Cheyenne camp that morning. Then he was “General in the Field”; now, “Soldier at the End of Day.”
It’s funny how a man with Custer’s personality could influence that of his would-be murderer, but I was seeing myself in various illustrations: knife raised over unsuspecting general, him with his halo of golden locks, me with teeth bared, and so on through a series that ended with “Assassin at Bay.”
Who knows how much time I wasted on them childish visions. If you set out to kill, leave your imagination at home. Reality should suffice, at least if you’re white.
For what happened now was that Custer spoke.
Still scratching away with his nib, his eyes to the paper, he says: “I’ll take a cup of coffee now.”
Maybe I simply lost my guts at that moment; maybe I never did have the stomach to slaughter a man in cold blood, but what I have always thought to be the case was that the
So the assassin answers slavishly: “Yes, sir,” and goes down the knoll to where that striker is waiting.
“Get up there on the double,” I says. “The General wants you to give him a bath.”
I don’t believe I have to take you along every inch of my route when leaving the Seventh Cavalry-for I did leave them that very night, in the dead of winter, and struck out alone across the wilderness. I had to. I had not given up my resolution. I was going to kill Custer sometime, but first I had to get away from him for a while. Nor could I stand to be in the proximity of them captive Cheyenne. And going downriver to the still free Indians was equally unthinkable. I had had it, right up to here.
I was going back to the settlements and get me some money, I didn’t care how or where, and buy a frock coat, a brocaded vest, and a pearl-handled revolver. And dressed like that on one fine day, I would encounter General Custer a-strolling with his Lady through the streets of some town, Topeka, say, or Kansas City, for I knowed he liked his cities-oh, I found out more about him than I have said: he liked fine restaurants and theatricals, knew New York City, even, like the palm of his hand; so said his striker.
“My compliments to your Lady, sir,” I would say, and then beg a private word with him, and we would step aside while his pretty Mrs. stood there simpering under her parasol. Then, “Sir,” I would say, “you are a son of a bitch.” And of course as a gentleman he would demand satisfaction, so the next scene was upon the prairie at dawn, our backs together, take ten paces forward, turn, and fire, then him upon the ground, a spreading red stain coming through his embroidered buttonholes. “Sir,” he says to me with his dying breath, “you are the better man.”
Then I’d dig a cold root out of the frozen ground with a pointy stick and gnaw on it, or pack more leaves as insulation between my shirt and jacket, and trudge on. I soon lost track of time. In fact, I went right out of my head and don’t know why I survived at all. I seen nothing but a mass of white, like I was in the middle of a desert of cotton. It was snow of course, blizzards, but I don’t recall it as cold, for I had got to the condition where I was more affected by textures than temperature, and it was all I could do to refrain from laying right down and going to sleep forever.
I guess I finally give in to the urge. I had been moving almost due east, having struck the Cimarron and stayed on it: in delirium you will follow almost anything that seems to know where it’s going. So what I was doing was to cross Indian Territory horizontally rather than proceeding north to Kansas which I had intended, and I reckon I had reached the edge of the Creek Nation when I just flopped down in a white prairie that looked like one big bed.
When I woke up, I was in the log-cabin home of Creek Indians. The man of the family had come across me while hunting and brung me in, and these kindly folk, him and his wife and several youngsters, they nursed and fed me, and give me clothes to replace that blue uniform now in shreds. The Creek was Georgia redskins who was whipped by Andy Jackson, and not long afterward, the Government forced them out of their native country to go and live west of Arkansas, same as they did the Choctaw, Cherokee, and others. But these tribes was right civilized, had them log cabins, wore white type of clothes, did farming, and before the war they had even kept Negro slaves of their own.
I stayed with them Creek until the spring of ’69. After I recovered, I done some hunting to pay my keep, and I helped out with the spring planting, and while I was sure glad to lend them people a hand, I proved to myself I was like a Cheyenne when it came to farming.
Actually, though, that civilized life in the eastern Nations was more dangerous than you might think from a look at them peaceful little farms thereabout. That Creek family, seeing my blue uniform, took me for a deserter, a common type in the Nations. And liked me for it, because they had old cause against the Army from the time of Jackson, and then during the War most of the Creek had been Reb sympathizers, which is a laugh considering how they had been kicked out of Georgia, but what they liked about the South was slavery. Anyway, when the War was done, the Federal Government punished them, and the Choctaw, Cherokee, etc., by taking away the western half of Indian Territory, which had earlier belonged to them tribes, and making it into reservations for such as the Cheyenne. From which followed in natural progression the Battle of the Washita.
What I started to say, though, was that there was considerable Army deserters in the eastern Nations, along with freed slaves who now didn’t have no work, and former Reb soldiers in a similar situation, and Indians what had gone bad, also fugitives from justice back in the States, bully-boys, cutthroats, and just plain rotten fellows. There was in addition every sort of breed in them parts: some being part white, Negro, and Indian all at the same time, with the worst traits of each.
I said it was dangerous living in that part of the country even though you kept to your cabin and cornfield, for gangs of the foregoing was always riding about and murdering people. It was a specially good place to practice that profession, for there wasn’t any local law to speak of. Generally, if you rubbed out a person you hadn’t nobody to get after you but a Federal marshal out of Fort Smith or Van Buren over in Arkansas, where the court was, and they wasn’t active much at this time because the court people had all been Rebel and thus got the boot with the war. A saying went “There ain’t no Sunday west of St. Louie and no God west of Fort Smith.”
Now the center for the rough element was a town in the eastern Creek Nation called Mooskokee, which was where I proceeded upon leaving that family what had befriended me, with a view to getting the stage there and so travel up to Kansas and thence take the Union Pacific out to end-of-track, find Caroline and Frank Delight and cash in my third of our hauling business, for as I have said I needed money. In any event, I could always borrow a bundle off of Frank, for he would now be my brother-in-law.
I walked it to Mooskokee, about forty mile. I didn’t have a cent for stage fare, but over my shoulders I was toting a pack of raccoon skins that I expected to sell once in town, for they make a serviceable cap. Indeed I was wearing one. Well sir, I had reached what I took to be the outlying suburbs, a long muddy hog wallow, lined with ramshackle sties, and I saw an old colored man there, looking for his pigs, and says: “Uncle, could you direct me to the city of Mooskokee?”
He scratches through the sweat-rag on his head and answers: “You has already got almost clear through it.”
“I was just a-looking for the stage line.”
“The station,” he says, “is up the street and around the corner. But if I was you I’d hold off going there at present, for it is in the process of getting robbed, I do believe.”
Sure enough, no sooner had he spoke than a volley of shots sounded from where he pointed and directly a body of men on horseback come tearing around the corner and galloped towards us and would have run us down had we not rolled into a slough alongside the road. I don’t know what was their hurry, for they had nobody chasing them. Somebody had shot the sheriff yesterday, my acquaintance pointed out as we drug ourselves from the mud.
I thanked him and went down to the stage station, which I figured was safe enough now. The agent was lying in a pool of gore, and great holes gaped in the thin board walls where a fellow had been mighty free with a shotgun. Well, I was standing just inside what was left of the place, thinking how it didn’t make much difference to me, on account of I didn’t have the price of a ticket yet anyway, when I heard the noise of horses outside and in busts three very nasty-looking customers, bristling with firearms.
These fellows glare at me with their red eyes and then take in that body of the dead agent, and the one who seemed their leader says to the others: “Told you we was goin’ to be late. Now this no-good bastard has done beat us.”
