edged off and proceeded across the campground. If I was going to assassinate Custer, I first had to locate him without arousing suspicion, which was not easy, since six or seven hundred soldiers was present and I was not tall enough to see over anybody’s head.
The Cheyenne captives had an area and a couple small fires to themselves, and they was now so many silent blanket-rolls upon the earth, the children wrapped right in with their mothers: nothing keeps a redskin from his sleep. Down a ways beyond that, their ponies was herded, with a wide separation between them and the cavalry horses, who the Indian animals make nervous.
I made quite a scout of that bivouac, which was spread out and well lighted by the enormous cottonwood fires; and with the men cold and tired and hungry, what a slaughter could have been managed by fifty Indians. But the tribe had been whipped and then tricked, and anyway they never fought at night. Custer could just as well have pulled in his guards. Only one active enemy lurked in that area.
That was me, and by a process of elimination I found him at last. The officers had their fire at the base of a little knoll, but the General wasn’t there, he was by himself on top of the slight eminence. He had his own little blaze, and was seated on the ground alongside it, writing by its yellow light. Occasionally his striker, that is the orderly who done his servant-work, would come up and put a new log on the flames, which he had got from a detail of poor devils who was kept cutting wood in the timber all night and hauling it into camp.
So on one of their trips in with a load, I joined these last and helped them stack logs, which they did not question, and watched for Custer’s striker to come over for a supply, which he finally done just before my back was broke.
“How’s the General?” I says. Now I must explain that the type of fellow who takes that job has got the personality to suit it. He helps his master dress, serves his master’s food, and digs his master’s latrine, and for all I know wipes his master’s behind. But sucking up to one man satisfies his appetite, and to all others he is extra- snotty.
“Don’t you worry about that,” says he. “Just give me two of them middle-sized logs.”
“I was thinking he must be plumb wore out.”
He give a sneering laugh. “You will never see the time when the General can’t run any man in this outfit into the ground. He only went into camp now on account of the likes of you. He don’t need no sleep nor food. Whipping one tribe of Indians only gives him the taste for another.”
I says: “I seen he was writing something.”
“Yes,” says the striker. “That would be a letter to his Lady. He writes her most every day.” There wasn’t no postal boxes on the plains at that time, so when Custer mailed them letters he had to send some scout through a couple hundred mile of savage wilderness. I had yet to hear a thing about that man that didn’t gall me like a cactus burr.
But just about the time I thought I had got this worm’s confidence, he suddenly stops and squints suspiciously.
“Say, have you got an eye on my job?”
“Not me,” I hastens to say. “No sir, I admit I am too dumb for it. But I tell you, I am right fascinated by heroes. I guess that’s because I am kind of yellow myself. I near pissed my pants on that charge this morning, and the only thing that kept me going was the sight of the General up there ahead, his hair streaming in the wind and his arm waving us on.” I put this watery, worshipful look on my face, and he swallowed it.
“Well,” he says, “you want to carry this wood for me? I reckon it’s O.K. if you come along to the bottom of the hill, where you can look up at him. And that’s a favor I wouldn’t give to any of the rest of these scum.”
“Listen,” says I, gritting my teeth with another feeling than that which he took it for, “it’s worth a month’s pay to me to actually go on up and put the wood on the fire near that noble individual.”
He was first scandalized at this suggestion, but after a good bit of talk and my signing an IOU, with a false name, to hand him over thirteen dollars at the next payday, which is what a private earned per month, I gained the privilege of carrying the wood alone to the top of the hill, sticking it into the fire, and coming immediately back thereafter.
We set out for the knoll, and upon reaching the bottom of it, he stayed there and I mounted the slope with my two logs. Them griping soldiers had been wrong: Custer wasn’t wearing no overcoat, and he had even laid his hat beside him and loosened the top of his shirt. Of course he was right close to the warm fire. His hair and mustache was golden in the light. He never looked up from the paper, supported upon an order book, which he was covering with line after line of fluent script, occasionally dipping his pen into a little ink bottle, then flinging the excess drops hissing into the flames.
I poked a log into the embers, with my back towards the striker at the foot of the slope, so he wouldn’t see my other hand go beneath the jacket to the hilt of my knife. Some sparks went up the pink smoke stream towards the open black heavens. Custer did not raise his head, for to do so he would have had to change the angle at which his noble profile took the light. He was posing here quite as much as he had done when striding about the
