buckskins, and I would have took him for a degenerate imbecile the way he was a-studying them barrels.
But some trooper says to me: “Looky there at Bloody Knife, will you. He’d cut his Ma’s throat for a shot of red-eye. You would never know he is Hard A-” He broke off, on account of he didn’t know who I might be, being as I wore civilian clothes: among the herders and teamsters was Boston Custer, the General’s youngest brother, and his nephew Armstrong Reed. The trooper had been going to say “Hard Ass,” but changed it. “You wouldn’t guess, from looking at him, that he was the General’s favorite scout, would you?” He snorted. “Goddam old drunk.”
But Bloody Knife wasn’t drunk at that minute, nor for some time thereafter, for not even scout Indians was allowed openly to drink whiskey in front of white men. So he hung around hopelessly awhile and tried to talk to people in sign language, and at last, not able to stand and study them barrels without a chance to break into one, he trudged off as though from the burial of a loved one, so grief-stricken was his dark face.
I caught him up and, never speaking Ree, says in the signs: “You want a drink?”
He says: “All right.” So I got a canteenful of that red-eye dispensed by the sutler, and me and Bloody Knife went on out one of the many ravines that cut up the country at the mouth of the Powder and set behind a sagebush, after the Indian had emptied his bladder so as to have a full capacity for drinking the whiskey. This pissing also served to run out a rattlesnake who had been sunning himself in the area: rattlers was abundant in that region.
I give Bloody Knife time for a good swallow and then took back the canteen. I says, watching a couple drops run down his chin and neck and flush out some bugs what lived in his collar, “What is Long Hair going to do?”
The Ree just kept his black eyes upon that canteen. “He has cut his hair,” he says, making the slicing sign with his two dusky hands.
I signaled that I knowed that, but never saw what it had to do with the issue.
“It means,” he says, “that he is going to die.”
I give him the canteen again. I don’t have to tell you at this point what importance an Indian sets upon human hair. Scalps are taken for a more important purpose than just trophies: a man without a skull-cover is considered powerless even when he reaches the Other Side. And whenever Indians saw a white man balded by nature, they believed him a coward who had deliberately shaved his head. I realized Custer had made a bad mistake for his own interests.
“That was not a good thing to do,” says Bloody Knife, who was getting more depressed with every swallow. He looks up at the sun and signals to it: “I shall not see you rise many more times.”
I knew that if I let him continue on that note he would commence to sing his death song at any minute and then I’d never get anything else out of him, so I says right quick: “But that will not happen until all those barrels of whiskey are gone, so drink up.”
At which he was some cheered and filled his fly-trap again.
“Many Sioux and Cheyenne out there?”
He says: “Numerous as stars on a clear night.”
I pointed back towards the camp. “But look at all those soldiers. And more will come from the west and south.”
Bloody Knife shook his dirty head of tangled hair. It was graying some at the temples. “It does not matter,” he says. “We will all be rubbed out. Long Hair will never be the Great Father in the chief village of the white men, as he wishes. I like him a lot, but his medicine has turned bad.”
He goes on that Custer had come to him and the other Ree a night or so since, give them presents, and said he would whip the entire Sioux nation before the month was out, in return for which the American people would make him President.
Well, Grant was in trouble on account of them crooks in his Administration, and when you figured he had got to the White House by whipping the Rebs, a similar result might transpire for the man who sent the Indians under, for they was the only outstanding enemy of the U.S.A. at this particular time in the hundredth year of our Independence from the tyranny of the Old Country.
“I reckon he would like to get it all done by the Fourth of July,” is what I wanted to say, but that is a hell of a difficult speech to make by signs. The Cheyenne know July as “the Moon When Buffalo Are Mating,” but I didn’t know what the Ree called it. However, I made the buffalo-horns, and the motion for screwing-which is the same as used by every white schoolboy-and for moon, and for the fourth day thereof. Still, what would a Ree know of the historical meaning. So I says the day when the soldiers made a lot of noise, shooting cannon and the like.
A look of dim recognition come over his dark face. “And get drunk?” he asks.
“Oh, hell,” I says aloud in English. “What does it matter? Drink up, you poor son of a bitch.”
He shortly passed out, and I took the precaution of unloading his rifle, in case he woke up before the effects had worn off.
I had learned what I wanted to know. I reckoned, in view of Custer’s current needs, this upcoming battle would make the Washita look cheap. Bloody Knife’s pessimism did not impress me. I didn’t care how many hostiles had collected, I knowed they wasn’t organized, never had much modern armament, and was living with their wives and kids.
Well, what was I going to do about it? That old childish idea of assassinating Custer was obviously out. Such a stunt, pulled off now, would just make the Seventh fight harder. They all hated his guts-no sooner had I got off the
Now I had left Bloody Knife under the sagebush when, walking back to camp a-studying this matter, who should I spot but a figure out of the distant past, sitting on the bank just beyond where the Powder emptied into the Yellowstone.
His skin was darker yet than a Ree’s and he wore a flop hat with an eagle feather in it. By God if he had changed much in twenty year.
I says to him: “Well, Lavender, this is some surprise.”
For that is who it was, and he looked at me right polite and says I had the advantage on him.
“Jack Crabb,” says I. “The Reverend Pendrake, in ______, Missouri.”
He studies me careful and says: “Go on.” Then he takes off his hat so he can see better, stands up, peers into my face, kind of groans, then laughs, and I grabs him and gives him a bear hug. I don’t know why, it was more like finding a long-lost relative than when I had actually done so on several occasions.
After we got through with exchanging the pleasures of re-meeting, I says: “Tell me what you’re doing here. Has the Reverend become a chaplain?”
“No, not him,” says Lavender, who must now have been around forty-five years of age and had a few gray hairs when I looked him over close, but the mahogany skin of his face was still unlined. He was dressed in buckskin jacket and pants with fringe, and if I wasn’t wrong, his belt showed beadwork in the Sioux fashion. “No,” he says again, and then: “My oh my, I ain’t thought on that Reverend for many a year. He died, Jack, not long after you run off. Et himself to death, is what happened. He packed away one of them gigantic dinners that Lucy made for him one noontime, then took a nap directly after, and some of that meal backed up and clogged his windpipe and he suffocated afore anyone knowed the difference, damn if he did not.”
At that minute Lavender got a bite on his fishline, for he had set down again and lifted his pole, with me alongside, and he pulled it out and there was a real nice fish on the hook, which he unfastened and tossed flopping on the bank.
“Well,” Lavender goes on, “the way I looked at it at the time, that man died happy, in the condition he liked best in all the world: stuffed with victual. I believe Lucy had cooked roast pork with applesauce that day.”
I suffered something between indigestion and heart flutter as I asked: “And Mrs. Pendrake? I reckon she got married again?”
Lavender was threading another earthworm on his hook. “The Lady,” he says, “no, the Lady closed up the shutters on that house and I recall never even attended the funeral. And the church got it a new preacher who was supposed to live in that house, but she never moved out and none of them white folks had nerve to ask her to do it, so the new one, he had to reside somewhere else, and as far as I know she is there yet.”
